Dogs, my Dad, and a Ditzy chick

So last week, I had some nice surprises with my articles on Yahoo! Voices, Yahoo! Finance, and Yahoo! News!

Dogs
My article about how I manage to keep my dog from the shelter despite being broke got featured on the Yahoo! Voices front page for a day and a half. That's a frickin big deal in Yahoo! Contributor land!! It increased my page views too, from less than 50 to an additional 3.8K page views - YAY!

Dad
Ok, so this next one is a stretch - but I'm in the Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) for a reason! I got a very nice compliment on twitter from another Yahoo! Contributor for my Yahoo! Finance article about my Dad's seemingly odd refinance of their house for another 30 years.

btw: if you've stopped by from the Bloggers Comment Club and/or the IWSG and follow me on twitter, if I haven't followed back and/or added you to my lists - please give me a shout out on twitter. Thankfully, my twitter followers are growing, but I can't remember who's who - so sorting followers by lists helps. I try to make sure that I retweet everybody, so lists helps me that way too. Thanks!   

Ditzy chick
Then, I got a special assignment to write a political article for Yahoo! News that was a test assignment to potentially become a "Featured Contributor" and it was accepted - YAY again!! I call it the Ditzy chick of the week in politics article - LoL! 

It did reasonably well for page views, 3.8K worth. That's not as many page views as the other one I blogged about, but it's pretty respectable. I've had a few that were much much lower. I've read that some Yahoo! News articles can get into 6 figure page views, but that seems to be when they're featured on the Yahoo! front page slides. I can wish!

So last week was a pretty darn good week with my writing for Yahoo! I didn't get as many articles published as I wanted - I'm going for 5 a week, but I did get 5 submitted so I'll just have to catch up this week by submitting more articles earlier in the week.  

And this is my 4th blog post this month, so I've already exceeded last month's one whole post - LoL! So hopefully I can stick to my goal for transitioning between blogging and article writing. So far, so good. 

On to E for the next post... hmmm, that's gonna be a tuffy...

Why Obamacare (aka Romneycare) Matters to Me and Should to You

Republicans: Does the Right to Life Include Right to Health Care?
 The Supreme Court needs to be the adult in this Left Wing vs. Right Wing health care reform feud. In a twisted paradox, it's a Right to Choose Healthcare righties vs. the Right to Choose Life lefties political showdown.

COMMENTARY | According to the Associated Press, the fate of the Affordable Health Care Act rests with the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court. The old health care system was not working because of denial of coverage to those with pre-existing... Read More

Backstory
This blog post is an experiment in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) magic. Hey, why not try to get some page view magic from a hot topic for next three days since Obamacare is in the Supreme Court today and for the next two days? 

The article was written for a Wild Card News Topic assignment picked up from the Yahoo! Voices Assignment Desk. I chose to write about Obamacare health care because of the AP article that was published when the Supreme Court case was two weeks ahead, thinkin' it'd be relevant for a few weeks. It did include an upfront payment ($5)  - YAY - and gets page view bonused at  $1.xx per 1K views.   

Even better, it was selected as an Editor's Pick Feature, meaning that it's prominently displayed on the Yahoo! Voices News front page - YAY - again! It started on the day of publication as the largest feature on the top left of the page. It migrated after a day or so to the top right spot, then down to the "More Picks" list. As of this moment, it's 5th down on the list. 

The Featured status is soooooo very helpful with racking up page views. I'm not yet in the six-digits page views like many of the News and Political Featured Contributors are -- more like low four-figures per featured article. This article is almost at 3K page views as of now. I'm hoping the Supreme Court case this week will pick up the pace from searches and such. 

One bummer though: I've had three similar Wild Card News Topic assignments be picked up and published in the regular Yahoo! News also. That's usually generates some great numbers too. But this article didn't go there, (no idea why not), but the Voices Feature selection got about as many page views as the others that did go there. So it worked out, I 'spose...

This past Saturday, I stumbled into Twitter and noticed one of the top trending hashtags was #ILikeObamacare. So I jumped on that trend and had a great time tweeting this article and retweeting all of the other pro-Obamacare tweets that I agreed with. I noticed that anti-Obamacare folks got into the tweetup as well. Those folks really like to post comments and such in articles too - so we'll see how this blog post goes. Hey, feel free to rant or rave in comments - just no personal attacks or irrelevant spam & stuff...