The first requirement for a Quick Guide is to find a picture. I prefer using third party sources, such as creativecommons.org that offers royalty-free images. You can use this website to find photographs for Demand Studios, but carefully read legal instructions under each photograph and credit correctly back to the image owner.

The second step is writing a short but engaging introduction, which should be 30-50 words. In some samples of Quick Guides that I ran across, the text is there to encourage people to click on article links below.

The worst part about Quick Guides is the third requirement – searching and selecting articles and videos that relate to the topic. Finding this information is not the problem, it’s the broken search function. I searched for “water fountains” and found a lot of garden topics but nothing that even mentioned the word “fountain”. Apparently, Demand Studios staff is aware that the search function is no working correctly and they are working on fixing it.

Quick Guide style pays $7.50, which would be really easy money to make if the search portion of it worked properly. I’ll wait until the issue is resolved and I’ll give one a try. They seem to be really good for search engine optimization and driving traffic to some of the already published work on Ehow.com that may not be getting as much notice anymore.