I started writing on eHow.com in November of 2008, a little over 7 months ago (wow, time flies). I went hardcore for the first month, writing a total of exactly 150 articles, and I just stopped. I planned on writing more as the months went by, but I had a lot of other projects going on, as you already know. So, I just let the articles sit.
I have continued to earn money via my 150 articles each month since November. I’ve even made an effort to include these earnings on my monthly reports, but they seem to get overlooked by the larger earnings from my eBook and Audio Guide. I’d like to highlight just my earnings from eHow from the last 7 months here for you (especially you eHow writers), just to show you what happened. I think it’s pretty interesting data.
Here’s the breakdown:
Total Earned: $879.66
Total Page Views: 130,394
Learned Findings From my eHow Experience
Here are a few things that I will conclude about these numbers. These are just my opinion, and you can choose to agree or disagree as you wish.
1. eHow is a Decent Method to Earn a Passive Income
Obviously, I’ve been earning an income from eHow for the last 6 months by doing absolutely nothing. I did not retouch any of my articles, or go back and add more, nor did I do anything to promote my articles. All I did was nothing (and let Google naturally take care of things for me).
Of course, $140-ish dollars a month isn’t enough to live off of, but if you put in enough work (i.e. write many more articles), you could hypothetically earn enough for something like a mortgage payment. How about an emergency fund?
2. Earnings Will Eventually Plateau
At first, I saw my earnings grow more and more each month, but for the last few months, it’s been up and down and averaging a pretty consistent amount. At first, the earnings will come slowly. Remember this if you’ve just started writing and are not seeing any substantial results yet.
As the search engines crawl through eHow and your eHow articles, if you’ve done the correct keyword research (with the help of Maria’s eBook, for example), your earnings will begin to grow until they’ve reached a point where they cannot earn that much more than they did the previous months. In other words, the amount you earn per article each month will generally plateau.
So, to increase your monthly earnings from eHow, you should simply write more articles.
3. You Can Trust eHow
I know a lot of websites that say they will pay you, but either they don’t pay or are very late with their payments (I think I heard this about Busika.com when it first came about). But with eHow, around the same time each month I receive an email stating my monthly earnings have been deposited into my Paypal account. They are very professional and very on time with everything. Even though I haven’t contributed to eHow for the past 6 months, they continue to pay me what I’ve earned.
Also, I poke my head into the eHow community forum every once and a while. I noticed that if there’s one little bug, or earnings are late to show in the daily reports, everyone goes nuts! “Where’s my earnings!”, “Help, what happened to my earnings report!”, “What the *&%$!”. Patience is very thin in the eHow community.
But, the eHow’s support team seems to be on top of their game and quick to respond to the ebb and flow of it’s users. It’s a sign they are serious about what they do, which means that you shouldn’t have to worry about eHow ever “folding” or losing your income stream from eHow anytime soon.
4. eHow Does Indeed Rank High in the Search Engines
As you may or may not know, I started this blog about a month or two before I started writing on eHow. Even so, I’ve had about 30,000 more views on my eHow articles than on this blog, which is definitely a significant amount of views. It’s kind of crazy to think about because I spend a lot of time and effort promoting this blog, and nothing to really promote my eHow articles.
This shows me that if you were to compare starting a blog to starting to write for eHow, you will more quickly rank higher in the search engines and have more page views on eHow. I believe the blog will eventually catch up, and it sort of depends on what you’re writing about, but if you were to write about the same subject, eHow would win in those categories, at first. Again, at first.
Starting a blog, however, gives us more earnings potential, and of course more freedom to do what you want.
5. It is Possible to Earn Money on eHow!
This kind of goes back to #1, but I want to reiterate that to me, eHow is a winner. I wouldn’t say it’s like winning the lotto, but for all of you haters and doubtful people, including those of you who are writing on eHow and not making anything – it really does work, you just have to put in the time and effort up front.
Quick Tips:
- Create a goal for how many articles you’d like to write next month. 150 was a lot, but it was doable. Divide by 30 and make sure you write that many each day.
- Don’t just write about anything. At first, I thought it was smarter to write about whatever came to mind without thinking about how many people would find it useful or search for it in a search engine, because I could write more articles. Keyword research is the key to your success, and you will earn more money by writing 10 keyword rich, well-researched articles than 200 articles that were not thought about beforehand.
- Lastly, in regards to the bold statement above, if you’re serious about earning $100 or more dollars a month like I do, I’d invest a small amount of money to pick up Maria’s eHow eBook or Janet’s eHow eBook and read every page and copy their process. You will earn your money back within the first month or two.
For all of you eHow writers out there, please feel free to leave a comment below and let me know what you think. And if you’re new to my blog, please feel free to subscribe, and find me on eHow (TheWriteGuy). Thanks!
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{ 29 comments (Click Here to Leave a Comment Below) }
One of the best ways to capitalize on ehow’s traffic flow is in the comments. Add a small signature to each comment and it will bring people to you too!
Thats exactly what I wanted to know. Not only a way to monetize on your expertise, but get some visibility from it.
Pat, I’ve been following your blog about your eHow journey since it’s inception. Thanks for the update !
Wow that’s impressive. I started my blog around the same time you started your e-how project and I have been earning less than you have..
Your website is not only incredibly helpful with tips but it is also very inspiring for anyone trying to create a passive income. Well done. I’m also doing well on ehow
Hi WriterGuy, I’m still new to eHow and learning my way around. This is the first time I’ve seen your blog and I’m thoroughly enjoying your style. Thanks for the encouragement. Elaine Chastain
Absolutely love your endorsement of E-How. I’ve started off very slowly, but I’m going to keep going. There are a lot of side benefits. If you include a blog post or one of your own e-books as a ‘resource’, you are having the benefit of earning passive income, plus having the higher traffic from the e-how name behind the article, so that your product is also promoted.
Hi Pat,
Otherwise I will let people know! I like ehow. I’ve put in 2 hrs work total and made 9 dollars so far (7 articles). If I make $9 each month that’s about $100 for the year which is pretty good for 2 hrs total.
I finally caved and bought marias book after your repeated endorsments. I hope it’s useful!
Okay, love your blog (it’s so useful) and I’m off to read the ebook.
Hi Pet, I’m still leraning on eHow. Thanks a lot for this great Website! Greets from Germany, Markus
Yes, I agree with above posts, thanks for an interesting and useful blog!
Markus, how do you post and earn on ehow? I´d love to start writing but thought it was available for US citizens only?
/Fredrik
Pat – I couldn’t say it any better. I will soon post my 150th article and am knocking on the $100 per month door. I think the absolute most important point for eHow newbies to understand is the point you made in bold (about writing 10 keyword rich articles).
Of my 149 current articles, 32 of them have not even earned 1 penny and each one of those did not use any keyword research. My big money articles have been written recently and all use keywords.
If you want to accelerate your earnings, you need to do the research!
Another great article, I never though about writing for ehow. I will do some keyword research on a few articles I can write. Maybe I will save them until I have around 100 – 500 articles. Then join ehow and submit them.
Its all about keyword research – once you have that nailed you should be able to make money anywhere. I can’t comment on eHow – they dont allow non-US authors – but hubpages works very well for me. I am surprised by your comment that your earnings have plateaued after some months – you should be getting conitinued and increasing income as you get ranked for more and more long tail search terms.
Hi Pat,
I’m so glad you updated us on your ehow journey. I agree with everything you’ve said about Ehow from the occasional hic-cups to the earning potential. I also agree with the investment in Maria’s book. I read it and saw my earnings skyrocket. I have about 170 articles and until this month my earnings doubled every other month. I have about 5 or 10 that earn the bulk of my earnings and a few that have never made one red cent! (I wrote most of them before reading the ebook) Now I’m focusing on trying to promote my articles. I wish someone would come out with an ebook on that! I’m finding it difficult to promote them on forums without coming off as being spammy. So I’ve turned to Squidoo and, of course, I use my blog. But as you say with the blog the traffic, for me, is trickling in. Good luck and, again, thanks for the update!
Unfortunately I am New Zealand and eHow WCP is only for US residents … not good. Still always a pleasure to read your posts.
Nice post. Personally, I have too much going on now to consider adding more writing . . .
That said, this sounds like a good way to get your feet wet with blogging and make a few bucks at the same time.
I’ve also generally stopped writing for eHow to pursue photography more, but unfortunately I haven’t had quite the success you’ve had. I have 99 articles (a few more were just removed) and I still only earn about $30-$50 a month. But hey, it’s a cable bill, right?
Impressive! I hope to be able to match and exceed that!
M
Great Read, It certainly inspired me to give my first article a go, only to find out that WCP hasn’t quite reached South Africa as yet
but I’m going to try and find some that have, I think then the issue will be finding the right article topic. Still though, reading your post was really informative. Thanks!
Great encouraging post, Pat! Your passive income story inspired me to pursue my own streams of online revenue – so far only $176/month. But it’s a start! Anyone who is interested, check out my blog
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Thank you for this great review. I have been wanting to try this out but wasn’ t sure how it compared to ac and other programs that pay for writing. I’d love to get an update next month of your earnings. I am wondering if you link to your blog if your keyword ranks higher on ehow due to it’s page rank or if you think your own site can surpass it as it gets more links?
Deb
Wow, this is impressive! I’ve been thinking about writing for ehow for a while now, but haven’t actually started. I’m going to try giving it a shot!
I did not know you can make money from eHow.com…. I just registered. This is awesome! Thank you for the post.
I found your site through Yaro Starak’s blog. I am really interested in making some money on eHow. I’ve been really successful on Epinions (Top 50) so it’ll be interesting to see how earnings compare.
Great tips and awesome site!
Hi Pat,
Yes, what you’re saying is true. I started writing on eHow in spring of 2009. My best earner makes $30 a month. I also invest in mutual funds but they don’t do as well as my articles. Also, I can never lose money on an article so I lean toward niche sites and other content for passive earnings.
I’ve been reading your blog for a while, by the way. I like it.
Good job and congrats on the baby.
Hey Pat, just want to let you know that I just purchased Maria’s book. Brewing another cup of tea and then I’m going to dive in. Thanks. This is really good stuff that you put out!
I find your website today and a I wanted to create an account to eHow but it says in the terms and conditions that “EFFECTIVE AS OF APRIL 5, 2010, THE WCP WILL BE CLOSED TO NEW PARTICIPANTS.”
It sucks…
Is there an other similar way to make some money?
@ Kamiy – Try Associated Content.
@ Admin – Two of our articles were used as resources so we decided to sign up (to comment) only to find out the WCP is gone. We would not have used it though as eHow may rank higher than 411 NY’s articles thus knocking our rank down.
I guess it is back to Associated Content which does rank as high as well. Fortunately, we know not to add the entire artile and provie a long enough summary and link the readeder to the original and delete the “nofollow” codes.
Wow! Thanks! I was considering Associated Content (I’ve been a member there for a few years), but your earnings for eHow are 6 times what I’d make on AC for the same number of page views. This post will help me out a lot!
I’ve gotten your eBook too, and will subscribe to your blog