My Third Month of eHow Unwrapped

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In addition to my monthly reports, I usually write a post each month specifically about my earnings writing for eHow.com. When this blog first started, a majority of its readers were from eHow, which is why I spent a lot of time writing about it as a passive income source in the past. (A tip from Pat: if you write a blog, know who your audience is, and write for them, not just for you).

Anyways, now that I’ve accumulated a significant influx of readers from personal finance blogs and the like, I’d like to take a brief moment and introduce eHow to anyone who is unfamiliar with it – and how it can produce passive income.

eHow At A Glance

eHow.com is a website where you can learn “how to do just about everything”. If you have a chance, feel free to enter something in the search form and I’m pretty sure you’ll find an article about how to do it. The cool thing about this is that each of the articles are written by people like us. It’s basically like a huge open source how-to manual that anyone can add their own content to.

Whenever anyone writes an article, it gets posted along with ads that are mainly from Google (adsense). Whenever anyone clicks on an ad on an article, eHow earns money, and the author of the article gets a little piece of it (for now, only U.S. citizens can earn money from their articles).

The power of this is that if you write an article, it’s forever on the net and awaiting those readers who will click on the ads and earn you money. It’s kind of like a blog post that has ads on it. So, you may be thinking, why not just start a blog and keep all of the cash yourself without giving any piece of the earnings away?

Well – eHow articles rank really high in the Google Search engines. If you were start a blog today and write an article about doggy diapers, it would take a few months for the search engines to find it and your blog would have to have good keywords and metadata, as well as good outgoing links and backlinks etc, just to be ranked near the top. If you wrote the same article and posted it on eHow, your chances of having it show up at the top of the search engine results page (SERP) sooner is almost guaranteed. I once wrote an article on eHow and I found it on Google as the top result with a few keywords within 3 days.

Another perk is that you can write about anything and everything. In a blog, you really want to narrow your focus and find a niche if you want it to succeed. With eHow, you can write about many different topics, although I’d recommend studying which of your articles earn the most money and then focus on writing more about similar subjects.

The Big Picture

I once wrote a blog post about how it’s possible to make over 40k a year writing articles on eHow. I said that if I wrote 5 articles a day for an entire year, this would possibly happen, and I had the math to prove it. A few people I know earn well over $1000 a month, and the cool part is that they earn money on articles they’ve already written! I mean, they could stop writing new articles today and continue to earn $1000 a month for doing nothing. That’s passive income for sure. Again, it’s about putting in the initial hard work (writing articles, creating a product, etc.) and then reaping the benefits later after it’s on auto-pilot.

Before I get into this month’s earning, here are a few more articles about eHow that I’ve written that may be of interest to you:

• My Big Little Experiment Writing for eHow
• My eHow Experiment – Day 4 Update and Initial Findings
• The Math Behind my eHow Experiment – 40K+ a Year?
• My eHow Experiment: Am I Going About it All Wrong?
• Niche Blog vs. eHow: A New Game Plan
• My First Month of eHow Unwrapped
• My Second Month of eHow Unwrapped

My Third Month of eHow Unwrapped

During the month of January, I wrote zero articles. Yes, for the second month in a row, I wrote no new articles on eHow. I did this, one, because I was focused on the launch of my audio guide for intheleed.com (not to mention my wedding), but also because I was curious to see what would happen to my earnings. Would they go down, would they go up, or would they remain the same?

If you recall, in my first month I had written about 150 articles and totaled $20.02.

In my second month, I wrote zero new articles and totaled $96.87. That’s a 484% increase in earnings – for doing nothing. This got me juiced, and I was hoping for another 484% increase, which would make my January earnings about $468 dollars. Hey – I can dream right?

In January, I earned $101.08. It’s not $468, which I knew wouldn’t happen, but I’m relieved and happy to say that my earnings have stayed just about the same. This leads me to believe a few things:

• Earnings for a number of articles reach a plateau after a certain amount of time (basically when the search engines finally pick up on them and stabilize their rankings. This is why I had such low earnings the first month). Of course, the occasionally digg or social bookmarking of some of your articles may boost your earnings, but generally you’ll earn the same amount each month if you don’t increase the number of articles you have.
• I can control how much I earn. If I write more articles, I will earn more money. I think many eHow writers know this and can see it for themselves in their earnings reports, which often leads to “eHow addiction”.
• Lastly, it’s really important to write good articles and make sure they are optimized to earn the most money. This can be done by doing proper keyword research and writing articles in such a way that the search engines pick up on them faster. All of this is explained in these two eBooks about how to increase your income on eHow:
  1. Maria’s “Increase eHow Earnings”
  2. Janet Ford’s “How to eHow”

I’m not going to post any graphs or charts about my earnings this month, because I think I’ve told you the whole story already.

If you write for eHow, just use my two months off as motivation for you to keep writing, knowing that in a sense, like I explained, you do have control of how much you earn.

If you don’t write for eHow yet but are interested, getting started is very easy and just takes a few minutes. Also, if you ever have questions about anything, feel free to ask me or post your question on the eHow community forum after you sign up. The community there is awesome and very friendly. Sign up and introduce yourself!

Upcoming Posts on SPI

• Today, I got my own business checking account! The process was fairly simple, and I’ll go over exactly what you need before you get one for your own business.
• I’ve had a lot of people ask me about how much money it took to get started on my website that now earns almost $20k/month. I’ll go over everything I spent my $100 on.
• I’ll talk about how I automate everything. I’ll go over which services I use and how I can sell and deliver my eBook and audio guide in my sleep, and how you can do it too.

Cheers everyone!

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