Writing for eHow

Since I began my blog last month, I have continued to write articles for eHow and have been adding them to this blog as I write. So, here is a little bit about eHow and my progress to date.

Basically, as an eHow author, you write "how to" articles and publish them on their website. Based on the keywords in the article, Google will place relevant ads. So, if you are writing about "weddings", the ads SHOULD be about weddings. However, they may not always be about weddings (more to come on this later). People that view your article may be more interested in your wedding topic, for instance, and click on Google adds related to your wedding topic or weddings in general. This is where you earn money. Google pays eHow for this click (since it is their site) and eHow passes on some of this money to authors (since it is their article that resulted in the click).

Now, that was a really quick and rather simplistic overview. Many successful eHow writers have written and are selling ebooks about writing for eHow. Others have compiled eHow writing strategies in "free" formats. Here is a link to one that really gets into the importance of keywords and just making money on eHow, in general.
http://desolator144.com/ehow.html

One of the other successful eHow writers has described eHow as one of the "best sites on the internet for earning income as a content-provider". I guess this is a pretty fair description for someone who made about $25,000 last year doing this type of work ($12,000 of that from eHow). See a feature on him and other successful eHow writers here: http://blog.ehow.com/2009/02/218/). He and other successful writers will tell you that, in addition to using keywords appropriately, volume of articles and maturation of articles are key to earning at eHow. The importance of volume is clear-the more you write, the greater the likelihood of income generation. Article maturation, for eHow writing purposes, means that older articles will, in most cases, perform better than new articles. This is because it generally takes some time for new articles to show up in major search engines like Google or Yahoo. HOWEVER, if you post a relevant article to your social marketing site (i.e. Facebook, My Space) or a relevant forum, you can see the money come in quicker since you'll have a captive audience. One successful eHow writer states that it takes about 100 articles (all at least 3 months old) to really see your true potential for making money on eHow.

So, about my progress to date (drum roll please).... I have been writing for eHow since January 3, 2009 and have 52 articles so I am certainly not to a point where I can truly realize my earning potential from eHow (goal of 100 articles by end of June 2009). However, here are my earnings to date (another drum roll please).....

January 2009 ($3.57)
February 2009 (22.32)
March 2009 (pending since month is not over but currently at $15.24)

As long as I keep writing, I hope to see my income go up each month. Oh, the money that I have earned in Jan. and Feb. has already been deposited into my Paypal account (which is necessary for getting paid by eHow) so this is a legitimate money-making opportunity. Who knows how long the site will last. I'm just going to take advantage of it while it is around and make sure that I have back-up copies of all my articles-just in case.

You can view my eHow articles in this blog by looking in "Blog Archive" on this page (for a previous month, click on the month to see all the posts-most articles are categories are in February). I've categorized the articles by topic so a brand new article in previously added category will show still show up in the archive folder with that category.

I've started adding my writing content to a few other sites that I'll write about in a separate post. Stay tuned.