The past month has been the most disappointing, frustrating, and down right ugly month I have spent as an eHow writer. The latest problems with eHow were the worst yet and have sent many writers packing up and moving to other sites. This is on top of the articles sweeps and other technological quirks that had been taking place late last year. Let’s just say that a lot of eHow writers are not real happy right now.
Why eHow is Still the King
While there are plenty of reasons why I can be frustrated with eHow and what has taken place, I must sit back and look at the larger picture. First of all, I haven’t found a site yet that can earn you income immediately after a article is published. I don’t see any of my new Info Barrel articles or Hubs earning money immediately after published. To put it in perspective, I earned $9.30 last month from eHow articles published during the same month. My entire Info Barrel earnings were not even half of that!
Secondly, eHow has been a wonderful learning experience for me. Less than two years ago I was wandering about with no clear direction on how to make money online. While I am nowhere’s near meeting my long term goals, eHow provides stable recurring income that helps fund other passive income projects I am working on. This makes it easier for me to take risks and bold actions when building new income streams.
Finally, the events that have taken place on eHow recently have only reinforced the importance of building diversified income streams. Many eHow writers (including myself) got fat and happy with the incredible earnings, which made many of us comfortable with what we were doing. I can say that I am now even more focused on building and growing my own content, while still leveraging eHow as a tool to earn a nice income.
Let’s take a look at my monthly results -
January Updates
During the month of January, I published 13 new articles and have 2 still pending review. I am growing a bit concerned about eHow’s new approval process. I realize there have been some kinks in the whole review process, but my pending articles have been in that status for over a week now. I notice the approvals normally taking anywhere from a few hours to about a day, so these are a bit behind.
While December turned out to be a month for growth with my eHow earnings, January was a flat out disaster. My earnings dropped by over (18%)! This was only the second month that I saw negative earnings growth which appears to be directly related to the eHow UK site.
Here is the breakdown of my eHow earnings from the past 17 months -
- January (2010)
- Earnings – $188.07
- Articles Published – 13
- Articles in Process – 2
- December (2009)
- Earnings – $230.35
- Articles Published – 7
- November (2009)
- Earnings – $230.28
- Articles Published – 2
- October (2009)
- Earnings – $253.84
- Articles Published – 4
- September (2009)
- Earnings – $223.79
- Articles Published – 12
- Year #1
- Earnings – $656.48
- Articles Published – 224
GRAND TOTAL (17 Months)
- Earnings – $1,782.81
- Articles Published – 262
- Articles Deleted from eHow – 13
Are you looking for a free way to start increasing your income? If so, eHow is one option that allows you to accomplish this goal. There are people just like you earning over a $1,000 each month on a recurring basis just by writing “How To” articles. If you are new to eHow, one place to start is by checking out a great resource called – How to Earn Passive Income on eHow.com: Maximize Your Online Earnings. I purchased this resource several months ago and have made my money back within the first month using the guidelines laid out.
100 Article eHow Challenge – January Results
One of my goals last year was to jump start my eHow passive income stream and accelerate my profits. Back in August of last year, I launched the 100 Article eHow Challenge, where I had a goal to publish 100 new articles (finished with 72). I have been tracking the status of these articles each month to see how the challenge turned out.
Here are my earnings from the 100 Article eHow Challenge -
- August – $119.48
- September – $113.95
- October – $75.47
- November – $73.45
- December – $59.86
- January – $37.00
Total Earnings – $479.21
As you can tell, my earnings from the 100 article challenge dropped just like the rest of my articles did. I am very interested to see what will happen this month to these earnings as they have now hit the 7 month mark. From my past experience, I have noticed that earnings from eHow articles tend to take off after 6 months.
Final Thoughts
Based on the recent events at eHow, my 2010 SMART Goal to increase my eHow profits by 100% is in jeopardy. In order to hit my target, I need to increase my monthly earnings to $500! Unfortunately, I am heading in the wrong direction. Goals are meant to be updated, so I may be altering a few things after February is over.
Have you left eHow yet? What are your thoughts on the future of eHow and it’s potential to earn consistent passive income?
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ve been tracking the whole earnings declines in great detail since before the eHow UK fiasco and after. I’ve noted that most of the declines in earnings in te month of January was in the period between roughly 1/8 through 1/23. There was about two weeks in the middle of the month where my earnings per 1000 page views dropped almost in half despite unchanging page view trends. Before and after everything seemed fine.
This coinsides with eHow’s decision to pull our artciles from the eHow UK website. I believe the fixing of this problem caused us all to temporarily miss out on earnings we otherwise would have gotten.
The last week of January and the first couple days here in Feb earnings seem to be right back on track so I think you shouldn’t worry about the january decline. Long-term however is yet to be determined. I have yet to get the spark to continue writing mass articles for eHow though I do intend to keep adding one- or two articles here and there. Diversification is your friend after all.
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pfincome Reply:
February 3rd, 2010 at 10:51 pm
@Brian – Wow, that is some serious tracking you have going on! To be honest, I noticed very poor earning all the way through the end of the month.
I will agree with your “spark” comment. The motivation is starting to slip for me with this site, but I will keep posting a few every month and see how things work out.
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As you know I’m all over eHow’s problems and I’m sure your earnings drop is directly related to the ehow UK site. It will be interesting to see how they compensate the writers this month.
I’m working hard to find alternatives. I think that building out a targeted niche content site (or 10) is the answer.
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pfincome Reply:
February 3rd, 2010 at 10:53 pm
@Jade – I enjoyed reading up on the latest eHow news on your site. I don’t have a lot of patience to really get into the finer details – partly out of frustration and working on building other income streams.
Agreed with the niche sites. I am working heavily on two right now.
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I haven’t left eHow, and I still think it can be a good place to earn residual income. After several months of not writing for them, I have resumed with a more keyword focused approach. It is very disheartening, though, that earnings have been on the nosedive rather than the up and up. I think all the problems that have been going on will help clean out the spammers and bad writers, which helps the good writers in the long run. I am sticking with eHow for the next year, and my hope is that the site will continue to grow in good ways with earnings to reflect it.
I am extremely interested in how writers will be compensated for their lost earnings in Jan.
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pfincome Reply:
February 3rd, 2010 at 10:55 pm
@Rachel – It is disappointing to see earnings fall while posting more and more content. It should be the other way around!
I will continue to write content on eHow on a month by month basis. If things turn around in February, then I may up the article count in March. I am in a “holding” pattern right now I guess you could say.
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John,
That IS alarming that your earnings dropped from ~$253 to ~$180. 224 artiicles should be yielding you about $200, IMHO.
The problem is that we don’t know many of the details. Could it be the eHow UK disaster? Heck yeah. We don’t know how much we’ll be getting out of a click either, and I realize it varies.
One remarkable thing about eHow, like you mentioned, is that your articles have the potential to rank very quickly and earn money right away. That is very encouraging when starting out.
Let’s see what we can drum up between your goals and mine for February
Not sure if we’re connected on eHow, but my username is link82.
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pfincome Reply:
February 5th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
@Moon – At the growth I was seeing back in August/September, I would have expected to be around $300 per month. Now I slipped back below $200.
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I forgot to include the latest eHow fiasco: the comments! All of the hard work I did to get all those comments… now they all say zero and who knows if we’ll get that fixed or all comments have been wiped clean. >:(
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pfincome Reply:
February 5th, 2010 at 1:37 pm
@Moon – Didn’t even realize that was a problem for writers. I have not spent anytime trying to get comments on my articles. While I can understand a value, it doesn’t fit the passive model that I am looking for.
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I’m sorry to hear about that, but I really hope it’s just a blip and that next month is better again – I don’t write for eHow so can’t really comment much except to say good luck pushing up your income!
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pfincome Reply:
February 5th, 2010 at 1:38 pm
@Ruth – Rumor has it, eHow will compensate their writers in February for lost January earnings. Problem is, nobody knows how exactly it will be calculated. Should prove interesting.
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Thanks for posting all the details on ehow. It is helpful. I have only 14 articles so far and have reading and reading, trying to incorporate the whole SEO and keywords tools.
Thanks
Elainek (user name on ehow)
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pfincome Reply:
February 5th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Elaine,
Best of luck to you. Make sure you back up all of your articles in Word or another text editor. You never know if eHow will pull them or not.
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My ehow earnings were down in January, but they appear to be better so far this month. I hadn’t heard that eHow was planning to compensate the writers for the low Jan earnings. We’ll see if that happens.
Not that I have tried alot, but eHow still seems to give the best ROI. While I am disappointed with how the UK thing was handled, I will continue there until the ROI is no longer worth it.
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pfincome Reply:
February 8th, 2010 at 10:47 am
@Carrie – I agree that eHow still provides the best return on your time. There is no other site that I know of where I can consistently generate income within a day of an article being published. This has not changed at all since I have been writing content there for well over a year.
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Keep in mind that there are many factors that go into a reduction in earnings, including decreased ad revenue from Google. Adsense fluctuates depending not only on advertiser demand, but also Google’s own whims. If they need to increase profits one quarter, they can take publishers’ earnings down a notch or play with algorithms behind the scene as needed.
That being said, it seems the UK eHow site may be responsible for some reduced earnings. I do appreciate the eHow team for acknowledging this and working to compensate writers for their work that is published on the UK site.
I encourage writers to utilize the Resources section of their articles so that they can truly maximize earnings (affiliate commissions and traffic to niche sites/blogs).
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pfincome Reply:
February 8th, 2010 at 11:00 am
@Maria – You make a very good point about utilizing the resources section which I have been doing for some time. I can understand the quirks in the AdSense earnings from Google from month to month. However, I believe the majority of lower earnings are a direct result from the UK site as they are very significant. It is too much of a coincidence not to be.
All that said, I will continue to write for eHow until I no longer can see the benefits of spending my time there.
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There are many ways of earning income through online, but there are only few of them that can give a passive income opportunity. And in line with, I would like to say thank you for sharing us another information with regards to passive income opportunity.
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pfincome Reply:
February 9th, 2010 at 9:55 pm
@Residual – I do agree that many of the online earnings sites require a lot of your time, which isn’t very passive. I do however, believe that eHow is one place that you can publish content and not touch it again and watch the earnings pile up.
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