eHow Experiment 08: Income Increased by 64%

When I wrote my last update over a month ago, I estimated that I would earn at least $412.92 for the month of January. If I met this goal, I would surpass my overall goal of earning $3 per article in any given month (or $339 a month – though one of my articles was removed, reducing my goal to $336 a month).

Well, as it turns out, my estimations were more than correct.

In January I earned a total of $420.29, which is about $3.75 per article a month and $13.56 a day. And, so far in February, I earned $368.44 (earnings were last updated Wednesday), which is about $4 per article and $16.02 a day. If this keeps up, I should make an all-time high of about $449 by the end of the month (and there’s only 28 days as opposed to 30 or 31)! Not bad for doing very little work as far as backlinking is concerned.

I’m also happy to see that my earnings are continuing to grow. If you remember, last year saw 3 months (Oct, Nov, and Dec) where my eHow earnings sort of leveled out and didn’t increase by much. That was when I started giving a few of my highest earning articles backlinks from content written on other Web 2.0 sites. If you compare now (or my estimated total income for the month) to my earnings in December 2010, my earnings increased by 64%. (more…)

eHow Experiment 07: An Exciting Discovery

It has been a little over a month since I last updated this eHow Experiment series – and oh do I have good news to tell you!

If you remember, last month I had one article sitting on the second spot in Google search listings, one on the third spot, and another on the sixth. The other two showing up in search results were sitting on the twenty-fifth and fifty-first spot in Google. Keep in mind that these were broad match results for each keyword phrase, instead of phrase match (the results from exact searches).

Well, I noticed that my eHow earnings this month had improved quite a bit lately since last year. Here’s a screenshot of my earnings from last year (2010). You can click on it to enlarge the image.

Last month, I was earning about $8.81 a day – $2.44 an article (eHow removed one of my articles by the way, though I’m not sure which one – now I have 112 articles published).

Now, let’s look at my earnings so far for this month (keep in mind that we’re only 12 days into the month and earnings don’t include what I accrued today). (more…)

eHow Experiment 06: Analyzing Keywords and Tracking Results

As many of you already know, 8 days ago I posted my first Goals and Achievement post in a long while, where I shared my goals of December. I wasn’t able to work much on my goals for the past week, since I’ve been working on launching my eBook and setting up a newsletter for Cash Campfire.

However, the 3 goals I have set for eHow (in case you’re too lazy to read the actual post) are…

• Increase my monthly income by $100
• Edit 15 articles
• Rank on the first page of Google with 10 out of 113 articles

Now, this might seem like a lot of work, since I have other tasks I also plan to complete, but I believe these goals are obtainable if I really push myself. To achieve these goals, it will require a lot of keyword analyzing and backlinking (so tons of writing on my end) to increase search engine rankings.

I’m not too worried about the editing, since eHow articles are generally short (400-500 words), and I’m so used to writing 1,000 or more word blog posts here on Cash Campfire and other content sites. (more…)

eHow Experiment 05: A New Income Milestone and Backlinking Approach

It’s been a little over a month since I updated the experiment. Even so, I’m really excited to say that I nearly met my income expectations!

In the last eHow Experiment update, I did some calculations and estimated that I would earn $279 or more in the month of October.

Well, guess what?

My predictions were nearly right – only $4.63 off the mark – and I managed to earn $274.37! (more…)

eHow Experiment 04: Massive Growth

It’s been a while since I last updated the eHow Experiment. In case you didn’t know, I had started an eHow experiment on May of this year to see if I could maximize my earning potential with the articles already written on eHow. I planned to do this by maintaining a keyword density of 2% and increasing backlinks to my eHow articles. Truthfully, I haven’t done much article improvement in the past few months, as I was primarily working on this blog and the new eBook that I’ll be launching soon.

However, I did notice a massive growth in my earnings since the last time I updated the eHow Experiment about 5 months ago, and I wanted to share this growth with you. At the time when I first started this experiment, I was hoping to earn at least $100 on eHow. Now, I’m making over $200, and I haven’t added any additional articles to eHow (since they closed down their writing platform).

Here’s a screen shot of the progress I made this year on eHow in terms of earnings (click the image to enlarge it). (more…)

eHow Experiment 03: Some Progress and Results

My earnings on eHow for this month is now a little bit over $10 more than I made last month. Not too shabby. I might make the $100 mark in a few months.

Most of the articles I’ve been editing on eHow have a nice keyword density. The main thing I need to work on for the next few weeks are backlinking strategies and increasing the number of websites pointing to my articles. So far, I’ve backlinked articles on this blog, though haven’t really ventured anywhere else. Therefore, today I’m going to backlink articles on Yahoo Answers, as I answer questions users have that relate to my articles. (more…)

eHow Experiment 02: A New Beginning

As I mentioned in my introduction eHow Experiment post, I’ll be editing and improving 4 eHow articles a day in order to average $3 per article and make $339 or more per month for 113 articles. I plan to do this through maintaining a keyword density of 2-3% and using backlinking strategies.

My earnings on eHow per month have been steadily rising. In January 2010, I made $52.08 for the month. Every month after that, I made $57.85, $63.54, and $71.33. This month, with two days left until June, I’ve earned $78.58 so far. I should reach $80 by the end of the month. However, even $80 only gives me $0.70 per article a month. These earnings are pitifully low compared to what I should be earning according to Maria O’Brien’s eBook How to Earn Passive Income at eHow. So, I’m taking the initiative and stepping it up a notch.

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eHow Experiment 01: Keyword Optimization and Backlinking Strategies

As you all know, I had purchased an eBook several months ago to help me with my eHow residual income. Since reading this eBook and incorporating the tips in several of my articles, my earnings had went from $30 to around $80 without adding new eHow articles. According to Maria O’Brien’s eBook How to Earn Passive Income at eHow (the one I purchased), the earnings per article should average $3 a month. However, after calculating my average per article from last month, my earnings don’t even come close. My earnings last month were $71.33. I have 113 residual articles written and published. 113 multiplied by 3 gives me $339. At the moment, I’m less than one thirds of the way there.

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eHow Writing Platform Switch: Good or Bad?

For the past year, eHow has been continuously changing their eHow writing platform so that users have to get used to the new set of rules again and again. It first started with their article sweeps, where thousands of eHow articles were removed if they didn’t meet eHow’s new guidelines. This created a lot of frustration in the eHow community and some members lost as much as 50 articles to the sweeps. Other eHow members had their whole article library wiped out. Luckily, I only had about 10 articles deleted during the time. Freelance writers began disappearing, upset with all the hard work and effort spent in articles that just got tossed down the drain without a second thought. A few dedicated writers, including myself, continued to write for eHow.

However, the problems didn’t stop there. The eHow website started shutting down at random times of the day, articles stopped publishing, and pictures stopped uploading. Several more eHow writers left, deciding to find more stable sources of income and not wanting to deal with any more issues from the eHow writing platform. Again, many hopeful eHow freelance writers remained, thinking that all of eHow’s problems will soon be fixed. After all, they were still getting paid and they had already invested months, and in many cases, years of time into eHow.

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