Wrinkly Dollar

Money Making Experiment: Writing for eHow

Recently, I’ve been exploring a few ways to develop several streams of income, passive or otherwise. In that spirit, I began writing for eHow a few weeks ago. eHow’s Writer Compensation Program offers writers the chance to publish how-to articles on just about any topic. The articles are published to eHow’s website, and writers are paid by eHow according to a few criteria:

Your article’s earning potential can be based on a combination of several elements, including the amount of times it’s been viewed and its category. The more useful your articles are to the reader, the more money you could make

More likely than not, writers are simply being given a cut of the advertising revenue that their articles generate. You post articles, eHow’s computers generate relevant ads to place alongside your article, advertisers pay eHow for each viewer that clicks the ads, and you get a cut. The exact amount of the cut, or the formula that determines how much you’ll earn is not revealed by eHow.

Now, I could be doing the same thing on Wrinkly Dollar, but there are two reasons I’ve decided to diversify a little:

• eHow is a very popular and well-trafficked website, with 15 million visitors per month. It generates more traffic than Wrinkly Dollar (for now!) and, as a result, more ad revenue. I realize I might be getting the short end of the stick as my cut of revenue, but that is still more than I could generate on my own (for now!).
• eHow allows me to write on any variety of topics I like. People visit Wrinkly Dollar to read about personal finance.

I’ve read several success stories to keep myself motivated about writers on eHow making $1,000 per month or more. (I believe these stories by the way. The eHow community seems to be quite a genuine set of folk.) Each of these high-earning writers has a few to several hundred articles written.

Currently, I have a mere 8 articles written in 2 weeks of time. Here’s a look at how my total earnings for April have progressed since I signed up on April 11:

By no means a king’s ransom! But I’m just getting started. Keep in mind that 4 of my 8 articles have earned nothing at all thusfar – it takes some time to generate traffic. All of my earnings have come from articles written over 1 week ago. That is the wonderful thing that I hope to take advantage of – the content can earn you money long after it is written.

So what is my plan for generating more than a few bucks of income? That’s easy – keep writing high-quality articles. For the foreseeable future, I plan to write 20 articles per month – 1 article every day or two. The articles typically take me anywhere from 20 minutes to one hour to write, depending on the complexity of the topic. After reading about the earnings of some other authors, I’ve developed this target schedule for number of articles and earnings at the end of each month:

I think the targets for the first few months should be very achievable. As far as those last few months, time and experience will tell. I’ll be updating you regularly with my eHow efforts and earnings.

Oh, and check out my eHow profile too!