Wrinkly Dollar

eHow Earnings Update, May 2009

A few weeks ago, I told you about an experiment I was trying out in order to make some extra cash: writing for eHow. eHow is a website that allows users to write how-to articles on any topic. The articles are published on eHow’s website with some ads alongside, and eHow shares any generated advertising revenue with its writers.

There are a few issues that I have with eHow. First and foremost is that Demand Media, which owns eHow, does not reveal how it calculates payouts to writers, so you’re completely at their mercy. The second is that eHow is pretty strict about the formatting of its articles. All articles need to have a step-by-step format, which restricts the author whose how-tos are more free-formed. But other than those complaints, eHow has presented a simple and solid way to make some extra money online. In fact, it’s probably the quickest and easiest way to do so if you have next to no technical knowledge.

I started writing for eHow a little over 2 months ago, excited about the prospect of making some extra cash and intrigued by other eHow success stories I had read about. Soon after I started writing, I came up with a plan – targets for the number of articles I would write and how much I wanted to earn per month.

So, how am I doing?

Awful!

After starting like a bat out of hell, I’ve written almost no articles over the past month. (I went on vacation for a week, which stopped my momentum, and then had some other projects to work on.) I was targeting a total of 30 articles by the end of May and $10 in earnings for the month. But I only totaled 18 articles and $6.94. And I’ve only written 1 article in the first half of June! You can see my eHow progress below:

It’s not all bad. A few dollars in generated earnings for work already completed and in place is a nice thing. But I want to be making more.

So, what now? Clearly, I am off of my planned pace. Part of the reason has been a decrease in my motivation after the first month of registering with the site. I think a lot of this has to do with the regimen I had set up for myself. Before, I was writing 1 article almost every day. Publishing once a day was not too time-consuming in practice (the articles take me 30-60 minutes to write). But thinking about writing every day was taxing. Now, I plan to set aside a few hours once a week to write 5 articles at a time. My new plan should relieve some of that small stress by allowing me to go into “eHow mode” once a week instead of every day. And with the new plan comes my new earnings targets:

These are significantly lower than my previous estimates. I’ll keep you updated…