eHow Earnings Report - September 2009

Happy news today: I received my first ever payment from eHow for my earnings from the months of August and September. The money is in my personal account and I couldn’t be happier. Apparently, according to the forums a lot of the details revolving around the payment system has been changing a bit this month and even veteran members who have been receiving payments like clockwork for over a year were worried that something was wrong. Regardless, this is my first payment and thus the details of delivery are all I know. I wasn’t worried and I am happy.

My eHow Earnings Report Philosophy

I know a lot of eHow bloggers give monthly income reports on their blogs and I, up until now, have resisted the urge to give specific earnings information on this blog or to people in general. I have talked a bit about goals and $/thousand page views but I’ve resisted the urge to give specific about which articles are my best earners, how many page views I have, and home many earnings I have. I think I will continue this trend to maintain my privacy but I do want to provide some form of an earnings update monthly. It only seems fitting.

For now I will stick to publishing a dollars-per-thousand-page-view ratio as my public measure of earnings. I think it’s a valid measurement that people can get a grasp of yet it doesn’t reveal too much because nobody really knows what my page views are except for me. I did reveal my first month page views on the eHow forums last month but going forward I expect to keep this info under wraps with little deviation. Maybe on an article by article basis but I’ll leave that for when the time comes to reconsider my self-imposed rule.

First Month On eHow - How Much Can You Earn?

A lot of people ask the question: How much can I (did you) earn in your first month and this of course is a difficult question to answer because you can consider many things your first month. I will consider my first month to be the calendar month of August even though I only joined eHow on August 16th. That gave me 16 days to earn in my first month and only 15 days of that did I have articles live. In those 15 days I published 36 articles and did not make payout. The money I did make however I felt was good considering my short time with eHow and my low overall page view total. I made exactly $8.84/1000 page views… better than my regular earning ratio from my blogs. That alone was fuel to keep writing for eHow.

September of course saw a better maturation of my original articles and thus better search engine ranking. My ratio improved to $9.76/1000 PVs for the month. During September I also added an additional 19 articles to my library (yes, my pace slowed considerably). At this point I see that the earning potential is quite good here. :)

September eHow Earnings Statistics
55 published articles earned at a combined rate of $9.76 / 1,000 PV
80 percent of my earnings came from 25 percent of my articles
20 percent of my earnings came from 37 percent of my articles
38 percent of my articles had no earnings at all

Also, as stated in my goals post I want to duplicate my day job income by earning residual income online. Here is my progress thus far without giving out actual numbers:



In the coming months I’d like to improve on these numbers. I’d like to my current 80/25 ratio to improve to say… 80/40 and of course I’d like my $0 earners to decrease in percentage as low as possible. We’ll have to see what natural article maturation does however, because as of yet, none of my articles have even aged two months yet.