eHow Writers Actually Make Decent Money

I haven’t posted too much in this blog this month for a couple reasons. The first was my initial hesitation to continue branding a blog about eHow when I hadn’t made any money on the site and wasn’t sure if I would stick around. I did touch on the subject of the earnings issues in a post earlier this month but didn’t go into details. In summary a small group of people who signed up for eHow during a window of approximately three weeks spanning late July through roughly the 20th of August were improperly enrolled in the Writer’ Compensation Program (WCP) and thus were not getting credit for the money they made. Naturally I was in the group. In about 15 days writing for eHow in August I wrote 36 articles and as September progressed I slowed my article writing not being sure that the problem would be fixed or not.

Of course it was and now I and everyone else from our group of newcomers were back-credited for earnings earned but not previously recorded. It turns out I did quite well for a first month and a moderate sized article library in it’s infancy. In fact as I write this my eCPM is approximately two-three times that of my longevity blog which is nearing five months old now. I am quite happy with those results and will have to renew my effort to contribute to the eHow library in October. This month, I have only written 15 articles and I have fallen short of my original goal of hitting 100 articles by the end of September. I feel, however, the earnings hiccup was an adequate excuse and I will extend this goal out one more month and try to hit 100 by Halloween.

So, to all the zero club members out there congratulations to you for sticking it out and to those of you who have befriended me I appreciate it. Good luck to you all.

In closing I thought I would put a shameless plug in for my most recent article: How to Lower Prostate Cancer Risk With Better Nutrition. This last article was written just a few days after the earning bug was fixed and thus it was the first article I had written having known that eHow really does pay it’s writers. :) I will remember this one.

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Income Diversification

I was reading my daily dose of ProBlogger this morning and Darren posed a question about how the recession is affecting your earnings. Well I thought about it and commented that the recession actually caused me to start blogging as a way to diversify my income. We all have heard the mantra don’t put all of your eggs in one basket… well, I figured a risky economy with so many people losing their jobs was good enough motivation to start blogging. Today is actually the four-month anniversary of my first professional blog (and by that I mean non-personal blog) and I’m nearing my one month anniversary writing for eHow.

Writing for eHow is definitely another step to my goals of income diversification. I’ve put in significant time there over the past 3-4 weeks building up a base library of articles and am for the most part pleased with my beginnings. There has been some issues with the writers compensation program and new members but I’m confident those issues will be worked out in due time. After all I’m starting my fifth month with HowToLiveA LongerLife.com and I haven’t hit payout yet so I think I can wait a while longer with eHow.

Regarding the recession; I feel that building upon the income I derive from my day job my multiple income streams from online musings will help the financial stability cause that I bring to my home. This blog, The eHow Journey, I’m not exactly sure how I’m going to fit into the mix, nor am I fully sure what my goals for it are but for now I’ll develop it a little here and a little there. Maybe one day I’ll be inspired to take this blog in a specific direction and add it to my diversification mix. It does get me thinking though that even though this is a second blog and separate from eHow income derived from it will likely be derived from AdSense income which is not exactly a major diversification method seeing as though each online property is based significantly on AdSense… I’ll have to think about further diversification methods in the monetization arena of my blogs.

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Trouble with eHow's Payment System for Newbies?

Today is my 22nd day with eHow.  The last four days or so I have "only" written about 3-4 articles for a couple reasons.  First it's a holiday weekend and I've enjoyed the time to relax and not do anything work related.  Second is the ongoing drama in the forums from all the newbies like myself who are a few weeks to a month-and-change old with eHow who have not yet earned a penny.

My own opinion is that I don't expect to earn hardly anything for at least another month but I probably should have earned at least a penny for now.  As a result I've had slightly less motivation to write new articles which is why I've only written one article over the weekend.  Check it out if you want: How To Cope with a Double Dip Recession, which I swear we're going to experience in the near future.

Anyway, I just wanted to reacquaint myself here on this blog and will update again as my writing continues.  For now I have written 43 articles on eHow and received 1,055 page views with no earnings of any kind.  Surely things will work themselves out in the end.  I know that some members from late July stat dates have earned and at least one member from late August earned so the group of us from early August will eventually earn... eHow will definitely make sure their are no glitches at the very least.

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