Residual Income Online – March 2010

Introducing Quarterly Income Reports
As I stated in my last residual income stream report for the month of February I am going to switch to a model of breaking down my numbers on a quarterly basis from hence forth. Considering this is the first week of April this will obviously be my Q1 2010 report and I must say that March was great. It was by far my best month ever for residuals and it certainly proved that my backlinking work paid off. Incidentally it also showed how significant the eHow UK bug was impacting eHow earnings as my earnings there increased a ton over February.

EHow WCP No Longer Accepting Articles
I’ll have touch on this again I’m sure in another post. I like to be comprehensive and not piece things together but today I logged into eHow and found that they are no longer signing up new members to the eHow writer’s Compensation Program and are phasing out new article publication for existing members over the next week. This essentially means that my 82 published articles there will no longer get any bigger. Not that I’ve been on any torrent for publishing there since about September but I’ve enjoyed inching the number up every month. It is quick money for each published article if you know what to write about.

What is currently clear is that to continue publishing to eHow we will all have to sign up with Demand Studios and agree to their Terms Of Service which are a bit different than eHow’s current TOS. Most notably in my book is that all earnings will be very similar… and writers will not retain ownership of their articles on the new publishing platform. This is not that big a deal if you never move you’re articles around like me but for many it is a big deal. People want to retain ownership of their work not give it away especially since there are so many places they can publish while retaining ownership rights.

Anyway, I will at least be satisfied that my current will continue making money just as they have before especially now that they are earning so much every month compared to months past. As for Demand Studios, I will give them a shot for a good 10 articles or so and see what I think. I don’t move articles around the web so ownership rights aren’t that big a deal to me but I like knowing that the option is available. Also, I’m not convinced the earning pace is as good at DS but that is merely pessimistic speculation.

For more on the migration for eHow writers to Demand Studios follow along Crunchy Data’s Residual Income Content Writer blog as she cover’s these situations very thoroughly as demonstrated by her coverage of the eHow UK fiasco. You can also look at Write For eHow’s post: Changes At eHow.

eHow Residual Income Report
Despite the constant drama at eHow I have had by far my best month ever there for residual income. As the pace for earnings there accelerated in February they continued to accelerate in March as the lingering problem of eHow UK continued to fade and as the gradual increase in backlinks to my articles expanded. Last month I stated that my raw earnings and earning pace (residual income per 1000 page views) were the best they’ve ever been at eHow, well March topped both of those numbers from February easily.

My eHow earnings stats for March 2010 are below:

• 80 published articles earned at a combined rate of $14.05 per 1,000 PV – up from $11.78 in February. Last month I stated that the $11.78/1000 PV to be a rebound due to the fixing of the eHow UK bug. This month I am led to believe that the rebound has continued to take effect. Possibly the bug fix occurred in a rolling manner slowly taking affect to my articles in small bunches. March must have had most if not all of my articles fixed as my earning pace was so high compared to February or any other month for that matter.
• Page views for my published articles expanded month over month by 28 percent. More page views earning at a faster pace has led to a remarkable increase in this particular residual income stream.
• 80 percent of my earnings came from 23 percent of my articles – up from 22 percent in February. – Always pleased to have this number higher.
• 20 percent of my earnings came from 48 percent of my articles – up from 36 percent in February.
• 30 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – down from 42 percent in February. – Last month I wanted to see this number drop down into the 30s, looks like I got my wish and almost some more; 20’s next month maybe?
• Overall, 9 percent of my published articles have never earned a penny (7 articles). This is a slight improvement from last month. Additionally I feel moving these articles will be too much effort than it is worth. We’ll see if they ever earn anything. If they don’t then no big deal.

My eHow Earnings Pace
08-2009 - $8.84 per 1000 PV
09-2009 - $9.76 per 1000 PV
10-2009 - $10.19 per 1000 PV
11-2009 - $10.25 per 1000 PV
12-2009 - $10.41 per 1000 PV
01-2010 - $8.30 per 1000 PV
02-2010 - $11.78 per 1000 PV
03-2010 - $14.05 per 1000 PV

I’m curious where this pace will settle at. I can’t imagine it will keep going up every month though it would be nice. :)

InfoBarrel
Of all the paces that I write for InfoBarrel was the one that really took the back seat in the month of March. During the month I was immersed in my Xomba Bookmarks Experiment and because of two different vacations and routine backlinking work I do I barely participated on InfoBarrel at all. Despite that I was pleased to see my raw earnings there rise month over month to an all time high for me, my earnings pace declined a bit month over month, and lastly my visitors increased month over month to an all time high for me. All three things combined led to notably higher income. No crazy big increase but nice nevertheless.

Ironically I made some comments on the forum over there and possibly here on this blog that my pace there was less than I would have expected early in the month but they rebounded quite nicely. The first week or so was really slow I guess. Possibly this was just random chance at play.

At the end of March I had posted 123 articles, only two higher than the month prior. I should also note that I have a good handful of additional articles posted on IB on different accounts which are not tied to my Adsense code. I use these articles for links only, not for earnings. I don’t want to water down my Adsense account with articles with no potential to earn. In the future I may develop this topic a bit more but not now.

My InfoBarrel Earnings Stats and Pace
Dec 2009 - 90 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $14.61
Jan 2010 - 110 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $15.33
Feb 2010 - 121 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $16.99
Mar 2010 - 123 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $14.77

Now that eHow is out of the picture I will slowly start refocusing my efforts here. In fact I just joined The Keyword Academy and will be doing some experimenting here on IB as I try some of their tips. I have yet to delve into Self-Hosted niche blogs on Wordpress but will use some of my experiments on InfoBarrel to start this plan off. A lot of what is said on the Keyword Academy is known by many but for Wordpress blogs they have a great system for supporting all the members with good backlinks. The membership fee may be worth it for this reason alone. We’ll see.

Wow, that was a tangent. Anyway, you can read more about the Keyword Academy from Lis at Passive Income Online who finally convinced me to join. Hurry, time’s running out for the low cost membership as their prices are rising this month on the 6th. As an aside I’ll say many of my experiments won’t be on my main IB account as these will be experiments for niche sites that I’ll be putting together in the future. I will however add the IB stats together for these quarterly income reports however.

Xomba
I’m not going to say much here on Xomba as I recently posted a major update on my one-month mark on my Xomba Bookmarks Experiment. I closed the month out with a small earnings spurt there though it wasn’t much. I only earned around $10 at Xomba for the month but I guess this has the potential to rise in the future. We’ll see. Since all earnings here are exactly my Adsense stats and it’s against TOS to share this info I’ll say that my earnings pace has dropped off what I experienced through the first 10 days of March considerably however the conversion rate of Adsense page views to clicks is still the best of all my properties online. Unfortunately it’s tough to get Adsense page views there because of the 50/50 split and due to the brevity of 50-100 word Blurbs / Bookmarks.

Nevertheless, I’ll take my $10 and see what happens in April. I will continue to post Bookmarks on Xomba but will slow my pace considerably. I’m pushing 279 Bookmarks there in roughly 44 days; I see 300+ by month end but 500 is a long time off compared to what I expected from this site a month ago. I hope things get better there though because I like the site quite a bit for what it is.

My Longevity Blog & Other Niche Sites
As we all know my main residual income blog is my Longevity blog which focuses on teaching you how to live a long life. Like the anchored backlink there? :) This site is my bread and butter and will be so pretty much for ever as far as I can tell. It is hosted on Blogspot and thus my only costs associated with it are the domain registration fees every year. My earnings for this site have been expanding greatly month over month this year as I’ve noted in my last residual income report in March for February.

I had a problem with this blog for a while in that most of the traffic to the site was coming from Google to a page that got PSA ads. I kept tweaking the page and couldn’t switch the ads over so I just took them off the page completely and moved on. Because of this my Adsense page views dropped but my Adsense page views became more efficient and my site’s CTR and earnings per 1000 Ad page views increased remarkably.

I’ve also done some extensive backlinking on many of the pages with more backlinking currently happening. As a result my SERP ranking is getting much better for all my other pages and the entire site is performing so much better. I will continue backlinking this site from InfoBarrel, Post Your Own Articles, and many Article Directories as I’ve described time and again and in great detail in my ultimate guide to residual income. For the month of March my search traffic was the most it has ever been to the site and my earnings per search visitor are as high as it’s ever been by a long shot. I expect the trend of increasing earnings and increasing the sites earning pace to continue into April.

Ironically, one of my vacations this month allowed me to work on a niche site that I have had dormant for over a year. When I built the site (blog) it was just a personal site that happened to be a niche topic. Well, I worked on it during a weeklong vacation in March with no purpose in making money on it but I did anyway. It seems that once you learn how to make residual income online you can’t stop even when you aren’t trying. I will continue expanding on this site little by little in the future and possibly optimizing some of my older posts. I’m not sure what kind of money this can make but because it’s personal and something I did before I was looking to make money online I will continue working on it for enjoyment and take the residuals as an added bonus.

Similarly, I will slowly introduce some niche sites into my arsenal of online properties which follow the Keyword Academy model and in time I will discuss these a bit. But for now there’s nothing in place yet.

Overall Online Residual Income Stream
Overall my online residual income streams have expanded greatly in March over February. Everything was up month over month in raw earnings and most were up on the pace as well as the search visitors and ad page views. Below you can see the graph for my residual income goal. Remember there is no published number what the long term goal is other than it is a duplication of my day job income. My long term goal is to make as much online as I do at the office. Of course you don’t know how much I make at the office so that keeps things at least a little vague.

Last month I had achieved 2.81 percent of my long term goal; March I achieved 4.83 percent of my long term goal for an overall increase in residual income online of 71.5 percent month over month. Nice.

You can also take a look at my past residual earning recaps if you care to here and I’ll recap once again in about three months. In between however you’ll get nuggets here and there. Good luck everyone and work hard. That’s how it’s done.

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Residual Income Report – February 2010

It’s that time again for another online residual income report. Most people who do these kinds of reports tend to do them right after the first of the month however if you’ve been following this blog for any amount of time you surely have noticed that I don’t usually fully report my residual income until at lest a good week or more into the next month.

Along these lines February came and went and It’s almost a full week and a half behind us. In the month I didn’t write too much here on the blog other than a marathon post: The Ultimate Guide To Making The Most Money Writing Online. Yeah, I know the title stinks. I couldn’t water it down. It’s like my posts, way too long. Other than that I previewed my upcoming Xomba Xomblurb experiment in which I intended on backlinking every single one of my blog posts from How To Live Long as well as some articles online. Well I can safely say that 17 days later I have hit 200 blurbs in total and if you can believe it or not my blurbs are already making more money than my InfoBarrel articles which have been aging for 2-3 months by now. Crazy! I’m really liking Xomba so far.

In addition to these articles I also previewed my research case study on the Home & Garden category at eHow specifically focusing in on long time writers there who have noticed a large drop in earnings. That experiment culminated in early March with my post Re-Examining The eHow Earnings Algorithm. Check it out if you missed it.

Needless to say my February was pretty booked because in addition to all of this I made a kamikaze run on a niche site that I started from scratch. I made a hunch on a topic getting really big by the end of February and I peaked at about 75 search visitors a day but the niche slowly fizzled and died. My site now gets about 5-10 a day and the topic is slowly fading from the news. I had my fingers crossed on that one and spent some good time setting myself to cash in on it. Too bad. For all my efforts on this one niche site I made $0.00 total. Of course the site does still exist and I do have PR on it after only 5 weeks of being live so it should be a good blog to send backlinks from later on as needed.

So how about earnings you may ask. Let me give a few details about earnings. As always I will stay slightly coy with my actual totals because I don’t feel that is information that should be public. Nobody talks about their paychecks at work; why should things be any different online.

InfoBarrel Earnings Report – February 2010

In the month of February I slowed down considerably on InfoBarrel. Mostly because I was using the site initially to send backlinks to my eHow articles. For the most part I did that plenty. By month end I had over 120 articles posted on InfoBarrel with most every one of them sending backlinks at my eHow articles and some at my blog posts.

Not only that but I continued to go back to my early IB articles and tweaked then to be more SEO friendly. To this date I haven’t yet finished tweaking them all but am satisfied with what is there. This may be a continual project of mine for when I don’t feel up to writing new content.

Anyway, as my work slowed on InfoBarrel my traffic increased as did my earnings. My stats lay below for your pleasure.

Dec 2009 - 90 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $14.61
Jan 2010 - 110 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $15.33
Feb 2010 - 121 posts - Earnings Per 1000 Search Visitors $15.84

As you can see my earnings per search visitor stat is rising every month. Also of note, though I don’t publish my amount of page views I see no problem with saying my page views have increased each month over the previous. February was in fact 6 percent higher than January despite the three days advantage January had. Not bad.

For a long time now I’ve been preaching to everyone to use InfoBarrel to backlink your eHow articles; well I still think this is the best part of IB. Because despite the nice high numbers page views there just aren’t what they are anywhere else. The domain is just not strong enough to generate lots of organic traffic without backlinks. Maybe in the future but for now the links are why the site is great.

In the future I will be placing a huge effort on sending backlinks from IB back to all my quality blog posts; this will take some time but it should bump up my post count there considerably when I get around to this task.

eHow Residual Income Report

eHow continues to be one of the hottest topics in the content site arena these days. Everyone seems to have strong opinions over eHow, their business practices, their long-term outlook for writers, their earnings algorithm. I have even gotten deeply entrenched in trying to analyze their algorithm by watching earnings trends very closely and writing about them very thoroughly here on this blog. However I don’t believe I have ever stated passionately one way or another what I believe about eHow and the merits of writing for them.

I haven’t said what I think because frankly I don’t know what I think. I know eHow is the easiest site to make money with quickly but will they be around in 5-10 years? I don’t know. Will their earnings algorithm change for the worse? I don’t know. The thing is however the same questions and answers can be said for any site you don’t own. The same can be said for Blogspot blogs by Google Blogger which I host virtually all of my blogs on.

I don’t know the answer to these questions so I continue to use them until I see evidence otherwise. The only caveat being I try to diversify. This is why I now write for eHow, InfoBarrel, Xomba, and a few Blogger Blogs. In the future I will likely experiment with Hubpages, Weebly, and Wordpress. Nobody knows what will happen to a site if you don’t own and control everything yourself. So I march on.

Getting back to my residual income from eHow in February I want to say that most of it was residual. For the most part during the month of February I was involved in projects circling around InfoBarrel, Article Marketing, Niche Blogs, and Xomba though I did add three articles to my eHow library and a fairly solid collection of backlinks to older articles there early in the month.

The earnings dip that I experienced in January by the way disappeared completed and I saw the best month ever for earnings at eHow for me in terms of raw dollars and in terms of earnings per 1000 page views. Due to the short month my page view total was fairly flat but the efficiency of those articles was very good.

My eHow earnings stats for February 2010 are below:

• 77 published articles earned at a combined rate of $11.78 per 1,000 PV – up from $8.30 in January. Last month I stated that the $8.30/1000 PV to be a temporary dip due to the eHow UK fix. This month my thoughts were confirmed as my earnings pace rebounded to an all time high. Thank you eHow for the redirects – there I said it.
• 80 percent of my earnings came from 22 percent of my articles – up from 19 percent in January. – Always pleased to have this number higher.
• 20 percent of my earnings came from 36 percent of my articles – up from 38 percent in January.
• 42 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – down from 43 percent in January. – Would be nice to see this number drop down into the 30s sometime soon.
• Overall, 9% of my published articles have never earned a penny (7 articles). This is a slight improvement from last month. In the future I may start lifting these from the site to publish elsewhere for backlinks however this is likely going to more work than I feel is worth it.

My eHow Earnings Trends
August 2009 - $8.84 / 1000 Page Views
September 2009 - $9.76 / 1000 Page Views
October 2009 - $10.19 / 1000 Page Views
November 2009 - $10.25 / 1000 Page Views
December 2009 - $10.41 / 1000 Page Views
January 2010 - $8.30 / 1000 Page Views
February 2010 - $11.78 per 1000 Page Views

As you can see from the above stats the trend in earnings efficiency is basically improving month after month. This is (I think) due to the ad optimization. The longer your article sits online making money from Adsense the better Adsense gets at knowing which ads will convert into clicks. This is why the efficiency of earnings increases over time. It also could be due to editing articles after publication for better optimization but not in my case because I never go back to edit my articles.

Regarding Page view totals I don’t disclose these because you could simply calculate what I make and I have chosen to keep this information confidential however I will say that my page views were flat for the month over January.

Other Residual Income Streams

I’ve got a few other streams of residual income to report, most notably my main blog, How To Live A Longer Life which saw another excellent month. It wasn’t a record breaker in terms of dollars or earnings per 1000 PV but it was close. Also I earned small bits on Hubpages (I’ve got less than 10 articles there; this is not worth going into) and my niche blogs are not yet monetized for the most part. Again this is not worth delving into yet. In future months I will have to start addressing these as they will only become significant in time.

Xomba Xomblurbs
I plan on doing an entire lengthy post devoted to Xomba in the near future. Can’t say when because I’ve got some travels coming up and may not have much time online available to me for at least a week but to summarize I’ll say this.

Roughly 19 days ago I started a Xomba Xomblurb Experiment. In the past 19 days I’ve posted over 200 Xomblurbs for the sole purpose of funneling traffic through the nofollow links Xomba offers to try and get a trickle of targeted search traffic to my archived blog posts that don’t get any traffic at all. As of today, less than 3 weeks into this project Xomba is my number one source of referral traffic to my longevity blog, my number one source of referral traffic converting to earnings on my blog, and I already am making more money on the Blurbs themselves in Adsense that I make on the 120 Infobarrel articles I have up. My earning efficiency at Xomba is amazing.

Even though they only split Adsense views with you at a 50 percent clip all of the views convert better. My Xomblubs so far have the highest CTR in Adsense of any of my web properties. I fully expect this to be a good long term relationship.

Because Adsense won’t allow you to publish detailed stats I can’t say what my earnings per 1000 PV is at Xomba but let’s just say it’s more than twice as good as eHow or InfoBarrel. I definitely recommend Xomba Xomblurbs to anyone and everyone! You can sign up on your own or be kind and sign up under my referral link. If you sign up or are already a member there stay tuned for my upcoming in depth post on Xomba and How to effectively work the system.

Of Note – Upcoming Focus of this Blog
I said this in my last online residual earnings report; I don’t expect this blog to ever only be about writing blogs and content articles for money. I want to round out the concept of residual income. In the future expect a slow introduction to a wider variety of topics all relating to residual income. I plan on touching on the business side of things and what to do with the residual income we make to leverage it and turn the income into compounded residual income. This will be slow to come but it will come.

Also, these residual income reports are great and I like looking back on them as I thinks many others do as well but I am going to switch this to a quarterly report in the future. This means you can expect another one of these in a month for the 1st quarter and then one every three months thereafter. I’m sure you understand why as residual income fluctuates and a quarterly report will smooth out the results. It will also focus my efforts on making money rather than talking about what I made.

Overall Online Residual Earnings Goal

Last month I benefited from increasing revenues on my blogs to increase my residual income; this month the gains came from InfoBarrel and eHow predominantly. Due to the short month the increase in my goal was slight but it was still there. In January at was at 2.62 Percent achieved and this month I’m at 2.81 percent. – March, BTW, is on pace to blow this out of the water. I’m seeing unbelievable gains across the board. That however is another post. :)

Your comments are always welcome and appreciated.

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Re-Examining The eHow Earnings Algorithm & eHow UK

More Thoughts On eHow Earnings & Why Some People Have Experienced A Drop In eHow Earnings

I’ve touched on this project a few times over the past 10 days or so in and now it’s time to devote a bit text to what I’ve been up to. In addition to my regular regimen of adding content to my blogs (light work as of late) and my recent Xomba Xomblurb Experiment (which I also plan on writing a devoted update post on) I have also been working closely with a handful of writers on eHow who have been noticing a significant declining trend in residual income for a long time… not just over the past couple months but over the past year as a whole.

In fact my project at first involved predominantly the Home & Garden category of eHow as Demand Media recently introduced a new website to their repertoire of massive content sites which is focused squarely on the Gardening niche. It seems that in particular circles on eHow many members were becoming suspicious that eHow was somehow manipulating the category causing articles in this category to start earning less… presumably to dissuade writers from providing competition to their new site.

At first I thought this was a crazy notion but I took the project of dissecting old data and new data to formulate an objective opinion based only on what I found. Having looked at the data from multiple eHow writers in the community with experience dating back to almost two years ago and article totals nearly a couple thousand I narrowed the titles down to a manageable bunch and began crunching numbers. What I found was both surprising to me and yet still somewhat what I expected.

Based on what I was finding with many of the articles I was seeing was not that eHow was outranking Home And Garden articles with their new site, their UK site, or by any other means but that most of the articles I was looking at had at one point earned way more per month than they were now. At first I suspected this was because the article were losing ground in the SERPs which is what spawned my ultimate guide to residual income post a few days back. What I later found however was that it appeared many of the articles I was analyzing did not appear to have fallen in the SERPs due to competition from others. Surely some of them did but for the most part search ranking and organic search traffic seemed to be stable despite most of these articles not receiving a lot of backlink help.

What was surprising however was that even though search traffic didn’t seem to drop but rather remain extremely stable over the past year for the average of the articles I looked at earnings per 1000 page views did drop considerably. And considerably is taking it lightly; they dropped a ton.

But before I get into that let’s look at a couple related questions first.

What Are The Best Earning Articles On eHow?

I was recently asked about the best earning articles that writers have on eHow (this relates to any other site too) and how the article that earns the most is not necessarily the best earning article based on an earnings per 1000 page view basis. I like to separate the thought process into two concepts. The articles that earn the most per month and the articles with the highest earnings per 1000 page views. The latter essentially refers to the potential best earners while the former refers to the actual best earners.

In my spreadsheets I have a list of the top 20 percent of my articles in terms of how much money they bring in every month. I also keep a list however of the articles that show the greatest potential even if they aren’t in my top 20 percent of high earning articles. I constantly tell people to send backlinks to their best earners so that they can be even better earnings and have greater longevity and security in the search engines but I also pay close attention to my best potential articles because these articles can earn more than any of the others if I can just send enough backlinks at them.

Because these articles earn a lot per 1000 page views but don’t earn a lot every month is because they are up against tougher competition in the SERPs. By constantly sending backlinks at these over the weeks and months eventually they will climb the SERPs to start making a lot of money.

Conversely both groups of articles can fall in the SERPs if ranking is lost and when this happens you will make less money per article. In the case where you are in a weak niche and few or no backlinks still mean your article earns then that means the slightest change to the SERPs could drop you back and bring you search traffic to a grinding halt. This is important to remember because it ties into my conclusions regarding this experiment and analysis.

My Conclusions (so far) On the eHow Earnings Drop

I have some very interesting results from the analysis of the traffic and residual income from many of these articles. I touched on it above with the concept of potential earners versus actual earners. Actual earners (articles which made a lot of money month in and month out) for the entire bunch of articles analyzed (on average) earned almost half of what they did almost a year ago based on potential earnings and real earnings. This startled me because I really anticipated seeing a page view decline as the cause of the earnings slip.

As I told one of the eHow writers I’ve been working closely with this week “It's blatantly obvious that your eHow residual earnings decline has not solely been due to you falling in rankings in the SERPs. It shouldn't matter where you are in the SERPs, page views should equate into earnings at the same rate for the same article assuming all things remain equal.” Something obviously is not equal.

So here are the possibilities that I can see that might have caused a large drop in earnings:

• eHow page views may be have been inflated throughout the summer and Fall and even recently due to eHow UK. If you ranked for eHow UK articles in the Fall you might have seen the page views tally up in your eHow account but not the earnings because the UK views didn't earn anything for you. If eHow is to believed then the redirects should restore this balance and the views should remain unchanged in the weeks coming forward but the earnings should jump back up (which I'm starting to see a lot of evidence for). Your views now should have the potential to earn even when the UK article is clicked on in the SERPs whereas they didn't in the Fall. If this is the case then that might explain why my articles have seen a remarkable increase in earnings per 1000 PV over the past 4-5 weeks; since the redirects started happening. We're talking almost a 100 percent increase for me over the last 4-5 weeks. 
• Also possible but probably unlikely:  eHow at some point over the last year changed their template and ad placement which resulted in a new mix of ad placement. I'm sure the template has changed over the last year but it's doubtful eHow would have done this only to realize a decline in revenue per 1000 PV so great. This in my mind is very unlikely.
• eHow changed the earnings algorithm at some point over the last 12 months to share less revenue with writers. This is very possible and likely this happens frequently to a small degree. Because they reserve the right to manage their algorithm in secret they could very well tweak it every month for all we know based on their underlying needs.  I see no problem with this as this is their business decision and we all know about it.  Having said that however making drastic changes to the algorithm is probably not a smart move and I doubt any writer would be able to notice it changing month after month.
• Last possibility I see which also seems very unlikely is that ad revenue simply declined over the period. I highly doubt this is the case though because every site across the board would have noticed a remarkable dip in ad revenue and this just isn't the case.

Here's What I Guess Actually Happened

I believe many people were making good money on eHow up until summer last year. Around that time eHow UK was launched and some of your page views went to that site but were still tallied on your US site counter in your eHow profile. This made slight traffic declines seem much greater as a percentage of what did come to your articles actually went to a place where you couldn’t' earn for it, eHow UK. People that didn't have many (if any) quality backlinks to their US version articles at that time were hit particularly hard by the UK site. Those people who weren't hit hard probably had more backlinks built up.

In January eHow began redirecting traffic from UK articles back to US articles. For some unknown reason everyone goes through a period of next to no earnings during this phase. For me it was about 2 1/2 weeks in January. Others saw that occur in February. Most of us however are starting to see a rebound (for me that rebound is remarkable - I'll talk about this more in my next post on my February residual earnings) and I believe it's because the redirects are making our page view totals correct again, meaning the page view count we see is actually the views on articles we earn on rather than simple articles we wrote.

The Damage From eHow UK
I believe that eHow UK hurt everybody’s earnings a ton and especially those that did very little or no backlinking before the UK launch. For me; eHow UK and the earnings due to it were all I ever knew. I started at eHow in August 2009, but I backlinked from the very beginning and I saw earnings growth for the most part all the way to January 2010.  But conversely people who had seasonal articles that were not good for Fall or Winter who also had little or no quality backlinks took a huge hit by the Fall.  Some people lost hundreds of dollars every month.

My guess is that most were not adequately compensated for losses from the UK site launch with the January bonus distributions we all received (mine was about $4) but in the future most articles will soon be making what they were making before and possibly more if any backlink work has been done over the past few months. If you were to start backlinking your articles I believe most would be back to new highs very easily by May and June.  Personally my new highs are here already.  March is on pace to double my previously best month.

Good luck to you all and I hope everyone starts earning better money again.  If you want to start learning how to backlink your articles properly let me once again suggest the residual income guide I wrote about a week ago or for shorter reading I suggest you simply start an account at InfoBarrel and start baclinking your eHow articles from there.

Lastly I'd love to hear your thoughts and questions.  Add them below in the comments and we'll work our way through them.

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GeoTargeting Missouri & San Diego

I’ve been reading up a lot on GeoTargeting articles online for greater profit. The concept is simple certain search strings are virtually impossible to rank well for even with the help of a powerful domain name like eHow or InfoBarrel or HubPages. A simple and lucrative keyword like real estate license (CPC $4.88 - ) is simply unattainable but by GeoTargeting it to a specific geographic location like Missouri or San Diego the term suddenly is within reach.

I have experience GeoTargeting already albeit accidentally. When I was first learning about how to write for eHow I stumbled upon an eHow user that said that one of his highest earning articles was something along the lines of “How To ________ in A Random City”. At the time I thought, interesting; maybe I’ll try it.

Targeting Missouri Specifically

And I did. I wrote an article about getting a Missouri real estate license and I posted it up on eHow. In the following months I’ve sent a handful of anchored links at the page (as I just did right there) and it has actually become one of my better earning articles. It’s not the best but it is pretty darned good. To date it’s in my top ten and get’s roughly $17.42 per 1000 page views. I’ll take that every day of the week. The term is only ranking 27 in Google for my keyword too; it’s got quite a bit of potential left in it.

The reason I bring this up is that I’ve learned through the teachings of Vic at Blogger Unleashed (an excellent make money online blog) that the CPC of ads is typically spread along a spectrum of prices. The average CPC which we see in Google’s Keyword tool is just that, an average. That means that many of the clicks for your keyword are actually quite higher than the average CPC and many are lower.

Why GeoTarget?

A company advertising for the term “real estate license” for example is most likely a school or training company selling a learning service. A San Diego school likely doesn’t want to reach people in Missouri nor does a Missouri resident want to find schools in San Diego. Because of this the San Diego school won’t pay the average CPC for people searching for “real estate license” unless the person searching is in the San Diego market. In this case the San Diego school is willing to pay more than the average CPC to get that lead.

In my example I wrote an article tailored for Missouri residents. By doing so I ensured that I would split the market to 1/50th of the eligible searchers by targeting Missouri over all other states. In return for doing this I ensure myself better ranking for searches related to Missouri real estate licenses and better CPC rates for those visitors that do in fact click ads on the article.

If I was targeting the generic term “real estate license” I would likely not rank as well and would get less CPC from those visitors that did find my page and click an ad. Is it worth it to GeoTarget? Having just this one article to show for it I think it does make sense because I don’t feel I would have made as much on this article if it was for the entire country rather than just one state.

I can say this because many of my articles that show potential for better earnings don’t actually earn well because I can’t rank for my term even with a few good backlinks in place. You have to have visitors to your page from the search engines to have any chance at making good money and if you have to narrow your market to get those visitors then so be it.

Targeting San Diego Specifically

Now having a better understanding of GeoTargeting and having one article to look back on as experience that GeoTargeting can work even with a tough keyword like “real estate license”, I have decided to try one more similar article in an experiment targeted to San Diego. Yesterday I posted an eHow article on Custom File Cabinets in San Diego and was lucky enough to get my exact keyword string in my URL. Exactly one day later the article already is serving ads that say “custom cabinets San Diego” in the ad text itself. Now al I have to do is wait and see if I can rank for this and get search traffic to this article.

I have a feeling this will turn out well I’m just anxious to see what kind of traffic there is for this level of GeoTargeting.

In a related topic I previously mentioned some of the tactics I use to increase SERP rank including sending dofollow anchored backlinks at my eHow articles. My favorite place to do this is from InfoBarrel followed by the big article directories. You can read more on this process in my backlinks with Infobarrel post and at the tail end of my SERP Rank update post.

And lastly, in other news, I’m going to be working up another eHow earnings case study over the next handful of days. Look for in the near future. It will be based on the general category of Gardening. And don’t worry; it will not be GeoTargeted to San Diego or Missouri. :)

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Residual Income Report – January 2010

January was a very interesting month for generating Residual Income. I use this term loosely here though because I worked my butt off in January so it wasn’t exactly residual. Not only did I do a mega backlinking campaign to increase eHow earnings dramatically but I also started backlinking my best performing blog posts, optimizing old blog posts for better on-page SEO, and optimizing my first ¾ of my InfoBarrel articles for better SEO.  A lot of this I discussed in my SERP rank update post.

I let on a couple/few weeks ago that my InfoBarrel earnings were fairly disappointing despite my mass output but I quickly came to understand early in January that though I was merely writing these articles for the backlinks that they would make money much better if I too took the time to at least format them properly and interlink them. Man that was dumb setting up some 90 articles without so much as thinking to bold keywords, use header tags or link related articles together. Anyway January saw the bulk of my effort to optimize these articles and as a result I saw a noticeable increase in traffic and earnings on my IB articles in the second half of January… the last week in particular was where I realized most of my InfoBarrel earnings.

InfoBarrel Earnings Report

Through the end of January I had written and published a grand total 110 InfoBarrel articles. 90 were done in the first 44 days that I was with the site, the last 20 were done in January. My earnings on a page view basis, including my Chitika earnings at InfoBarrel has increased every month I’ve been there and I look forward to see what happens here in February.

Adsense does not allow you to see specific conversion data but when mixed with Chitika and only taking search visitors into account rather than ad page views we’re talking about a different beast. This is a highly mixed number very different from the details presented in Adsense reports and quite a bit different than the numbers presented in my eHow earnings report. Because I only track this mixed number rather than my Adsense stats it is OK to divulge this info. My InfoBarrel earnings numbers are below.

November 2009 - $8.75 / 1000 search visitors
December 2009 - $14.61 / 1000 search visitors
January 2010 - $15.33 / 1000 search visitors

My search visitors increased just about 20% from December to January and so I hope to experience similar increases in the future as I’ve been finishing up optimizing these articles and will soon begin strongly backlinking them.  So far I've only really backlinked a few of them with any vigor.

eHow Earnings Report

This is the crazy beast that everyone has had their panties in a bunch over for a while now. I wrote last month that it seemed than in coordination with the decision to rectify the eHow UK fiasco it seemed the eHow earnings algorithm was changed to offset the lost revenue that eHow would be taking in.

At that time I posted the anomaly of my earnings at eHow and showed that despite increased page view growth and a strong historical trend of revenue / 1000 page views for the months of August through December 2009, my January earnings were well off the normal pace. The pace in fact only dropped around the 8th of the month or so and then I noticed through daily number crunching that around the 22nd-24th the month the earnings pace slowly began climbing back up in the direction of normal levels.

At that time I mentioned my assumption that the pulling of articles from eHow UK temporarily affected the eHow earnings algorithm. The last week of January was fairly normal in earnings / 1000 visitors and thus the end of the month saw a reduction in my earning rate there by a noticeable sum but it was not as bad as it looked like it was going to be around the 20th.

My eHow earnings stats for January 2010 are below:

• 74 published articles earned at a combined rate of $8.30 per 1,000 PV – down from $10.41 in December. This in my mind is a temporary dip due to the eHow UK fix. Normal earnings should be over $10 / 1000 visitors for me.
• 80 percent of my earnings came from 19 percent of my articles – down from 23 percent in December.
• 20 percent of my earnings came from 38 percent of my articles – up from 34 percent in December.
• 43 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – unchanged from November.
• Overall, 10% of my published articles have never earned a penny (8 articles).  In the future I may start lifting these from the site to publish elsewhere for backlinks.  I wrote them; I might as well get some backlinks out of them.  This will have to wait for now but Maybe in March.

My eHow Earnings Trends
August 2009 - $8.84 / 1000 Page Views
September 2009 - $9.76 / 1000 Page Views
October 2009 - $10.19 / 1000 Page Views
November 2009 - $10.25 / 1000 Page Views
December 2009 - $10.41 / 1000 Page Views
January 2010 - $8.30 / 1000 Page Views

eHow Earnings Algorithm
Do I know for sure there is no problem or long-term change to the eHow earnings algorithm? No, but I feel like things are back to normal. One week into February and earnings are back to their normal pace… higher even. Through 7 days I’m sitting at $11.55 / 1000 page views. I can’t complain about that.

Backlinks work for traffic as well as for earnings too it seems. My over all eHow traffic was up 27.5% over December 2009. I have since stopped focusing on sending backlinks to my best earners as I decided I would one month ago in my December residual income report as new projects are now on my plate. Maybe in the future I’ll send some more. I have a list of about 10 articles that earn a lot per 1000 page views but they don’t get many views. If some backlinks in the future can get them going then I’ll be doing really good at eHow.

Other Residual Income Streams Report

All of my other residual income streams had great success in January. I spent so much time optimizing everything on How To Live Longer and changing my Adsense ad placement that my earnings there more than doubled month over month on a better traffic mix and better conversion rates. Backlinks are amazing as are big, below the post title ads. :)

I have one particular niche on that blog which has had a traffic increase of 600% since November and I attribute it all to backlinks. If you all haven’t read my report on using InfoBarrel for Dofollow Backlinks please do right now and sign up.

This blog made money in January for the first time… I think I’m going to pull Adsense from it though. Everywhere I read from long-term experts who hound on the fact that Adsense is horrible for this type of blog (make money online) and now I can say I agree due to a little experience. I may replace some of my ad code with affiliate links but I'm not sure yet how I’ll go at that. This blog is just fun for me so money here doesn’t mean as much.

Alternately I’ve also set up a few niche sites which I’m trying to monetize and I plan on expanding the focus on this blog to more residual income ideas in the future. I am a financially oriented guy by nature and one day plan to finish the CFP charter process. Expect a small hint of financial info in the future as I expand the residual income idea from simply writing online for royalties to doing something with that money to further generate income… I’m thinking safe investing strategies. We’ll see where that takes us.

Anyway, I wanted to say thanks to those of you who are reading and commenting here you make me feel good. If you are finding any value here I hope you’ll take the time to send me some “anchored link” love. Can you say Earn Residual Income? Thanks. :)

Overall Residual Income Earnings

BTW: My monthly Residual Income Goal is up significantly this month. Last month I was 1.87% to my long term goal; this month my residual income goal is 2.62% achieved. Nice jump in earnings!

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SERP Rank Update

Using Backlinks To Increase SERP Rank and Page Views

It’s been a while since I discussed in detail my thoughts and results from my previous post on increasing eHow SERP rank. Some of that is because I’ve been busy with numerous projects that come up from time to time. Part of it is because of the recent turmoil at eHow and with many of the writers there. Some of it is even recently due to my confusion relating to the apparent changing of the eHow earnings algorithm.

I’m not sure that the algorithm has been permanently changed however because since my post on the subject my CPM has been climbing back up. It bottomed somewhere around the 22nd of January at around $7 per 1000 page views but is now back up to around $8.25 as of this writing. This is squarely lower than in each of my past full months at eHow but it isn’t quite as low as I thought it might go. I suspect and hope that the algorithm or earnings well affected by the eHow UK mess which was getting worked on during the middle of the month.

Regardless however, as I mentioned in my past publication my mega-backlinking mission to my eHow articles have brought increased page views with little to no extra article publishing on the site. I only published two articles on eHow since early November. I’ll try to break this all down in a future article I’m afraid. I want to see how the month closes out.

Getting Anchored Backlinks To Increase Google Rankings

In the past I've discussed anchored backlinks and how they boost SERP rank. This information is neither novel nor unique. This knowledge is in fact known by many people who both make a living online and by those who dabble and fail. Most people know to rank well in the search engines you have to both have on page SEO focused on researched and deliberately targeted keywords and that you need to have backlinks pointing to your publications. The trouble is most people either just don’t obtain those backlinks or they simply don’t know how to go about a backlink mission.

I discussed at the time a friend’s article posted on eHow on the topic of honeymoon showers. At the time I said that this article had the potential to make probably around $5 per month max if it was optimized and ranked at the top of Google. When I stated this the article was ranked number 9 on page 1 for its main keyword. Since that time she tweaked her article to be more SEO friendly. I linked to the article with an anchored backlink once or twice, she did also from a couple other sites as did another friend… it’s been about three months and I almost forgot about this experiment but I decided to run a check on the article’s SERP rank and what did I find? An across the board improvement in the ranking of this article for all main variations of the article’s main keyword.

On October 14, 2009 this article ranked:
• 1st for “How To Host A Honeymoon Shower”
• 1st for “Host A Honeymoon Shower”
• 7th for “A honeymoon shower”
• 9th for “honeymoon shower”

Today, January 28, 2010 this article with some backlinks (very few backlinks actually) this article ranks:
• 1st for “How To Host A Honeymoon Shower”
• 1st for “Host A Honeymoon Shower”
• 1st for “A Honeymoon Shower”
• 3rd for “Honeymoon Shower”

That’s an excellent improvement and likely will bring this article up to the top of the SERPs for a multitude of long-tail searches related to her main keyword. Again, this article probably isn’t a huge moneymaker due to potential traffic and CPC as demonstrated by Gs Keyword Tool but with a few backlinks I bet it gets a lot more page views today and probably more money today than it did three months ago.

Incidentally the two pages still out ranking her for “Honeymoon Shower” are PR1 and PR0 pages and only one appear to even be optimized for search engines at all. A few more backlinks and this eHow article (which is a PR3 by the way) could easily be number one for the main keyword.

Is My SERP Rank Increasing?
I’ve also discussed a few of my personal SERP Rank goals as they relate to my main longevity blog. Currently I want to get my site: How To Live Longer to the rank well for the phrase “how to live longer”. In the past I stated a few other phrases I wanted it to rank for. “Longer Life” was the first I mentioned back in October in my post titled build residual income with anchored backlinks. This is the same article in which I discuss the Honeymoon Showers article (BTW).

In that article I noted that I currently ranked:
• 2nd for “how to live a longer life”
• 2nd for “live a longer life”
• 8th for “a longer life”
• 22nd for “longer life”

Today for the same terms I rank:
• 3rd for “how to live a longer life”
• 2nd for “live a longer life”
• 3rd for “a longer life”
• 4th for “longer life”

That’s a nice improvement and though I can’t say I’ve gotten to the maximum estimate for earnings because of this climb in the SERPs, I can say that my overall organic search traffic for “live longer” related searches is up a lot. In the month preceding my stated SERP rank goal for my main keyword I received 205 entrances via search to my main blog page on my longevity blog. According to G Analytics this was from 41 different keywords.

Over the next two months I built up a ton of backlinks to my main page and deep post pages using a variety of “longevity” related anchored backlinks. As you can see above, as my main keywords ranking improved, so too did my entrances via search to the main page from all the various long-tail searches. It’s only been a little over three months but the last month I have had 628 entrances via search to just my main blog page via 62 different keywords.

Basically in three months my anchored backlinking campaign increased my search traffic more than 200 percent and increased my long-tail search traffic by about 50%. I even started getting ranked for a new search term that I will be heavily backlinking over the next 30-60 days: “How To Live Longer”. In the month before my campaign this keyword brought one visitor to my blog; in the past 30 days however this one keyword brought 300 visitors to the blog… and I’m still on page two! In fact this keyword ranks 18th in the SERPs. I can’t wait to get this to page one.

Improving SERP Rank – Making Goals

I share this with you for two reasons. This is fun for me and form of entertainment when I don’t feel like writing articles or generating backlinks but also to refine my opinion on what is working and how to do it better. I also hope that you reading this come to understand that increasing your SERP rank is not complicated; it just takes time and work. It just takes anchored backlinks.

What are you doing next, you might ask. How can I do the same? The answer to this is simple. Court at the Keyword Academy recently identified a challenge to single out 30 URLs that get little traffic and to build five backlinks to each of those articles over 30 days. I won’t rehash the terms though, go to his site and read about the backlink experiment for yourself. Regardless of his experiment however I’ve been doing just that for some time and will continue to do so.

How To Build Backlinks – My Evolving Strategy

I have recently identified about 10 articles on my longevity blog which make good money and which get decent traffic. I am sending backlinks like a storm to them. I have also identified roughly 15-20 eHow articles (my best performing articles) and am doing the same for them. Sending more backlinks to them will cause them to appear in searches more often and will increase them money they make.

Recently I’ve identified 33 articles on InfoBarrel that I published between late November and early January that mostly send backlinks to my blog and my eHow articles. These 33 articles in fact send about 55 backlinks to my articles on eHow and my Longevity blog. I feel these articles could earn more money on their own so I will be sending backlinks to them over the next 30 days as well.

This is how you increase your SERP rank and increase organic traffic. Publish a lot of stuff and identify the articles which appear to perform well and send backlinks to them… then send backlinks to those articles as well.

Here’s my pattern for how to build backlinks as it stands now. Keep in mind this is not set in stone.

An article on eHow is backlinked by an article on my blog. An InfoBarrel article then backlinks both the eHow article and the blog post. Then an article directory submission backlinks the InfoBarrel article, the blog post, and the eHow article. From this point on I have three articles (out of four that I wrote) that can make money, my eHow article, my blog post, and my InfoBarrel article. Each one has between one and three backlinks and this can be increased further by simply adding an extra layer of an additional directory such as eZine articles, Squidoo, or GoArticles.

Personally I also backlink my moneymakers with ArticleBast, SelfGrowth, and Buzzle though these get less of my time for now. That’s how I did it. And if you’re wondering if it’s worth it then give it a few months of hard work and see if you get addicted to seeing traffic growth via search engines that grows 20-30% month over month consistently. This growth comes purely from increasing SERP rank and an increasing volume of long-tail traffic. Get to work on building those backlinks; they work.

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Changes to eHow Earnings Algorithm?

Update on Mega-Backlinking

I had a question come to me regarding my backlinking of eHow articles since Thanksgiving which I touched on in my post titled InfoBarrel Versus eHow. If you haven’t been following along I’ve gone on a mission to send a ton of dofollow backlinks to my eHow and Blog articles from various submissions sites including InfoBarrel and various article directories.

In roughly two months I’ve backlinked 100% of my eHow articles at least once, 76% of them at least twice, 57% of them at least three times, 40% four times, 23 percent at least five times, and a few backlinked over ten times with a spattering in between.

I’ve also sent dofollow backlinks to my best performing blog posts on my Longevity Blog and here from the same sources as well as blog carnivals.

The question was this:

“Out of curiosity, have your views picked up at all since you mega-backlinked recently? How about pay? Does Google do a once-a-year shuffle of article ranking (just wondering)?”

My answer - Regarding eHow specifically, my article views on average for the first 18 days of January are up 22% over the average daily views I got in December... that would imply an increase in earnings of roughly 22% as well however my earnings per 1000 page views have dropped considerably.

On face value yes, my article marketing and backlinking has considerably increased my organic search traffic to my eHow articles month over month and I continue to expect further gains in the future. However there has been a lot of talk on the eHow forums about low earnings this January. Some of this is being fueled by some of the long running writers who have experience significant success and longevity on the site. Many of these writers also feel something is wrong.

My eHow Earnings Experience

My earnings per 1000 page views on my eHow articles for September '09 – December '09

September - $9.76
October - $10.19
November - $10.25
December - $10.41

Notice the obvious trend of slightly increasing earnings per page view month after month. This is the result of aging and optimizing ads. As the article matures the ads are more appropriate. As far as Adsense goes your page will receive better converting ads as you get a history of ad clicks on a page. When Google understands what ads convert better for your content the ads will be better optimized and your earnings per 1000 page views will increase.

Declining eHow Earnings

Now see my figures for January 2010.

January - $7.94

This is through the first 18 days. Despite the very tight range for the previous four months and the increasing trend due to aging this month is seeing far worse conversion of page views into earnings. What makes this crazy is that my article marketing and backlinking since Thanksgiving has produced increasing page views month over month.

Even though my page views on eHow articles are up 22% over December my earnings per 1000 page views are down 23.7%. That is huge considering my tight range for four months in a row... each month even increased until now.

eHow Earnings Glitch?

Something is up with eHow; I'm sure of it. This month I have added only one article to eHow so it doesn't have to do with a large influx of new articles which aren’t earning due to their relative youth... all articles are simply not earning like they should be or have been in the past.

Truth be told, my eHow articles were earning at a fairly normal pace for the first week of January... until they said they would pull eHow UK articles from their database. From that time on earnings/1000 PV dropped considerably.

Every day my number gets lower. I'm curious how low it will go. After all nothing has changed. I haven't edited my articles, my best performing articles haven’t changed their placement considerably in Google, some are up a few spots even. In fact my Blog earnings on How To Live Longer (my Longevity blog) are up considerably January over December on an earnings/PV ratio. We’re talking they’re up 79%! I’ve done the same backlinking to my articles there as I have with eHow, my earnings at eHow should not be declining.

eHow Earnings Algorithm

This has nothing to do with advertisers. In my mind this is a change in the eHow earnings algorithm and/or a glitch associated with the pulling of articles from eHow UK. What are your thoughts?

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Residual Income Report – December 2009

December seemingly came and went quickly. It’s almost a whole week behind us know. In fact by the time I get to publishing this residual income report surely it will have been a full week into 2010. I cannot lie December was an interesting month and a really bad one in many ways. The biggest reasons behind this are personal but to some extent I was disappointed with my earnings too. Then again I’ve never been blogging or writing online for money during the holiday season.

Personally my wife and I had a tough time about a week before Christmas when our beloved little kitty died. I won’t go into the detail here but if you are interested you can stop by my longevity blog and read all about on my post Living Longer and Genetics.

Once that happened I pretty much lost all motivation to write and really didn’t do much of anything until really this week. On top of that I was sick twice during the month and my productivity was much lower than what I would have liked.

I don’t want to moan and complain all over this blog but I might as well finish off my dissertation on my residual income disappointments by noting that it is true, no matter your work ethic holiday traffic sucks. My longevity blog saw a decrease in traffic by roughly 20 percent while my traffic to my eHow articles declined by roughly 10 percent.

My InfoBarrel articles unfortunately I cannot vouch for because December was my first full month writing for InfoBarrel. I had hoped to close out December with well over 100 InfoBarrel articles, each one essentially sending backlinks to my eHow articles and my blog posts but around the 20th of the month I slowed on my publication schedule and ended up only finishing the month with 90 articles published since the 18th of November.

I don’t know what normal traffic levels for those articles would be in any other normal month so I’ll just assume they’re roughly 15 percent below normal as well.

Despite the low levels of traffic for the month I must say that I’m quite happy with my earnings. Over the course of the entire month from all sources combined my earning increased month over month by 0.6 percent. That’s not too bad considering I got way fewer page views than in previous months.

Over on the eHow forums so many people were moaning and complaining about low earnings. In fact a number of people are convinced that eHow is responsible for slighting it’s writers on compensation. I disagree. They are honestly in some transition with the new eHow UK website they are rolling out but overall my page views there held up better than my own blog that I own. Not only that but my earnings per page view at eHow once again climbed to the highest level it’s ever been at for an entire month. November eHow earnings saw my dollars per 1000 page views hit $10.25 and in December my dollars per 1000 page views climbed to $10.41. I’m very pleased with that.

My longevity blog for whatever reason seems to be languishing. I think it’s because I’m targeting very difficult medical niches and have yet to crack the top ten search ranking for anything beyond long tail keywords. I’m working on it however through some of the backlink techniques I’ve described in previous posts on this site.

Many of my InfoBarrel articles in December backlinked many of my posts on that site and I have expanded some of my article submission work to backlink the blog posts as well. I also have a long term goal of going back through all my old posts and laying down some solid SEO on each and every post. I’m talking about changing the titles of many posts, changing the anchor link text in posts, adding bolded keywords, and grabbing better backlinks for good money making posts. This however is a long term plan which I won’t be able to get done all at once.

I had a question pop up in the comments a couple days ago asking about my InfoBarrel earnings for the month of December. I last discussed my earnings there about two weeks ago. Since that time I posted a few more articles on IB and am currently sitting at 94 publications. None of these articles are even two months old and most are not even one month old. Hardly any have any backlinks pointing at them at all outside of internal links from other InfoBarrel articles. Having said that my InfoBarrel articles are earning me less on a dollars per articles basis than my eHow articles. I believe this is an oddity due to the quick influx of page views you get right after publication and due to the fact that the first month or so your contextual ads are not exactly perfectly matched up to your content. I expect this to increase in future months.

Because Adsense doesn’t allow you to publish CTR and eCPC I won’t say exactly what I’m making there in those terms but I will say it is more than my Longevity blog and less than at eHow. In January I expect my numbers to increase simply because normal traffic should start hitting my pages as well as I expect to slowly start sending some backlinks to my InfoBarrel articles just as I’m doing with eHow and my blog.

For my first 6 weeks on InfoBarrel I made nearly $8. You are absolutely right… don’t rub it in. It’s not much, I know but I feel there is potential here because many of my articles there were posted just before the holidays and they didn’t get viewed hardly at all because of search traffic. I’ll be honest too. Many of these articles were not as geared for search as I would have liked either. They were geared to send relevant links to my eHow articles. I didn’t need them to be SEOd to do that… I wish however I had at this point… in any event.

eHow Earnings Breakdown – December 2009

As I’ve done in past months I’m going to break down my eHow earnings a bit for comparison sake.

73 published articles earned at a combined rate of $10.41 per 1,000 PV – up from $10.25 in November.
80 percent of my earnings came from 23 percent of my articles – down from 24 percent in November.
20 percent of my earnings came from 34 percent of my articles – down from 45 percent in November.
43 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – up from 31 percent in November.

All in all, my trends were basically down for the month other than my coveted dollars per 1000 page view. I have my suspicion that this is due to the low traffic volume of the month… but then again who knows.

Breaking down my result overall just a bit I wanted to say that my top ten articles for over all earnings have made a cool $14.90 per 1000 page views and they account for 43 percent of all of my page views and 64 percent of my overall earnings to date. Considering I have taken the time to send backlinks to every article nearly twice at minimum from InfoBarrel I think it’s time to start focusing on these top articles and a few “notable” articles which are not in the top ten to really help increase my eHow earnings.

I parsed my article results into potential performers and found that I have and addition nine articles which are not in my top ten for earnings which combined have been earning at a rate of $17.86 per 1000 page views. The potential searches for these articles based on their main keywords are actually greater than my top ten and I only selected articles which have been getting page views so I think I can focus on these too and increase my earnings dramatically.

To that end I plan on sending more anchored backlinks at these 19 eHow articles, which I feel can be milked for a lot more money, with good backlinking promotion from InfoBarrel and from a few article submission sites. Furthermore there is one article in particular on eHow which I’m going to do my very best to heavily market. I’m talking like 4-5 times as heavy as the others because I feel the article has the potential to make more money than all my others combined. To this date the article has been earning at a rate of $46.67 per 1000 page views and with a little more ranking in the search engines I believe I could be making almost that every month on this one article alone. I’ll report back on progress on this article in the coming weeks and months.

To close out this epic residual income earnings report I’ll leave once again with my goal progress bar for all sources of online income combined. My goal is to duplicate my full time monthly income with just online residual income. The last couple months I’ve kind of plateaued and things didn’t change this month. My overall residual income online increased only slightly over November and I achieved 1.87 percent of my long term goal. That was on significantly lowered traffic due to the holidays and thus I expect January to be quite better. In fact I’m already off to a noticeably faster pace even after a slow couple days right after New Years.

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Increase eHow Earnings Dramatically

eHow Earnings | The eHow Journey
I started this blog back in August of 2009 to chronicle my eHow journey. In fact at the time this blog was called the eHow Journey as its main purpose was to track my eHow earnings and promote my eHow articles while simultaneously keeping track of what methods I was using to increase my eHow earnings month after month.

It didn’t take me long to realize however that increasing eHow earnings was not the only goal I should be having. So in September I rebranded this blog to it’s current name, Earn Residual Income Online, because that really is the goal I had in the first place. I wanted to start building residual income online and in August eHow was my main focus.

Since then I have written a number of eHow articles and my eHow earnings have increased every month since the beginning. Ad my eHow earnings have increased month-over-month I also have experienced increasing page views on my articles as well as a greater efficiency in monetizing the visitors that come to view my articles on eHow. I’ve laid out a number of reasons for this here on the blog in my archives but many of the specifics I have left out purposefully.

An eHow Earnings Slump?
I’ve now been a member and pleased contributor of eHow for roughly four months and I routinely make over $10 per 1000 visitors to my articles. Even as I write this the eHow forums are flooded with people saying that earnings now are lower than they have been in the past. There is some speculation as to why this is. It’s possible eHow earnings are down due to the new formation of eHow UK which is basically a clone of eHow US. Being a clone it is feasible that the site is leeching traffic to our paying articles in the US to non-paying articles in the UK.

Another reason cited for lower eHow earnings across the board is the effects of the recession and advertisers spending. This is unlikely I think due to the profits Google is showing. They don’t seem to be slowing and the bulk of their revenue comes from advertising. Another idea is that people simply click fewer ads during the holiday season. This may be but I haven’t been around long enough to witness eHow earnings fluctuations with the seasons. What I do know however is that I have been able to increase earning this month without contributing huge swaths of new articles to my library because I’ve been doing article marketing on what I already have published.

Increase eHow Earnings eBook
My eHow earnings have been rising this month because I am working to place my articles higher in the search engine results pages by using various article marketing techniques. Many of these techniques I talked about already on this blog and many I have not. Despite this however I have been working on an eBook covering the intricacies of eHow earnings with two fellow eHow writers and we have set out a goal to offer a book that really crunches the numbers behind eHow by showing what eHow earnings are all about.

The three of us are all very different writers and we all write about very different topics and thus we have the ability to fully encapsulate the nuances of the eHow earnings journey that all writers go down. In the coming weeks I’m going to preview some more of the goals that we have for this eBook and begin the preparation stages for the books release.

What Makes This eHow eBook Different?
I am fully aware that there are a number of quality eHow eBooks written by some prolific eHow writers some of which who have been on the site for at least a couple of years. I also understand that they have vast credibility in the field of “How To eHow” but in our eHow earnings eBook we intend not to best our fellow writers in their eBook offerings but to offer something different. We want to really delve into actual articles that make actual money and discuss the details of what makes those articles tick versus others that might not.

I want to increase my eHow earnings and I’m sure you want to increase yours as well. To do this we need to understand what eHow articles make money and why they do so. Instead of throwing a ton of articles against the wall and seeing what sticks let’s learn how to get articles to stick against the wall and then lets make it happen. I have a number of goals in my residual income journey and this will be a large one. I intend on increasing my eHow earnings and I hope you will try to do the same.

I realize there’s not much substance to this post but I felt it was necessary to lay the groundwork and state my purpose with eHow and my eHow earnings. I hope you’ll stick around to follow this journey and listen to my banter as we enter a new year and a new decade. Let’s make 2010 a profitable year full of residual income and ever increasing eHow earnings.

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Writing For InfoBarrel Versus eHow

11/20/10 - Please see my updated InfoBarrel Review here for more info.

Writing For InfoBarrel Versus eHow - A First Month Analysis

I’ve been very casually participating in a thread over on the eHow forums on eHow versus InfoBarrel and strangely the two sites appear very polarizing. Many eHow writers are ticked off at being burned by site glitches and article deletions at eHow and many people are convinced that InfoBarrel is not worth their time because the earnings aren’t as good as they are at eHow. No surprise, I am sitting squarely in the middle as I feel both sites are worthwhile even as I agree with the arguments of both sides.

I just posted a variation of the following on the eHow forums on my thoughts between the two. It is very neutral I think especially since I am happy writing for both sites. As is usually quite popular I provided a very personal account of my experiences on the two sites in the first month.

eHow First Month Earnings
I first started writing for eHow in late August. In my first 14 days on eHow (in August) I posted 36 articles and made a grand total of $3.81 during those first 14 days on eHow.

InfoBarrel First Month Earnings
During November I joined InfoBarrel and posted 37 articles in the last 13 days of the month. During those 13 days, as I described previously in my post titled InfoBarrel for Dofollow Backlinks, I earned $1.26.

For comparison sake this illustrates how eHow earns quicker with no article marketing. During both ~two week periods I did no article marketing of any kind for either site, although now I market my eHow articles by linking to them from my InfoBarrel articles. The dofollow backlinks InfoBarrel offers help my eHow SERP rank considerably in my opinion.

eHow Earnings Week Three and Four
In the first half of the next month at eHow (Sept) I posted an additional 10-15 articles and earned around $15- $20. I don’t know exactly how much I earned because that was during the time of the Zero Earners Club at ehow which I was a part of. During that time our eHow earnings were not tracked until around the end of Sept until a huge amount of community appeals forced eHow to finally look into the problem and fix it.

InfoBarrel Earnings Week Three and Four
For comparison sake the first 13 days of December at InfoBarrel I have published an additional 37 articles and earned nearly $4, about a quarter of what I earned during the same time period at eHow.

InfoBarrel's Advantages and Flaws
This shows that InfoBarrel is not good for quick money right out of the gate with no article marketing. It will take a lot more time and article marketing to make up for InfoBarrel’s new domain name (in comparison to eHow) which doesn’t rank as well in search engines as eHow. Having said that, as I’ve said before, every article written at InfoBarrel sends dofollow backlinks to my articles at eHow as well as my blogs and has noticeably helped my eHow earnings thus far in December. Even despite the eHow.UK crazy thing going on right now my page views at eHow are increasing as are my earnings per 1000 views. I feel much of this is due to the backlinks I am sending from InfoBarrel articles to eHow articles. Considering it takes me about 20 min to whip out an InfoBarrel article which backlinks three eHow articles or blog posts compared to spending an hour to whip up one eHow article that links to nothing I think the time spent at InfoBarrel there is worth it.

In the time it takes me to write one quality eHow article I can write 2-3 at InfoBarrel which sends quality contextual anchored backlinks to 6-9 different eHow or blog articles I own online. For me InfoBarrel is worth it for that alone and the earnings there are nice to. In fact if the earnings there ever start picking up then that’s golden; that’s the best of all worlds. I understand many people have their own variables which lead their decisions and opinions and that’s fine. Everyone is different and everyone values different things. For me, however, InfoBarrel is a very nice compliment to eHow and to niche blogs and I recommend others to give them a try.

InfoBarrel Versus eHow | Both Sites Have Value
I’m not sure slamming eHow on their faults is the way to go, nor do I feel that blanket statements that InfoBarrel stinks because of earnings is valuable either. Both sites are quality and have significant advantages. eHow earns better right out of the gate for whatever reason but it is harder to write for. It also runs on a platform that is seemingly held together twine and glue-sticks with all the glitches they have whereas InfoBarrel is an easier site to write for, offers extra incentives (dofollow backlinks), better customer service, and runs on a stable platform but doesn’t seem to earn as good right out of the gate.

Time will tell if InfoBarrel’s earnings improve but I will continue to write for both. I’ve got 72 articles at eHow and 74 articles at InfoBarrel. I want to get both up past 100 or so in time and then age them a few more months before I really start to compare which site I want to spend most of my time on.

Your InfoBarrel Story
I hope people unfamiliar with IB don’t brush it off as crap just because others haven’t had success with it. I know it is valuable just as I understand the eHow is valuable as well. I would be very interested to hear from anyone that has good experiences with IB. If there are any of you out there please speak up and tell your story.

And if you haven’t tried InfoBarrel yet I really encourage you to do so. You can sign up for InfoBarrel under my referral link here or a non referral link here. I hope you’ll allow me to refer you in; I’ll always be happy to help you out along the way. Thanks for reading.

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Residual Income Report – November 2009

November is fast becoming a distant memory as we are nearly a week into December. As I stated in my October eHow earnings report my main goals for November were to build my article rankings up from my eHow articles and my blog posts by building anchored backlinks to them all. And as I stated in my post yesterday on using Infobarrel for residual earnings my main way of doing that was by writing articles and posting them on InfoBarrel in addition to a smattering of articles posted on article directory sites. All in all I posted a lot of articles in November, probably more than I can consistently hit every month going forward.

eHow Earnings - Blog Earnings - InfoBarrel Earnings

You might expect that all those linking strategies paid of handsomely for me and my online residual income skyrocketed. You would be wrong however. My earnings on eHow increased about 1 percent month over month and my blog income decreased month over month. Because I didn’t post my first article on InfoBarrel until the 18th of the month I only made a little more than a dollar there and resultantly my overall monthly earnings declined slightly from October.

Having said that however all individual stats from my eHow earnings look pretty good.  Here is the break down as usual:

eHow Residual Earnings Statistics - November 2009

67 published articles earned at a combined rate of $10.25 per 1,000 PV – up from $10.19 in October
80 percent of my earnings came from 24 percent of my articles – up from 19 percent in October
20 percent of my earnings came from 45 percent of my articles – up from 41 percent in October
31 percent of my articles had no earnings at all – down from 39 percent in October

If you compare back to October every one of these stats improved month over month and I am very confident this is because of the backlink work I’ve been putting in to these articles from my blogs and from InfoBarrel in particular. If you haven’t yet tried InfoBarrel for its residual earnings and backlinks potential I recommend them whole heartedly. You can use my referral link here or a non-referral link here. Of course I’d be honored if you let me refer you in.

InfoBarrel Residual Earnings Statistics - November 2009

I don’t think I’m going to say much yet. I posted a lot in November but it was all at the end of the month and thus nothing has really earned yet. For the sake of saying something however I will say I posted 37 articles at the end of November and have earned $1.26. In December I’ll provide some updates on InfoBarrel and will fully analyze my earnings on the next Income report in the first week of January.

SERP Rank Update

I am kind of disappointed considering the amount of work that I put in but I cannot be too down on it because all the backlink worked is helping. I’m seeing my main keywords raising in the SERPs though many are still not on page one and as they get closer I’ll be very close to making significantly more money. Also, I’m not dismayed because November is a short month with a four-day holiday weekend in it. I was on pace to increase my earnings by about 10 percent for the month before Thanksgiving hit. It’s amazing how few people are surfing the web for those four days.

Earnings Per 1000 Page Views

During the month of November I had five articles deleted by eHow and I posted eight more during the month giving me 67 published articles for the month. My page views slightly improved on the month as did my earnings per thousand page views. In October I made $10.19 per 100 pages views on eHow and in November that number went up to an all time high of $10.25 per 1000 page views. Not bad at all. Overall my residual income online dipped just a bit and the heels of declining Blog earnings.

November Residual Income Report

You can see my goal bar below. My earnings for November were 1.86% of my long term goal. This is down from October but still higher than September. The dip was not too big.

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eHow Residual Income Report – October 2009

Monthly Residual Income Increase of 21 Percent

Last month I made payout with eHow. I was fairly excited about it because I had only been with eHow for a little over one full month and for the bulk of that time I was not earning anything due to a glitch in the eHow earnings calculator. After a lot of work trying to get that fixed all was well and earnings started showing up… and they were excellent compared to what I had been registering with my blog.

The reasonings for the increase in residual income were mostly due to my writing on eHow with SEO in mind whereas on my blog at the time I wasn’t doing that. I was simply blogging as everybody does. I wasn’t giving SEO much of a thought. I interlinked my posts and made sure my template SEO details were in place but other than that I was not writing for residual income; I was writing for blog subscribers.

Residual Income Online

Writing for eHow, however, I started with one thing in mind. Can I make money with eHow? This was my primary question I wanted to ask and answer. Money was the only thing on my mind. After writing one quick article on fine wine (which by the way has yet to earn even a penny) just to see how the eHow system worked I went and read a lot of How-To-eHow articles, writing for SEO articles and notably Desolator’s eHow for newbies guide. I quickly applied my principals.

As September rolled around I moved beyond strictly eHow guides and began reading the most remarkable guides to making money online that there is available. Grizzly’s Make Money Online blog is the gold standard for how this is done. I feel like I should have given him credit for everything he has taught me a long time ago. Seriously; if you want to learn how to make money online, be it on eHow on your own blog, you should read every post Grizzly has on his site. I have been going through his archives for about a month and a half, reading from oldest to newest, and I’m still not current. There is almost an overwhelming amount of inspiring and informative information there if you give him two months of your time to read it all.

That being said I began applying all that I had learned to my blog in September and have been slowly transforming my longevity blog into something less of a social blog and more of a money maker. Earnings for October are actually double what they were in August primarily because of the changes I’ve implemented.

So all that is to say; my residual income portfolio of passive income sources is higher in October than it was in September. This is my best month yet and I can say that my page views were higher in the month and my earning per 1000 page views increased month over month as well. This is important to note because this means that I am bringing in more residual income per visitor and thus my increasing earnings are expanding quite nicely.

Making Money With eHow

As previously stated in my September eHow Earnings Report I made $8.84 per 1000 page views on 36 published articles. September saw an increase in this rate as well as an increase in overall page views. I received $9.76 per 1000 page views on 55 published articles. And in October I only published a few more articles (9), mostly because I’ve been writing tons of content elsewhere. However due to the info I’ve been picking up I was able to increase both my page view total and earnings per 1000 rate. On 64 published articles I made $10.19 per 1000 page views on eHow. Not bad at all.

Regarding my blogging my earnings per 1000 page views increased ~34 percent over August as I’ve been slowly working on monetizing the site rather than socializing it. Again; a lot of this is due to the writings of the aforementioned Grizzly. I also implemented one specific change late in October on my longevity blog which I won’t fully see the results of for another month. About 40 percent of my search traffic goes to one page on that blog on the top causes of death in America.

I rank in Google (G) for this page in the top 1-5 spots for many different related search terms and thus I get a ton of traffic to the page. Unfortunately it is traffic that doesn’t make money. People searching for this info get what they want on the page and they don’t click on the ads. Additionally there are no advertisers for this page either. My Adsense ad blocks showed up as PSA ads for this page and they always had. Anyone landing on this page made me no money at all. So what did I do? I took Adsense down for this one page and installed Chitika for this one page instead.

Diversify Residual Income Sources

Chitika serves up ads based on the search term used to find your site and they only display to search traffic. When all was said and done I was able to monetize this page after all. The conversion rate is quite low but it is far better than the 0 percent that it once was… and because this page gets so much traffic the increase in earnings for this one page alone increased my overall earnings rate on the blog substantially. November will be the first full month of this change so the results will be interesting to see.

Regarding my residual income on eHow I thought it would be important to note some of the general stats again.

eHow Residual Earnings Statistics - October 2009

64 published articles earned at a combined rate of $10.19 per 1,000 PV
80 percent of my earnings came from 19 percent of my articles
20 percent of my earnings came from 42 percent of my articles
39 percent of my articles had no earnings at all

My Top Earning eHow Article

A mini-case study: One of my articles accounted for 31 percent of my total earnings. Under closer inspection I found that this was primarily due to the fact that the main keyword phrase of the article (two variations of it actually) appear in G on page one of the SERP rankings. None of my other highest earners fall on page one. This means that this article makes money based on both long-tail keyword searches as well as targeted main keyword searches. All of my other articles only get the long-tail searches because searchers for their main keyword phrases fall much deeper in the SERPs.

This is important to note because it illustrates just how important it is to rank well for your main keyword phrase. A friend of mine, Kim, has a nice hypothetical earnings plan up over on her site The Content Writer.  She charts what earnings might look like making $5 per article a month.  This is possible but it will require main keyword phrases to hit the first page of Google to achieve.  This might mean a bit of backlinking behind the scenes will be required.  A goal for the coming months will be to get some of these other articles ranking better in G and see if I can get more articles to duplicate the success of this one in particular. Backlinking will be my main strategy. I have linked into them some from this blog as well as my longevity blog. I will have to continue working to build more links into these articles and rank them better for their main keywords.

My Overall Residual Income Online

To finish off this post I’ll give a brief synopsis of my overall residual income online. My previously stated goal is to duplicate my day job income with online residuals. I won’t say how much I making online nor will I say how much my day job income is but lets be coy and say that my day job pays well enough to support a home-owning family of two on one income.

Last month my online residuals covered 1.64 percent of my salary; this month the total is up to 1.99 percent, a total month-over-month increase in residual income of 21 percent. Not bad. Next month surely will be better as I continue to optimize for search traffic and monetization and build anchored backlinks. Stay tuned.

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