Year In Review

Hi. I am still niching around the internet, you? Just not blogging here much. I continue to have a lot of health and personal issues that are very time consuming.

However, in terms of year on year growth, the niche blogging thing performed well.

Here's how the earnings stack up.

eHow: I made over three thousand dollars with a percentage increase over last year of 60%. On 100 articles. Not bad, eh? We'll see how long it lasts.

Amazon: around $600. Not great, but not bad considering this is about 150% more than last year.

Adsense: (includes, blogs, Infobarrel, and Hubpages): Roughly $300, an increase of 200% over last year. Month on month earnings seem to be growing. I was making like $20 a month, now it seems to be $30+ so progress.

Main source of income is Infobarrel and Hubpages, not my niche blogs. Interesting!

Suite101: Roughly $200. I don't even have 30 articles up but I will say, even though I haven't achieved significant volume, Suite is much slower than eHow was with earnings growth. Given that I have proven SEO results and a good track record on a site like eHow, I tend to lean toward the conclusion that Suite's SEO to promote the site is not so hot.

They are a good organization but they seem to be flailing a bit. Also, I have a hard time publishing any article with product tie-ins on Suite, I hate not being able to use Amazon affiliate links. So this has meant, I've not been writing as much for Suite. I still really want to get to 50 articles to see what happens to earnings, but between the personal BS and my interest in pushing my Amazon affiliate earnings, it's not easy.

I haven't seen any major innovations in writing online. Although I do see people out earning me for the first time. Just haven't seen any mention of a new and improved strategy to explain their earnings.

Right now my thought is to focus on pushing products.

August Earnings

eHow: Almost $300. So close, but couldn't cross the finish line.

Amazon: Getting closer to $50.

Adsense: Slightly more than $30

Suite: Almost $40 on 22 articles which is amazing.

But I need to somehow break through to the next level. I seem to be stuck at the $300-$400 mark and can't seem to grow much past it.

Need to work on that.

Earnings for July 2010 & Making eHow Work For Me (For Once!)

Before I forget...

-eHow: $300 and change. Up about $100 from the last month. Nice.

-Amazon: Still less than $50

-Adsense: More than $20 but not by much. Most of this is Infobarrel, particularly one article that seems to be doing well.

-Suite: Roughly $20 for the month, but actual income was more like $40 since they paid me for accrued earnings from previous months as well.

-Online used book sales: This is a new thing I've been experimenting with. Not sure I'll stick with it, but I did make $200 in used book sales.

My laptop is dying--it was a lemon from day one, the power jack has had constant problems. Replaced it once, it's dying again. New laptop comes in next week! Thank goodness!

So, quickly because my battery is dying and I can't get the power cord to work at the moment...

I am pruning my backlinks today. I even went into my eHow stuff and added links to new articles. So long as I hit the save button, the article doesn't run back through the plagiarism filter. eHow is not an 'official' back link, but it does drive traffic and a lot of my eHow articles get great traffic.

Just thought I would mention that in case any one is trying to get some traffic to new articles since the eHow WCP closed.

Cheers!

September Earnings

This is a quickie...

Ehow: $144 and change -- with less than 100 articles.

Amazon Affiliate: $4

Adsense: around $4.

Apparently Suite101 has lifted the ban on discussing earnings and people are making about 7 times what I am making on ehow (i.e. $800) with the same number of articles. Hmmmm. Sounds like I need to give Suite another shot.

PROSELYTZING

I am biting my cheek this very second so as to keep myself from shouting about how I am averaging a $100 a month on eHow as of my first full month on the site.

I see sooooo many new people who are completely lost and instead of being proactive, they whine, whine, whine.

I know people who could use a $100 a month but show zero interest when I talk about my online money making ventures.

I also see many people complaining about making zero money from Hubpages and looking for a solution. I always point out that ehow money is much faster than Hubpages and I'm summarily ignored.

Sure, writing web content may not be for everyone but, here's the thing, the big secret about making money on ehow...

It is FREAKING EASY so long as you invest the time to learn and the time to write.

Here are the three keys to making money on ehow:

1. Understand SEO.
2. Know how to find good keywords.
3. Build good backlinks.

That's it. If all the above is Greek to you, then please check out Willow's excellent and FREE ehow tutorial. If you must, go ahead and buy an ebook but there's no reason to spend money on the ehow learning curve, particularly because I think the game has changed a bit since most of those ebooks were written. Web content writing is more competitive, there are a lot more people now and everyone wants to write about the same moneymakers (i.e. acai berry weight loss) so newcomers need to really be ready to bust their butts.

And here's the one action that brings in guaranteed ehow income:

1. Write 100 how-to articles. (Although I have fewer than 100 and am now pulling in over $100 a month regularly. See, if you nail 1-3 above, then you don't necessarily have to write as many articles.)

Yes ehow is glitchy, mercurial, and sometimes bites the very hands that feed them, but it is also the fastest and easiest way to get into making money online with absolutely no experience. eHow is a valuable training ground and it pays you to learn.

In other news, Hub Pages has been a surreal experience for me--Like holding a party that no one comes to. For all eHow's faults, the site really does generate income quickly, which is nice positive feedback. Hub Pages is slow to pay off from what I can tell. I think I've made like $3 in the last 3 weeks with them. So kind of lame. However, I have been using my hubs as backlinks for ehow which has pumped up my earnings there quite nicely.

So not a total loss.

My niche sites are slowly inching along. I am starting to think they were right when they said it takes a year to get off the ground. I am making pennies. Getting some traffic. But nowhere near outpacing ehow.

Amazon.com affiliate sales are also slow for me. At one point this month, I had posted a bajillion links and was getting a ton of clicks and zero buyers. So my conversion rate went from 4% to 1.2%. Nuts!

Pleasantly Surprised with Average Earnings on eHow So Far

I thought I'd pop in and note that my daily averages so far this month range from $2 a day to almost $6 a day. I've tapped into another moneymaker somehow, although I doubt it will be anywhere near as prolific as the first one.

Also, dead articles that were earning squat previously, have seen a nice bump in earnings from the backlinking/interlinking I did. Which was minimal as I don't have a ton of time so I'm doubly pleased to see those results.

I've also started at hubpages as well, but won't be able to go into detail as my toddler has just demonstrated that you don't need a bubble wand at all if you can just get enough bubble solution in your mouth. I must go investigate to see how much of the bubble solution was eaten vs. spilled on the carpet.

August Earnings Update, Some eHow Tips & eHow is Not Forever

Hi! I'm here. We were busy in August, out of town ALOT. There was a wedding, a vacation on the pristine beaches of Lake Michigan, and a writer's conference. There wasn't a lot of internet access.

Fortunately, I worked my butt off in early August and had 15 new articles on ehow as well as wrote niche content. While I was out watching my toddler go swimming for the first time and bust a move on the dance floor at the wedding reception, I earned $40.

My total ehow earnings this month were $110, down $30 from last month because my time sensitive moneymaker died.

Adsense was close to $30 for the same reason, time ran out on the money train. *sob*

It will be interesting to see how earnings go this month now that I'm not raking it in anymore.

***
Some eHow Tips

Here are some simple eHow tips for newbies:

1. Make sure your link to your other articles in the resources section. For example, all parenting related articles, should be interlinked.

2. You can also choose your articles as 'related articles' when you first publish content on eHow. It's a bit awkward to do, but well worth the effort. Note that, from what I understand, this has to be done the first time you publish as you can't go back and edit the related articles later. (Note: You can still edit your content, just not the related articles.)

3.Link from blogs and websites back to your eHow articles. I've been using my niche blogs for back links and I think this has helped. Out of the last 10 articles I wrote, I have three at or over $1--one is almost at $5.  9 out of the 10 articles have earning something, at least $0.40.  This is much faster than it was when I started, I think in part due to the backlinking I now do as well as, I think/hope/pray, concurrent improvement in my SEO skills.

If you don't have a blog, start one for each of the main topics you write about on ehow (i.e. a Parenting blog, a cooking blog, etc..).  Segregating topics, in my opinion, helps create targeted traffic and ad clicks as opposed to just one blog where you dump everything all together--SEO is not a pot luck! I think topic matters.

Anyway...Use a free blogging platform like Blogger. Put one or two original articles on it that have been SEO-ified so that google will rank your blog for that topic. Then post links back to your ehow content.

Do NOT put adsense on these blogs as you could risk losing your account for TOS violations.

This will give you a bump in the rankings for a minimum amount of work, but realize it will take some time to see results. The blogs I'm using have some good google ranked content on them, so I get a boost, I think, fairly quickly from my backlinks, but that took some time and sweat.

***
eHow is Not Forever.

The latest article sweeps at eHow continue to highlight the company's flawed business model and poor customer relations. I think it is unwise to go into a business that depends on public goodwill and then piss all over that goodwill and tell people to shove it. However, someone at eHow thinks this is a sublime business paradigm.

I understand eHow thinks they are doing everything ethically and responsibly, but the complaints are mounting as are the examples that show eHow management to be capricious and untrustworthy,which means something is not working.

Is it just me or do you ever picture the eHow staff as a group of twenty somethings with no kids, a surfing habit, and growing marijuana on the balcony of their apartment so they can toke up during smoke breaks at work?  Okay, maybe that was off base, but I've been to the West Coast several times and have seen that dynamic in companies there. I'm just trying to understand how they make the decisions they do.

eHow is the glitchiest site I've ever seen. They routinely take days to answer questions. They are now deleting articles that shouldn't have been deleted and they don't seem to care. Or, if they do, that is not the impression eHow contributors are getting.

Having also worked on the Demand Studios side of eHow, I can attest to the fact that DS is just as quirky. It's a pervasive problem that has permeated the company culture.

eHow needs to revamp their business model with an eye to treating contributors, who have many many many options to take their work elsewhere, with respect. Just because there are a lot of spammers doesn't justify treating every single writer as one. I'd like to remind eHow (and DS) that Quality Control isn't only important for their writers, it's important for them too.

And just so no one thinks I have sour grapes, I have not lost any articles in the sweeps, although I'm sure my time is coming.

JULY EARNINGS ARE HERE

This will be quick as I'm short on time...

1. Ehow $140. Roughly $100 from my moneymaker.

2.Amazon.com Almost $10.

3. Adsense Almost $40.

So just shy of $200 this month in ad revenue income.

BOOYA! WOOT!

#1 baby! Several times over. In less than a month. Yup. One of my niches is now ranked, highly, by Google and I will probably have somewhere around a $10 adsense day today. Maybe. We'll see. Because adsense is nothing if not unpredictable.

But, yeah, baby. #1!

I also had a $7 update from ehow. I'm getting there.

Happy dance.

Happy dance.

Joy. Joy. Joy.

I'm a little excited.

As for Demand Studios, I see their writer scorecard is live and I'm now completely demotivated. Even though my rating is above average, I still don't feel it reflects the quality I give them (and note the writing quality here on this blog is NOT stellar and I don't claim it is so please don't think it's representative of my professional writing--this is my brainstorm and blow off steam blog. It's not meant to be pretty.).

For me, until they make it so we can rate the CE's back or at least dialogue with them when they are unreasonable instead of having to walk away or risk outright rejection (which counts against you and can cause you to be terminated so lots of people just walk away), I'm going to be peeved.

Still, I need to put on my big girl panties and just write for them. I need the income because niche blogging isn't going to meet my income needs for a while.

RAINMAKER

I have my first rainmaker, one article that is raking in the dough over at ehow. I've had $10 earning jumps in one day and have around $40 in earnings so far for July. Which is a huge jump.

On the one hand, it's exciting to have a money maker finally.

On the other hand, it's depressing because I have 40 some odd articles that are earning pennies dimes. And that's on a good day!

Plus, my rainmaker has an expiration date. The topic will go belly up in the Fall because that's when the program I wrote about ends. So another bummer, this is just a temporary blip.

I need to write a lot of articles to make up the income gap, which does not sound like fun at all. Blech.

On the niche front, I wrote some articles to build backlinks to my niches and am still waiting for them to go live. The approval process is taking forever. In fact, I just got back from a 2000 mile road trip and the articles (just 500 words each) are still in the editorial queue. Hard to imagine that I can drive faster than someone can review a 500 word article!?!?!

MONTH 2 EARNINGS TALLY

So my eHow earnings so far:

1st 2 weeks: $3.69

1st full month: $13  @ 4 times previous earnings

2nd full month $25 roughly double the previous month and @ 8 times earnings my first 2 weeks so the growth has been exponential.

1 contest win: $100

Total eHow earnings for 2.5 months: @$140 or 1.5 months worth of diapers.

The goal is to reliably pull in $100 a month from eHow and I think I'm on track to meet that goal. I'd like to get to where I don't have to work quite so frantically to get content up.

As for Demand Studios, they show I made $337.

So in all, very close to my goal of $100 a week.