Backlink Experiment: Before & After

As mentioned in my past few posts, I've been busy backlinking my niche sites and blogs and eHow articles to improve their placement in the search engine result pages (SERPs), increase traffic and ultimately to earn more through ad clicks and affiliate purchases.

One of the eHow articles I backlinked showed a dramatic increase in views and earnings that can't be attributed to seasonal factors as it is one of those "evergreen" articles not particularly affected by the time of year. In fact, its previous best month was in the spring.

Here's what How to Get Applications for Free Personal Government Grants looked like at the end of October, before the backlink:

And here's how it's doing today, with views jumping by 2,000 in less than two months and earnings nearly quadrupling:

After a decent first two months when it was initially published, the article had nosedived for the next three months until I gave it a good article database backlink on Oct. 29, 2010. From that point, it took off:

I found this little one-article example very interesting -- crazy how one simple back-link (albeit from a very well-ranked source) could have such a profound effect so quickly.

Have I convinced you yet about the power of a good backlink? If not, I'll follow up shortly with an update on my affiliate earnings in recent months and how backlinks have contributed to that success, too.

Crazy High eHow Earnings

Residual income from my eHow articles hit an all-time high in November 2010, with a combined total of over $3,000 from my WriterGig account, Demand Studios residuals, and another very small eHow.com profile. My WriterGig profile alone brought in an eye-popping $2,870.42 USD in November and is already over $2,600 so far in December. These earnings come from just 390 articles, written between Oct. 2007 and April 2010.

This fairly impressive increase in revenue (some 7 months after eHow stopped allowing writers to contribute new articles) resulted, in my estimation, from a few particularly popular seasonal articles in conjunction with a back-linking campaign I started in September. [I wrote articles for Ezine Articles and several other article directory sites, and linked to particular eHow how-tos in my author bio at the end of these article submissions.]

These two high months bring my 2010 eHow earnings  to over $20,000 -- not bad for what amounts to almost entirely passive income from articles that have long since paid me for my time invested. Isn't that incredible? I sincerely wish I had written hundreds more eHow articles when I still had the chance, before the Writers Compensation program was closed to new articles.

While eHow is not the opportunity for making money online that it once was, since nobody new can join and no new articles can be submitted (except through a Demand Studios account), it is still possible to increase your eHow earnings as I have done and as David Sarokin has in the past few months as well (his recent $2k+ eHow month inspired me to shoot for one myself).

Have you seen an increase in eHow earnings recently? Will you give backlinking a try to improve your earnings at eHow and elsewhere?