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?

Are You Causing Your Earnings Plateau?

Have you been stuck in the same earnings bracket for weeks or months ... or even longer? Is there a monetary ceiling that you just haven't been able to crack? Whether you earn $500 a  month from your articles and blog or $1,000 in residual income every week, if the numbers don't change much from month to month ... you just might be the reason your earnings are stagnate.

In Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, author T. Harv Eker posits that each of us has a "money blueprint" that determines more or less our earnings potential and our spending habits. Some people have relatively high blueprints and thus achieve wealth more readily than others. Others might have a poor financial blueprint, created by a variety of factors throughout their lives, that predisposes them to spend every penny they earn, never getting ahead of the bills. Still others neither earn nor spend very much; it's just how they are wired.

Reading this chapter resonated with me -- I realized that I had set my blueprint for online residual income at about $2,500 a month and there my earnings sat, fluctuating slightly, for over a year. You see, I was subconsciously satisfied with that number. It was far more than I ever thought I would earn online, and just what my family needed to make ends meet every month, with a little extra for getting out of debt and for savings. It was all I needed to earn, all I intended to earn, and so it was all I earned.

Reset Your Money Blueprint

It's incredible how powerful your mindset is in determining everything from your mood to your character. It affects your interpersonal relationships and determines the kind of person you will become. And, it seems, it predicts how much money you make. (Of course, money seems trivial when juxtaposed with things like virtue and character, but it is simply one aspect that is influenced greatly by mindset and more to the point of this blog than the others.)

Steps you can take today to reset your money blueprint and increase your monthly income:

1. Make a higher income goal than the last one you achieved. Don't pick some lofty number you secretly  think you'll never make. Decide how much you want to earn, a number you will actually work toward, and write it down. Commit to this goal.
2. Change your negative thinking processes. You know, the ones that say you can't do it, or that you're getting in over your head. Believe in your abilities to succeed and to help make the world -- or your corner of it -- a better place.
3. Calculate your net financial worth and update it every month. This simple process is highly motivating as you get out of debt and build wealth.

Have you subconsciously been satisfied with your level of earnings and seen a plateau? I'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic.  

Recommended Reading: Making Goals and Setting Tasks

Recommended Resource:  Wealthy Affiliate University

Wealthy Affiliate Progress: Goals & Tasks

My blog posting has admittedly fallen to the wayside as I've concentrated on my niche sites over the summer. A big part of the Wealthy Affiliate approach is to set goals and create related tasks to accomplish these goals, periodically checking in to ensure you're still on track. The goals are an important way to envision success and articulate what you hope to achieve.

Written goals give you a way to measure your progress, and your successes or failures along the way. For example, one of my goals is to earn $800 per month from my three mini cooking-niche sites combined by September 12, 2011. Since they are currently earning just a few dollars each every month, I have a good amount of work to do to see the achievement of my goal. That's where tasks come in.

The tasks related to each goal are the specific ways in which you will work to achieve the goals. Tasks are set up on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, depending on your level of motivation and time available. One of my current tasks is to add three posts or pages to each of my cooking sites this week, and create one new backlink for each.

My Wealthy Affiliate control panel includes a user-friendly section for Tasks & Goals where I can stay organized, and create or delete these items as needed. Of course, actually doing the work is still up to me ... but having both my goals and self-created tasks staring at me is totally motivating and I am accomplishing much more than I was without a written plan.

An unanticipated benefit to my membership there has been the tools to promote Wealthy Affiliate and earn commissions on referrals made. To date, I've earned $394.50 from WA commissions, just by discussing WA on two of my blogs and in a few emails. Everyone who joins has the ability to see this kind of success and better. With the tools and instruction provided as part of your membership, you can use WA to pay for itself at a minimum, or provide another income stream to further diversify your online income.

What are your current goals for making money online? Have you set up specific tasks to help you reach those goals?

P.S. After writing this post, I noticed that fellow WAHM blogger Felicia at No Job for Mom is dreaming big with a  long term goal in the six figures annually ... I have no doubt she'll get there, and you can, too!

Demand Studios: My Experience

I joined the Demand Studios (DS) community as a writer in March of 2008 and in six months wrote over 180 pieces of content for eHow.com and Livestrong.com using the DS writing tool. (note: in an earlier post I said it was 130 but my DS account shows 187) I did this while building up my residual income, and stopped writing for the flat upfront fee when I reached my residual income goal.

My experience with Demand Studios was very good -- I chose their titles from the list of available assignments, wrote efficiently and was paid promptly. I made more money per hour than I had as a full-time editorial assistant/ reporter for a weekly newspaper in Washington, DC only a few years previous. I never experienced the overly picky or crazy Content Editor (CE) rewrites many DS writers detail. Only 2 or 3 of my early articles ever came back for edits and were subsequently approved.

Last spring, April-May of 2009, I wrote 15 Demand Studios revenue-sharing articles to compare the DS rev-sharing model to the eHow Writers Compensation Program (WCP) with which I had already experienced a great deal of success. I found there was no real advantage at the time, and felt the eHow platform was more lucrative for me and gave me more freedom as a writer. Over the past year, the articles have earned over $10 each on average, and of course are continuing to earn.

As I noted in my previous post, the reason those rev-sharing articles didn't earn as well as my eHow.com WCP articles, in my opinion, is that I didn't pick the titles -- DS did -- and their pagerank (PR) was not as high as those posted under my well-ranked WriterGig profile in the WCP. Further, I did absolutely no promotion or linking to the DS rev-sharing articles. I simply wrote them and left them and saw a PayPal deposit every month for the residual income. At the time, the revenue-sharing was capped at five years from the time of publication. Thankfully, DS has now lifted this cap and the articles will earn into perpetuity as they do with eHow's WCP.

Now that the eHow WCP has been closed to further publishing, I'm revisiting Demand Studios as one of the many facets of my residual income business. There are many things to like about publishing articles on eHow.com, most notably the high page rank and monstrous traffic to the site. The main difference now is that the writing platform has changed from the eHow tool to the Demand Studios tool, and that the rights to the articles written through DS now belong to the company and not to the writer.

There is no reason to cut yourself off from the excellent earning potential that is eHow. If you are worried about the ownership of the content, save your favorite niche writing or material you want to use in your own publications for yourself. But with the ease of rewriting content and the gazillions of niches available, there are scores of titles you can write for eHow through Demand Studios to which the copyright is a moot point because you have no need for or interest in publishing the material in a book or website not owned by yourself.

Demand Studios made a business decision--  to merge eHow writers with Demand Studios -- that will benefit the company as a whole and its writers, too, in many aspects (less spam and a higher quality standard). Now the business decision of where to write and how to earn money online is yours -- just as it has always been.

How to Make Money with a Website

Figuring out how to make money with a website is a learning process, one that has certainly been simplified by the plethora of informative guides, blog posts and articles available online for free. One of the best resources I've seen recently is the How to Build Passive Income with Article Sites Series by Lindsay at Writing for Your Wealth. If you're new to creating niche sites, or want to take your earnings to a higher level, pay attention to Lindsay's advice. She knows what she's talking about -- she earns over $100,000 in Adsense a year.

I have several sites online making money and several domains that I plan to bring online this year. My non-Blogger sites consist (so far) of the following:

• A nutrition site created with SiteBuild It! in December 2007
• A home and garden site & Wordpress blog started in June 2008
• A pets site created in December 2008
• A mini-site for my eHow eBook
• Several other domains with one page or none, needing attention

For all except the nutrition site, I use HostGator hosting and can have unlimited domains under that account, paying about $15 to register each one and then $10/ month to host them all. I decided to go this route rather than purchase multiple SBI sites because, under my one membership, I have access to all the tools and can use the Brainstorming tools, keyword information, forums and networking/ link building aspects for any of my sites. Also, I am not expecting to make a large amount of money from the sites right away, so HostGator was more affordable than SBI! for multiple small sites. The education I received at SBI! was invaluable and I continue to use those resources on my SBI site as well as in my other website ventures.

My pets site, whose link I will share sometime later when the site is more complete, has 9 pages and has been indexed by Google. I have earned just over $10 in Adsense and $4 in Amazon referrals since I published the first page in mid December.

I'm doing this site partially as a case study, to see how well it will earn and whether it is a better method than writing for content sites with better page ranks. I also want to diversify my income.

Some quick stats on the site:

• Domain name is a three-word search term.
• The topic has low search engine traffic and low cost Adsense ads.
• Competition for the keywords isn't bad.
  

I'll be interested to see how it earns as I add more pages and do a little site promotion. As always, I'll post updates.

Do you make money with your website or a blog? I'd love to hear how it's going.

Photo by Eylem Culculoglu

Bukisa Payout Reached

I've hit the $50 payout level on Bukisa and will receive payment next month, in February, according to the terms of use. I'll let you know how prompt the payment is after it's received.



As you can see, 1/5 of my earnings are from my own content and the other 4/5 is from my network's earnings. My strategy with Bukisa was to build up my network at the get-go, as soon as I heard about the site and had tried it out and considered it legitimate, since network earnings are 100% passive income.

I'm using Bukisa to publish high-hit articles, since the site pays by view and not by ad clicks. I'm also using the site to build backlinks to some of my eHow articles and blogs, to improve page rank with Google and other search engines.

As Bukisa grows and revenue sharing sites increase in popularity, I expect it to be a good earner and another key ingredient to making money online through content, both for its own earnings and for building links and traffic to my other work.

Have you used Bukisa to build backlinks to your other sites? Are you building your Bukisa network (without using spammy PMs!)?

Passive Income through Affiliate Programs

Some of my passive income this month has been through affiliate programs, which was very encouraging (and exciting!) for me. One of the sales was for SiteBuildIt, which is a great website building program and educational course for creating successful websites. I have Site Build It! for my nutrition website and love it. That sale earned me about $75.

Then, I received emails on June 11 and June 15 from Implix letting me know someone had purchased eBook Gold through my affiliate link, for a total of $67 in affiliate sales commissions.

This is one of the things I love about making money online ... I am not a saleswoman by any stretch of the imagination in person, but with my words and an unobtrusive text link, written months ago and posted online, I earned over $140 with no further effort.

Here is one of the ads generated through my Implix affiliate account:

Turn your brain food into a $300 a day income stream, fast and easily. Click here to discover how.

But to be honest the ad that brought me both my June sales was simply "eBook Gold Writer Home" in an article about using eBook Gold. If you're interested in becoming an Implix affiliate, please click that link to sign up and then email me for tips and ideas on getting started. That's another great thing about this affiliate program--you earn a small amount for sales through affiliates directly under you.

Freelance Writing Jobs: Persistence, Patience Pay Off

I landed two new freelance writing jobs during the past week, in addition to the blogging opportunity I wrote about. One is for a soon-to-be launched health-oriented website, and the company pays $30 per 450-word article. Since I am passionate about nutrition and fitness, I am thrilled with this gig. I got my first assignment of 10 articles last week and have completed eight. Since I already know these general topics, the material comes easily to me.

But if I hadn't been patient and persistent, I would probably be writing these same articles at $10 each. Here's the story.

A few months ago, I decided not to continue writing for a client (I'll call them Group W) because of a non-compete clause in the renewal contract. Just as I was tapering off my work on one website with Group W, they announced a new, large contract for another website, the one on health-related topics (I'll call it e-alive.com). Oooh, I wanted in on that gig! But I realized that if Group W was paying us writers $10 per article, they were receiving more than that for the articles from e-alive.com. Why not get the full amount by writing directly for e-alive.com? Also, I couldn't get past Group W's contract, which would not allow me to write for any of their contracted clients (such as eHow, e-alive.com, etc.) within a year of ceasing my work with them.

I decided to apply directly to the company behind the new website instead of writing for my Group A, much in the same way that I decided to write directly for eHow instead of the content company. Over a month went by before I heard from e-alive.com's parent company, but last week I received an email. the editor told me they received my application, were satisfied with my credentials and offered me ongoing work: when I finish my first set, I'll be assigned 10 more titles.

So you see, persistence and patience pay off. That's why I put the little turtle in this post, as a reminder. Set your goals, and work toward them. One of my goals is to write for myself and increase my passive income. While there is no passive, long-term income potential with this gig, I did cut out the middle man and increased my profits more than 100% in doing so.

The kicker? Some of the contracted writers at Group W still haven't received their approval for the health-related article gig at e-alive.com. While I had to be patient to get this gig on my own, I may not have gotten it yet if I'd stuck with Group W.

What are your writing goals? What keeps you motivated to achieve them?

Making Money with Affiliate Programs

Some people make a living marketing other peoples' stuff online. One is the author of The Super Affiliate Handbook: How I Made $436,797 Last Year Selling Other People's Stuff Online, a book that purports to show you how it is done. I don't have $75 for the book, so I am learning as I go.

I am now an affiliate for Amazon.com, eBay.com, Half.com and The Coupon Clippers. I've started posting the links on my blog, forum signatures, and articles I write for other websites.

I earn about $20 a month from Amazon, without much promotion at all. Most of my purchases are made through some plain text links on another site (not this blog).

For me, becoming an affiliate marketer allows me another opportunity to earn passive income, my new hobby. I spend a few minutes creating text links, add them to my articles or posts, and leave them alone. I log in to my Amazon Associates account a few times a week to check on the progress and am pleasantly surprised when a sale shows up.

However, I haven't made more than $5 on any one item and was slightly jealous to see that many Amazon Associates have had commissions of $100 or more on a single item. One associate mentioned selling a $1,000+ watch and earning a large commission for it. That would be nice, but for now I am content to build up my traffic and hope my referral links get the clicks.

I'll let you know how my progress goes, so keep an eye on my blog for an update.