Write for money online series Part 3 - eHow.com

Xin Lu — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 20:40:14 +0000

So far, I have covered two pay for content sites called Bukisa and Associated Content in part one and two of this series. Both of these sites allows a wide range of content, but the pay systems vary. You also have to do a fair amount of promotion to be successful on these sites. Today I am reviewing an extremely popular site called eHow.com where you can receive a share of ad revenue for writing short how-to articles.

Website Use and Feel

The eHow website is fairly user friendly, but there are some ongoing bugs right now. For example, there has been issues in the update of earnings and pageviews recently. Additionally, sometimes when you submit an article there is a bug that prevents you from submitting. So my advice is to save your articles in a program like Notepad or Word first. The website can also be quite slow in the mornings when everyone is checking their earnings. If the kinks are worked out then eHow is actually a pretty decent website.

Allowable content

eHow allows specifically "how-to" articles, and the format is laid out. First, you need a short introduction, and then at least three steps describing how to do something. You can add more steps if you have more. Then you can add tips and warnings to your article and also pictures to the article.

Copyright

According to the eHow FAQ, you retain all rights to your articles, but you do grant them non-exclusive rights to your articles when you post them on their site. You can republish the articles anywhere you want. You can also request to remove content from eHow by written request.

Payment details

Right now eHow is only issuing payments monthly to writers based in the United States. You need a Paypal account and the minimum payment is $10.00. The method as to how eHow calculates earnings is somewhat of a mystery. According to eHow they use a secret algorithm to decide your article's earnings based on page views, ratings, and ad clicks. So it is a little unpredictable how much your articles will earn. Some people have hundreds to thousands of articles and they could earn hundreds or thousands per month.

I joined the site just recently on January 26th and wrote 19 articles so far because these articles are very easy to write. I can write each one in about 10 to 15 minutes. So far, my earnings totaled to $2.13, which is an average of 11 cents per article over 8 days. This sounds pretty pitiful, but if I leave the articles there and they continue to earn around $2 a week then I would have $100 in a year. In other writers' experiences, their eHow earnings increase with time as the articles are indexed in search engines and more random visitors find the articles and click on the ads. The advantage to posting these short articles with eHow over your own website is that Google ranks eHow articles fairly high for many keywords.

Conclusion

I like eHow mostly because it is a lot of fun. I am writing articles about things that do not fit into Wise Bread and my other blogs. Additionally, the community at eHow is very friendly and a lot of people read my short little articles and give constructive comments. This is definitely not a place for people who want a set payment for each article because it is unpredictable which articles would be earning a lot of money. Some writers research the keywords they write to optimize the amount of money they would earn, but that cuts down on the fun. There is also a sense of quantity over quality because more content could bring more ad money, but I have found many useful and well written articles on the site. I think you should definitely try out eHow if you have a spare 15 minutes and a "how-to" idea. It could be as silly and simple as, "How to drink lemonade".

Written by Xin Lu and published on Wise Bread. Read more articles from Wise Bread.

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Write for money online series Part 3 - eHow.com