There are a lot of ways for a writer to make money online these days, and while I’m a big advocate of starting your own site so you can maintain complete control (and keep 100% of the earnings for yourself), that can be daunting if you’re not sure where to start.
What if you’re not ready to launch your own blog and you haven’t decided which “niche” you’d like to cover?
You may want to start out writing for a big site such as eHow, which pays you a percentage of the income your articles earn. There are no rules about niches–you can cover whatever interests you on any given day.
Joining eHow is what one Writing for Your Wealth reader chose to do, and a year later she’s pulling in over $1,000 a month.
Maria, who goes by WriterGig on eHow, agreed to answer a few email questions and offer her advice for other writers who may want to get started this way.
1. Would you like to share a bit about yourself and what made you start looking online for ways to make money? And what led you to eHow?
I’m been a work at home mom since my oldest son was born in 2003. I left the newspaper where I worked to be home with him, but kept up freelance writing and then started grading high school English papers for a homeschool curriculum part-time (from home).
I began to move into online content writing in the spring of 2007, which paid better than grading. I heard about eHow’s Writers Compensation Program from Rich, the community manager at eHow, when he posted about it on the WAHM forums I frequent. I decided to try eHow as an experiment and when the money was good, and I realized the awesomeness of residaul income, I stayed.
2. How does eHow work as far as writing for them and making money goes?
Writers submit original how-to articles via a simple article submission tool. Earnings are determined primarily by Adsense revenue sharing, but article popularity, ratings and views may contribute to the algorithm used.
3. What kind of money are you making and how long has it taken you to build up to that?
I earned nearly $900 in September 2008 with about 200 articles. I have 223 article on eHow today, and have already earned more than $1,500 for October. I expect to see similar earnings in November and December. I have already earned over $24 per article (on average), and the money increases each month. I have been a member on the site for exactly one year.
4. How many articles have you written? Do you have to promote them yourself, or do you get a lot of traffic naturally since eHow is a big authority site?
I have written 223 articles on eHow.com under the Writers compensation Program, and while I do link to some of my best articles through my blog, I do very little social promotion of my articles. One of the best things about eHow is that it receives a ton of traffic and ranks great with the search engines, so I imagine most of my traffic comes from Google.
5. Do you focus on one niche or area of expertise, or do you write about anything that strikes your interest?
I enjoy writing about personal finance, health, home and garden, and seasonal topics. But I will write on just about everything that I know something about.
6. Any tips for writers who may be interested in making money through eHow?
Write original titles. If the same or nearly identical title has already been written, think of something else. Google won’t index more than 1-2 articles with the same keywords on any given site. Learn basic SEO, and concentrate on quality content for each and every article you write.
Okay, that’s it from Maria!
If you want to learn more about her strategies for making money from eHow, you can check out her eHow ebook. Her Work at Home Mom Blog is another resource you can check out, and here are a couple of her eHow articles you may find useful:
How to Create Passive Income Writing eHow Articles
How to Earn eHow Payments
Update (Maria had a few comments and clarifications she wanted to add after this went live):
I wanted to mention, though, that I don’t see eHow just as an alternative to having one’s own site for those getting started –it is a powerful money-maker AND traffic generator for all online writers, even and especially those who do have the skills to write their own sites (I have four websites and four blogs as well as my eHow, HubPages, BrightHub articles).
My earnings per article on eHow far outstrip my personal website article earnings thus far and there are several reasons why:
- eHow has a page rank of 7 — very hard to get! My eHow articles are indexed in a matter of hours and many hit the first page or so of Google pretty quickly.
- eHow has monthly traffic of 25 million visitors
- The community features on eHow (and there’s more to come) are a huge boost to article promotion
Anyway I just wanted to kind of clarify that because from what I have experienced, eHow is really a cut above the other content/ revenue-sharing sites and I believe it has great potential.
Thanks so much for interviewing me!
21 responses so far ↓
1 Pat // Nov 4, 2008 at 4:35 pm
Thanks for the interview Maria! It’s really cool to hear how well you are doing on eHow. I never even thought about writing for eHow but I love how easy it seems and I just may get involved on the side.
I’m just thinking that I could very well write one article a day and earn an extra $1000 a month eventually.
After you submit articles, can you stop and still make money each month, or do you have to keep submitting articles in order to receive a payment?
Just curious.
Again, very inspiring! Thanks for your time to answer Lindsay’s questions =)
2 Erin Maher // Nov 4, 2008 at 10:16 pm
Oh, I wanted to try eHow but it’s only open to U.S citizens so I was out of luck. Still, interesting to hear that some people are able to pull a fair amount of money out of it!
3 HowToMakeMyBlog.com // Nov 5, 2008 at 6:23 am
Wow impressive! I wonder how it would go if you spent that year on a personal blog, writing quality articles like that and posting so frequently. Would you be able to earn $1000 monthly that way as well, or more, or less?
Marko
http://www.howtomakemyblog.com
4 Write for eHow // Nov 5, 2008 at 9:20 am
Great interview. Maria’s had much success on eHow.
5 Maria // Nov 5, 2008 at 10:25 am
Thank you so much for this interview, Lindsay! I really enjoy your blog.
6 Michele // Nov 5, 2008 at 1:51 pm
I can’t wait to order her ebook. I just started on eHow, but it’s been slow going with my other projects. Thanks!
7 David // Nov 5, 2008 at 3:00 pm
Hi everybody. I came across this thread while searching about eHow, and just wanted to add a bit. I, too, write for eHow, and have just about broken the $1,000 a month income level. It’s a great site, and Maria (WriterGig) is one of the site’s superstars.
Like many online writers, I’ve explored a lot of money-making sites, and have also built my own Adsense-laden websites. As far as I’m concerned, NOTHING COMES CLOSE TO EHOW as a way of earning money online. (I usually avoid all caps, but it seemed called just this once!).
A nice wrinkle to eHow is that it’s not at all competitive. The more good writers that contribute to the site, the more traffic gets generated, and the more popular eHow becomes. Everyone benefits from that. It’s the proverbial rising tide that floats all the eHow ships.
And just to clarify, eHow income is ‘evergreen’. It’s like writing a book, cutting a record album, or appearing in a movie. Long after the actual work is done, you still get residual income from your work. If I stopped writing at eHow today, I’d still get a check next month, and the month after, and so on. Possibly for the rest of my life!
So basically, I’m just here to second everything Maria said. Come to eHow, join the Writers Compensation Program, and start writing. Income is just a trickle at first, but in less than a year you can do what WriterGig did (and what I’m about to do) — earn $1,000 a month or more. Hope to see you there. I’m at eHow as David Sarokin. Feel free to drop me a note if you have any questions.
8 Amylaine // Nov 5, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Great post. I love ehow and make good a good part time income at it. I am not yet up to her $1,500 a month but I hope to be by the end of the year. I decided to sign up with ehow after reading one of Maria’s articles on ehow earnings last Feb. Marias’ been a great teacher through who e-book and other articles.
9 My Big Little Experiment Writing at eHOW | The Smart Passive Income Blog // Nov 5, 2008 at 11:05 pm
[...] was so inspired by an interview I read at WritingForYourWealth.com about an eHow contributor, that I just had to try something crazy. For those of you who don’t [...]
10 AverageGal // Nov 6, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Thanks for the insight! I’m definitely going to look into this avenue of generating income.
11 The Math Behind My eHow Experiment - 40k+ a year? | The Smart Passive Income Blog // Nov 11, 2008 at 2:53 pm
[...] $1000 a month of residual income as a result. Lindsay from Writingforyourwealth.com actually has a fantastic interview with a successful eHow contributor, named Maria (aka WriterGig), who was generous enough to share some tips and her earnings with the [...]
12 Kim Woodbridge | (Anti) Social Development // Nov 12, 2008 at 9:42 pm
I’ve considered writing for eHow but always thought that what I knew most about wouldn’t be as popular. Maybe I should reconsider. Thanks for the interview, Lindsay.
13 Bonecandy // Nov 30, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Thanks for a great article Maria, they are always great! Ive made $23 so far my first month on eHow and I hope to see it grow and grow!
I need to understand how blogs generate income outside of eHow….
14 Shirley Philbrick // Dec 4, 2008 at 9:12 am
Hi all, like David I was “surfing” and came across this great interview with Maria. I, too, can attest to the positive experience of writing for eHow. Not only can you earn great residuals, but there is a fantastic community there that is more than willing to help you succeed !
15 erica // Feb 4, 2009 at 4:01 pm
I wonder how much you can make if you write about 20-30 articles per day? I mean for the first month though. I just signed up with Ehow, and I plan to write these many articles. I know it seems like a lot, but it isn’t. If you average 3-4 per hour and you write for 8 hours, that is 24-30 articles.
Another good thing to do is look at Google trends to see what topics are hot! You are going to get views based off of 2 things. Evergreen content and “hot content for the moment”.
I decided to write for Ehow because Associated Content is sooooo shady lately. They are banning peoples accounts for having muliple accounts but my thing is this, “why did you allow people to have multiple accounts in the first place?” Plus, associated content shows favortism and they lie about your page views! They are so sad and pathetic. Here I come ehow!!!
16 Pam Irie // Apr 11, 2009 at 1:04 pm
Hi! I’ve been writing for eHow almost 7 months now. In that time I’ve been lucky enough to be featured on eHow’s front page 3 times. A lot of this I do attribute to lessons learned from quality writers like Maria (WriterGig).
If you enjoy writing, join eHow today. You’ll find a wonderful community of writers. BTW, my user name on eHow is veryirie.
17 Busey // Feb 5, 2010 at 12:29 pm
Great article. I have written 18 articles in about 40 days on e-How and I have noticed they have already doubled in revenue for each of the 3 pay periods in which they have been listed … It’s a great site.
18 Celia // Mar 8, 2010 at 11:49 am
This article was probably true when it was written. Unfortunately eHow paid early members well, and later members not well at all. Then eHow deceived all their members who earned monthly payments by copying their articles on a cloned site and not paying them at all.
Now eHow keeps writers from being able to publish (except for the cheap articles eHow buys from DS writers) and refuses to answer any questions about their fraud.
If you think new members can earn a lot of money on eHow, you’re wrong. Search for eHow scam online before you join or you will be very sorry. I was.
19 JT // Sep 9, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Hi, I was writing for ehow until they stopped the Writers Compensation Prgram. And I know a lot of members at ehow have been frustrated about the loss of the writers compensation program so I wanted to share a website that was impressive and also offers a similar writers compensation program.
It’s called http://www.listmyfive.com you basically create any “top five” list that you can think of and get ad revenue share for the lists you create. They to pay with pay-pal and set-up and publishing is simple. This is the best thing I found sense the dismantle of ehow’s WCP.
With listmyfive I’ve seen about the same revenue potential as ehow, so I thought I would share that site with fellow frustrated ehow writers and other freelance writers looking for a good site to join… hope this helps.
-JT
20 tommy // Nov 18, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Maria you are amazing. Now is ds at ehow the same or is infobarrel and hubpages the new way to go?
21 Felix // Feb 18, 2013 at 6:42 am
Unfortunately Ehow is not accepting new contributors anymore
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