Update: In 2011 eHow decided to buy out their writers. At the time, I had been consistently making $10/month from my articles. The buy out offer was $22 to transfer ownership of the articles I had written. Feeling somewhat insulted, I refused and kept my articles. This shows that not owning your revenue platform is a serious liability. I recommend only writing articles for upfront payment or if monetized through advertising or similar deals that you own the website.

After the first “2” months (1 month and 10 days) I have now made $17.65 on eHow with $5.55 in August and $12.10 in September. I have written 37 instructionals, 14 of which were written before September and the rest of which were written throughout September. I, therefore, do not think that $12.10 is representative of typical earnings. To find typical earnings, I have to wait for a few months during which the rise in my total number of articles is small, ideally 0, compared to the number of existing articles I have.

To put these earnings in perspective, you can buy a well-diversified global high yield fund, like EHI (I have 400 shares) that yields $8.5/month in dividends per 100 shares. EHI currently trades at $10.63, so to replicate 12 bucks, you’d have to buy about 140 shares or pay about $1500 with aftertax money.

(Another issue in terms of general earnings potential is that I have provided a link which could have been seen 1500 times or so. I do however also know that few will actually click on the link above(see comment below), maybe 1 in 10, and out of those, maybe fewer will click on the ads, so I think the revenue being generated coming through from ERE is quite small if not nonexistent.)

If revenue mainly depends on google searches, it stands to reason that the growth potential is enormous unlike a blog which will eventually saturate with the finite number of people who are interested in, say, early retirement. Also blog revenue is non-diversified and not passive. If you stop writing, you’re toast. Conversely, with eHow, you depend on them not going under or changing their business plan on you.

Now, what does saturate is the ability to write additional instructionals. The easy ones, the low hanging fruit, are written first. After this it becomes more of a challenge. Writing 1000 quality instructionals, which should theoretically fund my budget is a serious challenge; on the other hand so is going to work 60 hours a week for 5 years. The effective hourly wage writing instructionals is certainly higher than most salaried jobs.

One thing that discouraged me initially was the complete lack of updates on my earnings for the first three weeks. My earnings had stopped and showed a constant $0.10. This is not very motivating to wards keeping up the writing. Now they seem to update daily but still not on a consistent basis, that is, on some pages they will be updated, and on others don’t; some number will show no updates for 3-4 days and the suddenly update the number by about 4 times the average. I think this is something eHow should fix if they want more people writing.

Originally posted 2009-10-01 16:19:04.