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.

Whoa! You may remember me with grand plans about writing 3 instructionals a day to reach 1000 in a year. Well, to say the least after after three weeks of doing so and making $0.10 in total, that was sufficiently demotivating to send me off on a break not to mention the fact that contrary to what I previously believed there are only so many instructionals that are “easy” to write and which have not been written already.

The latter is a big issue. It often happens that I have the idea for a good howto and it has already been written. Continuing to write is real work. I feel, however, that researching things and writing howtos should only be done if I have already tried out the given activity myself. I don’t like posing as an expert on things I only read about for the first time two hours ago. Another self-imposed limit.

“To succeed in life, you need two things: ignorance and confidence.”
—Mark Twain

Then yesterday I checked my stats again and noticed I had actually been making money all along(*). I have actually made $14.65 in about one months work. If we presume that this income will repeat in eternity and hence become passive, this money stream is worth 300×14.65= $4395. This is not bad for my 25 articles, which is probably about 25 hours of work or less.
Even better, I did not have to pay taxes first, before I could invest the money—there’s something to be said about not spending earned money to invest.

(*) I have not been able to make any sense in how they update their numbers and page views. It seem to happen in spurts and not very consistently at that.

Some observations: As others have already mentioned, finance articles bring in more money. My bicycle articles also bring in a few cents each. My hockey articles which are some of the most elaborate articles actually bring in nothing. Interesting!

Originally posted 2009-09-22 09:13:58.