eHow Residual Income Report – October 2009

Monthly Residual Income Increase of 21 Percent

Last month I made payout with eHow. I was fairly excited about it because I had only been with eHow for a little over one full month and for the bulk of that time I was not earning anything due to a glitch in the eHow earnings calculator. After a lot of work trying to get that fixed all was well and earnings started showing up… and they were excellent compared to what I had been registering with my blog.

The reasonings for the increase in residual income were mostly due to my writing on eHow with SEO in mind whereas on my blog at the time I wasn’t doing that. I was simply blogging as everybody does. I wasn’t giving SEO much of a thought. I interlinked my posts and made sure my template SEO details were in place but other than that I was not writing for residual income; I was writing for blog subscribers.

Residual Income Online

Writing for eHow, however, I started with one thing in mind. Can I make money with eHow? This was my primary question I wanted to ask and answer. Money was the only thing on my mind. After writing one quick article on fine wine (which by the way has yet to earn even a penny) just to see how the eHow system worked I went and read a lot of How-To-eHow articles, writing for SEO articles and notably Desolator’s eHow for newbies guide. I quickly applied my principals.

As September rolled around I moved beyond strictly eHow guides and began reading the most remarkable guides to making money online that there is available. Grizzly’s Make Money Online blog is the gold standard for how this is done. I feel like I should have given him credit for everything he has taught me a long time ago. Seriously; if you want to learn how to make money online, be it on eHow on your own blog, you should read every post Grizzly has on his site. I have been going through his archives for about a month and a half, reading from oldest to newest, and I’m still not current. There is almost an overwhelming amount of inspiring and informative information there if you give him two months of your time to read it all.

That being said I began applying all that I had learned to my blog in September and have been slowly transforming my longevity blog into something less of a social blog and more of a money maker. Earnings for October are actually double what they were in August primarily because of the changes I’ve implemented.

So all that is to say; my residual income portfolio of passive income sources is higher in October than it was in September. This is my best month yet and I can say that my page views were higher in the month and my earning per 1000 page views increased month over month as well. This is important to note because this means that I am bringing in more residual income per visitor and thus my increasing earnings are expanding quite nicely.

Making Money With eHow

As previously stated in my September eHow Earnings Report I made $8.84 per 1000 page views on 36 published articles. September saw an increase in this rate as well as an increase in overall page views. I received $9.76 per 1000 page views on 55 published articles. And in October I only published a few more articles (9), mostly because I’ve been writing tons of content elsewhere. However due to the info I’ve been picking up I was able to increase both my page view total and earnings per 1000 rate. On 64 published articles I made $10.19 per 1000 page views on eHow. Not bad at all.

Regarding my blogging my earnings per 1000 page views increased ~34 percent over August as I’ve been slowly working on monetizing the site rather than socializing it. Again; a lot of this is due to the writings of the aforementioned Grizzly. I also implemented one specific change late in October on my longevity blog which I won’t fully see the results of for another month. About 40 percent of my search traffic goes to one page on that blog on the top causes of death in America.

I rank in Google (G) for this page in the top 1-5 spots for many different related search terms and thus I get a ton of traffic to the page. Unfortunately it is traffic that doesn’t make money. People searching for this info get what they want on the page and they don’t click on the ads. Additionally there are no advertisers for this page either. My Adsense ad blocks showed up as PSA ads for this page and they always had. Anyone landing on this page made me no money at all. So what did I do? I took Adsense down for this one page and installed Chitika for this one page instead.

Diversify Residual Income Sources

Chitika serves up ads based on the search term used to find your site and they only display to search traffic. When all was said and done I was able to monetize this page after all. The conversion rate is quite low but it is far better than the 0 percent that it once was… and because this page gets so much traffic the increase in earnings for this one page alone increased my overall earnings rate on the blog substantially. November will be the first full month of this change so the results will be interesting to see.

Regarding my residual income on eHow I thought it would be important to note some of the general stats again.

eHow Residual Earnings Statistics - October 2009

64 published articles earned at a combined rate of $10.19 per 1,000 PV
80 percent of my earnings came from 19 percent of my articles
20 percent of my earnings came from 42 percent of my articles
39 percent of my articles had no earnings at all

My Top Earning eHow Article

A mini-case study: One of my articles accounted for 31 percent of my total earnings. Under closer inspection I found that this was primarily due to the fact that the main keyword phrase of the article (two variations of it actually) appear in G on page one of the SERP rankings. None of my other highest earners fall on page one. This means that this article makes money based on both long-tail keyword searches as well as targeted main keyword searches. All of my other articles only get the long-tail searches because searchers for their main keyword phrases fall much deeper in the SERPs.

This is important to note because it illustrates just how important it is to rank well for your main keyword phrase. A friend of mine, Kim, has a nice hypothetical earnings plan up over on her site The Content Writer.  She charts what earnings might look like making $5 per article a month.  This is possible but it will require main keyword phrases to hit the first page of Google to achieve.  This might mean a bit of backlinking behind the scenes will be required.  A goal for the coming months will be to get some of these other articles ranking better in G and see if I can get more articles to duplicate the success of this one in particular. Backlinking will be my main strategy. I have linked into them some from this blog as well as my longevity blog. I will have to continue working to build more links into these articles and rank them better for their main keywords.

My Overall Residual Income Online

To finish off this post I’ll give a brief synopsis of my overall residual income online. My previously stated goal is to duplicate my day job income with online residuals. I won’t say how much I making online nor will I say how much my day job income is but lets be coy and say that my day job pays well enough to support a home-owning family of two on one income.

Last month my online residuals covered 1.64 percent of my salary; this month the total is up to 1.99 percent, a total month-over-month increase in residual income of 21 percent. Not bad. Next month surely will be better as I continue to optimize for search traffic and monetization and build anchored backlinks. Stay tuned.