Week 1: writing for eHow

The first week of the frankie d. experiment brought in my first dollar (well, $0.99 actually) from articles I wrote and submitted to eHow.com. If you are new to eHow, it is a website where you can write articles about how to do pretty much anything and are then paid by the site a share of any ad revenues generated from people clicking on ads placed around your work.

www.ehow.com

It is free to participate and you can get pretty into it (eHow addiction). Anyway, my goal on eHow is to generate future passive income of what I hope will be a few hundred dollars or so a month from about 200 articles by the end of this summer (August 2009). I started with 5 articles last weekend and added 6 more to get me up to 11 total.

Here are links to what I have done:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4817431_make-toga-costumes.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4807317_new-original-ideas-write-ehow.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4805312_enjoy-great-nutella-snack.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4804289_score-gmat.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4803784_figure-out-lactose-intolerant.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4803399_reduce-credit-card-interest-rate.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4802608_pay-off-credit-card-debt.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4801637_set-up-dual-monitors-pc.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4801606_stuff-money-under-mattress.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4801554_write-letter-of-resignation.html
http://www.ehow.com/how_4801234_set-up-k.html

It was hard not to get excited at the possibility of earning cash from simply having these articles uploaded to eHow and I definitely got caught up dreaming of how sweet it would to have that extra income and feeling anxious, checking "My Earnings" every hour to see if I got any upticks.

But, I have be realistic and patient. From the success stories I read of people who make up to $1,000 a month from articles they have written on eHow, I saw that they also faced slow starts (sometimes taking months to earn over the $10 minumum payout) but they kept writing and eventually their work started to pay off over time. That's all I'm trying to duplicate here, so if I stick to a strategy of writing interesting articles people want to read or at least be entertained by what I write (and click on those ads!) I am hoping that the market will reward me.

So I will keep doing what I'm doing and after I build a stock of articles I plan to expand my work to other writing sites with a similar model to eHow. I will talk in detail abou them in subsequent posts in case you want to try them out for yourself. Until next time, - frankie d.