3 New Articles and General Update

Getting Back on Track Writing for eHow

Well this month's been rough. A few hospital trips, a lot of bills, and general disorganization later, my goals for June haven't come close to being met. It looks like I'll end June with around 50 new articles written for eHow, which isn't bad at all, though nowhere close to what my actual goals were. Still, summer's a long time, and it's a lot easier to get freelance writing goals finished when the health and moving issues have settled out.

Anyhow, since my last post I've managed three new articles on eHow, once again going for the broad shot strategy:

How to Build Blog Traffic

How to Find a Flair Bartending School

How to Learn Conversational Chinese Fast

These three hit across the board as far as topics, and once again I'm taking advantage of the great authority that the eHow site offers its authors to promote other products and ventures through the links allowed at the bottom. I broke my monthly Amazon.com affiliate earnings record once again, which makes something like 6 months in a row, and I'm confident that things are only going to continue to get better.

That's the brief update for now, with more to come soon. This was a very short post, but I'm trying to make up for a lackluster June with a stunning July, so every bit of time is precious and it's time to get writing again. Just remember for all of you freelance writers struggling with the passive income or residual income game: the more work you do now, the more it will pay off later. Keep at it, I'm pulling for you.

5 More to Finish the Weekend

5 More eHow Articles

This last batch, only one of which was actually a diet how to article. Some of these are gardening articles that I'm fairly proud of, and hope they have a legitimate shot at getting featured and making my mark on one of those $75 contests. That would always be a plus! Anyway, here are the last five articles that I typed on my laptop while out of Internet range for a weekend. A good 19 articles in two days, and all could have been uploaded in one day had it not been for that online limitation while I was back in Belle Plaine.

Anyway, here are the last five articles to what was an extremely productive weekend:

How to Lose Weight Following The Egg Diet

How to Keep Deer Out of Your Garden Naturally

How to Make Money By Using Peer to Peer Lending

How to Get Rid of Garden Slugs Naturally

How to Create a Good Home Workshop

This is a fairly decent spread of articles and topics, and I'm intrigued to see how these do. I've heard from many of the best writers on eHow that they get $1-5 an article on average per month. I haven't had a true "breakthrough" article to pull up the averages yet, and my general average is a lot lower: like $0.39 per article per month, but I have tons of new articles that haven't had time to rank on the search engines, and many of my more recent articles are already averaging $1 a month every month, so bit by bit my consistent earnings are growing.

In my head my goal is to break past $60 this month, and well over $100 next. Whether that happens or not, I don't know. Especially considering my over all writing goals for my passive income have me creating content like made through August, then doing virtually nothing but marketing and link building in September and October, meaning the true value of these articles is going to come out in the fall.

Well that's it for now. I'm back with Internet access for a while, so there will be more eHow writing updates in the near future.

Great Writing Weekend, Part II

The Second Batch of eHow Writing Articles

This is the promised update on the large amount of writing I finished over the weekend, which has kept me on track and a little ahead all the way through Tuesday. It was a good weekend, but I expect with a lot of these diet niche articles, it's going to take a few back links and a little bit of time in order to get them on the first page of Google, but once they are there each one is going to be a very nice monthly stream of income. I figure if they get anywhere close to what my best article gets, then I'll be very happy as the one diet eHow article I have on page one of Google right now gets me about $4-7 a month. If I can take that times twenty or thirty, it's nothing to sneeze at - especially since that is all passive income on eHow.

Anyhow, here is the second batch of articles I completed, all of which or weight loss or diet based.

How to Lose Weight Following the Martini Diet

How to Lose Weight Following the Hallelujah Diet

How to Lose Weight Following the Liver Cleansing Diet

How to Lose Weight Following the MediterAsian Way

How to Lose Weight Following the Dorm Room Diet

How to Avoid the Israeli Army Diet

How to Lose Weight Following the Ultimate Tea Diet

Some of these get quite a bit more traffic than others, but all of them find a few hundred a month on the low side, and some get quite a bit more. While many of these are older fad diets, I think that one of these actually has the potential to absolutely take off because its full potential hasn't hit yet. Whether or not that will happen remains to be seen, but if it does I'm hoping by then that my article will be poised to reap the benefits of that traffic surge.

Since eHow has also continued its gardening contest for June, I'll be writing a lot of gardening articles. This could be good on two levels. First, many top level eHow writers say that the gardening topic produces some very good earnings for articles. The second is that with the contest going on, if any of my gardening articles are good enough and/or fortunate enough to get featured, that's a $75 bonus. So here's to writing and hoping.

The hardest part with writing over the summer like this is that the majority of results won't be seen for 3+ months, and often times full results could be even later. Still, the early signs are very encouraging to me so the writing will continue, and maybe a lucky bonus will be in the cards along the way.

Great Writing Weekend, Part I

Exceeding eHow Expectations

This limited Internet is becoming extremely frustrating, but there's only so much I can do about that for now. Right now I'm not only keeping up with my eHow writing goals, but I'm also blowing past them. Granted, I'm not keeping up with my HubPages or Constant-Content writing goals, so there is some suffering going on there and I have a lot of "pay now" freelance work to help with the rapidly approaching move across the country.

Still, this is encouraging and even with the articles out there I'm watching them improve monthly bit by bit with no effort on my part. Once I get to start marketing some of these articles I think the potential will go through the roof. The other thing I've noticed is that I'm getting a lot better at picking article topics that will make a little bit of quick money with their initial indexing. Over half the articles I've wrote since the end of May earned me income within the first two days.

There are a LOT of eHow articles to get to seeing as how I typed 19 on my laptop over the weekend when I had no Internet access, so here are the first 7.

How to make the 2468 Diet Work safely

How to Lose Weight Following the Apple Cider Vinegar Diet

How to Lose Weight Following the 3 Apples a Day Diet

How to Lose Weight Following the Coconut Diet

How to Lose Weight Following the Jerusalem Diet

How to Lose Weight Following the Chocolate Diet

How to Get a Loan with Peer to Peer Lending

As you can see, the far majority of these articles are on diet and weight loss plans, including several fad diets that aren't nearly as saturated with web writing as some of the main ones like negative calorie foods, Mediterranean Diet, or Atkins. I'm hoping that with the relative strength of eHow as an authority site, some good internal linking practices from all my diet articles to one another, and with a little bit of marketing maybe a lot of these articles can end up on page one of their niche, maybe get me $5-10 a month. That might not seem like much, but there are literally hundreds of fad diets out there, so this could become big.

The last one is an article for personal finance - which many people have said is a good niche. I've seen steady returns, but low returns, from that niche thus far, but you always send out feelers.

In related news, from my hometown library and some garage sales I found some killer gardening books full of amazing tips and advice...so I'll really get to push this summer and see if that gardening niche is as high an earner as many people say it is.

That's it for now. Happy writing, and keep on keeping at it.

Quick eHow Writing Update

Quick Writing Update

This is a very quick update. Only two more articles for today. Even with the earnings trackings always being a little slow at the very beginning of the month, the early earnings look good, and a couple of the new articles are showing earnings from the first day of June. The limited Internet access is definitely slowing me down right now, but I'll have a lot of articles written out for eHow on Monday, I'll just have to transcribe them online. It's a little slower than being able to post as I write, but every little bit helps.

Anyway, I have two more articles published on eHow, which are:

How to Survive a Bear's Attack

&

How to Retrieve Your Number from a T Mobile Cell Phone

And I think beginning writers can learn a couple thinks from this odd couple pair of eHow articles. First, the "survive a bear's attack" is phrased that way for a very specific reason: no one else had done it. There are about a dozen articles on how to survive a bear attack, and every variation thereof, but no one had an apostraphe s, so that's what I claimed. Not only does this make it easy for me to pick out my own article whenver I add to the "Search for Related Articles" with any of my future eHow articles, but this also has me as the only eHow article going for that very specific search term. This is the type of thing you need to learn as an online writer.

The second article I'm actually curious about. It's technical, it's useful, and it seems like the kind of article that wouldn't get any income at all. Then again, I thought the same thing about "How to Set Up a PayPal Account" and "How to Fix Task Manager When the Tool Bar Disappears" yet both seem to consistently earn my $1+ per month. Considering all these articles took less than 12 minutes to write, I'm really curious to see if this one keeps up the trend.

Other than that, weight loss articles have been pretty consistent earners for me, so I'll be searching for some diets or weight loss angles that haven't been beaten to death already. That's all for now, keep on writing and I'll see you at the next update!

June 5 Morning - Still Looking Good

eHow Writing Update

Well the freelance writing and passive income quest continues, and so far so good. Currently not only is it challenging to get my writing in every day for this and several other blogs, not to mention my crazy summer writing goals, in my current location I have very limited Internet access: 8 hours at most Monday-Thursday, 4 hours on Friday, and none on Sunday. So the updates might not be daily, but the writing is going well. I still have 3-4 eHow articles to write today to make my daily goals, but I've kept up with every day so far - and the 4 a day average would also give me 40 beyond my goal by the end of summer, so I'm in good shape.

Here is a list of the eHow articles I've written since my last update:

How to Learn Italian Fast
How to Make a Perfect Mediterranean Omelet
How to Pick a Heavy Duty Flashlight
How to Set Up a Summer Travel Blog
How to Identify Sunstroke
How to Learn Conversational Spanish Fast
How to Make Low Carb Stir Fry
How to Start Improving Self Esteem
How to Find Old Friends
How to Sell Fiction Online
How to Sell Poetry Online
How to Learn Conversational Japanese

So my daily goal of 4 per day is holding well, and I will write more tonight to post tomorrow, seeing as I'll run out of Internet time before I can get all my actual writing done today. Still, this is steady progress, and I know it's going to pay off a lot more down the line - especially once I do some link building and article marketing to get these articles to actually rank higher in the search engines for the keywords I'm targeting.

And as always, the nice thing I like about writing for eHow is that writing articles not only increases your eHow income - but those articles all represent more affiliate links, more Amazon affiliate items, and more Clickbank affiliate links and items that are getting actual trafic and are going to convert into more sales over the long run.

That's the update for now. Expect another one in four or five days or so, as I continue my freelance writing for eHow in pursuit of residual income.

June 1 Ehow Goals Met!

4 More eHow Articles Finished!

Well you know the old saying about every journey beginning with just one step? That was part of the mentality I'm taking with trying not to get overwhelmed by my goals, especially with everything that's competing for my time this summer. So the first step in completing my eHow goals for the summer was simple: get four articles done on day one.

That's it. Don't look ahead, don't get bogged down in research or perfect monetization, just get four new articles written and published, and then posted in the eHow forums to help them get their first backlinks and more quickly indexed in Google.

Done and done. The topics are varied, but each has some affiliate sales options, and a very wide array of topics. So day one is going with the scatter-shot method. Those four articles for the first day are:

How to Learn German Fast
How to Write a Great Dystopian Novel
How to Stop Recurring Nightmares
How to Land a Government Job

One of these has a Clickbank product, as I'm trying to test the waters with these, and there was plenty of opportunity for some Amazon links. These are a wide array of articles that fit into four different categories, so we'll see how these do.

So day one of summer's eHow writing efforts are good. I went four for four, and all of these are eHow articles that I'm proud of. That's it for now.