Why the Long Delay?

Keep Writing for eHow

So any of you have been following this writing blog for any amount of time know that this has been a pretty long gap between blog posts. There have been a few reasons for this. I don't intend for this blog to die - I enjoy writing about my experiences writing for eHow, and I enjoy helping others get a start.

But I haven't written nearly as much for eHow in the past month as I wanted to. The reasons are several. For one, I still have major ongoing issues with the personal and family life and that always comes first.

Second, there was the move. Thankfully I'm out of the old slum lord owned apartment with knife fighting neighbors and mutant cockroaches. I'm not kidding - it was a pit that smelled like mold day and night. Not looking forward to how living there for a year is going to affect my quality of life at the end. But we've moved into a much nicer apartment, three bedrooms, and helping my brother move in as he was just recently fired without cause (but his bosses claim to the community he walked away and are challenging his unemployment on that basis), so helping him move in, and then there was the carpal tunnel that struck hard last week.

Yeah. Carpal tunnel, the bane of writers and office workers alike. If you want a decent blog post on carpal tunnel and writers, check that one out. It's also a pretty good freelance writing blog, to boot. It slows down work drastically, not to mention that I have to work less and take care of myself to avoid doing permanent damage.

Which brings us back around to the current point. I was attacking my business plan with the results by volume approach. I know enough to know that if I just kept doing enough work over enough time then eventually I would get to where I wanted to be without having to get lucky or spend a ton of time figuring out perfect keywords or what have you. Not the best strategy, but I had "mini-strategies" in place which helped me to make sure my work was moving me forward.

But I can't work 16 hours a day anymore. Heck, I'm lucky to get in 8 actual work hours before carpal tunnel sets in, and as a writer who is used to being able to pump out volumes of work, this is really hard. So I have to spend most of my limited time on the projects that are most effective to the bottom line and to helping me achieve my goals of full time passive income.

So as much as I like this blog, it's going to see far less posts than it has before, because I don't make money off of this blog. As my wrists hopefully heal, then maybe this is something I can come back to. And there is plenty for me to write, including about the e-book I'm working on, and the strategies I've found that really help the SERP rankings for eHow articles, as well as for other sites you can make money off of.

But for now, I thank everyone for their patience and I'll see ya' later.

A Good September on eHow

So Far, So Good, Writing in September

The eHow goals I have for September are relatively modest. 3 articles a day, for 93 by the end of the month. As with all my online writing now, these will be articles that are written only after keyword research, and I'll post pictures with them as soon as eHow can get that freaking fixed (saving the long pointless rant for later). But the writing goes on, and the earnings for August matched July, which is really good considering August is generally the slowest online month out of the year.

So the writing continues, and I have the main few projects targeted that I'll be working on this month because I think they will provide the most potential income the most quickly. Some of my eHow articles won't be completely targeted, but the results from this website don't lie, and I'd be stunned if a year from now I didn't have a near full time income stream coming solely from my writing on eHow and the affiliate commissions those articles generate.

So for any of you who have found this blog but haven't started writing yet, get started now. There's absolutely no point in waiting. The sooner you start, the sooner eHow will help you get to your writing goals.

If you're interested in any of my recent work:

How to Avoid Dangerous Quick Weight Loss Diets

How to Find Affordable Bicycle Inner Tubes

How to Make Money as a Ghost Writer

How to Improve Your eHow Articles Using Comments

That's a brief tasting. Thanks for reading my freelance writing for eHow blog, but now get over to eHow and start writing!

Why SEO Matters Writing for eHow

SEO Matters for eHow Earnings

One thing that it doesn't take online freelance writers long to figure out is that SEO isn't just for Internet Marketing. If you are trying to make a living by promoting your website, or writing for sites like HubPages or for AdSense funded blogs, you know you must understand search engine optimization. It can be easy to assume that because many good writers on eHow make a good side income just from writing. But the best writers do their keyword research. I guarantee it.

Not every writer might get into SEO (Search Engine Optimization) the same way, but in some shape or form the best writers know how to study their results and figure out what articles are making them money and which ones fizzle out. Writing for eHow gives a writer a lot of lee way because the sheer authority that Google gives to eHow gets you a lot of traffic because eHow articles tend to rank very highly in the search engine rankings very quickly.

So why does SEO still matter when writing for eHow? Because if you can do really good keyword research to locate very profitable keywords that also have little competition, then you can write good "how to" articles around those words that will be very easy to get to the top ratings on Google. This means by targeting your articles, your earnings per article will be much higher and require less supporting work to get them there. It's much easier to get to a solid income if you make $5 an article per month on average than if you make 30-50 cents per article per month on average.

If you're an online writer, don't let a lack of SEO knowledge keep you from writing. It's better to write an article a day without any SEO considerations than to write nothing all. Just read this post about writers taking action now if you need a little kick in the pants. If you're going to be a freelance writer, you need to write. If you're going to make money as a freelance writer online, you need to learn SEO.

And if you're really a newbie and somehow you haven't heard of Courtney Tuttle and the Keyword Academy, I strongly recommend them. There's plenty of great information for free on that site, and the Membership section you can get into for $1 for the first month, and then it's $37 a month after that if you decide to stay. It's worth every penny. If nothing else, spend the $1 just to learn how they do keyword research. In my opinion that formula alone is worth several thousand dollars.

Then if you don't want to stay subscribed, fine, but that $1 would be the best you ever spend. Not only as a writer, but also the understanding of Internet Marketing and SEO they give you can really open your eyes to what is possible with making money online with your writing.

Brief eHow Update

eHow Writing Update

Well one of the things I really enjoy about online freelance writing is that sometimes you get a nice pleasant surprise. I thought that my earnings from eHow last month were nice, and I was hoping that based on some studying I was doing that maybe I had really figured out how to maximize my earnings on this site. To some extent, it definitely looks like I'm on to something, although to what level only time will tell. The one reservation I had was two "fluke" articles that had very little traffic, very little attention, and both produced $10 each in less than a month.

This was a very nice surprise, but without really solid search engine rankings behind either one, I have to figure that $20 as a one time thing. Even bracing for the hit my earnings could have taken this month, it seems that instead of being down twenty, I'm still going to break last month's earning records, and without a single "surprise" article that has picked up and done really well. To me, this is absolutely fantastic and shows that my body of work as a whole on eHow continues to pick up steam.

I'm also amazed at the pure strength of eHow as an authority site. Based on my findings, I'd say they outrank all the other writing sites by far. The second half of my recent series of surprises on eHow: odd articles across a variety of platforms are earning pretty nicely. Because of that I would definitely say to anyone interested in writing for eHow to join and start building up your future nest eggs today.

For those of you who want to see a little bit of what I've done since the last post:

How to Smoke a Cigar Properly

How to Find Great Carp Fishing Gear

How to Choose Between Liposuction Procedures

How to Beat Medieval 2 Total War with Hungary

And for the video game geeks out there (not insulting - I am one myself), yes, I fully realize that Medieval 2 is not the newest game any more, but it's still the one I know best.

Pretty diverse group. Obviously my goals haven't come to pass so far this month, but I am making sure to do something each and every day to move my freelance writing goals and my money making goals forward - and the testing on my little experiment is moving forward, so it's not like I'm being slothful or anything. Let's just keep hammering it forward.

Thanks for stopping by to read, and if you're a freelance writer who hasn't started writing for eHow, you'll want to get started now.

Returning to the Freelance Writing for eHow Blog

Writing for eHow Update

First off, an apology for not having been here for a while. In the beginning of July there was a major family emergency that is still actually ongoing and may be a very long term thing. Obviously family comes first, and for a month everything (and I mean pretty much everything) fell to the wayside. Now I'm making a hard effort to get back into the swing of things, starting with relatively modest goals for August that still put enough on my plate to work 18+ hours a day it seems like. Then again, I have a lot on my plate for many various reasons, but we're working to get everything set right and pointed in the right direction and right now that means getting back to a daily freelance writing schedule.

First bit of news: I'm going to be spending the next two months experimenting with eHow, article marketing, and another writing website. I did virtually no writing in July, but my passive income earnings went up almost 70%. So I checked over what I did in the month of June to see if there was something specific and different that I did that could have affected those dramatic results, and yes, it seems like I might have stumbled upon something HUGE.

This makes me especially eager to test, because if the results hold up and aren't just a coincidence or the result of two or three articles that just hit the keywords right, then this strategy is going to be especially geared towards (and effective for) freelance writers who are more into writing than SEO and Internet Marketing. This makes me particularly happy since I am definitely a writer first.

So the earnings update. For eHow alone, my income in June was $53.42, with almost 1/3 of that coming in the last week alone. Then in July when I was dealing with personal issues and not really marketing, link building, or writing at all? My income for July was $87.74 and is already looking higher for the month of August. Oh, yeah, my AdSense income went up by about the same percentage and my Amazon affiliate sales were right on target, as well. So it was a good month, and I'll be testing to see if my little "discovery" is indeed the main cause, and how scalable my new online freelance writing strategies are.

There aren't many new eHow articles of note. Most of them I've written since July 4th have earned me $0.00, so I'm in a bit of a slump now, but earnings from some articles I tweaked have jumped, and there are a couple newer ones that I think could be great for me coming up. If you're interested in reading some:

How to Choose a Non Surgical Liposuction Expert (some potential)

How to Learn from the Stoics ($0.00 so far, but I love the topic)

How to Lose Weight Following the Cambridge Diet (this one has actually shown some serious potential to be a $8-10 a month article if I can move it up the Google rankings a little bit)

How to Set Freelance Writing Goals for eHow (just seems appropriate for the blog)

That's it. I haven't done nearly the writing I needed to in July, nor the amount I wanted to. However, I'll be starting to get back into a writing groove in August and hopefully be at full shape in September, especially with all this testing I have to do now. And if it turns out my "discovery" continues to kick butt, you can be sure I'll let ya'll know shortly afterwards. Keep on writing, and keep on running towards your dreams.

Travel Article for eHow

Quick Writing Update

I have one article to add a link to on this update, as well as a few general updates to help anyone reading this with their own freelance writing goals on eHow. I figured for summer it would make sense beyond the gardening articles (both of which are actually doing quite well so far) travel articles also make sense, especially for the summer months when many traditional family vacations take place because of the time off from school. Even better, even single individuals tend to travel more during the summer. Travel is also a topic that I'm passionate about, so why not write some articles about traveling on a budget?

How to Travel Cheaply

This is my most recent travel article on eHow, and it earned 17 cents in one day, so hey, that was a nice little bonus since I always assume that with eHow a longer term outlook is the best way to go.

Other bits of promised news and update about writing for eHow:

"The importance of writing unique content." I had two articles removed from eHow based on not being original enough. This does NOT mean plagirized - this means that one article of mine was about how to create bookmarks on Mozilla Firefox, something I had trouble with. Turns out mine was one of quite a few articles on the same topic - and there's only so many ways to give the exact same steps and give the same instructions, so mine was seen as redundant. Ditto with another article of mine that was about a topic I wrote two articles about, and forgot about the first one.

I'm not mad on either - and this SHOULD NOT discourage you from writing for eHow. This is just an example of why you want to make sure you have something new to say in your articles as opposed to just re-hashing old information.

The second part is the payment update. With 132 articles written (the far majority of which were not at all based around keywords or practical useful solutions or "how to" topics), many of which are also really new, as well. As time goes by and links get gathered (which I'm getting to but haven't done yet) these articles will continue to make more and more. My monthly income went from $36.80 in May and jumped to $53.42 in June. If the first three days of July are any indication at all, it looks like I might even double June's numbers.

And I can't overestimate the importance of gathering backlinks. One article I wrote back in September kept getting $1 a month until only two backlinks pushed it to the top of Google, where it now makes me $6-7 a month. That's not bad. I don't expect that jump with most of my articles, but it just shows how much of a difference a few backlinks to each article can make. Imagine a $1 a month from each of these - that would be a $132 jump per month in passive income without writing any new articles.

If you haven't written for eHow yet, get started now. I wrote all of 5 articles in my first three months combined. The steady earnings they started getting me was exactly the excited push that I needed to really get going with eHow, and the potential here is incredible. So keep at it, and I'll be sure to update in the near future.

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.

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.