I’ve managed to accidentally write an article that earned over $1,000! Wow. The article took about 15 or 20 minutes to write, another 5 – 10 minutes to find an appropriate image and upload the whole shebang to eHow. Who knew that six months later, my 30 minute time investment would earn $1,000 ($1,014.23 and counting).

What’s the Secret Formula?

I wish I knew. I’ve tried in vain to repeat my success. I knew it was a winner after the first month. It started earning right out of the gate. I watched in amazement how each day the earnings seemed to increase.

Since writing that article, I’ve analyzed it every which way from Sunday and still don’t have a clue as to why it is such a success. I’ve got other eHow articles on similar topics and none of them have earned anywhere near as much.

My second place article from an earnings standpoint has earned $545 and it was written 14 months ago (half the earnings in twice the time)!

Words of Advice

I’m not so sure I’m in a position to give advice. After all, I’ve only got one winning article. But, if I were to give advice I’d say to use the tips offered in WriterGig’s book and try to diversify your topics. My articles range from buying insurance to making sandwiches. Some earn more while others were more fun to write.

In addition to keywords, SEO and article topics, I also believe that if you throw enough spaghetti against the wall, eventually some of it will stick. Not very scientific, but I’ve found it to be true.

This time around 11 of my articles were deleted. I agree with 10 of them, but the 11th one I can’t figure out why it was deleted nor will I spend any time thinking about it. All in all, ever since they started the cleanup I found that my daily eHow income has increased. It may be a coincidence or a fluke, but I’m enjoying it.

Recycle the Deleted Articles

As I’ve written in the past, never throw away your work. There is always somewhere on the internet where your deleted article could be put to good use. Before copying it and pasting it somewhere else, however, take a good long look at the article and critique it. eHow is removing articles for the following reasons:

1. SPAM articles; articles that read like advertisements.
2. Articles that do not fit the How To format.
3. Articles that are cloned. This essentially means creating replicas of articles with the same or similar body of content and using different titles.
4. Plagiarized articles.
5. Articles that are inadequately written– this can range from severe grammatical errors to incomprehensible How Tos.
6. Articles that are search optimized for financial gain but offer little or no useful information for the reader
7. Articles missing key pieces of information.
8. Articles promoting click fraud on web advertisements.
9. Articles that read like blogs or provide opinions as though they are fact.
10. Articles that do not answer the stated title.

If you believe the articles were deleted for reasons # 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 the article probably should be either thrown away or re-written. If you believe the article was deleted because of reason # 2, 9 or 10, there’s a place on the internet that will gladly accept your work. Just make sure to make corrections or title changes as needed.

Lucrative Article Rejection

In the last eHow cleanup, I lost two articles. After reviewing them I didn’t feel they needed to be changed in any way so I just placed them on one of my other sites. They’ve have been doing very well financially.

The interesting thing about the timing of this round of cleanup is that I’ve been too busy to write for eHow this month (life sometimes takes a front seat). It now looks like I’ve got 11 less articles than I did when the month started, but I’ve earned more this month than I did last month. Go figure. To top it off, eHow has graciously provided me with 11 new articles to place on one of my other sites.

I look at this situation as a win-win.

Here’s my eHow experiment.

I’m going to track how money grows and how long it takes to make eHow earnings worthwhile. I’m going to use Demand Studios as my comparison yardstick. If I had written 100 articles through Demand Studios, I would have earned $15 per article, which would mean I would have earned $1,500.

Well, maybe not. Demand Studios recently instituted a change. They no longer pay $15 for writer-generated titles. They pay based on a sliding scale. From what I understand the price can range as low as $5 to as high as $15. Although I completed the 100 articles prior to the title rate change, going forward, that is another moving factor to consider.

So far, writing 100 articles earned me a total of $14.46. That means each article is worth a little over 14 cents. I’m averaging out the income across all 100 articles. Actually only 25 articles have earned anything so far.

Using SEO Tactics

I’ve got to say that approximately 25 to 35% of the articles are written using the tips outlined in the book How to Earn Passive Income at eHow.com. Those are probably the 25 to 35 articles that have made money so far. The rest were written on topics that floated into my head on any particular day.

Going Forward

I’m going to continue to place content on eHow, but at a much slower rate. I’d like to see what happens to the first 100 after they season a little.

Check back monthly as I report my eHow earnings. As a matter of fact, why watch what I do, why not join me and try it too?

Check out My eHow Statistical Trend.

Update 4/16/10: Due to the recent changes at eHow/Demand Studios, I have decided to discontinue my experiment.