My 2011 Earnings from Writing Online & 2012 Writing Goals

Happy New Year! 2011 has come to a close and 2012 has started.  I have updated all of my making money earnings and made a total of $585.48 this year by writing online.  I made $554.32 from writing articles and $31.16 from affiliate sales.  A more detailed break-down of my earnings per program is below.

My goal for 2012 is by the end of the year to be making $500 per month.  A huge goal!  I hope to become more diligent about promoting all of my articles and creating backlinks for them.  I also plan to write, write, write.  I hope to have at least 100 articles/pages for each site that I write for by the end of the year and will greatly increase the number of articles I write for Infobarrel.  (I haven't written for Infobarrel in almost 2 months!)  This year I received my first tier 1 lens for Squidoo: Daily Deal Sites Like Groupon.  I plan to promote this lens so that it remains tier 1 all year and create at least 1 new lens that becomes tier 1.  (Ideally, I would like to end 2012 with 5 tier 1 lenses).   I also plan to create more pages at Wizzley, where although I have 2 very simple pages, I am pulling in strong Adsense earnings per page.

My 2011 Squidoo Earnings: $100.99
My 2011 Infobarrel Earnings: $20.38
My 2011 Bukisa Earnings: $11.81
My 2011 Triond Earnings: $2.14
My 2011 Associated Content Earnings: $94.62
My 2011 Hubpages Earnings: $2.61
My 2011 Wizzley Earnings: $1.76
My 2011 Examiner Earnings: $9.71
My 2011 eHow Earnings: $310.30

How did you do in 2011?  What are your writing goals for 2012?

More eHow Articles on Bukisa: How to Tell if Fruits are Ripe

One topic that I used to write about a lot on eHow were articles on whether fruits were ripe.  I guess this was one of my "niches."  It started simply enough.  One day, my boyfriend, who had recently purchased a mango asked me how to tell if a mango is ripe.  Neither of us knew and I figured if neither of us knew, there were probably plenty of people on the internet who had the same question.  So I did some research on how to tell if a mango is ripe and wrote an eHow article about it.  Very quickly it became one of my highest paying articles.  That's one of the tricks to getting paid to write, write about things people want to know.  You can have as many backlinks and sources driving traffic to your articles as possible but if no one cares about what you're writing about, no one's going to read your articles.

After I found success with my "How to Tell if a Mango is Ripe" article, I wrote several other articles about how to tell if fruits are ripe.  I have chosen to migrate these articles to Bukisa because Bukisa has their own "how to" format and I didn't think the articles were meaty enough to turn into Infobarrel articles. Also, as a way to create backlinks and also have a separate paying source, I created a Squidoo lens "How to Tell If Fruits Are Ripe" and linked to all of my Bukisa articles.  This will be useful to people who want an ultimate guide to whether different types of fruits are ripe and will send them to by Bukisa articles.

eHow Ends WCP & Where to Go From Here

I my spare time I have been writing articles online and gaining revenue both passive and active for these articles.  My biggest earnings came from several eHow articles I wrote when the Writers' Compensation Program ("WCP") was active.  Sometime last year, eHow stopped allowing writers to contribute new articles unless they applied to and were accepted to their Demand Studios writing program.  However, they continued to pay WCP members residual income for the articles they had written.  Starting May 5, 2011, they stopped paying WCP members their residual income and offered either a bulk payment for your articles or for you to remove all of your articles from the site.  I felt my offer wasn't worth what I could make on other sites, tTherefore, I had all of my eHow articles removed from eHow and will be migrating them to other sites.  That's where the tricky part comes in--where do I move them to?  I already write for Associated Content (no Yahoo! Contributor Program), Bukisa, Squidoo, and Hubpages.  However, none of those sites pay as much as eHow did--nor have I put as much work into them.  Associated Content is great for upfront payments, but not so great for residual income (only 1.50 for every 1,000 views). Bukisa has switched over to an adsense format so I'm still seeing how that is working out.  Squidoo lenses and Hubpages hubs are tailored differently and I'm not sure are the best place for simple eHow articles.  I am hearing good things about Infobarrel so I have recently joined them and will likely put my articles in a combination of Infobarrel and Bukisa.  I will let you know how it goes and as I post new articles I plan to do blog posts advising how it's going and which sites have give success.  I plan to use sites like Shetoldme, Best-Reviewer, Squidoo and Hubpages to get backlinks to my articles.

Are you a former WCP member? Did you accept eHow's offer or are you moving your articles somewhere else? What type of success have you had so far?

eHow Earnings Update: Jan. 1-15, 2010

It's halfway through the month so I thought I'd do an update on how I am doing for the month of January with eHow. I've been a little lax in writing articles this past week (I've written none), but I wrote a ton at the beginning of the month.

EHow "accidentally" posted the US articles on the UK site, which they can't compensate writers for, so earnings have been lower this month than they should be. (Views have been directed to UK articles instead of US articles on Google.) Hopefully when they resolve the issue my earnings will be much higher, but right now they're averaging lower than they should.

eHow Earnings Jan 1-15, 2010: $14.27
eHow Earnings to Date: $49.29
Number of Articles on Jan 1: 75
Number of Articles on Jan 15: 175


In order for you to get a sense of which articles are high earners, quick earners, etc... I will also post some of my top articles.
Highest Earning Article All Time: How to Tell if a Mango is Ripe
Highest Earning Article Per Click: How to Write a Health Care Proxy in New York
Newest Article that Has Earned Money: How to Make a Liquid Viagra Written: 1/10/2010 (Note: I hadn't written any articles since 1/11/2010)
Oldest Article that Has Earned Nothing: How to Upload Videos from Your Computer to Your TiVo Written: 9/4/2009

If you want to check out my eHow articles, you can go here.

eHow Writer's Compensation Program

I thought I would start off the first post about eHow's Writer's Compensation Program. It is one of the highest earning paid to write sites out there. It is incredibly popular and their articles have high placement in Google search results.

EHow pays you to write "How to" articles for their site.

However, in order to get paid to write eHow articles, you must sign-up for eHow's Writers Compensation Program (WCP). Sign-Up for eHow's WCP by going to this link http://www.ehow.com/write.html and filling out the pertinent income.

EHow's exact earning matrix is not revealed but is believed to be a combination of the revenue from ads on your articles, the quality of your articles, the number of views of your articles, the comments on your article, and the ratings of your articles.

Therefore, the more articles you write and the better knowledge of SEO (search engine optimization) you have, the more you will earn. In order to maximize your earnings, you want to learn as much about writing for eHow. There is a great book that explains how to write for eHow and how to earn as much as $1000 per month! You can check out the book here.

One of the great things about eHow is that the income is passive income. Meaning that you can write several articles and continue to earn money off of those articles long after you have written them. Write as many quality articles as you can and you will continue to earn.

EHow pays via Paypal at the beginning of each month provided you have earned at least $10.

At this time eHow does not pay for referrals and is only available legal residents of the US.

I will continue to update on this blog new tricks on how to earn with eHow and update my success and my earnings.

I joined September 1, 2009, but did not begin writing seriously until December of 2009. It usually takes about 30 days for articles to show up in Google search results and to really start earning, so my earnings are somewhat limited. From September to December I wrote about 25 articles. I wrote another 50 in December. My total earnings for September through December was $35.02. However, in just the first 3 days of January I have already earned $4.20. I also plan to continue writing and upping my article total. I will keep you updated on how it goes!