Earn Passive Income With eHow

The first source of passive income I'm learning to use is the freelance writing website eHow. As one of the most popular sites of its kind, eHow draws in millions of viewers daily, who want to learn - as the site's slogan says - "How to Do Just About Everything".

Given the popularity of the site and my inexperience using it as a source of income, I'd be hard-pressed to include any information that hasn't been said before. In fact, a quick search on Google including only the words "eHow" and "money" yielded almost 2 million results. What I can talk about is potential, and eHow's got that in spades.

When the thought to look up freelance writing opportunities came into my head, I started to search. Almost immediately I found a page about WriterGig, one of eHow's most successful writers. She's written the book on eHow success (literally) and is currently earning over $1500 a month from her articles there. Of course, she's been writing on the site for a few years and is now an expert on optimizing traffic to her articles, but she started off as new and unsuccessful as anyone else. The thought that there are people out there making a living from this really inspires me to become one of them.

On eHow, writers earn their income through the site's Writer's Compensation Program (or WCP). Through a somewhat secret formula, writers receive a share of the ad revenue generated on their articles' pages. This service is not automatically turned on when you create an eHow account, but it's completely free to use. When you activate WCP on your account, all your articles - including ones you may have written before activating it - will be eligible for program earnings. To get paid for any given month, you'll need to earn at least $10 with the program. If you don't earn enough to meet the minimum payout, your earnings will "roll" over each month until you've earned enough to be paid. Payments are distributed via PayPal - so if you don't have a PayPal account and you'd like to write for eHow now is a good time to set up an account.

As of this writing, I've earned a total of 29 cents with eHow. Due to a recent bug on the site (which has since been corrected), I was only able to publish 2 articles. Each has gotten less than 50 views so far, and are for very niche interests, so I don't know how they'll perform in the long-term. But since I am now able to publish again, I'm hoping to start producing quality articles that will pick up a lot of views in the near future.

It definitely benefits would-be writers to get comfortable with SEO and choosing the right keywords to draw in views, as well as choosing appropriately popular topics. It's important to hit a sweet spot - go for too popular a topic and your article will never be seen, since more popular or more qualified writers have already covered it. But write about something too obscure and you won't get views simply because no one's looking for it. Properly setting up your articles seems to be a fine art, but seemingly once you've mastered it you'll greatly increase your earnings per article. A great feature of eHow is being able to go back and edit your articles after they've been published. That way if your article is poorly keyworded or includes information that's become outdated since you published it, it could become profitable with just a few easy tweaks.

As I said, the ins and outs of earning on eHow would be best explained by people other than myself. Check out WriterGig's ebook (which guarantees success), or scour the internet for quality information from the site's many other successful writers. From what I've seen so far, there appears to be nearly limitless earning potential if you're willing to do the legwork. I'll also be happy to share what I learn along the way, since I plan to make passive income from eHow a big part of my earnings during this experiment.

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