Johnny's eHow Experiment

I officially have the swine flu

2009-09-01T17:11:00.000-07:00

Well, I have the swine flu, and I've never been so sick in my life. Of course I get this sick right as school starts. So writing articles for ehow has been put on hold until I feel a little better. It'll be hard to work it all in with calculus, physics and programming and chemistry lingering. Oh well. Stay positive.

The last picture I'll make you suffer through.....

2009-08-28T09:30:00.000-07:00

This is the last picture I'll make you suffer through, it's way less 'hilarious', from our rival elevator music composers......

PS: Earnings update coming soon. Hold tight

New Blog, Preview of the Elevator music composers

2009-08-27T15:19:00.000-07:00

Our new blog, Hilarious Robot will be debuting soon. The debut is coming with a new short film we are doing about two elevator music composers pitching their new album. Here's a preview of their album cover........

New blogs, other stuff (a lot of name dropping)

2009-08-20T22:27:00.000-07:00

Hi guys and gals and dogs and extraterrestrials from Vega,

I will be unveiling two new blogs soon, one that is an extension of the crap that comes up in my mind, and the other is an online entrepreneur blog. I'll be writing under the name 'Sir Eggs Benedict'. The mind blog is called 'Hilarious Robot' and will include my comic strip, Me and Bigfoot, as well as ideas and other tasty slices of altogether hilarious information.

Hilarious Robot will debut with the short film that our production company, Banana Nut Productions, is shooting this weekend. (spoiler alert) It's about two cocky elevator music composers that are pitching their new album to an executive at EMCA, the Elevator Music Corporation of America. In the end they sell their album for about $12.50 and validated parking.

It looks better this way

2009-08-17T11:21:00.000-07:00

Earnings update for August (17th) through 15 paydays

2009-08-17T09:12:00.000-07:00

Hello all, It has been a while since I last updated but here I am. August has been relatively slow, in writing and earnings. I am on track for exactly what I did last month even though I've added about 50-60 articles this month. In July I wasn't able to write at all. This month I will be pumping them out for the next two weeks until school starts back up. I have officially covered my base expenses, including the Examiner and such. In fact, my mom has a boring job so I'm trying to tell her to fill that time writing articles. She just puts her head back down into her book. Oh well.

So far I'm at $72 bucks, and earnings haven't updated today yet, lately it's been between 4 and 8 dollars a day.My goal is $10 a day, which is $300 a month, if you guys never took 2nd grade math.

I have some important news which i'll break later in the day. It's about this blog and the 2 new ones I'm starting. (really just about my plans for online income and entrepreneurship)

Earnings update for 17 days, shattering my PR

2009-07-18T11:23:00.000-07:00

Through 17 days of July I'm averaging $5.41 a day, or $90 so far. It's nice because I'm watching my ehow earnings go up everyday, while not doing anymore work.

I'm on track to make more than $150 this month, and mind you that's with doing nothing because of summer school. I have 156 articles still, and am looking forward to gearing up for the next month. My goal for next month is 300 more articles. That's 10 a day, which is totally doable if you look at it as a job. I'm averaging a little more than a dollar per month per article, which means once I get to 1,000, I'll be pulling in about an extra $250 a week for doing nothing but eating pizza and playing basketball. It is looking like eHow really is a great way to make extra money online easily.

earnings update through 11 days, July 09

2009-07-13T08:18:00.001-07:00

It's mid july and the weather is getting warm here at the beach. I still havent been able to write any articles this month but a friend of mine and I are making a goal next month to write a ton.

Earnings this month are better than ever, even though they've just been sitting there. I'm averaging over 5 dollars a day, with a new record 1 day total of over $12. The earnings won't come in for today until about 11 am, and that's for yesterday.

The earnings tab is not functioning right now on eHow, so I took a screenshot of my profile page.

Until next time... when I have time between studying

record earnings, great start to July

2009-07-04T21:24:00.000-07:00

HAPPY 4th EVERYONE!

First off, I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has followed this blog so far. It's been a fun month with some decent earnings, and Im off to another record month in July. I started off the month with $8 for one day, a new one day record. This is all with the fact that I'm too busy with summer school to write right now. In three days of July I have over $17 so far. My examiner examiner earnings were over $266 for my first month, due to good exposure. This blog is picking up steam and I will be debuting a new Entrepreneur and traveler blog at the end of this month. I won't be writing any time soon but will pick up at the end of the month, when I'll be stepping up my goal to 10 articles a day, for 300 in one month.

Thanks again everyone for reading my so called blog, if anyone has questions about making money with eHow or just wanna talk, IM me at golfingjoo, no that's not a typo

eHow earnings update for June, $100 for the month

2009-07-01T14:35:00.001-07:00

I had an update of about $6 today which put me just over the $100 mark for the month which is great. I've been way to busy this month to meet my goal of 5 articles a day, because I have to take summer school. That's 8 hours a day, 4 days a week of quantum physics and calc 3. With that said, I plan on stepping the goal up to 10 articles a day for the month of August. That will more than make up for summer school. All in all I added 56 articles this month, wrote quite a bit for the Examiner and lastly, studied a lot.

Here's the totals for June:

July 1st

Articles written: 156

earnings for June: $100.27

total earnings: $144.01

total article views: 12,411

eHow earnings update, passed $100 in total earnings

2009-06-21T10:15:00.000-07:00

I passed the $100 milestone in total earnings yesterday, which is pretty cool. The work I've put in is earning me at least a couple bucks a day forever. Yesterday I had my biggest update yet with over $13 (although it was for 2 days). I'm still writing for eHow but have been behind big time on my goal of 5 a day because of the Examiner spot. I can't wait to get a second spot, it pays 5 or 6 fold to get a hot topic like money or celebrities. I've also found some great social news sites for promoting, which will be a later post.

On a bummer note, I thought the domain www.sadrobot.com would be awesome but it's taken. It's for sale, and I emailed the guys to see what they'll work with. Sad robot would be a great cartoon. That's something we can all agree on.

$106 in earnings with Examiner today, so far

2009-06-18T20:27:00.000-07:00

This shows what a little self promotion can do. I have gathered about 5 sites that I like for promoting my stories on Examiner. I woke up this morning with a nice surprise. Slashdot, a popular tech news site, had published one of my articles and I had made about 60 bucks by the time I woke up. The earnings went up throughout the day. It was cool, and at first I thought something was wrong, but when I saw the 40 or 50 comments I had, I knew someone had given me a backlink. Anyways, the Examiner is fun and the money is quick. Again, I highly recommend it, and feel free to use me as a reference, because I get a kickback for it.

Ciao for now!

eHow earnings update, passed $50 for the month

2009-06-18T12:40:00.000-07:00

Hi Folks,

Writing for the Examiner and physics and calculus are taking up most of my time so I'm behind on my 5 articles a day, but not really since I'm making much more with the Examiner. Today I passed the $50 mark for the month, probably 3 days until I pass $100 in total earnings. Which will be nice.

Until next time, listen to cut your hair by pavement.

Writing for the National Examiner, great money so far!

2009-06-15T14:34:00.000-07:00

I was just accepted as a energy technologies writer for the National Examiner. I have only been writing for about 3 days but I can tell you the money is quick. I was surprised when I logged on this morning to see that I've passed the $10 mark already, and I'd say by tomorrow it'll be way much more than that. I was worried about getting the gig, so i wrote my application and edited it a bit. Writing for the Examiner is really fun, and earnings are updated in real time. You can view some of my articles here.

The Examiner pays you for every hit you get to one of your articles, so you don't have to worry about keywords too much. I say "too much" because you want to put keywords in, but aren't too worried about the CPC. The application process was quick, I got a reply within 2 days although I've heard it can take up to 2 weeks. They want you to write at least 4 articles a week, but if oyu want to make money you might as well publish more often. I'm taking my eHow work ethic to the Examiner and am writing about 2 a day.

Another good thing abut the Examiner is they encourage links, so if you can do some affiliate marketing, there is some big income potential there too. I would love to read your application before you apply because I have an idea of what they are looking for. Also, please use my name as a referral when you apply, it's at the bottom of the application. Leave a comment or email me with your application and I'll edit it for you if you'd like.

If you're thinking about applying with them, and I would, just browse the positions open. There is a national edition and a local edition for each city. I chose national because I figured I would get more eyes, but you can do two spots, picking up the second after about 2 months.

Cross promotion helps, so you can link articles together, or find places to put your links. I found a news site that lets users submit articles for energy news, and I'm sure that's helping my views. Later I'm going to focus on affiliate marketing.

Review of YouData.com, a promising competitor

2009-06-11T14:33:00.000-07:00

Youdata.com is an interesting new money making site still in what I would call the "beta" stages. Youdata allows people to make money by viewing ads from their sponsors. There are a few other sites that do this but I haven't seen any as sleek as Youdata.

I started signing up, which took about 5 minutes total. The only annoying part is that they make you put in your cell phone number so they can send you a text with a confirmation number. I reluctantly did, and everything worked out well. It's been about a week and haven't received one spam email or text, so you can trust them. After you sign up you have to fill out a profile, which consists of checking boxes that apply to you. This whole process took about 10 minutes. The reason is so they know which ads apply to you. If you know what's good for you you'll check quite a few.

Immediately I had about $3 in ads to click on, which took all of 2 minutes. They have a sleek interface and everything is quick. You don't have to wait a certain time to collect the money, which is way better than any other pay for viewing site I know of.

Everything or youdata is great except for one major thing..... They don't have enough advertisers yet to keep you busy. You'll make about 3 dollars instantly, then you'll have to keep signing in once a week to make more, but go ahead and sign up because if the site takes off, it'll be the easiest money you ever made.

Lastly, they have a referral program which is nice. Click here to sign up, which is my referral.

Thanks for reading!

(my account balance 5 minutes after signing up)

eHow earnings update for June 10

2009-06-10T22:06:00.000-07:00

Pardon all the commas but, I love Seinfeld, I truly do, and my earnings are on track, whatever that means. I'm falling a few articles behind on my 5 articles a day goal because of calculus and physics, but I shall carpe diem! I'm averaging about 2 to 3 bucks a day so far, with some days above that and some below. The biggest problem with eHow is the obsessive waiting to see the earnings for the day. I'm convinced there needs to be an eHowcoholics anonymous group for people addicted to signing on to see if the earnings have been updated. Anyhoo, that's all for now because physics is calling but check back tomorrow for my review of youdata.com!

June Earnings: $ 17.09

Total Earnings: $ 60.83

Articles Written: 127

Insomnia: continuing

Record eHow earning day: $7.23

2009-05-26T10:13:00.000-07:00

I was stoked when I saw a $2 day a few days ago, but today I killed that with $7.23 in earnings. I am ahead of my goal of 25 articles a week. I have been writing more about business which I've seen is a huge jump in costs per click. I got stuck a few times though and wen I do I tend to go back to traveling. A friend and I are planning a trip to Singapore and Japan, and I'm trying to see if I could pay for the trip with eHow earnings only. Too ambitious?

Date: May 26, 2009

Articles Written: 80

Total Earnings: $25.20

Vertical Leap: improving

Expand your sit in front of a computer at home income!!!

2009-06-08T15:00:00.000-07:00

Hello followers and wanderers! Today I won't be talking about eHow or my recent run-in with the Buzzkillingtons that wander the site. Instead I'll be talking about expanding the "I wanna make enough money to live without actually working" possibility. Today is about other residual income. Through other eHow writers and through forums, I've found a few sites that actually will be worthwhile to my resume and wallet. A lot of people have been talking about writing for the Examiner, which would be a dream come true. This is awesome because they let you focus on writing snappy titles and cool articles, without being bogged down by the "How to" format too much. Being a tech writer for the Examiner would be an amazing experience. I hope I get accepted, but I hear it takes a couple of weeks to get through the application process so I'll have to wait and see.

In the coming weeks I'll be testing and reviewing some of the better known ways to make income online, including a site that everyone's talking about called youdata.com. When you spend so much time on eHow looking at your earnings and dreaming about the forums, it would be nice to write somewhere else. Maybe a little sausage here, and some biscuits there, mixed in with some orange juice will create a great passive income breakfast.

So that's it for now, I will report on my earnings and updates with eHow tomorrow. I will also be including a new installment on the European Adventure Extravaganza.

So until next time, here's a picture of the coolest guy since the Fonz:

Once in a lifetime on a train to Scotland

2009-06-02T10:32:00.000-07:00

This is a true story that happened to me and a friend on a train from London to Scotland a while back........

We had almost missed the train that morning, which was because the nice old English lady had sold us tickets for a shuttle that didn't exist. We had gotten up at about 5 in the morning, and being winter in the U.K., it was still dark outside. Since we were late, we had to take the tube to King's Cross Station and ran the whole way. Fukushi kept looking at his watch saying, "we just might make it." Looking back on the whole trip, it sure was amazing. Edinburgh was spectacular, Sweden was beautiful and Hamburg was a blast. We got to King's Cross with about 7 minutes to spare, out of breath, and bewildered by the beautiful architecture. It was about -2 degrees Celsius but we were drenched in sweat from running for the past half hour with backpacks on our backs and about 5 layers of clothing. We both smiled because we were actually going to make it to Scotland that day, just in time for the annual Hogmanay New Year's festival that we had heard was amazing. In the train station, there was 1 snack bar open. I remember ordering 2 coffees, a hot dog for some reason, and the biggest water they had. I grabbed the water and gulped it down like I hadn't had a drink in 3 days. We both ran for the train that was departing, and with our tickets in our hands, we jumped on just in time.

The train was nearly empty, which was a surprise for New Year's Eve, but what do I know, I'm just a stupid American tourist. There were two good looking girls sitting behind us, so I kept looking back to try and start up a conversation, but they didn't seem to be noticing. The Scottish train attendant came by and stamped our tickets, and I lied down and put my headphones in. It was still dark outside, and at each stop we could see little snowflakes coming down as we pressed onward north into the Scottish countryside....

Our train car was mostly empty, like I said, except for the two mystery girls behind us and a few people at the front of the car. Fukushi was sitting across from me, reading a Kurt Vonnegut book, and enjoying the emptiness of the train. I was somewhat tired from the running and getting up at 5 in the morning. But my body didn't know what time it was because 2 days earlier I was waking up in a bed in LA, which was an 8 hour difference. I was tired so I laid my head down next to my hot dog and coffee trash. I heard a child singing "twinkle twinkle little star" in the background. I didn't pay to much attention to it, but I took notice because it sounded kind of creepy, something that you would hear in an old Hitchcock film. "Twinkle twinkle little star", she sang, "How I wonder what you are". I heard the song but was kinda tired and didn't pay any attention to it. All of a sudden, Fukushi hit me on the head. I looked up and saw a very shocked look on his face. His eyes were wide open and he was staring at me. "What the hell is wrong with you", I said. He pushed the book in my face and showed me a paragraph about halfway down the page. I read the paragraph, still confused. It said, "Right then a girl sang, twinkle twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are." I looked up at Fukushi, and he looked back at me. I glanced up at the girl who was singing in the front of the car. Was this some sort of joke? What just happened? Are we in the twilight zone? Fukushi looked at me and said, "dude, I read that paragraph right when she started singing." It synced up perfectly.

I thought to myself, how many times in your lifetime do you hear a little girl randomly singing twinkle twinkle little star. Then I thought, how many times do you read a book with the lyrics to that song in them. Then I thought, what are the chances of this happening on this cold and dark winter morning in Scotland? We looked at each other and the looked up at the girl who was singing, and she was looking back at us. Maybe she had some 6th sense and started singing because she heard Fukushi's thoughts. That was the only explanation. we figured that it must be some omen for what was about to happen on that trip, and decided not to look into it too much.

The train pulled into Edinburgh at about 10 in the morning that New.

And I'll save the rest for later. Thanks for reading.

-Johnathan Martinez

Kings Cross Station, the day before

100 Articles in 1 Month, goal reached

2009-06-01T09:41:00.000-07:00

Well, I finished 100 articles in my first month, despite having to catch up the second part of the month. I go through writer's block spells, but then I spend some time building my light activated synthesizer, putting words into Word Tracker and listening to old school P-Funk. Lately I've been spending about 20 minutes at night setting up my articles and writing them the next morning. I also broke the $40 mark yesterday, and have been averaging about 3 to 4 dollars a day. I'm actually starting to think that I'm going to surpass my monthly expenditures sooner than possible, which shows eHow is a good resource of passive income.

Date: June 1st

Articles Written: 100

Total Earnings: $43.74

Mercury: rising

This video is Brilliant

2009-05-23T16:25:00.000-07:00

This video was featured at the Cannes Film Festival, and I thought it would be nice to share with you.....

Earnings and Article update, May 22nd

2009-05-22T19:22:00.000-07:00

Date: May 22nd, 2009

Articles written: 65

Total Earnings: $12.94

Days on eHow: 25

I reached payout! I have been averaging about $1 a day and have had some $2 days. Today the earnings update was only about .50 cents but I guess that's the difference between one or two clicks. I had to study hard for my 4.0 this semester, which is unusual, so earlier this week I got behind but I have plenty of time to write this weekend to catch up. Most of my articles lately have been about travel and making money, which seems to get plenty of views. There is still no algorithm for the perfect article, but maybe that will change as I go on and see what makes more money.

The eHow earnings formula for new writers

2009-05-22T10:05:00.001-07:00

Someone sent me a message the other day about how to calculate the earnings potential of eHow so I thought I would share it. So far I am ahead of the curve when it comes to the formula, but
The formula is: Take your total articles that are less than 4 months old and divide that number by two. Then, take your total articles that are over four months old and multiply that number by two. Add the two numbers and that is your average earnings per month.

In other words, young articles should be making .50 cents a month and old articles about $2 a month. As a few months go by those articles will slowly mature to $1 a month and up. So, does this stack up with you? Have your earnings been consistent with this formula? Now obviously, if you are good with search engine optimization and write about good subjects, this number will be higher, and for me so far I'm finding out that it is. Some of my articles are going to be starting out at $3 a month or more. I'll post my earnings update as soon as it happens today.

Go Lakers!

Writing eHow articles that pay well

2009-05-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

Myself, and every other writer on Ehow tries to figure out why some articles make so much money and why others don't. In your head you try to create an algorithm for how to write a perfect article every time. What is the magical formula to optimize keywords perfectly, and get the reader super pumped on your article at the same time? I have heard of people even starting spreadsheets and studying them all day long.

As you write with ehow, you will find that some random articles make awesome money every day, and some you thought you were going to retire on have 5 views and $0.00 in earnings a month later. There is no real way to write perfect articles every time, but if you follow some guidelines, you can optimize your earnings. Here's my 2 cents on the subject:

*Use Wordtracker to see what people are searching for. Wordtracker allows you to see what people are searching for and the volume. It is like ad-sense but it uses more complete sentences.

*Ad-sense. I use this with every article. You can use google's free tool to see the volume and cost per click of searches. Google is going to be your best friend because this is where your traffic will come from. Sprinkle in the higher keywords in your articles to draw higher paying ads on your page. Also, look at the competition, use lower competition for your titles and higher competition for your keywords, because this is what google bot uses to put ads on your pages.

* Be aware of the higher searched categories. These tend to be personal finance and health. Right now the fads are getting in shape, eating healthy and saving your tail during the recession.

*Don't overdo the keywords. Google's bot has been developed for over ten years and is more sophisticated than I want to know and it will throw your butt to the curb if it thinks your writing just for SEO. Also, ehow will throw your article out if they think the same. Write good, naturally flowing informative articles with some nice keywords every other step or so.

*Try the long tail, but try the middle as well. People will tell you that their highest paying articles are random ones. This is true, but I have also seen good results with insurance and foreclosure articles. The competition is enormous but if people get to your article, the average cost per click is as high as $30!

*Don't waste you time telling people to rate and comment on your articles. This is kinda spammy and in bad taste. Let people rate your articles as they deserved to be rated. If you get a bad rating, maybe your article sucked and you need to revise it or add more content.

*Stay involved in the forums to stay up on the news of the site and what people are saying, it pays to stay informed!

Welcome!

2009-05-16T10:16:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the "Johnny's Ehow Experiment" section of the internet. I am a starving college student who recently found out that he has no job and is running out of money. After reading a blog about the Ehow writer's compensation program, and how much money people were making, I decided to give it a try. This blog is here to document my progress as a writer on ehow and to see what the real earnings potential of the site is. Is it possible to write for eHow full time? Over the next couple of months we'll see....

HOW I GOT IN THIS SITUATION:

Over the course of my life I have done some lucrative things. After a friend and I made a pretty decent living selling iPhones, we decided to skip town and head back to Europe. It was a fantastic trip, visiting relatives in Sweden and such. On my return, I found out that my screen printing business had vanished into another dimension and I had no way to make money. I decided to finally get a normal job, but during a bad recession, "starving college student" isn't enough on a resume to get hired. After reading about Ehow's writer compensation program, I decided to give it a try.

GOALS:

The goal I have set is to write at least 25 articles a week. I plan on doing 5 articles a day, 5 days a week, and on the weekends I can either get ahead or catch up if I had a day that was just too busy to write. The articles have to be QUALITY, I can't just write mumbo jumbo to get my count up. If you read the about me,

TOTALS:

Articles written: 44

Money made: About $5

I'll be updating every week with my totals, and hopefully blogging more than that about my findings and what not. I would love for you to subscribe and follow along as I try to do the impossible, become a full time eHow writer!