Ascent to Freedom

Update on eHow Earnings

STRONGside — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 18:35:02 +0000

It has been a few months since my last update. Life has been exceedingly busy and I have just not been able to find the time to update this blog. However, I really have been encouraged, excited, motivated to share my results through eHow. If you remember, back in March 2010, I joined eHow. I had extremely high hopes for building a credible stream of passive online income. I realized that once again, my daydreaming got in my way, and I quickly learned the reality was not as beautiful and easy as i had once hoped. That was month 1. I wrote 29 articles and earned $5.01 from ad revenue. Those 29 articles took me an average of 30 minutes a piece, so 14.5 hours of writing time equates to $0.35/hour. Not exactly the barn burner I was hoping for. I was not discouraged and had high hopes for Month 2.

Month 2

Articles written = 31. Ad revenue earned = $4.97. Hourly wage = $0.32/hour. Stellar. Blackpedaling.

Month 3

May brought on a strange series of events, where eHow completely changed their guidelines and users were no longer able to submit articles the usual method. There was a completely new service which involved submitting your article to an editor. I tried two articles, both were rejected and I gave up. Articles written = 0. Money earned = $3.82. Hourly wage = $0.19/hour (Even though I did not get any articles published, I spent 20 hours writing and editing the two articles that were eventually rejected…). Massive fail.

Month 4

Completely demoralized. I just spent the last 3 months pinning my future passive income earnings on a big, fat, flop. However, by month’s end a strange thing happened. I earned $5.22. A record month. I did not write a single article, or really think about Ehow that much, except to lament my plight. So I earned $5.22 for doing nothing. Not bad. Nothing to get excited about. But, not bad.

Month 5

Still doing nothing on eHow. Earnings = $10.34. Not bad. Doubled my money from last month. Still doing nothing.

Month 6

Total earnings = $26.41. Hold the phone. You mean to tell me that for not doing a single thing or even spending brain power THINKING about Ehow, my articles have continued to gain ad revenue, and they want to send me a check for $26? I’ll take it.

Month 7

Total earnings = 27.58. Sitting pretty. But I keep telling myself not to get excited. This latest amount was from September 2010, and I have continued to be disinterested with eHow and frustrated over the loss of my passive income stream. Suddenly I realize, that *gasp* I have created a passive income stream. From the misery of my loss, a passive income stream has risen. Granted, still not enough money to be a game changer, but who would not want $27 extra per month. The best thing, every month is gradually getting better.

Month 8

October 2010. I eagerly check my Paypal account and *BOOM* , total earnings = $39.36. I am speechless. That is real money. They just paid me almost $40 to do nothing. I will take and run….to the bank.

With the current earnings from November I have earned $138.45. Total hours invested 50. Hourly wage = $2.77. Still nothing to brag about, but the great thing is that since I am not putting any additional work into this income stream, that hourly figure will only rise. Who knows what it will be in a year from now? Maybe 2? 3?

The moral of this story is that there is an actual way to make money from home in a passive income model. Even though I was only able to write 61 total articles, my earnings have continued to increase each month and I look forward to increased earnings in the future. You can absolutely replicate this same success with a little hard work. Your dream of a home based business is not a dream at all. In fact, your home based business is simply waiting on you to take the plunge and open up shop!

eHow switching to 100% Demand Studios Publishing Platform

STRONGside — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 20:47:02 +0000

If you are an eHow writer you have probably received an e-mail by now announcing that the Writer Compensation Program will cease to exist to new users. They also announced that current eHow writers will now solely produce content through Demand Studios. This marks an extreme change for Demand Media which is one of the largest content creation companies in the world.

Current eHow writers will either be pre-approved, based on their current article acceptance rate as of April 1st, or they will be given the option to apply for a writing position at Demand Studios to continue producing content for eHow.

A lot of people who receive a passive income from eHow should pay attention to these changes. All of your old articles will not be touched and you can continue to receive revenue sharing from your articles as you have been, however, for any new articles you submit, you will have to go through Demand Studios.

Thankfully, I was pre-approved into Demand Studios based on a 92% acceptance rate. Here is the e-mail that I received from eHow earlier today.

Demand Studios is now the exclusive writing platform for eHow.com.

Hi strongside,

Today, we are announcing that Demand Studios is now the exclusive platform for writing new articles for eHow.com. Congratulations, you have automatically been accepted into Demand Studios. This change will not impact any of your existing articles or payments currently affiliated with the Writer Compensation Program (WCP). Demand Studios gives eHow.com’s writers a more robust publishing platform including copy editors, quality assurance and a number of great, new resources for the writer community. We are committed to providing a quality experience and are excited for you to get started.

How does this impact you?

Demand Studios has a rigorous writer admission process to ensure quality. Writers, like you, were pre-approved, because of your excellent track record. Quality is paramount, and our criteria for accepting eHow.com writers into Demand Studios were based on writer activity level andmoderation history. By the end of March 2010, you should have published five or more articles, of which at least 80 percent were accepted. Also, you must have been a member of the WCP. Having written 64 articles with a 92% acceptance rate, you should be proud of yourself for being pre-approved.

We are migrating thousands of writers on eHow.com over the next few weeks. We appreciate your patience and will notify you via email when you can begin writing for Demand Studios. In the meantime, it’s business as usual, and you can continue to publish on eHow.com.

What are the benefits?

Demand Studios now offers the benefits you are accustomed to on eHow.com, with added flexibility. You can suggest your own titles and write articles that pay monthly on a residual basis. In addition you can select assignments that pay upfront. The combination of these options gives you the opportunity to make more money. You choose what articles you write and how you get paid.

Next Steps:

Continue to write using eHow.com’s publishing tools and watch for an email notification from us regarding your transition into Demand Studios.
For additional questions, please visit the FAQ or email us at writers@ehow.com.

Thank you,

The eHow Team

Important Changes Ahead

Here is an additional graphic provided from eHow that will hopefully illustrate some of the differences between eHow and the new Demand Studios publishing platform.

What do you think?

Will you continue to write for Demand Studios?

Make Money Online with CashCrate

STRONGside — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 18:33:06 +0000

In my continuing quest to earn a passive income online, I have stumbled across a website that I plan on implementing into my passive income plan.

CashCrate is simply a service that compiles paid trial offers and surveys. You complete offers and surveys, and you earn a small fee for your time.

I went through their introductory program, completed my first 3 offers, and have earned $2.40. This is not a lot of money by any means, but it does go to show that there is money to be made…and quickly. My total time for that first $2.40 was approximately 10 minutes ( on pace for $14.40 an hour).

The beauty of the CashCrate system and the reason I am excited about it, is their referral program. Theoretically, you could never complete a single survey or trial offer and still earn money through their referral program. here is how it works:

For the first 50 referrals you earn 20% of their earnings. That’s right, without lifting a finger, you earn 20% of the money that your referrals are earning. On top of that, for every second level referral (one of your referrals refers someone else) you earn 10% of their earnings.

You can literally build a small army of referrals that may complete a few offers a day, but earn big bucks for you!

The CashCrate referral program also gets better as you increase referrals. When you reach Elite status and have over 500 referrals, you will earn 30% of your referrals earnings, and 20% of your second level referrals.

If you do the math, you have already realized that there is serious earning potential here.

The trick here is obviously going to be getting referrals. The more you get the more you earn. Simple as that. So how do I plan to go about getting referrals?

Promote here at Ascent to Freedom.
Include my referral link in my e-mail signature
Create free business cards at vista print with my referral link
Put up pictures of my earnings checks (once they start rolling in)
Create a website dedicated to CashCrate. This will allow me to display banners for CashCrate.

So all in all, I think this can be a very lucrative activity. I will let you know how I am progressing, and if I am actually able to gain any referrals who will earn any money.

Do you have experience with CashCrate?

Do you participate in their referral program?

eHow Earnings Update: 20 Days In

STRONGside — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:50:03 +0000

It has been 20 short days since I registered with eHow.com and published my first article. I have learned a lot about the inner workings of eHow and been frustrated along with all the other eHow community members at the publishing glitches. But through all that frustration, I have managed to publish 35 articles on my own.

Here are links to some of my favorite articles that I have written:

How to Graduate College For Free

How to Recycle Your Old Blog Posts Into eHow Articles

How to Get Free Stuff For a Product Review Website

How to Quit Your 9-5 and Live on Passive Income

How to Earn a Passive Income on eHow

How to Create a Niche Website that Makes Money

As of the writing of this article I have gained 434 article views. I have earned a total of $2.25. Not exactly a goldmine but I feel like I am well on my way to earning a steady residual income.

You can check out my eHow profile here.

Do you have eHow articles up? What have you found are the best methods for gaining traffic to your articles?

Break Down Your Goals Into Bite Sized Pieces

STRONGside — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 13:19:44 +0000

What are your goals?

What are your dreams?

Do you want to quit your job and live on passive income?

I know I sure do.

I also know that it seems like a crazy far-fetched dream that I will ever be able to make it there. I posted a while back about finding your number, the amount of monthly income that it will take for you to quit your job, and live life on your own terms. For me, that number is $5000 per month. That may seem like a huge number to some of you and probably a small number to a lot of you, but for me, that’s all I need.

But $5000 per month is still a lot of money!!

That number becomes even bigger, and even more unattainable, when I look at my paltry earnings so far online. I’m not ever gonna make it to $5000 per month making a few dollars a day through ad revenue.

On the flip side, I also just started this experiment less than a month ago. I actually have made money and have a positive cash flow (my expenses are $0 so far, so any cash flow will be positive!).

It really is all about perspective and putting your goals into perspective. If I continue to focus on the $5000 per month goal, I will get discouraged and frustrated along the way, and give up on my dream (I know myself too well, I know I cannot sustain this forever with an unattainable goal).

Have you ever heard of the Debt Snowball? Ever heard of Dave Ramsey? His now famous Debt Snowball plan works because it focuses on psychology not finances. Obviously, he is a financial guru, but he has learned that it is the psychology behind the finances that is the core of the problem. His program teaches you to set a small debt reduction goal, pay off one small amount, then apply that monthly payment to the next amount, pay that off, add the monthly payments together and apply it to the next biggest amount. Financially, this is not the smartest plan, but psychologically, it works! It just makes sense! You set yourself attainable goals, you get encouraged from your success, and you move on to the next goal!

I break my goal into bite sized pieces, I will be able to make it. Say I focus on the first $100 per month goal. This is a big milestone as it is the minimum payout for revenue sharing programs (Google Adsense). Once I reach $100 per month then bump up to $500, then $1000, I will progress on until I really have met my goal.

That may sound a little trivial, but for me I know it works. I imagine that it could work for you too! Breaking down your goals into bite sized pieces will give you the confidence that you need to surge on towards your goals.

Photo by: Dunilo Rizzuti

Are Companies Required to Pay Overtime and Allow Paid Sick Leave

STRONGside — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:10:08 +0000

This might seem a little off topic of my usual posts but I wanted to see what you thought about this question, and because one of you is probably an expert on this topic and can answer my question definitively. Heres the scenario: My wife is a full-time graphic artist for a company. She is a regular employee (receives a W2) and typically works a standard 40 hour week. She also is able to work from home full-time. She may go into her office one a month for a short meeting, but most months she never leaves the living room. From the beginning, we have felt that her company is taking advantage of her because she has worked more than 40 hours every week and has received no overtime or compensatory pay or time off for the extra hours worked. She has also not been given a sick day policy so it has always been a very vague question of whether she would be able to actually take a paid sick day from her work. And her boss puts insane pressure on her to not take a sick day “because she works from home”. While this is true and she does work in her pajamas, sometimes you just have to take a day off because you are sick.

So that is the scenario. I am really hoping someone has some expertise they can lend to our situation because all the information we can find is very confusing. We have checked out the Department of Labor’s website: http://www.dol.gov/ and they seem to be fairly clear about sick days. The company is not required to pay for sick days, but they are required to give up to 10 weeks off in unpaid time under FMLA. But they are very vague on whether or not an employee can be considered Exempt or Non-Exempt from overtime compensation.

I would love to hear your feedback!

Making Money Writing On eHow

STRONGside — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 13:31:47 +0000

Many of you probably already know about the site ehow.com The more I do research about passive income streams this repeatedly surfaces as one of the easiest and potentially, most rewarding residual income streams for writers. While I do not fancy myself a writer of novels or prose, I sure do like the idea of writing short (200-600 word) “how to” pieces.

Perfect For Scatterbrains!

I think my brain works extremely well with this style of writing. I have never been diagnosed with ADD, but I have serious trouble staying focused on a single topic for an extended period of time. Especially the time it would take to write say, a novel, or a feature-length article. With eHow, I can get an idea in my head and within 15 minutes, I have pounded out a quick 4-6 step How-To article about the burning topic of the day and submitted it to be published. If you are anything like me and have trouble staying focused on long writing assignments (or anything else in life for that matter) this may be for you!

Residual Income Potential

I want to be up front about my earnings through eHow so you can make an informed decision about whether this could be a quality source of residual income. As of today, my account reads $0. My first articles were just published yesterday, so I know they need to have time to gain momentum.

You earn income on your articles through Adsense revenue sharing basically. eHow has a complicated algorithm that they use to determine the share of the profits, but I do know that their calculations depend heavily on the Adsense earnings your article brings in. If you run a blog, you are probably very familiar with how Adsense works and can easily apply that knowledge to publishing articles on eHow.

SEO also plays a large role in getting your articles found. Basic knowledge of keyword searches will aid you tremendously in crafting titles for your articles and formatting your text.

As I move forward with this project, I will keep you updated with monthly earning reports. Hopefully each month they will continue to grow and grow and I will get a great jumpstart on the path to Life On My Own Terms!

Check out my eHow profile here!!!

What do you think?

Are you already on eHow???

Photo by: Simon Howden

Saving For Your Goals with ING Direct

STRONGside — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:18:20 +0000

One of the most important aspects of living off of passive income and being your own boss, is being able to sustain yourself and your family financially. That is the goal right? Quit your 9-5, support yourself and your family through passive income streams, and dedicate yourself entirely to your family? Well, in order to accomplish that goal you will need to utilize various financial tools to aid you on your journey. One of the best methods I have found of saving money towards specific goals is creating sub-accounts through ING Direct. If you would like a detailed tutorial on how these can actually be set-up, Ramit Sethi has created a great step by step tutorial you can find here.

The best part about ING Direct is the ease of set-up. Within 5 minutes of creating an account, you can have multiple accounts created, money being transferred to fund these accounts, and automatic transfers scheduled that will automate your savings. This part is key if you are really going to build wealth and progress rapidly towards your goals. We both know that humans are unable to escape the psychological roadblocks that keep us from saving money and that if we do not actively set money aside for future goals, it just will not happen! So with ING, you simply schedule an automatic transfer from your bank account, and the money is whisked away to be held safe and grow! What I like most about ING is that you can create unlimited accounts. I have 7 accounts created. Everything from my emergency fund to HOA fees, to car insurance and taxes. Every relatively large bill that I want to set money aside for each month, I simply create a sub account. The money is deposited each month, it grows, and I withdraw the money when I need it. Simply as that.

I could talk about the benefits of ING all day, but let’s face it, money talks! So if you respond to these comments with your e-mail address, I will send you an invitation to join up with ING Direct and they will give you a $25 bonus just for signing up! (I will get a little bonus as well, so its a win win for everyone!)

Photo by: Simon Howden

Developing iPhone Apps for Cash

STRONGside — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 14:02:46 +0000

The more I look for ideas of earning an income online I keep seeing one recurring theme: iPhone apps.

It seems like every time I turn around another one of my friends gets an iPhone. Personally, even as fanatic of a fan of Apple products as I am, I cannot stomach paying the monthly service fee through AT&T so I don’t own an iPhone, but I know that a whole boatload of people do, and those people buy apps!

So you have a captive audience willing to spend the big bucks on the phone, the monthly service fee, and all the trapping to make their iPhone cool and unique, and you better believe they are willing to pay a few bucks to download a cool app that will make them stand out among their friends.

Now I will be the first to admit that I don’t know the first thing about programming, so I would have to outsource the programming for an iPhone app, but I’m gonnna jump on this bandwagon while its hot.

Have you developed an iPhone app? Do you know exactly where the best programmers are to be found? Is there money to be made?

Photo by: Francesco Marino

What is your number??

STRONGside — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 13:05:22 +0000

By now you have probably all seen the ING Direct commercials asking “What is your number?”

I want to ask the same question about a different number. ING wants to know what number you will need to retire, I want to know what number will cause you to quit your 9-5 job and start living your life on your terms!

When I sat down to consider my number I quickly realized that a lot of factors had to be considered. I have a good hold on our family finances so I knew exactly how much would be needed to cover our expenses each month. But the goal of securing passive income is not just to cover expenses, I want to create a life for my family that meets our needs, allows us to spend more time together, and secures a safe future. With this goal in mind, suddenly my number jumped drastically.

I figured it would be easiest to break it down into a monthly number since most expenses and income are calculated on a monthly basis. I had to consider the rising cost of supporting a growing family, the expenses of socking more money away into retirement accounts, the added expenses of being self-employed (higher insurance premiums, business expenses, taxes), and a well padded emergency fund if something were to go awry.

I also factored in the concept that the amount that I would take right away is not necessarily my end goal amount. The amount that it will take to get me to switch will be considerably less than the amount I believe I am capable of bringing in. Suffice it to say, once you figure out your passive income plan, it should be easily scalable, which should offer a significant boost in your income in the future.

After considering all those factors, I settled on my number: $5000/month. Once I reach this goal I will be safely able to separate from my current job and venture into the world on my own terms, unencumbered by a 9-5 job!

So I encourage you to find your number! How much in monthly income would it take to pull you away from your 9-5 job and start putting your priorities in the order they need to be?

Photo by: Michelle Meiklejohn