A tale of two eHows

I checked my eHow earnings today, as I do pretty much every day (and if they don't post, grrrrrrrr.....).

My two top earning articles pulled in about $6 each since yesterday. One's a little over $6, one's a little under. But those two articles, alone, are a nice boost to my daily income. The articles are very different from each other, and it's interesting to look them over and try to figure what makes them work.

One top article is How to Make Money on the Internet. I've worked really hard on this one, trying to make it the best how-to-earn article out there. I had to. There are so many articles and so many websites with a similar theme, that I knew I had to find a way to make mine stand out to have any chance at it being successful. I put in a lot of time reviewing money-making sites, casting most of them aside as pretty worthless, and writing an article that highlighted the legitimate sites.

It's worked well. The article gets a lot of ratings and comments, and readers really appreciate it. I assume they also do all the nifty things we want readers to do: bookmark the article, send it to friends, add links to their sites, Digg it, and basically spread the word. I haven't actively done any of that myself...I leave most of my article promotion to the organic forces at work on the internet.

But one thing I do that's very important--every few months I update the article, removing outdated links, adding some new ones, and changing descriptions as the situation calls for (which reminds me, I have to update what I say about eHow now that it's no longer an active writers site).  It's an active way to keep the article evergreen.

My other top earner could hardly be more different. It's an article on free websites and domain names. It took me all of fifteen minutes to write (and has earned $1,030 so far. That's like getting paid $4,120 an hour!). It doesn't have a lot of content and doesn't offer a heaping helping of insight. (It doesn't even explain how to add Adsense to the free sites, but Tammy's article does.)

So why does my measly article earn so well? Truth is, I'm not really sure. I suspect I made a good choice with my title. I included both domain name and free website as keywords and there aren't a heck of a lot of sites that actually combine both those terms. The fact that the article is not from a web hosting company probably also helps. And of course, it gets some good old Google juice just from being on eHow.

But the bottom line is, I just got lucky. Sometimes, that's what it takes.