Earning "passive" income on ehow

So the past few months I've been trying out this site called ehow.com to earn a little extra money. It's a great site you really can learn how to do just about anything. Whether it's the correct way or not depends on the article but... take it with a grain of salt. What I have realized though is that if I really want to make a decent amount of income on this site there is nothing passive about the process. I spend hours working on writing my articles, reading, rating, and commenting on other articles. The only way to make money is to increase your page views. You increase you page views by utilizing good SEO (Search Engine Optimization), good keywords, and by commenting on other peoples articles. Ok doesn't sound so bad right? Well it wasn't, until I went from having 5 articles published to having 24 articles published. I know, I know, you're thinking well shouldn't that be a good thing? The more articles you have the more people you reach the more views you get the more money you make, right? Yes. Except that now you have people commenting on 24 articles instead of 5. If 5 people commented on each of my 5 original articles that would be 25 comments to return. No big deal and most people have atleast a few articles that are going to be interesting. Well if there are now 5 comments on each of my now 24 articles in one day that is 121 articles to read, rate, and comment on. Now you see the problem. As your article library grows you can no longer respond to all of the wonderful comments that you have recieved... If you take the time to respond to all of these great comments properly you no longer have the time to write your articles. It's like the "Which came first? The chicken or the egg?"

After pondering this for quite some time I have come to the conclusion that to make money writing articles you must write as many articles as you can as consistently as you can on more than one site. Once I started to think this was the way to go I started asking other members what they think.

Here is what I've learned about ehow: Ehow appears to have the highest over all pay out based on per view statistics say several of the high earners on the site. These are people who make "pay out" every month, many of which have used other sites and chosen to focus only on ehow. However there is no publicly posted rate. Ehow pays based on topic relevance and reviews as well as article views. Some sites offer a straight $3.50 per 1,000 views on articles, on ehow you have the potential to make significantly more income. In the last quarter of 2009 I made $3.21 over those 4 months. In Jan 2010 I made a total of $0.35, this month with the additional articles and investment in time I am at $3.27 for the month. Not bad considering the previous numbers I was looking at. I can't live off it but it's a definate improvement in percentage points. With 24 articles and 2430 total views that's $6.48 in total since I started. Making my return on investment at about $2.66 per 1,000 views. Less than the before mentioned site. But what if most of that money came from 1 or 2 articles? Than maybe it averages out to be more. Is it worth it? For now. Will it be worth it later when I am back in school full time and balancing family life? I hope so. That's where the residual earning comes in. Write enough articles now make more money later.