A friend posted an interesting entry in his blog not too long ago.  He decided to write five articles per day for one year, publishing them all on eHow.  Using estimation (and a healthy dose of guesstimation), Pat surmised that by the end of the second year, he’d be earning close to $43,000 per year in pure passive income from his eHow earnings.

Now here’s where the interesting part comes in: someone commented to Pat that he’d make more money if he posted those same five articles per day on his OWN blog.   The reason this commenter gave was that when writing for eHow, you share your advertising commission with eHow, whereas you keep 100% of the advertising earnings from articles on your own blogs.  True and true.  But here’s what I said to Pat and his readers:

“Writing for eHow is faster and easier because you get to use a birdshot approach, covering a broad array of topics and hitting a wider audience. If you wrote for your own blog, your articles would most likely take longer to write and would have to be about one niche.

In your math post, you said it would take you 2 hours per day to write 5 articles (I wager that if you take about 30 minutes a week to write out a list of topics, you could bang out your articles in 5-10 minutes, rather than 20, btw)… so for the next few months, double that. Write 5 articles for eHow, and 5 for your own blog each day. When you reach 100, you should have an idea as to which is more profitable.

My prediction is that they’ll both be making roughly the same amount of money. Why? Because your own blog will get you more revenue per click BUT your eHow articles will probably see more traffic and total clicks. (I say this because before I read your math article, and before I started writing for eHow, one of my blogs was earning me roughly $43,000 per year… close to what you expect to be earning with eHow.)

For the experiment to work, you would need to run articles on eHow and on a personal blog, BUT the articles on each would have to be on the same subjects (not necessarily duplicate articles, but duplicate theme). (IOW – how to make grilled cheese x 2. How to shave a pig x 2. How to bathe a tuba x 2. – you get the point.) I’m thinking with such a wide-reaching variety of topics, the articles on eHow would earn more, because nobody would really be stopping by the personal blog of a guy who writes about making sandwiches one day, and shaving pigs another day. BUT (”everyone I know has a big but”) — if he dedicated the same amount of time writing 5 daily posts on one dedicated subject for a niche site… THAT would bring in the most revenue.

So now I change my earlier statement, because I realized something while thinking “aloud”: In order to get a TRUE idea of where five articles a day would bring more revenue, you’d need to write fifteen articles per day. Five for eHow. Five for a personal blog, with articles that would echo the eHow articles. And five for a niche blog. In the end, my guess is the results would be (in order of highest income to least): 1) niche site 2) eHow 3) weird anything-goes blog.”