Xomba vs. eHow - Which is Better?

I'm comparing my experiences with eHow and Xomba. I haven't been able to spend much time on either, but if you're deciding between the two I hope this will give you some insight.

I joined eHow in May 2009 and wrote two articles. I earned $0.32 that first month and nothing the next. Finding topics to write about was hard, but filling in the steps as you wrote made the actual writing easy. I wrote a few more articles and made $0.54 in July.

In late August I discovered Xomba. I loved the 50-word Xomblurbs, and I wrote several blog posts about my experiences on the site. I even wrote an eHow article about one method for finding good links to write Xomblurbs about.

I made $1.02 on eHow in August - almost double July's earnings! But even though I'd only been on Xomba a week of August, I also made $1.02 with them! I decided to focus more on Xomba, unless I got a great idea for an eHow article.

September was an even better month for me on eHow, even though I wasn't posting there. I made $2.53, and was on track for getting the $10 minimum deposit by the end of the year. Things weren't as great on Xomba - I only made $0.86 that month. It looked like I should focus on eHow instead.

Then in early October eHow did a purge and two of my articles got the axe. I found them with Google's cache function and posted them to Xomba instead. I decided if coming up with things to write about for eHow was so hard anyway, and they threw away some of the ones I did write, I'd stick with Xomba. I applied for a feature writer position on Xomba and was accepted.

I still left the few articles I had left up on eHow, in hopes of getting the $10 payout. October's earning of $1.08 dashed that hope. But I did make $2.08 on Xomba.

For November, instead of doing NaNoWriMo, I decided that every day I would post something online - an article, a blog post, or two Xomblurbs each day. So every day so far this month I've posted at least one Xombyte or two Xomblurbs. And what have I made this month? $0.00. Pretty depressing.

EHow has earned me $0.15 this month. But when I went to check my earnings for this article, guess what I found? They had deleted yet another one of my articles - the one I'd written about Xomba. No explanation, nothing. And for some reason I can't access my inbox or my friends list.

So I'm sticking with Xomba. The big zero on my adsense earnings is a downer, but most of my posts lately have been put up in the middle of the night, since I can't do it on breaks at work any more. The timing may be messing things up, or they may need more time to show up in search engines. I'm going to twitter about them once I'm back online during the day.

*****

The article above was written in November 2009. Since then, a lot has changed for both eHow and Xomba.

Since eHow deleted several of my articles as their rules changed, I was unable to becoming a Demand Studios writer automatically. I decided not to apply, and simply left my 5 remaining articles up on the site. They earned me $3.75 (the highest month I've ever had on the site) in January 2011, $2.50 in December 2010, $0.64 in November 2010, and $1.51 in October 2010. I'm fine with ignoring the site for now and will hopefully reach the $10 payout each year.

Xomba has done a bit better for me. I hadn't done anything with Xomba for several months (focusing on other writing projects), but when my earnings increased significantly in late fall 2010 I tried to figure out why. It took me a while to figure out it was from my referrals, because, while I had URL channels for most of my articles and bookmarks, I didn't have one for Xomba.com. I hadn't even tried very hard to get referrals - just a blog post or two about Xomba with my link and including it in my comment signature.

But once I figured out where the earnings were coming from, I figured that perhaps Xomba was worth more effort. So I went back. And my earnings plummeted. Such a nice welcome back, eh? I found out later that right around that time, Xomba discontinued the referral adsense placement. So while I earned $50 from Adsense in December 2010 (primarily from Xomba), I'm back to getting 2-3 clicks worth $0.25 each a week. Which makes the $3.75 I earned in January from eHow look pretty nice.

I'm waiting to see how the dust settles with all of Xomba's new changes (longer word count requirements, different referral rewards, only original content, no affiliate links) before I invest more time with the site. And I'm trying new sites, like EarnWrite. In a few months, I hope to write a comparison of Xomba and EarnWrite. Here's hoping my earnings will be impressive!