Should you write for other sites in your quest for passive income?

A fellow blogger, Pat from Smart Passive Income, wrote about the pros and cons for writing for Ehow. I am not registered on Ehow, but I did write to him, based off my limited experience in the online world the following message:

I am sorry Pat, but I believe that if you post all those 1825 articles on your OWN blog, you would make much more per year. Ehow only shares a portion of adsense earnings, while they also have other ad revenues which they don’t share with their authors..

He asked me for a response in a message on my site, so here it is:

That's a great post on the pros and cons of using Ehow. I would say that it could be a good idea to actually have your content exclusively on your own site, as you are actually creating your own brand. Brands carry an intangible set of values with it which cannot be touched, but differentiates yourself from the rest of the pack.

I guess I would be ok to use Ehow if I could also post the same content on my own blog and other sites as well. In my main site earner, my articles are republished with a slight delay by a leading site in my niche, which lets more users find my site. I "own" the articles and could withdraw the partnership at any time. Furthermore they don't post all of my articles. But they also post everything in an article- including inbound links to my own sites, which is valuable from a site with millions of users/day. In addition to that I use other methods to get traffic to my blog.The thing that I want to clarify is whether ehow allows you to post the same article on ehow and your own site? If it does then what I am talking about below might not be relevant.

I am amazed however that people only look for traffic from Google. In my other developing sites, Google traffic is less than 20%-30% of total traffic. My referral traffic is twice to three times the size or organic traffic. The rest comes from direct traffic.( I don't advetise my sites). My point is that if you write exclusively for ehow or assoc content and you are only relying on organic traffic, you are not optimizing your traffic sources.

But if you could only post that article on ehow, and you found other methods to get referal traffic to your articles there, then you are essentially driving traffic to ehow. This partnership is beneficial for both.. Untill they decide to kick you out for whatever reason ( and if they do you won't be able to do anything about it).

Do you provide your adsense publisher Id to ehow for the revenue sharing? If yes, what happens if your adsense account is disabled? Would you still make money from ehow? If you do use your adsense id for ehow and you get a lower CTR than on your site, then your account will be smart priced, and any click on your ads that you get will be worth considerably less.

I am a big believer that with your online businesses you should be creating something for yourself. Getting the traffic, writing the great content and doing all the marketing, promoting and monetizing. Using sites like ehow sounds to me like you are not the entrepreneurial type who wrote a book and started succesful websites, but you are a person who likes to work "for the man". Actually working for the man is not bad at all- some people like the relative stability of a paycheck coming every 2 to 4 weeks. Others like the relative stability of making their own business work for them and not them working for a greedy corporation that always demands more productivity but deserves the right to get rid of you, while keeping the fruits of your labor.
I do realize however that you might be writing articles on different topics. That's great and most probably you would benefit by posting the off-topic posts on ehow. On the other hand I think that specializing on a particular niche ( like you do in this passive income blog of yours) would really make you truly successful. Anything else would bring only nominal returns if any. If you have too many different ideas to write about however, you might be losing your focus on your main blog.

Last point I am thinking about is that if you write a particular article on a certain product while you could also monetize this traffic using an affiliate program, whose sales will be influenced by your review, then you will be missing opportunities by simply posting your content on another site that doesn't give you a lot of control.

To summarize, sites like Ehow might be a good starting point for writers who have some knowledge but don't want to get in the trouble of getting their hands dirty and actually promoting, networking and monetizing their sites. However if you are truly seriously passionate about your niche, then writing for pity pay without much control is not good business sense.