Choosing an Article Submission Website

Helium and Associated Content are both websites where you can write articles and get paid. When I signed up for both of these, I thought I could write articles and submit them to both websites, as they accept non-exclusive content.

As they both pay you depending on your articles' page views, if you write one article and submit it to two websites, you have to work twice as hard at promoting them; I use my blog, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, Reddit and Furl; there are lots more social bookmarking websites out there, and the Web is your oyster!

If you enjoy writing articles, submitting to Helium or Associated Content is the compulsory boring bit but if you want to earn a bit of money, you have to work really hard at promoting your articles to social bookmarking websites and having to do this twice for each article you write is just too exhausting.

If you decide to stay with both Helium and Associated Content, I would advise you to select maybe 5 social bookmarking websites for your Helium articles and 5 other websites for your Associated Content articles, so that you are not regarded as a spammer.

Associated Content may seem a bit strict at the beginning, because when you first submit an article, you must wait for approval before your next submission; your articles must have a minimum of 400 words, not contain any links in the body, and be free of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Helium accepts 200 word articles (but prefer 400 words) as long as they fit under their available titles; if no title is available for what you wrote, you must submit a new title and wait for your title's approval.

Once you have been approved with Associated Content, meaning your first 3 articles have been accepted and published, you have more freedom, even though I think it is better to stick to the rules. On Associated Content, you can submit the traditional written articles or reviews, but you can also submit Audio and Video, even Slideshows. They do have calls for content but those are very difficult to grab. Helium has a marketplace, where publishers can request titles and pay as much as $200 per article, athough $20 is the average payout: I have never availed of these offers as I was not interested in the subjects but if you take your writing seriously, it could be worth the effort of doing a bit of research.

The community on Associated Content is very helpful: you can leave comments on other members' articles; this almost guarantees you a visit from the writer to your own articles. Helium's system is completely different: when you are logged in the website, you are shown series of 2 articles and asked to rate them, you must choose which article fits the title best. Articles that are highly rated get to the top of Helium's search results and thus get more page views. You can also participate in discussions and contests and I found that the different articles I was shown on the site gave me some ideas for new articles.

I find Associated Content's website more user-friendly and I love leaving comments on other members' articles; also, I like the fact that I don't have to rewrite my articles to make them fit under certain titles, but Helium's marketplace is clearly more lucrative than Associated Content's, and Helium pays you after you have earned $25, whereas Associated Content has you slaving over your articles until you have made $100.

So here is my choice: Associated Content for creativity, Helium for the money I can make on the marketplace, it seems pretty obvious to me now.