How to Win the Weekly Helium.com Write to Win Contest

The first thing you need to know about the Write to Win Contest is that it works in precisely the opposite way that Helium.com describes it. This sounds strange, but will be explained in detail in this article. For starters, success in the contest is based on a combination of two factors: how many articles you write and how well they are rated. The contest guidelines and Helium.com site administrators recommend that you start writing early, write well and rate other articles frequently (rating other articles causes your own articles to be rated more). In theory, if you write good articles early, your articles will have more time to rise to a higher rank. Further, if you are rating other articles you will get rated more and continue to rank higher.

However, a single person has won the top prize ($300 cash) for three weeks in a row on Helium.com by doing the exact opposite of this recommended strategy. This individual has waited until three hours before the week-long contest is over in order to submit virtually all of his articles.

So, why does this work and how does he get away with it? This is what you need to know in order to win the contest yourself - or take second or third prize (which are worth $200 and $100 respectively) or one of a number of lesser prizes (worth between $5 and $20), depending upon how much time you want to invest - and how much of a risk you want to take (going for the top prize might be a waste of time unless you are extremely devious).

First of all, you have to understand how the Helium.com initial submission system works. All articles submitted in a category (e.g. articles about 'how to plant grass seed' submitted to the 'lawn care' category) are immediately placed into the middle of the ranks rather than a bottom. So, for example, if there are 10 articles on 'how to plant grass seed' in 'lawn care' and you submit an article, it will placed in 5th or 6th place among the other articles on 'how to plant grass seed' - not last, as you might expect.

Second, the behavior of articles in the ranks is erratic over the short term - an article might jump up and down in rank before settling into a final position. This is because articles are 'peer reviewed' by anyone and everyone who writes for Helium.com, no matter their knowledge or abilities. Many people either don't know the subject matter or don't spend much time rating. In fact, because people receive rewards for rating, I suspect that many people don't even read before they rate - which would explain the inconsistencies of what goes up and what goes down on the site.

Third, Helium.com judges winners based on a combination of quantity and quality. This means that you could win the contest without having a single article ranked first in any category - if you submit enough articles. As such, writing extremely good articles is not usually worth your time if you are going for the win - focus on cranking out a great many passable articles instead (ones that won't rank first, but won't drop to last place either).

Fourth, anyone who waits until the last minute can check and see what other articles are doing well, determine why they are doing well, and essentially borrow from their success to improve one's own submission. As long as you change the wording and order of the article around, and add a personal touch or two, they will let this kind of pseudo-plagiarism slide. This, above all else, is the key to success the winner of the last three contest rounds has found and used to his utmost advantage.

When you add this all up: all you have to do is submit enough articles at the last minute that are reasonably decent and you should easily outpace authors who have spent much more time land energy writing more original and intelligent articles throughout the week.

Now, you may be asking yourself at this point: "but how does he know all of this?" Well, I know this because I was in first place out of more than 90 participants until the last few hours of a previous week's Write to Win contest. I learned the hard way that being responsible, avoiding plagiarism and working hard to write well was not enough for me to win in the end - despite having so many highly-rated articles. I have since been banned from their site. Though they claim it was violations of their user policies, I believe it was because I pointed out flaws in their system. Thus, I feel no regret advising you to play dirty on Helium.com. With that in mind, here are some other tactics I saw winning writers use to get ahead (they are morally objectionable, but not against the rules):

1) Complete entire categories in one sitting. For example, there was a 'salads' category one week. All of the top-ranked contest participants (except for me) submitted a recipe for virtually every salad listed (approximately 20). They also made each article sound as if they were intimately familiar with making that salad, though I strongly suspect they were simply copying their answers out of a cookbook and maybe modifying them slightly. By using this strategy, you cut own on the amount of time you have to spend producing articles - and quantity counts more than quality in the end because the rating system is flawed.

2) Undermine other people who are close to you in the running. The only way to do this is to go and look at their profiles, see what they are writing on and write a more clear or concise article than they have on the same subject. I had this done to me by multiple participants and with a surprising amount of success, even in areas where I clearly knew considerably more about the subject matter than my opponents did (e.g. in subjects I have studied or been professionally involved in). Simplicity and a good, attention-grabbing first line can win a lot of people over who don't bother to read entire articles before rating them. Using this tactic, people not only gain standing themselves but they cost a close competitor to lose standing in the process - it's like writing two articles at once if you are in a neck-and-neck race with one or two other people for a top position.

3) Carefully build on what you learn from other articles. Yes, this sounds dangerously close to plagiarism. However, on Helium.com: they are incredibly lax in determining about what constitutes plagiarism and acting to remove plagiarized content. Unless copied material comes in the forms of long and direct quotes, they normally don't care (you can look around on the site and see this for yourself). In one case, I had someone borrow from my article and misspell a word - clearly demonstrating they didn't even understand the meaning of what they had copied. I reported them and was told it was not plagiarism.

What you have to understand about Helium.com is: they seem to care a lot about quantity and much less about quality. I suspect this is because they would rather have more information on their site than better information. More information boosts SEO (Search Engine Rankings) which in turn brings more readers which in turn generates more revenue via advertisements on the site. In fact, I was told I could not even flag an article for inaccurate content, because Helium.com's rating system is supposed to cause such articles to drop in the rank - but leave them in the system. I once asked about an article ranked #1 out of 223 that contained false content. They dodged the question.

So as far as I can tell, Helium.com is concerned first and foremost with making money (if not exclusively). If you threaten that bottom line by speaking out about plagiarism, which they are then forced to remove at the cost of their time and lost ad revenue, you may find yourself banned from the site (as I was). However, so long as you are producing content for them and you don't complain, they seem to let a great deal of questionable activity and writing slide.

Please note: the above article contains a combination of facts, opinions and suppositions - please refer to the Terms of Service of Helium.com before pursuing any ideas you might have based on reading this. However, if you watch the contest winners and look at their profiles you will see how much they get away with!