Make More Money Writing on Helium.com

Helium.com may or may not be the forum for serious writers that it claims to be, but it is still a place you can make some money writing online without too much work. If you follow a few basic rules of thumb you can avoid wasting a lot of time and creative energy writing articles that will never make more than a few cents on Helium.com. Moreover, even short and simple articles without much content can earn you quite a bit of cash. The following tips are presented in order of importance: if you have less time to contribute you may want to only use first one or two suggestions, but with more time you could implement all of these:

1) Stick to the front page: front page articles each day get read by more people - simply because they are featured prominently on Helium.com. Try writing a short article for each front page story, whether or not you are knowledgeable on the subject. Alternatively, save time and make more money (per time spent) by writing on subjects that few people have written about. My own highest-earning article at Helium.com was a website review that sat constantly in 4th place out of 4 articles. Due to the formatting of the site, articles ranked 5th or better receive considerably more hits than other articles. While I was writing for Helium.com, most of my high-earning articles were front-page articles - and few of them concerning subjects I knew a great deal about.

2) Pick popular subjects: you may be a saxophone enthusiast, but writing about hot issues will simply get you more hits (views) and thus make you more money. Technology, business and other subjects that are commonly searched for are your best bet. Obscure subjects simply aren't worth the time you spend writing on them and Helium.com is not the place for creative-writing exposure. In addition to picking popular subjects in general, be sure to write articles to the front pages of sub-sections of the site - such as Computers & Technology, Jobs & Careers and Entertainment (for the same reasons you should be writing on the main front page of Helium.com).

3) Write short and catchy articles: the first line of your article is by far the most important. Many raters on Helium.com rate an article entirely based on one sentence, so writing a 'hook' can be critical to your article's success and, consequently, how much it earns. Moreover, keep sentences short as well as paragraphs. Short declarative sentences and 3 to 4 sentence paragraphs are much more readable, given the format and readership of Helium.com. Do not spend a great deal of time writing about everything you know on a giving subject - just summarize and keep your articles simple and interesting. I have seen articles amazingly devoid of content rise in rank simply because they are catchy and easy to read, while experts on a given subject may drone on while readers lose interest.

4) Don't waste your time rating: unless Helium.com's rating system improves, rating isn't going to help your articles succeed. In theory, the more you rate the more your articles will be rated. In turn, your articles should rise in rank if they are well-written and content-rich articles. In practice, however, people don't spend much time rating - after all, rating is supposed to boost your own score, so rating more (and fast) is in a Helium.com user's best interest. Yes, you will have to rate some articles, but many people find this to be an incredibly painful process because so much of the writing on Helium.com is badly formatted, contains poor grammar and has terrible spelling (despite a built-in spell-check tool).

Much of the advice presented here is counter-intuitive or even contrary to the recommendations made by Helium.com. However, it is important to remember that Helium.com is interested in making money. Helium.com claims to be interested in encouraging writers to learn, grow and express themselves, though those claims are up for debate. The bottom line is: they earn money via advertisements, which in turn are fueled by searches on popular topics. Thus, writing about what they want to have you write about is critical, which means writing about what they feature on front page(s) of Helium.com each day. It is also important to write in a way that appeals to casual and quick-clicking raters, rather than investing your time in a serious article that most raters will never read to the end. For more information about Helium.com, including personal experiences, critiques, criticisms and advice, visit allsux.com