Helium.com - Writing for Fun or Writing to Make Money?

Helium.com is a site where you're paid to write articles, by a combination of one-off payments and revenue share. There are other revenue sharing sites - so is Helium a good choice or can you do better elsewhere?

On the plus side, Helium.com is a place to sharpen your skills against other writers. It's not just a place for revenue-sharing: you can take part in contests, or you can compete to sell your articles to publishers in the Marketplace. The site forces you to read and assess other writers' work, and to see it ranked against your own, which can be educational (and sometimes frustrating!).

But if your goal is to create a passive income source from your writing, there are reasons to have reservations about Helium.

Passive Income on Helium

There are several ways to earn money at Helium. Like other articles writing sites, Helium pays a daily share of the site's revenue on each article. On Helium, that's based on a secret formula.

If I compare my revenue share on Helium with my revenue share on HubPages, I get the following:

Helium: 190 articles earning $20 monthly = 13 cents per article per month (average)

HubPages: 94 articles earning $120 monthly = $1.28 per article per month (average)

Note these are averages - some of my articles earn far more, others earn much less.

On these figures, HubPages wins hands down. Even more so, when you consider that articles tend to earn at a faster rate the older they get: all my Helium articles are well over 2 years old, whereas my Hubs vary in age from 2 years to only a few weeks.

It's true that Hubs take longer to write than Helium articles, because they perform best when enriched with photos and videos. However, at HubPages there's no obligation to read and rate other Hubbers' work, whereas at Helium you must spend time rating to qualify for earnings. Many Heliumites overlook rating time when evaluating the two sites - in my book, it evens out (and I find embellishing my own Hubs more fun than rating!).

Helium members are coy about revealing their earnings, but those that do mention their earnings on the forums are earning around the same - an average of 10 to 20 cents per article per month.

It's harder these days to get accurate figures, because Heliumites rarely talk about their passive income, only their total income, which includes upfront payments and Marketplace. However a prominent steward was recently spruiking her success on the forums. When I asked her to state just her passive income, it sounded impressive because she has thousands of articles. But sure enough, it worked out at less than 20 cents per article per month.

To make matters worse, Helium's passive income is no longer truly passive. It's still paid, but now it's conditional on maintaining a minimum level of activity on the site (currently one rating star).

Helium changes the rules

For the first couple of years, Helium marketed itself as a place to earn long-term passive income. Writers contributed hundreds of articles, believing such a fundamental feature of the site would never change.

It has. You don't earn a cent on Helium now unless you maintain a "rating star". It's true that doesn't take much effort - a few hours rating articles once a month. But it does mean you can't go on a long trip and expect your articles to go on earning while you're away - and it's an example of how Helium has changed the rules several times.

Helium's original standard for articles was only 100 words, and there were no conditions on earning income. Since then the following changes have occurred:

Change #1 - Minimum article length of 200 words (later increased to 300, now 400). Articles under 100 words deleted.
Change #2 - 1 rating star required to receive payout of earnings.
Change #3 - "non-performing" titles deleted, and with them all the articles within those titles.
Change #4 - One rating star required at all times to earn income. Articles earn no income on days when the writer has no star.
Change #5 - Upfront payments of 50 cents to $2.50 introduced for writers with writing stars. Criteria for earning writing stars tightened - higher standards, and creative writing does not count.
Change #6 - articles under 350 words now being deleted.

The trend is clear, and there's no reason to suppose it won't continue. Helium keeps on raising the bar - I suspect it won't be long before they require 2 rating stars to earn income. And if you don't like the changes, too bad - you can't take your articles away.

Which leads me to the point which, for me, is the major downside of Helium:

Helium is Permanent!

Once you post an article on Helium, it’s there forever. You can’t delete it, even if you cancel your membership. And if you get banned for any reason, they keep your articles.

Helium will tell you it's only taking "first rights" - you can publish your articles elsewhere as often as you like.

But that freedom is illusory. Why? Because there is a widespread perception on the internet that search engines don’t like duplicate content.

If this is news to you, read this Hub on Google and duplicate content. It is just a theory (because Google doesn't reveal all its secrets!). However, most websites rely heavily on Google for traffic, so they won't take the risk of buying articles that already appear elsewhere online. Why do you think successful Marketplace articles are deleted from the site?

Book publishers also like to publish original work. Last year, there was a poet on Helium who lost out on being included in an anthology because her poems were on Helium, and the publisher wouldn't use them unless they could be deleted from the site.

It is possible to rewrite (or "spin") articles so they're different enough not to trigger duplicate content filters. However, it does take some effort. And for thing like poetry, it would be almost impossible!

Upfront Payments

A positive rule change at Helium was the introduction of upfront payments. If you are eligible, you get a one-off payment if you write one of the first 5 articles in a new topic, on top of the usual passive income.

Eligibility is based on the quality and quantity of the articles you already have posted on the site, indicated by "writing stars". If you have one writing star, you get 50 cents upfront, rising to $2.50 upfront if you have 5 writing stars.

To get one writing star, you theoretically need to write only 4 to 29 articles - but 90% of them must be rated in the top 25% of the topic. To earn 5 writing stars, you must have over 300 articles on the site, and 85% of them must still be in the top 25%.

The rating percentile is the problem, because rating is something over which you have less control than you think. Writing a quality article doesn't automatically mean a top ranking. You can leapfrog a poorly performing article, but there's no guarantee it will move up.

To fairly assess the value of the upfront payments, you need to take into account the amount of time spent on writing, rewriting and leapfrogging to gain and maintain your writing stars.

The "Big Money" on Helium

The big earner on Helium is the Marketplace, where you compete to sell articles to publishers on a topic they specify, for a pre-set amount. If your article sells, it’s deleted from the site – which just illustrates my point about publishers not accepting duplicate content! The good news is that most Marketplace publishers completely ignore the ratings in making their choice.

You can also compete in regular contests. The big problem with contests is that the winners are decided on ratings (see the "Rating" box above), so there's no guarantee the best article will win.

But I have reservations about Marketplace and contests. The topics are hotly contested - if you're good enough to win consistently against hundreds of other writers, you're probably good enough to get better-paid work on freelance writing sites like Elance or Guru.com.. And on those sites, if you don't sell the article to one publisher, you still own the article and can try selling it to someone else.

Helium as Portfolio

Helium claims their site is a great place to build a writing portfolio - a showcase to which you can refer publishers who might be interested in hiring you.

Personally, I think it's the worst possible place to build a portfolio. Why would you refer a publisher to an article on Helium, when there's a risk the article could be rated 18 out of 25 that particular week? True, they can still see your article is good - but a bad rating can't help but have a subconscious impact.

Besides, as you writing improves, you can't delete any articles you may now be ashamed of - and revising them through the leapfrog process is not always easy.

There are plenty of other places where you won't face such restrictions - right here at HubPages, for one. If a publisher likes the Hub, you can delete it from HubPages so they can buy it. And you can dress it up with photos and layout, which (like the rating) don't have a direct bearing on the worth of your article but can't help but have a psychological impact.

Helium for Internet Marketing

Last month, I briefly started writing on Helium again, because it's now possible to include hyperlinks in articles. I thought that meant I could use Helium to promote my other websites (if you're not sure how that works, read the Hub about blogging for backlinks at Today dot com).

However I soon discovered that all links in Helium articles are "no follow" - which means they're useless!

The Bottom Line

If you enjoy competing with other writers, Helium.com can be fun. But given the site's habit of frequently changing the rules, it doesn't make sense to rely on them as a source of passive income - you simply can't be sure that a future rule change won't turn off the tap.

For an interesting comparison of Helium with other writing websites, read Hal Licino's Hub on what writing sites pay.

If you like the site, I recommend you write exclusively for the Helium Marketplace section. Any articles that don't sell will at least earn you ongoing pennies.

Make Money by Blogging

With the financial crisis in full swing (don't let the government Inc fool you), many people are turning to the internet as a way of making money. I have made my living online for three years now, and I can promise you - it is no easy feat.

A few lucky souls hit big time by chance, and I am always amazed at the occasional "rags to riches" stories. You know the ones - single Mum starts a blog about the trials and tribulations of raising three kids alone and gets picked up by a network with a big deal TV show and goes on to world wide acclaim and fortune. I will let you in on a secret - NOT GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU. Sorry - reality bites. The chances of this being you are so slim - you would be better off buying a lottery ticket if this is any part of your plan to online success.

It is competitive out here; and I mean really, really competitive; the sort of competitive you can only dream about in the "real world," because you are not limited by geographic location and are competing with the entire world. I have had sites hacked and taken out of commission for successfully targeting the right keyword. I have people following me around and buying sites with similar names to the ones I own, and then emailing me trying to sell them to me. I have people here on hubpages copying what I write and writing an article about the same thing 3 days later. I spend more time protecting my personal sites from hackers and spammers, building links and doing background work than I do writing.

When I first started out to make money by blogging, I had this idyllic image in my head. I am well educated, can turn a mean phrase and like to think I can be witty when the moon is in the right ascension. Piece of piss - I will sit down at a computer, write about the world according to Mark and be rich and famous by next month. Ha!

Sadly - the qualities our society seem to value are not the ones I speak about. I am neither controversial enough or nasty enough to be a total success. I should be paying some Russian hacker to break into my competitors sites and destroy their databases. But - I am too much of a nice guy to do that.

Don't get me wrong - despite the fact that I live in Europe and get paid in dollars - I make a reasonable living, but it is at least 10000% harder than I anticipated, requires constant adaptation and is far less lucrative than a lot of people would have you believe. Most of the people making real money online are doing so in an underhanded - if not criminal - fashion. And that includes google.

Making money at hubpages. I would heartily recommend - if you are a beginner - starting out on hubpages and using them as a way of learning what will and will not work as far as making money goes. This site os not a blog - nor will it ever be, but there are distinct advantages to using their technical knowledge that is worth giving up 50% of the income. And yes - I know hubpages only takes 40% of the impressions - but the site is set up ion such a way as most people visiting will only visit one page of yours.

If you wish to make money by blogging, there are a number of skills you will need to learn that are completely unrelated to writing. You will need to learn how to do keyword research and create incoming links to your sites, you will need to suck it up, admit there are things you do not know and find some one you can trust to ask about where you are going wrong, but most importantly - you are going to have to learn that - even if you do everything right - it is still possible to fail. The best advice I can give is to diversify - whatever that means to you. Find as many different clients as possible if you are a freelance writer; find as many different affiliate programs as possible if you are an affiliate marketer; find as many different, unrelated niches as possible if you are making money with google adsense. Diversify, diversify, diversify.

Good luck.

How Facebook can promote and increase blog visitors and traffic

By Eddy Su

How to increase site visitors by Facebook

1. Create Facebook Profile:
If you don’t have a Facebook profile, register/signup for Facebook at facebook.com . Fill out your profile and make it look that you consider Facebook as social network and not any ad network. It is over here that many bloggers fail. Dont include your site link in your description section. I have observed that many bloggers include links in their about me description which sends out a bad impression for your profile visitors. So be careful while filling out your profile.

You will ask me then how will profile visitors know about your site. Friends, you can add your site links in your contact information. Thus, you can attract visitors to your site.

2. Add site feed to Facebook:
I wasn’t receiving much traffic unless i added my site feed to Facebook profile. If you aren’t knowing how to add your site feed, just click on Profile tab in upper navigation bar. Now, you will see “Write note” just around “Add Video”. Now click on downward arrow near “Write note”. Now click on import. Now, you can add your site feed to Facebook. You can even add other account profiles. I recommend adding your digg and stumbleupon links over here. This helped me a lot.

Adding feed to Facebook helps others know about your articles which really helps in driving traffic.

3. Create a Facebook Group:
After you think you are well established with Facebook, now its time to create a group to represent your site readership on Facebook. You can name the group as the site name. But, remember to make it Global i.e. anyone on Facebook can join this group. Why? Because, this “anyone” new member(not your site reader,not knowing your site) will be new most awaited visitor for you from Facebook group. This group member becomes you site loyal reader only because your group is Global. Got it !

4. Add Facebook link to site:
Now, since you are now equipped with Facebook account, add this Facebook account link to your site, just as i have added it in left sidebar, so that your site visitors can add you as friend. Remember, adding as friend, helps a lot in building loyal readership. Alongwith adding you as friend, they can even join your site group helping you further achieve your goal.

These are the 4 ways which helped me in increasing my site traffic. There may be some other ways. I accept, i am somewhat new to this. I may be unaware of any popular method used to attract traffic from Facebook. I am working hard to find out if any other way to get you the best targetted traffic from Facebook. I will be writing more on Facebook in my future articles. If any of you are having an idea to attract visitors from Facebook, not mentioned above, please share it in comments section.

Enjoy Blogging…..

Google Adsense Top Paying Keywords and How To Properly Research Them

It's easy enough to look up a Google Adsense top paying keyword. But, do you have the research on that keyword that will really help you manage a pay per click campaign or set up a keyword rich niche website?

Let's take a high Adsense paying keyword, the word "loan."

The word "loan" has a CPC or cost per click of $14.52. Looks pretty good you say?

It also has 18,540 clicks per month or people who click on Adsense ads under the keyword: loan.

There are 152 Adword sponsors for the word loan. On average they pay $3.00 per click on the word. The advertiser at the top of the results list will pay the full $14.52, however, the next highest paying Adwords user could be paying $5.00 per click. The third site in the ad listings could be paying $0.75 a click. So, there's never a guarantee that you will get highest payout available for an Adsense click.

Conversely, for an Adwords campaign, if you want to be in the first page of Google for a sponsored result, you'll have to pay a premium, since you're competing against 152 other sponsors for a top slot in the ad results.

If you are building a website, you need to know that there are 1,010,000 websites that are SEO optimized for the word loan. By this, I mean that out of the 208,000,000 sites that Google returns in its search results for the word loan, 1,010,000 of them have the word "loan" in their title, anchor text and keyword meta tags.

Meta tags and how to use them warrant an article on it's own. In brief, meta tags are the part of web page code that contain the title of your page, a description of your page and the keywords of your page. Due to the abuse that meta tag spammers have used to rate high in search results, the search engines discount these, however some search engines do use them to pull descriptions of your websites. And different search engines use different methods to come up with their search results. There should be a correlation between your meta tags and the content of your page.

300,000 competitors will not necessarily keep you from getting a top-ranking site on Google. Trying to compete against over 1 million serious and optimized competitors on a keyword is, to say the least, a little daunting.

The next piece of research is done using a Firefox toolbar with an SEO plugin. (I resisted switching toolbars for the longest time, and I now use box Firefox for all research.)

Go to Google and search the term loan.

The first three results on the page are: eLoan, Wikipedia and GovLoans.gov. The last place on the results page is held by finaid.org/loans/.

Although over million search results are listed, for me it comes down to these 4 results. Why?

Most people never leave the first page of search results when they are searching and most people don't look beyond the first three results, depending on what the search term is and what the results are. Chances are if you are looking for a loan, you would click on eLoans, that you wouldn't click on Wikipedia, and that you might click on GovLoans.gov. I always look at the last result on the page to see if there is a chance to beat the odds and knock the result to the next page.

And just a note to the web savvy - you're exactly that, web savvy. Your search patterns are not those of the average user. Some people still can't figure out how to get Google set up as their search engine of choice. Stop talking to other web wise people and start asking questions of people you meet who are NOT in the web business. In other words - your end users.

Let's look at these 4 in order through Firefox's SEO plugin.

If you are going to be doing keyword research, you should know the following information:

Page Rank - Google's Page Rank of a webpage or site. The Higher the better

Age - The age the site started. (You can buy an expired web site and this would show up as one with a greater age.)

Y! Links - Yahoo links.

Y! Edu Links - Yahoo links for sites registered as .edu or educational sites. .Edu sites are considered authority sites.

Y! Gov Links - Yahoo links for sites registered as .gov or government sites.

.Gov sites are considered authority sites.

DMOZ - OPD/Open Directory Project. Human edited directory used by Google and Alexa. Is considered an authority site. Please read as much as you can before submitting your site to DMOZ.

Sites with greater age and authority sites pass more "juice" to the ranking engines. SEO authories disagree what's important and what's not important. I deliberately did not list del.icio.is information to these stats. Social networking deserves its own article and cannot be done justice here.

eLoan:

Page Rank - 5 Age - 1998

Y! Links - 20,700

Y! Edu Links - 167

Y! Gov Links - 3

DMOZ - 8

WikiPedia:

Page Rank - 7

Age - 2001

Y! Links - 34,000,000

Y! Edu Links - 326,000

Y! Gov Links - 16,400

DMOZ - 20,400

GovLoan.gov:

Page Rank - 6 Age - 2004

Y! Links - 17,200

Y! Edu Links - 97

Y! Gov Links - 188 DMOZ - 1

finaid.org/loans/:

Page Rank - 7 Age - 1996

Y! Links - 158,000

Y! Edu Links - 31,800

Y! Gov Links - 655

DMOZ - 19

Looking at these four sites, you can see that you would not want to compete on the word “loan.”

Simply getting the links and authority links (.gov and .edu) would take several years. Google actually looks at sites that acquire a high number of links in a short period of time. A few thousand over the course of a year is natural. Tens of thousands is not.

Is there a way around this? Yes there is. There are what are know as "long tailed keywords" or "keyword phrases."

Trying to rank well for the word "loan" might take more time and effort than it's worth. But, people also search in phrases or in questions. So you might have less competition with phrases like "advance cash online loan" or "low home equity loan rates."

However, the whole "loan" keyword and most of its categories are pretty well played out and you'll have enough direct competitors, who have been around long enough and have enough links and authority links, that it will take you years to level the playing field. Many of us simply do not have the right kinds of tools or leverage to pull off ranking well for a keyword like "loan."

So, what can you do? First of all, don't be greedy. Find a good keyword that will return $1.00 to $7.00. If you anticipate huge amounts of traffic and click through, a good keyword can be under $5.00

The advice to start a website based on something you're an expert in, something you're passionate about, or a hobby, is advice that's well worth considering. If you build a website based on your interests, chances are you won't run out of steam while you're building it, and you already have most of the content in your head.

Do not build a MFA or made for Adsense site. You know the sites, all they seem to do is to have advertising and Google search results posted on them. Now, web developers you are in competition with, will report you to Adsense. Your Adsense account will be closed, and your website banned. You’ll never see any of the money you made.

The keyword for your site may not be worth $14.52 a click, but a steady stream of visitors at a dollar or three a click is nothing to sneeze at.

If you can build a website that produces results for you based on keywords you research on something you're passionate about, you can turn around and do it again.

So, it pays to do the research on Google Adsense top paying keywords, but do all the research. The time you spend will be well invested.

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Do You Know How To Choose The Right Blogging Platform

Do You Know How To Choose The Right Blogging Platform?

By Tom Lindstrom

As with everything on the internet, there are a number of options available to you when choosing a blogging platform.

A blogging platform can save you time, energy, and money if chosen correctly. You want to choose a platform that is going to further your business, not set it back. But do you know how to choose the right blogging platform?

There are some things you can do to help yourself out when trying to decipher the poor platforms from the legitimate. The first thing you will want to look into is whether the platform you are looking at offers a free trial. Many platforms do offer a free trial of some sort so you can give it a whirl and see what it is like. Not all platforms include every feature that comes with it, but you can get a basic idea of how it runs.

The next thing you want to look at is the search engine optimization modules and plugins. While blogging is a lot more basic and conversational, you can still use SEO techniques to better your business while still staying conversational. Some basic SEO features you should look to see if the blogging platform includes is Meta for each post, smart pinging to prevent you from spamming, and anything else you prefer.

You have to know that you are not the only person that has ever thought about or actually used the platform you are looking at. When choosing the right blogging platform, why not ask others around you online how it is? You can post in forums or blogs to find out what kinds of experiences other people had with the platform. While you are not guaranteed to get a truthful response, getting the reaction from several people can give you a general idea of how it went.

Lastly, you cannot consider something in life without money not being involved. There are several things you may have to potentially pay for depending on the platform you choose. You may have to pay for the blogging platform, hosting for your blog, and the domain name.

However, because there are so many choices to choose from there is a large price difference. There is everything from free to extremely expensive.

There is a lot that goes into choosing the right blogging platform, but it is well worth it once you have found the right platform for you. You want you and your business to better from the platform, not be set back. By following the tips in this article, you will be able to find the best one out there for you.

Also, choosing the right blogging platform takes a lot of consideration of what you are going to do with it. Personally, I think you cannot go wrong by choosing Wordpress. It is not the easiest blog platform to work with, but it has inbuilt features for SEO that cannot be found on other platforms. With a Wordpress blog you can truly become an authority online in any niche you choose!

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