Helium Again

I’m feeling a little tired this evening and I need to retire early. But first I must keep a promise and give some tips about Helium. Don’t forget though, that these tips are just what I’ve picked up in my few weeks of contributing there. If any more experienced Helium writers disagree, please leave a comment and give us the benefit of your greater wisdom.

1 Writing to a title. If you have already written articles or short stories and still own the copyright, you can submit them and earn a few extra cents or perhaps a little more. To get your stars, you need to make them fit a title that already exists with at least three articles already posted. Then you have a chance of being rated in the top 25%, which is needed to get a star and get paid an up-front amount. Alternatively, pick a title and check out some of the articles on it. If you think you could do an equally good job, or better, write a new article to submit. You can also submit a new title, but if there is no competition, it won’t qualify towards your star. It’s a good idea to do a bit of promotion of your articles to get people to click on them.

2 Entering the writing contests. Titles for these are issued every week, giving a deadline two weeks away. Points are awarded according to the ratings on each article you write; they can also be deducted for a poor rating. You need to write on several titles in the contest to have a chance of winning one of the three prizes; I reckon it probably needs about six. At the minimum word count of 400 per piece, that is 2,400 words. And if you win first prize having written six pieces you’ll receive $10 dollars per article. You can check your progress on the site page for the contest and see if you are in the running for a prize.

3 Writing for the Marketplace. Pay offered is not too bad here, but competition can be fierce. You have to write to a publisher’s spec and it’s very important to follow all instructions carefully. Just recently Helium has introduced a kill fee for all articles that are not selected and paid for by the publisher. The unsuccessful articles then revert to the site for public consumption.

4 Remember to rate. Helium sets great store by its policy of peer ratings. Everyone is expected to do this, and to get the most return, you need to get rating stars as well as writing ones.

There’s more to Helium than all the above, but that’s where I am right now. And it’s probably enough for anyone considering Helium to start out with.

As with any of the showcasing sites, don’t expect to earn lots of bucks from the word go. For serious freelancers, it can only be a sideline. For those with another income, it can be good fun.

By the way, I got my star back with my next article, Returning to College During Middle Age. It's currently rated number 12 out of 67.

Note to fellow entrecarders – I’m going to be away for a few days so my dropping will tail off. Back again next Wednesday.

Helium

Pic is from Free Digital Photos

I’m feeling a little frustrated with Helium. They’ve recently introduced some great incentives:

- additional daily revenue share
- up-front payments for articles submitted each month, and
- kill fees for articles not selected by publishers in their marketplace, and therefore automatically transferred to the site.

All you have to do to qualify, they say in their announcement about this, is maintain at least a one star rating, which is supposed to be easy. Elsewhere they say you have to have it on the last day of the month when they’ll work out who gets what. Five star holders will also get a $3 dollar monthly bonus.

To get your stars, your ratings have to average in the top quarter of the ratings. If you introduce a new title and noone follows suit, there will be nothing to rate it against, so it won’t count. The number of stars relates to the total number of articles you have submitted. I’m still a newbie, and I got my one star right away, then I lost it, then I got it back, now it’s disappeared again because my rating score is 74%.

Some of the ratings do seem a bit unfair. My article about home energy audits went up to number 2 of 6 and then back down to 6. In the meantime I received a message from another member who was kind enough to take the trouble to tell me that she found that particular piece very well written and helpful.

A writer pal told me that he doesn’t like Helium because people will vote for their friends so it’s not fair. That can only be true part of the time because articles for rating are all anonymous and are issued randomly. I guess you just might recognise something you’ve seen before, but the chance of this seems quite remote.

The same person said he thought it was slanted to the US. That could be something that contributed to my down-rating because I wrote about the home energy audit in relation to the UK law on the new Energy Performance Certificate.

Ah well, I’ll just have to try to submit some more articles and hope they get rated high before the end o November. If lots of writers do that each month, the Helium stock is going to grow and grow. More pages to attract the advertisers I suppose.