Helium

As promised in this post, here is a detail post about the new service called Helium. Basically Helium is a website were writers go and post articles on a wide range of things. There is three aspects of Helium and how it can earn you money. Here's a quick break down:

1. Write and Rate: This aspect of Helium is quite easy. First after signing up, you can go in to main part of Helium and find a channel you like, Arts and Humanities, Politics, Science, whatever you can think of there's a spot for it. Once you choose a channel you will find different prompts under the channel. For instance under the Society and Lifestyle channel, you have four major sub-channels: African-American Issues, Lifestyle, Racism, and Society & Lifestyle (other). In the sub-channels you will find topics to write on. Examples in African-American Issues: Barack Obama: Christian or Radical liberal?, Lifestyle: Living unconventional lifestyles, Racism: Passing on our prejudice is a disservice to our children, and S & L (other): Dating and the disabled. Once you find the topic you want to write on, you write. I suggest you write in a word processing program of some sort, that has a good spell and grammar check. Usually there is a word limit of 1200 or more, but sometimes it's less. After you wrote your article, re-read a couple of times, just like any other writing. And then go back to the site, click on the topic and it will take you to the page where you can post your article. After you go through the posting process, you will be taking to two articles on the same topic. Your asked to read both articles and rate which one is better than the other. After you post your first article you can start rating others.

How do you earn money? You can earn money from this by writing good articles and writing a lot of them. Just like you rated the other articles, someone else is rating yours. And the higher it goes the more it earns. So the more articles you have out there that are well-written, the more money your going to earn. Right now they are doing a reward-athon, the more articles you post under a certain criteria you earn stars, after you earn a star you get paid a certain amount for every article you post, if you post more articles that meet the criteria more stars, more money.

2. The Marketplace: If you are looking to earn a lot of money quickly, then this is the aspect of Helium you want to pay attention to. In the Marketplace you will find postings from editors and publishers on all sorts of topics. They post the topic and the amount they will pay for the article, for example one of the latest was from a children's magazine looking for mystery stories (even a chance for it to be turned into a series.) If they chose your story, they were going to pay $50 for one. There are pay-outs from as low as $16 to as high as $150 an article. Because of the high pay-outs, these articles are highly competitive (they also have expiring dates- so read the whole post before starting something.).

How do you earn money? Pick a title and write some of the best stuff you've every written before. You could earn up to $150 for just one article. But remember that this section is very competitive and the titles needed can be scarce sometimes.

3. Contests: This is kind of self-explanatory. A collection of writing competitions for many different topics. It's basically like the Write and Rate section, except you have less choice in the subject manner, and it deals with a point system. You collect points by writing as many highly rated articles as you can, under the channel (which has several different titles to chose from.) But if any of your articles drop below the top 50% points will be taken away from you.

How do you earn money? Like the first two, write good articles. First prize is $75, 2nd is $25, 3rd is $10, and 4th is $5.

So with a good combination of all three, you could really make a killing do what you like best writing. Is it worth the time and effort? I think it is, if you enjoy writing, then you really aren't going to be to bothered about the time and effort it takes to craft a good article. It's going to come natural to you. And like I said if you find a good combination of the three aspects, then yeah it could be worth it. Plus you are putting your name out there, publishers are looking at this site too. There are tons of success stories form people who were picked up full time (well freelance full time) from magazines.