How to earn money at Helium

We pay our writing members because it’s the right thing to do. Think of Helium as a co-op — we’re all stakeholders. We provide the publishing platform and the marketing investment to attract writers, readers and advertisers, while the community — that’s you — writes, rates and moderates the site. For all your efforts, you share in a percentage of Helium’s revenue.

Helium pays members based on the value of each article, which is based on a combination of three market factors:

  1. Article quality: The best-written and highest-ranked articles earn the most money. Why? Because quality matters. Those ranked at the top will be read more often and are considered more valuable to Helium members, readers and advertisers.
  2. Traffic: How many readers are interested in the article’s topic? Some subjects draw more total viewers than others. Topics and articles with more page views earn more money.
  3. Advertiser interest: Some topics have higher-paying advertisers or more buzz than others. Each topic attracts a unique set of advertisers with varying budgets. For example, subjects in the area of personal finance will generally draw a higher ad rate than subjects like chess.

There is opportunity to earn more than pocket change on Helium; on the other hand . . . don’t quit your day job.

Note: The Helium revenue share is figured daily for your account. If you have a rating star, you will receive revenue share payment for that day. If you do not participate by maintaining a rating star on Helium for a full 12 months, you will lose any accrued earnings in your account. For a more detailed explanation of our payment structure, read section #5 of our Helium User Agreement.

Upfront Payments

Starting with the July writing cycle (which starts June 25), we will pay Upfront Payments only for the first five (5) articles written to a title in an eligible channel. We also pay on the number of writing stars you have on calculation day (the last day of the month).

Based on your stars, you can earn:

  • 1 Writing Star – $0.50 per article published
  • 2 Writing Star – $1.00 per article published
  • 3 Writing Star – $1.50 per article published
  • 4 Writing Star – $2.00 per article published
  • 5 Writing Star – $2.50 per article published

According to our analysis of titles and top-earning articles over the past year, highly rated articles tend to win in the ad-revenue-share game. If you are article Number 15 in a title of 30 articles, chances are you’re not earning.
 
In order for you to earn more and get better visibility for your writing on the web, we want to encourage all members to write to empty and “lonely” titles. Use the Title Finder to uncover the empty titles or titles with only a few articles.
 
We’re not telling you NOT to write to titles with more than five articles. But we are strongly suggesting that you will do better to write where you can earn more in the long run.

Ineligible channels: Some channels are more lucrative to Helium in terms of advertising revenue, and it makes sense that these channels are where we encourage most of our writing energy. Opinion pieces, poetry, news stories just don’t generate the revenue we need to share with our writers.

So the following root channels (and all their sub-channels listed in the channel navigation bar on the left of each page) are excluded from Upfront Payments:

(1) Creative Writing benefits: We can’t leave our poets, short-story writers and novelists out in the cold! Deserving members, based on writing percentages for their work in the Creative Writing channel, receive new Creative Writing excellence badges in Bronze, Silver and Gold. Please visit our Stars and Badges page for more information.

Upfront Payment calculations: A member must have at least 1 writing star to generate an Upfront Payment. The member’s eligible submissions for Upfronts must be within the first five articles submitted to titles in eligible channels. All eligible articles submitted from the start-of-day on the 25th of the month to 23:59 GMT on the 24th of the following month will be calculated. You need to have your writing stars bright and shiny on the last day of the month, the day we calculate and credit Upfront Payments. Articles submitted on the 25th of the month and after, will be included in the next month’s calculation. Remember, all deadlines are figured on GMT. (Figure your local time from GMT here.)

NOTE: Stars are cached (fixed) for a 24 hour period wherever they are displayed for your account on Helium. What you can’t see, is that your score is dynamic and changing throughout the day in the database. When we update the database, we take a snapshot at a specific point in the day and use your scores at that moment for the next 24 hours to display your stars. When it comes time to calculate your upfront payments, we must do the same thing but we don’t do it at the same point in time that the database is updating. This means that your earnings per article for the upfront payments will be based on a specific point in time that is not necessarily ever represented by your stars or by the scores on your My Helium page.
NOTE: We calculate and post Upfront Payment credits within 24 to 48 hours of the point in time near the end of the last day of the month to your “Adjustments” section on your “Earnings and Payments” page. These are typically credited to your account by the end of the first business day of the new month.
NOTE: For more information on payment request deadlines and when payments are given, please refer to your Earnings and Payments page or the Payment Policy page of Help.

FAQs for Changes in Upfront Payments

Effective July 2009, Helium has made changes to its Upfront Payments policy. Below are some FAQs to provide clarification on the policy.

Q: Are Upfronts paid to the first five articles that are published to a title or to those articles that are ranked numbers one through five?
A: Starting with the July writing period (June 25), Helium will pay Upfront Payments to starred writers for the 1st five articles published to a title. There is no Rating Star requirement anymore for these Upfronts (a Rating Star is still required for daily ad revenue share).

Q: What determines which articles are submitted as the first five? What happens when two writers submit to the fifth place position at the same time?
A:  Currently a time stamp is used to determine when articles are submitted. As it is unlikely that two articles will be submitted at the exact same time, the time stamp to the database will be the final arbiter of which articles fall in the top five. As with the previous Upfront Payments system, eligibility for payment is determined at the end of each month.

Q: Will the new system negatively affect my writing stars? After all, when writing to titles with fewer articles, it is much tougher to be in the 25th percentile.
A: Statistically, your chances of being in the top quartile are better when the number of articles is less. We calculate your writing score using a “rank percentile” calculation that anchors to the top rather than the middle or the bottom. The formula for calculating rank percentile is 100 minus (# of articles above mine divided by  total # of articles x 100). So in a title with four articles you have a two-in-four chance of being in the top quartile (see examples below). Moreover, your chances of being the top article are obviously greater in a title with fewer articles. 

Title with three articles
Rank     writing score (1/3 or 33% chance)
1          100%
2          66%
3          33%

Title with four articles
Rank     writing score  (2/4 or 50% chance)
1          100%
2          75%
3          50%
4          25%

Title with five articles
Rank     writing score  (2/5 or 40% chance)
1          100%
2          80%
3          60%
4          40%
5          20%

Title with 100 articles
Rank     writing score  (26/100 or 26% chance)
1          100%
2          99%
.
.
26         75%
.
.
100       1%

Q: Do shallower titles hurt our writing stars?
A: In regard to the rating of shallower titles, we do not have any evidence to suggest that deeper titles rank better than shallower titles. Since deeper titles are usually older, they may have gotten more rating effort over a longer period of time. Titles with three or fewer articles are more likely to be newer and potentially have not yet reached a ranking consensus. Age is probably the dominant influence though, not the number of articles.

The average title size on Helium is seven articles. As you might expect, we do quite a bit of testing and evaluation in the three-to-ten article range and spend less time at the extremes, where there are several hundred articles. 

Q: If you’re paying only for the first five articles that are published to each title, won’t the site be overloaded with poorly written articles? Will quality suffer as people rush to submit content?
A: The only writers who are qualified for Upfront Payments are starred writers. This move encourages the starred writers to be the first in to the titles, as they’ll be the ones with the most to gain. Long term, the top-ranked five articles are the ones where the earnings are the highest, so over time, these writers will be rewarded even more.

Don’t forget that members are rating content and flagging articles. Articles of the lowest quality will be removed from the site – and from eligibility for Upfronts.

Q: With the removal of the requirement for the rating star for Upfront Payments, does this mean the end of rating? Won’t rating come to a halt?
A: We do not expect the change in the rating star requirement for Upfront Payments to have a big impact on the number of rates performed. Actually we are hoping that with less pressure to maintain a rating star, people will rate more earnestly. For many, the rating star requirement may have altered the way they really wanted to rate, trying more to predict what rate would give the best score rather than selecting according to their own preference. 

Rating remains the soul of Helium – it’s not going away. And we will be monitoring the situation.

Q: Won't we find ourselves spending a substantial amount of time looking for titles with fewer than five articles?
A: There are about 30,000 empty titles on Helium. Here are some of the ways to find them.
•    A board posting about finding empties
•    Suggest your own and get the Empty Title Bonus too
•    Use the Title Finder
•    Look for the Writers Wanted boxes on all channel pages (scroll down to see the box)

Q: I was making more from Upfront Payments to a variety of titles, including those with more than five articles, than ad revenue. Now that amount will be less than half.
A: The ad revenue earnings are heavily weighted to the top five articles on most titles because they generally receive the most search traffic. We list the top five with each article page on a title, which does improve SEO page rank. Of course, there are some articles with better SEO search terms or writers who market their articles better, but in general the site distributes page rank by the title rank. On average the top article gets about twice as many page views as the next ranked and so on.  

You can still earn well by writing for Upfront Payments. But now, instead of your adding article number 100 to an already deep title, we’re asking you to more effectively use your writing time by submitting to empty titles or shallow ones.

Q: Why don’t you make it the top ten articles instead of the top five?
A: We are not turning a "deaf ear" to the idea of raising the limit to ten; however, there is just far less value in the sixth to tenth articles and there is a clear point at which the value drops dramatically. A limit of five has business rationale, where a limit of ten does not. A change to the limit will necessarily mean diluting the real value of the first five to subsidize the next five.

Financially, the top three articles are where we think the upfront payment clearly makes business sense. The fourth and fifth articles will have a much longer return on investment (ROI), the point in time at which Helium's portion of the revenue share will exceed that of the upfront payment paid out. Keeping in mind that the search traffic to an article drops logarithmically with rank, as you step past the first few the likelihood of ever reaching ROI becomes very small on average. This is why we say that any change to the limit will necessarily mean diluting the real value of the first five to subsidize the next five.

Empty Title Bonus

Helium also offers a bonus to the Upfront Payments: The Empty Title $1 Bonus! Earn $1 for each empty title in an eligible channel that you’re the first to write to.

We’re constantly coming up with new titles based on what readers on the web are searching for right now. Unfortunately, many of these titles remain empty on our site – and they offer great long-term earning potential!

It’s simple: For each empty title on Helium that you’re the first to write to, you’ll earn $1.

If you’re looking for empties, click the “Write” button in the top nav, go to Title Finder, type in your interest and click the “Empty only” button under “Show titles.”

Don't forget, all the rules of Upfront Payments apply.

OTHER DETAILS TO REMEMBER:

  • Due to site cacheing, another writer could be contributing to the same title as you – our database time stamp will determine the writer first in.
  • Eligible articles must conform to the Helium User Agreement and Writing Standards.
  • Worried about the effect of onesies on your writing score? As long as at least 10% of your articles are in competitive titles, having lots of onesies will neither hurt nor help your score – but now will earn you $1 each! (See the Stars and Badges page for more information.)
  • If you suggest a new title and it’s approved, your article might be eligible for the Empty Title Bonus or the other Upfront Payments.
  • Most of the empty titles on the site were written with strong SEO in mind, which may equal more traffic and revenue share for you in the long run.

And don’t forget these Upfront Payment basics: At least 1 writing star, only titles in eligible channels, eligible time period.

NOTE: Credits for the Empty Title Bonus will appear in your “Adjustments” section on your “Earnings and Payments” page. These are typically credited to your account by the end of the first business day of the new month.
NOTE: For more information on payment request deadlines and when payments are given, please refer to your Earnings and Payments page or the Payment Policy page of Help.

Marketplace Kill Fee

Starred writers who write to Marketplace but didn't get their article selected, are eligible to receive a "kill fee" for each piece that transitions to Helium. Kill fee payments are paid on the same star basis and only the top five marketplace articles that transition may receive kill fees. Only titles in eligible channels, eligible time period.

NOTE: If you submitted your Marketplace piece and it transitions to Helium in the same pay period [25th to end-of-day on the 24th], it is considered a normal Upfront Payment.

You’ll see a line for Kill fees and another for Upfront Payments in the Adjustments section of your Earnings & Payments page.

Stock Content

Wouldn’t it be great if businesses in need of content could browse your archive of articles and choose ones they want to use? You wouldn’t have to write query letters or track down opportunities. The publisher would come right to you. What’s more, payment would simply appear in your account!

Dream no more. Helium introduces “Stock Content” and it works like this: Publishers of everything from niche newsletters to newspaper advertising sections need specific content for specific needs. They’re attracted to Helium’s range of content and are looking at your work on Helium. When they find something that suits their needs, they contact us to complete a licensing arrangement. We send you a letter telling you which article was licensed and the amount credited to your earnings. Now, that’s easy!

This is a golden opportunity to expand earnings and exposure for our writers. What’s more, because the publisher is not purchasing exclusive rights, your article remains on Helium to attract other publishers.

You still own the copyright to your article. But because you share rights to it with Helium, we’re able to facilitate publishers getting the content they need – and your earning on your work. And you get your byline with the article (as long as it’s an acceptably real-sounding name).

If a publisher has licensed your content, you’ll be sent an email from Helium that tells you which title/article, the article's URL and the publisher who purchased your article. You can view and verify this information and the amount paid in your Earnings & Payments page by clicking on “Adjustments” – that page will list the price and “stock_content” with a number. That number is your article ID number. To find the article, copy the number and paste it at the end of this URL: http://www.helium.com/items/[number goes here].

So, sit back, relax and let your work work for you. Oh, we didn’t say relax, did we? How about another article, just in case there’s a publisher looking right now…

NOTE: If one of your Helium articles is purchased by a publisher, you will receive an email from the email address: stockcontent-purchase@helium.com.
CAUTION: Do not contact Helium's publishers directly. Publishers are working with Helium because they do not have the time to work individually with freelancers. Your contacting a publisher directly will not reflect well on you and will endanger the future of this publisher working with Helium to provide assignments to many of our writers.

Contests and Marketplace

You can earn through writing articles and contributing to Debates. But there are more ways. You can also enter:

  • Contests: Helium loves to hold writing contests. And they help you earn some extra cash! They can be seasonal, topical or run indefinitely. They are a fun way for Helium members to increase their writing skills by writing to selected channels and topics. If you win, earnings show up in your account immediately.

When contests are being held, the main Contests page explains how the contest works and what’s expected of you. Typically we’ll also display running contest statistics. Of course, there you’ll find a link to more in-depth rules.

If you’re looking to earn some relatively big money, bring your A-game. Check out the latest Helium contests today.

  • Marketplace: Get hired by publishers — write to Marketplace titles today.

Marketplace provides access to big-name publishers looking for freelancers. Currently, earnings range from $16 to $200 per article! Marketplace article titles are specific in their needs, which are described by each publisher. If the publisher chooses your article, you get paid as soon as possible.

There’s more! If you’re a starred writer on Helium and your Marketplace submission is not chosen, you’ll receive a “kill fee” when the piece transitions to Helium.com. Get all the details here.

Other ways to earn on Helium

  • Earn by rating! Because rating is critical to the community and the success of Helium, we want to reward our star raters. If you have 5 rating stars on the last day of the month, you will be paid a $3 Rating Bonus.
  • Earn through writing! In addition to the Helium revenue share, you can make your writing pay off big for you through our contests and our Marketplace.
  • Invite-a-writer ™: Let your smart friends do the work for you. “Invite-a-writer” is a way for you to spread the word about the great communal writing spirit at Helium, to help the site grow and to earn more money. For every person you invite who registers and writes, you earn a 5% bonus based on his or her article earnings. The more successful invites you have, the greater your Invite-a-Writer earnings.
NOTE: Helium uses invitation email addresses only to send invitations on behalf of the inviter. These email addresses are not sold or provided to any third party.
  • Link in: Let the World (Wide Web) do the work for you. Cast a wide net throughout the Internet to spread the word about your Helium articles. Place Helium links on your website, blog, MySpace and Facebook accounts — anywhere on the web. These links will draw people and revenue directly to your articles.
Tip: How you use links and where they come from affects traffic and possibly your earnings. The goal is to link in from popular websites, blogs and other places that don’t require you to log in. Linking from sites like these is more valuable than linking from sites such as MySpace and Facebook, although they still help boost your article traffic. And remember, when linking, be sure to use the entire URL, not just a portion of it.

Here is a list of the top Internet places you want to try to LINK FROM, the best being at the top:

  1. Nonprofit and academic websites ending in .edu, .org or .gov
  2. Popular sites, such as newspapers, magazines, and online journals and newsletters
  3. Corporate and private websites
  4. Personal websites (yours, your friends, your family, etc.)
  5. Blogs

Here is a list of places in Helium you want to LINK TO, the best being at the top:

  1. An article (yours or someone else’s you like)
  2. An article list, such as pages that list all the articles to a particular title
  3. A debate list, such as pages that list debate articles supporting one side or the other (not debate side-by-side pages)
  4. Your About Me page
  5. A specific subchannel of interest, such as Internet Trends or Beading & Jewelry Making

Websites that are NOT optimal to link from:

  1. Wikipedia
  2. Websites that require logins
CAUTION: Don’t spam any single website with lots of links.
CAUTION: You may not generate traffic to your articles by using automated means such as “pay to surf” websites, robots, spiders, etc. Your account will be terminated and all earnings forfeited. We closely monitor all traffic.
  • Improve your “About Me” page: Let your persona do the work for you. Keep readers on your “About Me” page. When people are on this page, they read your listed articles and bring more traffic to those pages. This helps your potential earnings. Besides, blank space sets off the boring alarm. Show off and watch your earnings rise.

Things you can do to get more traffic to your articles

Of the top 50 writers on our site in the last three months (measured by how many people found their articles through search engines), HALF of them had their pages’ PageRanks on their About Me pages of 2 or more.

So what does this mean and what can you do to improve your PageRank?

As you might know, having a high PageRank in Google has a huge effect on whether search traffic finds its way to your web pages. On a web site, each and every page has its own PageRank. To examine your own pages’ PageRanks, you can download the Google Toolbar, go to your own About Me page and check your PageRank. Browse around to some of your articles and look at their PageRank.

The best writers on Helium have obtained PageRanks for their About Me pages of 3 and 4, although even a 2 is good for an About Me page.

How can you improve your pages’ PageRank? Here is a list of techniques that will help.

Things you can do while at Helium:

  1. Write articles that rank in the top 3 of the title. Because of how the intrasite linking works for highly rated articles, you will get more PageRank by being in the top-rated articles under a title.
  2. Be in the top-ranked articles of titles that have more than 10 articles. Being #1 of 1 doesn’t get you any PageRank benefit. But there is a point of diminishing returns, so adding one more article to a title that has 100 isn’t going to help you.
  3. Win contests. The links that come to your About Me page from the contest leaderboards tend to help a lot in PageRank.
  4. Write a lot of articles. How your articles automatically link to your About Me page and vice versa has a positive effect on your pages’ PageRank. Two hundred great articles are more than twice as good as 100 great articles.
  5. Participate in the discussion boards. Again, there is a point of diminishing returns, but adding a few useful posts helps all around, although this is the least useful of the techniques mentioned here.

Things you can do at other places:

  1. Get more “high-value” links from other sites to any of your articles or your About Me page—with the emphasis on “high value.” Adding links to your articles from your own blog (where the blog has no PageRank) isn’t going to help you much. Adding links to the navigational bar of your blog helps less than you think. When it comes down to it, not all links are created equal.
  2. The best high-value links are ones you don’t create but come from respected members of the community who read your articles and link to them. So don’t be shy about telling other people about your work!

Here’s a recent interesting article that talks about social link building. Please read it for more ideas.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/080205-112755

Splitting titles on Helium

Helium has always been open to change and modifying where we see an opportunity for improvement. We identified one such opportunity recently. After doing some preliminary research on the site, we determined that we could achieve far better search results for our content and our writers with a few adjustments.

As a writer on the web, one of your primary goals should be maximizing the instances that your content appears at or near the top of search results. This is known as search engine optimization or SEO.  As we looked at the collective SEO of Helium, we knew we had to do better. Although we have close to a million articles on the site, those few at the tops of titles were most often the ones found through search. So we wondered:  If there were more titles presenting slight variations on a subject with fewer articles, would our SEO searches improve?

We took titles with more than 10 articles written to them, recorded the placement in search results before and after dividing the content, then tracked the results. Because search engines require time to index content, we had to wait a week or two for accurate results. But we were surprised by the positive effect this had on the articles SEO. An example of one of the titles we broke up was originally somewhere in the 200s of a Google search. After splitting it in two, both titles shot up to within the top 15 results. This is constantly improving but you can see for yourself.

Old title: How to get a winning business plan
New Title: Tips on generating a successful business plan
 
Do a Google search on each of these titles and use the search feature on your browser on the results page to find "Helium.com." You will see the improvements this process has made.
 
After having done this with over one hundred titles and determining that we were getting a high rate of similar success, we have decided to formally adopt a process of dividing articles in deep titles among similarly worded titles that maintain the same meaning.

The actual process for dividing the articles is as follows. Stewards and volunteers are hand-crafting titles based on the original one, here is an example:

Old title: How good leaders listen
New Titles:
Why good listening skills make a great leader
Ways good listening skills enhance leadership
Leadership strategies: Methods to help managers listen
Ways good leaders listen to others
 
We then separate the articles in a sequential order. For example, if there are 16 articles and 3 new titles, here is how they would lay out:
Title………………Articles by rank
Original…………1,5,9,13
2……………………2,6,10,14
3……………………3,7,11,15
4……………………4,8,12,16

Any links to articles will remain the same -- nothing about them will change other than the title URL.

By moving content buried within a title into the light of (Google) day, these articles are getting returned much higher in search results. There are profound benefits of this for the entire community. More search results = more ad revenue = more revenue to share. Sharing among the top five articles means more money for the fewer articles. As we have been featuring the top five articles on any title, this will further add value to search results.

Looking for more earnings and search optimization tips?

Be sure to check out our section on Increasing your traffic and earnings in the Writers’ Resources area. There are some great articles on writing titles for the ‘Net, making links work for you, writing quality Web articles and other search engine optimization techniques.
Last modified March 31, 2010