I wrote up a series of short articles on Associated Content explaining the basics of exposure. If you’re starting out with photography and feel that you’re ready to break out of the “auto” mode on your camera, they’re a good read. The more you read about photography and how everything works together to create an image, the better you’ll be.

What Does the Aperture Setting of a Camera Do? The aperture is the size of the hole that lets light into your camera. Bigger hole = more light, smaller hole = less light. But, this also affects the depth of field – how much of an image will be in focus. Read the article for more details.

What Does the Shutter Speed Setting of Your Camera Do? The shutter speed is how long light is allowed to shine on your cameras image sensor (or film, if you’ve got a film camera). Keeping the shutter open longer allows in more light, and keep it open for a shorter period of time allows in less light. But… this also affects whether your picture will be blurry or not. Read the article for more details.

What Does the ISO Setting On Your Digital Camera Do? The ISO rating determines how sensitive your camera’s image sensor is to the light coming in. Turn the rating up, and your sensor will be more sensitive and create a brighter image. But, this also creates more “noise” – little pixelly speckles that can ruin your photo. Read the article for more details.

The Dell Inspiron 2600, on the other hand, was troublesome. I finally have it working now, and I’ve written a couple articles on my other blog about the process. These aren’t in depth tutorials, but they’re meant to help point people in the right direction if they have similar problems.

Installing Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron 2600. This seemingly simple task was complicated by the fact that the integrated graphics card doesn’t seem to work with most Ubuntu installations. I found some suggestions that Ubuntu 8.04 worked, and eventually it did after I modified the settings and specified the correct graphics driver. Read more about this in the full article.

Adding RAM to a Dell Inspiron 2600. This should have been simple, but it wasn’t. The machine reported 320mb of installed RAM, but I could only find one memory module – a 256mb memory module located underneath the mother board. After skimming through the documentation a couple times, I found that there was a second location to install a memory module located on the other side of the motherboard (underneath the keyboard). I followed the Dell documentation to disassemble the laptop and install another 256mb chip (which replaced the presumably original 64mb RAM chip).

I have been updating my other blog a bit, but its mostly inconsequential posts about my training as a runner.

I have, however, been doing some writing for Associated Content. I’ve amassed a decent amount of pageviews there (170k), and I’m close to hitting the second highest ranking on the site – Clout 9. If I keep writing articles, I’ll hit that benchmark in a month or two. The next goal would be to hit Clout 10, which would require 3-400k pageviews. These are fun goals, but they also bring with them higher pay-outs per pageview… so there’s a point.

Anyhow, here’s a quick rundown of some of the articles I’ve written recently.

Where Can I Find a Replacement Lens Cap for My Nikon Coolpix P80? I lost the lens cap for my P80, and I had a hell of a time finding a replacement. Nikon doesn’t seem to manufacture the part anymore, but I found a third party vendor on Ebay. Very useful article, if you happen to have the same model camera.

What is the Derivative of a Function? I’ve been working with some kids at school on Calculus, so I thought it would be interesting to try my hand at explaining math concepts online. I might expand this work into a larger site in the future, but for now I want to get some thoughts on paper, as it were.

How to Remove an Autorun Virus from Your Flash Drive. We had a nasty infection on our school network recently, and I spent a lot of time cleaning autorun viruses off my flash drive. I found a quicker way to handle it, through a basic DOS batch script, explained in the article.

So how do you get started? Is it hard to publish your first article at Helium? Not at all.

Each Topic Has Multiple Articles

On a writing site, you would expect to find a collection of articles. You might expect to find a list of titles – and each title represents one article.

This is where Helium is a bit unique. Helium is more like a collection of topics than headlines. For any give headline, there could be anywhere from a half dozen to a hundred articles.

For example, “The best ways to learn how to maintain a computer” has ten different articles. “Should cell phone use be banned while driving,” on the other hand, has 125 articles.

Once an author suggests a topic and submits an article – or the Helium staff creates a topic and requests an article – the topic appears on the site. It’s categorized by topic so that people can find it through browsing. Other users can then write their own article on the same topic.

How Do We Pick an Article to Read?

If there are 125 articles on the same topic, how does a user (or the computer) decide which article to read?

Another unique feature of Helium is the rating process. As well as writing articles for the site, users are asked to rate articles that have already been published.

When rating, you are presented with two articles on the same topic. You read each one and mark which one is better and by how much. The software uses this data to rank the articles from best to worst.

When someone clicks on a headline, they are taken to the #1 rated article. They can then browse other articles on the topic – but chances are they’ll only read the first couple. If you’re rated at the bottom of the heap… your article won’t get read much.

Get Started: Write On an Existing Topic

The easiest way to get started is to simply write on an existing topic.

Browse around the site and find something interesting. There are a number of general categories, and each one has a number of subcategories. You’ll find topics on everything from Religion, to Sports, to the Arts.

Once you’ve found a topic, click on the headline. You may want to read a few of the articles. If you don’t have anything substantially different to say – or if you don’t think you can say it better than it has already been said – then you should keep moving. After all, we don’t need a hundred identical articles under one topic.

If you do have something to add to the conversation, click on the pencil icon. This will take you to the writing screen, where you simply fill in the box and submit.

Your article will be instantaneously published. No review process required! Don’t you love instant gratification?

I’d suggest browsing the site for a while and then writing on some pre-existing topics. This will give you a chance to feel out what goes over well and what doesn’t. If your articles get rated poorly – then something needs to change! Otherwise, you must be doing something right.

I think it’s time to take a step back and look at a site where you can write for profit – without requiring any tech, design, or development savvy. I’ll be working on a complete section about Helium, but in the meantime here’s a quick overview.

Writing for Profit – Revenue Sharing

Helium is another online writing site, similar to Associated Content.

The site is a collection of articles – mostly non-fiction, but fiction and poetry are allowed. It generates revenue through advertising based on its traffic. When you post an article on the site, you carve out a portion of that advertising revenue for yourself.

The basic form of profit on the site is revenue sharing. When you article is read, you get a portion of the advertising revenue that the article’s topic generates. Helium hasn’t released specific details about the monetization formula, but basically more page views leads to more money.

Unfortunately, Helium doesn’t report the number of page views your article gets. It’s difficult to gauge, then, whether Helium pays more per page view than other sites (like Associated Content).

I have a little over 80 articles on the site. Many of these are highly rated – which means they appear towards the topic of their category – but many of them aren’t on highly monetized topics. As a result, I earn an average of $5 per month based on these old articles.

Alternate Forms of Income – Contests and Marketplace

One thing that sets Helium apart is the availability of alternate (and more profitable) sources of income.

At any given time, Helium is usually offering a contest or promotion that can net you a lot of cash. One popular contest format is the “Channel Champion” contest.

A list of topics (20-30) is generated for a given category. Everyone is eligible to write articles in that category for the week, and the most popular author at the end of the week wins a prize. In the past, first place has been $75 and second place has been $25. This can be a good way to build up a repertoire of articles for revenue sharing while also possibly earning a nice bonus.

The most profitable – and unique – section of the site is the marketplace. Publishers come to Heilum and request articles on a given topic. You submit an article on that topic. If your article is chosen, you get paid a premium rate for it. It’s essentially a marketplace for freelance writing.

Although some publishers pay poorly (less than $20 per article), there are many premium publishers. I wrote an article that was purchased for $80, and there are offers available for $100+.

A Final Plus – Community

Another reason I prefer Helium to Associated Content is that there is a strong, friendly community.

The Associated Content forums are generally populated by people complaining about problems with the site. There are some decent discussions if you dig deep enough, but I find little reason to frequent them.

Helium, on the other hand, has worked hard to develop a community within their site. The forums have sections for peer review of articles, suggestions for new features, critiques of the site, and general discussions about writing. Helium employees constantly frequent the forums and you can be assured that any issues you have will be noticed.

Check It Out

The bottom line is that you should check it out. Helium is a great place to start building your online writing portfolio, and it can even net you some real freelance gigs.

The revenue sharing isn’t as strong as Associated Content, from my experience, but you can more than make up for that if you participate in contests and the marketplace. The forums are also a great place to meet up with other writers and practice your craft.

If you’re truly interested in developing as a writer on the ‘net or in print, this is a great place to start. Check it out, and check back here later for a more in depth look at writing at Helium.

Why? I was able to work in a few nice backlinks to my site and my articles. I’ll earn some cash if it gets traffic of its own.

How Does Squidoo Work?

Squidoo is another writing site online – with a bit of a twist.

Squidoo isn’t about articles… it’s about “lenses.” Each lens is a mini-website. It’s longer and more in depth than an article – but it’s only one page.

You add all the content you want about your topic – writing, pictures, polls, link lists, etc – and hope users come a knockin. If you do get traffic, you get a portion of the advertising revenue.

You can eke out a few extra bucks by including items for sale on your lens – like books at Amazon.com.

Why Did I Write a Lens at Squidoo?

I’m pretty sure my lens (XML Through PHP) isn’t going to make a ton of money. That’s no reason to scoff at the idea, though.

The lens I created was (as you might have guessed from the title) about XML and PHP. In the past week or so, I’ve written three articles here about working with XML. Do you see where I’m going with this?

The lens is an overview of working with XML. Three parts of the lens are hooks to get the reader to come read an article here about a particular application of XML in PHP.

In writing this lens, I accomplished a number of tasks. I created a useful online resource – it should be educational for someone that’s new to working with XML and PHP together. I created some advertisement for my site – any readers of the lens should be enticed to click on one or another of my links. I also improved the SEO of my site by including five targeted backlinks from the lens to content on my own site.

You Should Join Too!

I don’t see any reason not to join Squidoo and make a lens or two about your niche.

You can create optimized links to your site and also capture some extra search engine traffic and direct it back to your site. There’s a decent referral system in place – you get $5 if a referree makes $15. You can also diversify your online writing portfolio and make a little more loot every month.

So head on over to Squidoo, sign up, and write your own lens.

So how do you keep on writing? Where do all the new ideas come from?

Everybody’s got their own tricks, but here’s one that I love to use when I’m short on ideas. Go through your search engine logs and see what people are searching for – and not finding.

Here’s an example. Last week I wrote an article on How to Create Style-able CSS Tooltips.

As usual, I was browsing through the Google Analytics data a day or two later. While looking through the Search Engine results (the queries that people used to come to my site), I noticed that someone used the query “gradient background image gimp.”

The odd thing about this was that the article wasn’t about creating background images in Gimp – I just happened to mention at the end that you could use Gimp to create a gradient background image and add it to your tooltip.

This tells me two things.

First, someone is looking for this information. If I write it… they will come.

Second, someone else is not serving this information up. If a user stumbles on one of my articles that just barely mentions the topic, there can’t be a lot of targeted articles out there.

I decided to take the topic and run with it. A few days later, I wrote a simple tutorial about how to create a gradient background image in Gimp. I targeted the article at those major keywords – gradient, background, image, Gimp – and now it’s getting some nice search engine traffic.

So if you’re ever short on ideas, this is a great way to respark that creativity. Look through your search engine logs for queries that bring people in – but don’t bring people to what they’re looking for. Then… give them what they want.

But even if you’re not interested in being published on someone else’s site, AC can be a great tool for you as a webmaster. You can use it to get optimized backlinks and targeted traffic.

If you’re not familiar with AC, here’s a quick rundown of how it works. You write an article which you can either submit for up front payment (in which you get paid ~3-8 bucks if they like it) or you can bypass the review process and get published immediately (without upfront payment).

Either way, once your article is published you earn a revenue share (Performance Payment, $1.50 per 1000 page views). The good thing about skipping the up front payment is you can post articles that advertise your site – without it getting reviewed and picked over.

Although most of my AC articles are strictly for content, I have created a few as an experiment for gaining backlinks and traffic. Here’s what I typically do.

I identify a topic on one of my sites that I’ve written a few articles on (3-4). Then I write a brief “Guide” article that gives the reader an overview of the topic. I dedicate one to two paragraphs to the sub-topics that each of my pages targets, and I include a link to my content page so that the reader can get more information.

You can see an example with this article on graphic organizers. It targets three content pages that I wrote on my other website (Babel). It also gives the user some useful information.

I originally tried this strictly as a method to gain backlinks. On that grounds, it definitely worked. I included four links to my site – one to the front page and three to individual content pages. They were indexed quickly and picked up by the search engines.

The unintended consequence of this is that it directed a bit of traffic to my site, too. It’s by no means a vast amount of traffic, but every little bit counts. In the past week, that article sent 21 visits to my site – a couple of visits per day (see the Google Analytics screenshot).

Doesn’t sound like a lot, but consider this. If you write ten guide articles that get an average of ten click throughs per week – that’s another 400 visits per month. On top of that, you’ll get 30-40 backlinks with keywords that you chose to best benefit your site.

This seems like a great tool for promoting your site – especially a relatively new site. You can get optimized backlinks, you can drive some traffic, and you even get income from Associated Content if people do read your article.

Get paid for advertising your own site? I don’t think it gets any better than that. Go sign up for Associated Content and write a few stump articles yourself.

The other day I came across something truly disturbing in the way of online writing. I stumbled on the website Senserely.

It was kind of like a train wreck – it was horrifying, but I had to keep looking around just to see if it could get any worse.

The website, like other online websites, works on a basic premise: you write an article, they host the article, you split the ad revenues. The topic of the site is supposed to be AdSense and similar items.

On the surface, this doesn’t sound like a horrible idea. Helium, Associated Content, and other sites have been working fine. But none have looked quite as disgusting as Senserely.

The layout of the site is horrible. It’s completely bogged down with ads – with three large square blocks and three rows of text ads before any content appears. The color scheme doesn’t mesh well, and the content is near un-findable under the mountain of ads.

The site is also incredibly slow to load. The site is built on top of a table based layout, with markup that doesn’t come close to passing validation. Between the poor design and the load of javascript advertisements, it takes quite some time for the page to load and for me to be able to scroll around.

Go check it out for a minute. You’ll get a good laugh out of it. I couldn’t even bring myself to sign up and get a referral id – I’d feel a little bit dirty about actually referring someone to this site and recommending that you sign up.

Bottom line – check it out for a laugh, and then run far far away. You can get similar functionality – with a better layout and better search engine placement – through Associated Content and Xomba.

I didn’t actually write an article until September of this year. For some reason, I never got around to it. I was quite pleased when they offered me an upfront payment of $10 for my first article.

Since then, I’ve written another 30 articles and published them at Associated Content. I’ve gotten a better idea of what to expect, payment wise. The initial $10 seems to be a high payment to entice you to write more… and it definitely worked.

Like I wrote in this page about how much you can earn at AC, I came to expect an average of about $4-5 per article. For a while I experimented with non-exclusive articles and I saw that average drop to about $3-4 per article.

Since September, I’ve published 31 articles at Associated Content. A handful of those were not for up front payment. A few of them were already published on another blog, and I felt uncomfortable asking for upfront payment (although at this point I think I should have). A couple others I used to promote my own website – so I figured it wasn’t right to ask for payment for those, either.

So, between the 25 or so articles that I published up front and the performance payments for the past few months, I’ve earned about $120.00. I also have not had any of my articles that I submitted for up front payment rejected.

Is this typical? I’d say it’s typical of what you can do without doing a lot of work. I didn’t attempt to publicize my work – so I didn’t reap a lot from the performance payment. I also didn’t experiment much to find a niche that was more popular than education. I found it very easy to write those 25 articles and earn over $100 – and I think anyone can do a similar thing.

I also wasn’t writing as fast as I could have. I just started a new job teaching in September, so my free time for writing was drastically cut back. When I sat down and wrote a few articles at a time, it was easy to make $20 – other times I’d just publish one article in a week for $4.

A lot of money? No. But it got me a little spending cash, and I really didn’t put a lot of time into it. This is, however, proof that the money is there – and they pay consistently. The amount that you make is based on how much you’re willing to work and how much time you’ve got to spare.

So if you haven’t signed up already… head over to Associated Content and write an article or two. There’s some spending cash waiting for you.