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.

Another site I’ve found useful is Gimp Tutorials. They’re a great place to list any graphics tutorials that you write for the GIMP graphic design program.

In case you don’t know what GIMP is, head to the Gimp homepage. It’s a free, open source graphic editing suite – similar in many ways to the expensive, proprietary Adobe Photoshop.

Gimp Tutorials is another niche directory where you can submit appropriate tutorials for listing. In this case, appropriate means just about anything related to creating or editing an image in Gimp.

I wrote a very basic tutorial to show users how to create a gradient background image in GIMP. Since I submitted the tutorial to Gimp Tutorials, slightly less than week ago, they’ve sent me 200 visits.

There was a brief spike on the first day, and I’ve been getting a steady stream of 20-30 visitors each day after that.

There doesn’t appear to be a lot of turnover on the site, so my tutorial is still listed third on the front page. That’s after five days. That’s a pretty lengthy period of exposure – considering that others sites (like Good Tutorials) turnover in about a day.

So if you write any tutorials for GIMP, don’t hesitate to submit them here. It’s a good way to drive a few extra users to your latest article.

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.

I’ve tried out a few methods, with varying success. What has worked really well, so far, is submitting an article to a niche site: Good Tutorials.

People often advise you to submit your articles to social networking and article sites. Often times this will get you a few backlinks and little to no traffic.

I stumbled on Good Tutorials when I was looking for some information on a different topic. After browsing around the site, I noticed that they take and review submissions of tutorials for inclusion in the directory. I thought what the hell, let me try it out.

I submitted the tutorial I wrote about creating a php script to send trackbacks. After signing up and submitting the tutorial, they told me it would take one to two days to be reviewed.

I never got an e-mail back confirming that my tutorial had been accepted or not. I forgot about it for a couple of days – kind of busy at work. Then, today, I logged in to see what the status was.

My tutorial had been accepted two days ago. In that time frame, it got 95 clicks. I logged into Google Analytics, and sure enough there was a big jump in traffic. Good Tutorials had sent me approximately 90 visits, and some of those people had looked around the site at other entries and articles.

I also noticed a bit of traffic coming from another new site – Tuts Buzz. I checked it out and it was another tutorial directory. A link to my tutorial had shown up there as well, probably from Good Tutorial’s feed.

Whether or not I’ll continue to get substantial traffic from these sites, I don’t know. It may be that I’m getting some click throughs because my tutorial is on the “Newest Tutorials” list. Maybe it’ll drop off to nothingness when it just becomes a filed away tutorial.

However, it definitely seems to be a worthwhile way to get some traffic. Unlike a lot of article sites – that send you a few low PR backlinks and no traffic – I got a real measurable increase in traffic.

So, if you write any tutorials on coding, software, or technology – head over to Good Tutorials and see about getting your own listing.

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.