How to Make $750 a Week Writing Part Time at Helium
I told you all the other day about how I made a bunch of money writing just a couple of hours a day over at Helium. While I’m not going to go into all of the ways I made my money writing at Helium until the free report comes out, I do want to tease you all a little bit today.
One of the ways I made money writing at Helium was in the weekly contests. Every week, Helium features contests in 10 different content areas. Contest topics range from Roleplaying Games to Visiting Canada (I’m not making this up. A contest is ending tonight on “Visiting Canada.”) Within each topic there are 25 different article titles. Helium members compete by writing to any number of these titles.
Contests run from Thursday through Wednesday.You don’t have to write to all of the titles, and you are awarded points based on how your articles are rated after the fact. First Place in each content area gets $75, Second Place gets $25, Third gets $10, and three Fourth Place winners each get $5.
I know you’ve got questions. What is the ratings system at Helium? What about plagiarism? Is there a way to cheat? Is it a level playing field? Here again, I’ll cover these questions as time goes on. Suffice it to say for today that I’m confident in the ratings system.
So, how can you make $750 in a week writing at Helium? Win every one of the contests, of course.
What’s that? You have other work to do? You can’t write 250 articles in a week and still maintain a high degree of quality? You’re not willing to risk your income on the chance that you’ll win every contest?
And you call yourself a writer.
No, it’s not likely that you’ll enter and win all 10 contests in a given week. I get that. I’ve not done it. I do believe it could be done. I’ve thought about blocking out 20 hours in a single week to devote to Helium to test the theory, and I may do it in time. Maybe one of you will beat me to it, though. If you do, just remember who pointed you in that direction.
So to get you started toward your $750 week writing part time, here’s what I’ve learned about winning the writing contests at Helium:
- It takes 7-12 articles in a category to score enough points to win. Fewer articles makes it less likely that you’ll place, as does writing more articles. If you can get your Helium rate down to 15 minutes apiece, you can write these articles in 20 hours or so.
- Bullet-point list-style articles (using asterisks because Helium doesn’t allow HTML) will almost always get rated higher than articles that don’t have bullet points.
- An interesting opening paragraph and a solid concluding one will push your ratings higher.
- There are often plagiarists in the contests. Check the top three or four writers in the contest on Tuesday. Spend 15 minutes or so googling random phrases from their articles. This doesn’t take long, and it’s almost always worth it. Don’t let that scare you off, by the way. Helium deals with these folks quickly and harshly - again, more on that later.
- Article ratings will often sit steadily until after a contest closes. You might have the lowest-rated article on Wednesday and it will be the highest on Friday when winners are announced.
- Use the leapfrog tool late in the contest for low-rated articles in topics with a large number of articles. This will often give you a boost going into the final stretch.
- Even the best and most prolific writers at Helium, who often win contests, can be beaten. I know, because I’ve done it on more than one occasion.
Now, I’ll be honest with you. There are other things I can tell you about how to win contests at Helium. Com back on May 12 to download my free report, which will contain those contest-winning tactics as well as other strategies you can use to make money writing on Helium.
The Helium Experiment is Complete
I like article directories. Why? Several reasons:
- Article directories can drive traffic to a website like nobody’s business, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. Yaro Starak of Entrepreneur’s Journey and Brian Clark of Copy Blogger released a free report back in 2006 on the use of article marketing as a traffic generation strategy.
- Article directories give you the chance to play around in a niche you otherwise wouldn’t write in. For example, I’ve written articles on things as diverse as starting a running exercise program to American Idol to avoiding work-at-home scams.
- Article directories give you a sandbox in which to test various techniques such as SEO and formatting before you use them on your production site.
Why do I mention article directories, and what do they have to do with a Helium SpongeBob and Powerpuff Girl balloons? Or is that just another one of Bob’s seemingly-random image selections?
Well, you might remember that, back on March 1, I decided to do an experiment. The experiment involved the article directory Helium and their Reward-athon promotion. Essentially, I wanted to see how much I could make on Helium in the 45 remaining days of the promotion.
I also invited readers to compete with me, and offered a prize to anyone who could top me. The Writing Journey was but a few days old at the time, and my readership was in the low double-digits. I got a few takers, but no one that really seemed to enjoy Helium as much as I did.
At any rate, I made $1,044.28 at Helium during the 45-day Helium experiment. I wrote for about two hours each day - around 33 work days. That works out to about $15 an hour. That’s not great, but there are other benefits. I’ve gained several regular readers (and some friends) along the way. I’ve had about 150 or so incoming hits from my Helium About page. (That’s nowhere near the hits I get from EzineArticles, but EzineArticles doesn’t pay me, either.)
What’s exciting to me is the residual income potential of the experiment. I’ve continued to earn about $2 a day on my articles. Given that most of my topics are timeless, I should continue to earn that $2 as long as Helium maintains or increases its popularity. Over a year’s time, that’ll raise my hourly rate by $11. In five years, Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, it will be $70 an hour. In reality I expect that to be higher; Helium, I predict, will go gangbusters before too long. It will not surprise me if, by January 1, 2009, That $2 a day is more like $10 a day. Even if Helium only maintains, $70 an hour isn’t too bad.
So, I consider the experiment a shining success. In fact, it was so successful that I’m turning the experience into a free report. I expect to release on May 12, so watch for it if you’re interested.
In the meantime, since you all have so such varied backgrounds and differing stories about how you got started writing, I’m curious: What do you all think of article directories? Do you use them? If so, how do you use them? If not, why not?
Photo by Nadia308
Why Internet Writing is Better than Print Writing
We talked some the other day about how there is a perception among some writers and among many non-writing folk about how Internet writing isn’t “real” writing, and how Internet writers are perceived as somehow being second-tier. I told you then that I didn’t agree with the analysis, and that there are specific benefits of Internet writing over print writing. Today, I want to explore some of those benefits in more detail. Why is Internet writing better than print writing?
photo credit: Mr. Wright
Internet writing has better odds.
Everyone who’s ever tried to have something published in print knows that you don’t win them all. In fact, when it comes to print publications, even the best writers don’t win many. There are exceptions. Once you hit a certain level in your niche, you can pretty much get anything published. Take my favorite fantasy author, Ed Greenwood, for example. Ed can write as many novels as he likes, and almost guarantee that someone will pick them up. Same for Stephen King. In the nonfiction world, the same would apply to folks like Seth Godin or Deepak Chopra.
I’m a decent writer; if I weren’t, I couldn’t make a living doing it. But the ratio of what I’ve written to what I’ve published when it comes to print is about 10 to 1. On a good day. And that number doesn’t even take into the account that most of my print writing doesn’t get published on the first submission; its usually the third or fourth. And my numbers are, as near as I can tell, very much in the average category.
Contrast this to my Internet writing. Everything I write for the Internet can be published. It might be for a client, or it might be on my blog, but it can be published. If I have an article topic I want to write that a client isn’t interested in, I can still write the dang thing and find a place to publish it with little effort. As an Internet writer, the odds of rejection are so small as to be insignificant.
photo credit: cassandra michelle
Internet writers make more per word than typical print writers.
I know what you’re thinking. “Bob, you’re full of crap.”
You’d be right. Only, not about this particular statement.
See, I’ve got a good number of steady Internet writing clients. My rate, while not as high as some, is sufficient to make the writing worth my time. And my clients give me specific writing assignments, which I complete, and get paid for. Every damn one of them. And, I’ve done the math: based on my rate of print publication, I make about twice as much per word written (not per word published, of course) on the Internet than I do with print. If you can get all of your print writing published, I’m sure it’s more lucrative. Bravo. Maybe you are a real writer and I’m not. But I can get all, or nearly all, of my Internet writing published, and I’m going to make money on it, even if I have to publish it myself.
See, I can write an article, maybe on a topic like common Internet writing mistakes, for this blog right here. In time, that article makes me money through contextual ads, affiliate sales, direct advertising and, eventually, my mentoring program. I can also spend about an extra 20 minutes rewriting that article or portions of that article three different ways, posting it to an article directory to make some additional pageview revenue and generate traffic back to my blog. The article directory income is relatively insignificant for a given article, but if you can get a thousand or so articles up on four different paying sites, you’ve got a healthy little supplemental income going on. I’m not all the way there, yet, but I’m making progress on that part of my journey, to be sure.
photo credit: Point-Shoot-Edit
Internet writers can have full editorial and marketing control over their writing.
Obviously I’m not talking about pen-for-hire work here. But anything that you self-publish on the Internet can have your own personal editorial stamp, and can be marketed as you see fit.
Does this create more work? of course.
Internet writing can be somewhat challenging because it forces you to learn to edit your own writing, and some folks can never seem to really master this concept. It also means you’ve got to develop an eye for design and know something about markets and marketing. But it also gives you a heck of a lot of latitude. The fact of the matter is that editors, in the print world, have different agendas than writers. I’m not saying they aren’t useful or even necessary; I’m just saying that it is nice to be able to rise or fall on your own merits, rather than on whether an editor makes you change something that really shouldn’t be changed. It also is nice to maintain some integrity when it comes to the marketing process, rather than leaving your integrity to an advertising agency.
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So, what do you all think? Based on the responses last time, many of you believe Internet writing is indeed better than print writing. What other reasons have we missed?
5 Ways to Earn More Money Writing on Helium.com
Since we’re just at the start of the Helium Experiment, I thought I’d offer you all some Helium-specific advice this morning. Many of you have asked for referrals, and I expect all 50 of my allotted referrals to be gone by the end of this week, maybe sooner. There’s still time to get in on Helium’s reward-athon, and to try to get a couple of free books from me.
For those who don’t write on Helium.com this advice may be less useful. I do like to think that there are some principles below that apply pretty much to all article submission sites as well as to Internet writing in general. So, here’s what I’ve discovered so far in my experiment with Helium:
Volume = earnings.
Volume is the key to success on Helium (and most article submission sites). Many writers who join Helium get discouraged after writing a few articles and earning a few cents (or less). My advice? Get a few hundred articles up, and then we can talk about making some money. That’s a start. Get a few thousand up, and we can talk about having a reliable source of residual income that doesn’t require much maintenance.
Content area matters.
Some topics are just more profitable than others. Test out the various topic areas that you’re interested in, and see which ones pay off. I can write all day long about Dungeons and Dragons and make nothing or next to nothing. However, I might write one good article about artificial insemination and suddenly you’ve made $2 in a week on that one article. Multiply that by a thousand quality articles and you’re talking about a nice lifestyle improvement.
Immediate income vs. long-term residual income.
Immediate income is important; you can’t buy gasoline with the $500 that you’ll earn three months from now. That is why contests, the Marketplace, and promotions like the reward-athon are so important to today. However, if you want to use Helium.com to improve your lifestyle tomorrow, you’re going to have to write for more than just those areas.
Rating and content quality.
Finally, the fact is that your higher-rated articles are going to be seen by more readers, and therefore make more money. Be meticulous about spelling, grammar, formatting and the like, so that you can consistently hit the higher ratings. Ratings have less to do with good ideas than with good method.
More competitive topics will produce lower ratings on average.
The more competition there is for a given topic, the more likely you are to see ratings that you’re not happy with. For many (not all) of my articles, I stick to smaller topics. If you can write an amazing article on a given topic and get it to number 1 out of 50 or 100, then you should definitely do it, but don’t be discouraged when you can’t seem to get in the top few. Keeping in the top 25% is all you really need for success.
There you have it. Follow those keys and you’ll find you’re on your way to making some good money at Helium.com.
The Helium Experiment
No, this isn’t a post about the colorless, odorless, tasteless, non-toxic, inert monatomic chemical element that heads the noble gas series in the periodic table and whose atomic number is 2 (thank you, Wikipedia!)
This is about helium.com, one of the newer article repository web sites, and about how I intend to make a bunch of money writing there in the next 45 days.
I hope that doesn’t put you off. Making money by writing on the Internet is how I buy Pop Tarts for my daughters, pay my electric bill, and buy dog food. I’m not particularly greedy or materialistic, but I’m also not ashamed to say, “My writing has value. You can use it, but you should pay me for it.” If you are skittish about wanting to make money from your writing, you should choose another profession.
Don’t skip this paragraph. It might cost you.
Before I provide you with links or more information, let me mention that Helium.com does have a referral program. If you do think you’d like to write for Helium, please send me an e-mail with the words ”Helium referral” in the subject line. I will send you a sign-up email as soon as possible. Helium.com only allows referrals via their own e-mail referral system, and they limit each writer to 50 referrals. If you’re interested, let me know as soon as possible before my referral emails are all gone. See below for more reasons to sign up via a referral from me.
The Helium.com Reward-athon
Helium.com is currently running a promotion designed to increase the size of their article repository. This promotion runs until April 15, 2008. At the end of the day on April 15, Helium.com will tally up the number of articles that you submit between January 7 and April 14. You will receive, in your PayPal account on April 15, up to $3 per article submitted.
This bonus payment is in addition to any revenues you accumulate due to page views, which is normally how Helium.com pays its writers. It is also in addition to any revenues generated by placing in the top of a Helium.com contest.
There are specific guidelines that determine how much you will receive per article, and those are available at the Reward-athon page on Helium.
How I am going to make a bunch of cold hard cash.
So, how am going to earn a bunch of money? I’m going to do the following:
- Write a minimum of 12 articles each day for submission between now and April 14. I’ve already got 30 articles at helium.com, so that will put me well above the 500 articles that I need to qualify for a “5-star rating.”
- Rate at least 5 times each day.
- Participate in at least 1 contest every week.
- Spend 20 minutes each day browsing the site or reading the forums trying to identify what sorts of things provide higher ratings at Helium.com.
Why you should try to make some cash, too.
Also, as I love a good competition, I have my own reward for anyone who:
- Signs up for Helium.com via my referral,
- Signs up for The Writing Journey updates via email and is still signed up on April 15, and
- Submits a minimum of 400 articles to Helium.com between March 1 (today) and April 14.
If you meet all three of these criteria, I will send you a copy of Jane Strauss‘ Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation (see below). This book is indispensable for any writer. I am pen pals with Jane, and I can tell you that she has put a lot of work and devotion into this book. I can also tell you that this book has made me money by helping me keep my writing at the top of its game.
Anyone who does the three things above AND tops my total number of articles submitted between March 1 and April 14 will also receive ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income by Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett which is scheduled for release on May 12, 2008. No Internet writer, regardless of whether or not you blog, should be without this great book. Like I said, I love a good competition, so be aware that I will do my best to top you if I can!
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