How to be a Writer for Helium

Contributor

By Christine Mattice
eHow Contributing Writer

Article Rating:

(6 Ratings)

Helium is a website where writers can submit their articles or short stories for instant publication and eventual money. But there is a right, and a wrong, way to become a successful, and profitable, writer for Helium. Here is the right way to do it.

Difficulty: Challenging

Instructions

How to be a Writer for Helium

Step 1

Always submit your strongest piece(s) of writing. Helium members compare two articles of the same subject against each other, and the ones that rise to the top 5 (hence the name, “Helium”) are the ones that get read the most and the ones that get paid the most from Helium.
Step 2

Write articles that will get the most advertisers. For instance, an article about high cholesterol would pull in more advertisers than an article about stamp collecting. This is important, because Helium shares its advertising revenue with its writers.
Step 3

Write about popular, and newsworthy, subjects because your payments are partially based on how many people view your articles. More people will search for, and view, popular, newsworthy, and possibly controversial issues than they will the more obscure subjects.
Step 4

Being a successful writer for Helium requires that you write often. Try to submit at least one good quality article a week. The more articles you submit to the site, the more money you will make. You will not make much money if you have just one or two articles out there, but the money you can make rises exponentially with the amount of articles you have published. Don’t sacrifice quality for quantity, but submit new articles to Helium weekly. Try to build up at least fifty articles in your portfolio.
Step 5

Helium has a "Marketplace" section, where writers can choose to write about certain subjects that publishers want. Usually, many writers respond, and their articles are compared against each other, with the best rising to the top. Whoever reaches the top five with their Marketplace articles has a good chance of being selected for publication. The pay range on selected pieces can range from around twenty dollars to a couple hundred dollars!
Step 6

Enter Helium’s writing contests. Helium continuously sponsors writing contests, and offers prize money, for the top ranking entries. Such writing contests stimulate your creativity and strengthens your writing skills.
Step 7

Join the debate! Helium offers a debate section where they introduce an issue, you pick which side of the issue you stand on, and you start writing. Writing for the debate section not only helps stimulate your creativity, but helps you to organize your thinking and hone your research skills.
Step 8

Be a citizen journalist. Helium sponsors Citizen Journalism Awards, where their partners offer a writing challenge concerning certain issues. Helium’s writers then compete against each other for the best articles on those issues. The nonprofit partner(s) then select the winning essays from the top ten entries in each category. These winning articles are well-researched, newsworthy pieces of writing that can significantly increase your reputation, and hone your skills, as a respectable news writer.