10/15/08

Writing at Helium

I received a lot of negativity for my post about Avoiding Revenue Share Sites - so I thought I'd do the right thing and put my writing where my mouth is.

Now I have actual statistics to write about ;)

I joined at one of "those" sites. I wrote a few simple articles. I submitted to the Marketplace. I have my stats now and won't be going back.

Here are the stats.

9 articles = $2.41
1 MarketPlace sale = $42

Total $44.41

Not impressed. Each of those articles was 500 words or longer. In a "normal" writing market environment, they should have been paid at close to $50 EACH = not $44.41 for 9 articles.

So... to all those who told me it's possible to make good money there, I say this: "It's also possible to make much MORE money elsewhere for the same amount of work."

If you want to break out of the low-paying pocket-money freelance ranks and earn some serious full time income, you'll need to write for markets that actually value their writers. Helium isn't one of them.

Cheers! :)

UPDATE - April: This original blog post was written and posted back on the 15th October. It's now April and those numbers have changed just a bit. Here's the new numbers and new verdict:

9 articles = $11.42
3 marketplace sales = $264

Verdict = one of those marketplace sales was for $200 - if you remove this unusually high sale (because this is not a regular sale price for Helium's marketplace) - you end up with an extremely LOW paying market that was a complete waste of the time it took me to write the other 11 articles.

If I'd sold the same articles on  Constant Content, I would have received $50 per article, which is $600.

Anyone who continues to tell me that slave-labor sites like this are worth the effort are either beginners and haven't been taught any differently yet or they're fooling themselves.

3 comments:

Valerie Lumanog-Caulin said...

Oh..I also write for Helium and I only got less for all the articles I wrote...

Zabrina said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Zabrina said...

(Sorry for the above deleted comment. I noticed a typo that made the meaning of my words much harder to understand!)

I wrote at Helium from February to June 2009. The $350+ I made from Helium for 120 articles was well worth it.

Here's why:

--I didn't sell any Marketplace articles; all the money I got was from my upfronts and empty title bonuses.

--I networked with writers and learned many tips about writing in general from them.

--I learned what it's like to earn money from writing, and discovered that I liked earning money for something I already did.

--I learned how to write a decent article... a step that so many article writers miss completely!

--And I learned about Constant Content. *grin*

That being said, I won't be writing at Helium very often anymore, if at all. I'll just enjoy about $10 a month in passive income, and submit my 120+ articles from Helium to Constant Content for usage only rights.

I'm still recommending that my friends start out there, because it's the best way to learn what readers like and don't like, as well as for the same reasons I pointed out above. And I got paid $350+ to learn how to write for the web... and discovered that I want to make it my full-time career, not just a hobby.

To me, that's worth the investment I made in Helium.