Recent Citizen Journalism Award Winners

We’re excited to announce the latest winners of Helium’s Citizen Journalism Award contests.

Kenneth Boser II won the 1H20 Citizen Journalism Award by writing about the United States’ position on access to clean drinking water as a basic human right and how it compares with the policies of other countries.

Mouhcine Azizoun won the 1H20 Citizen Journalism Award by writing about what is causing Lake Chad and other lakes to shrink.

Be sure to check out more information on these contests and the current winner on the 1h20 website.

Be sure to check out the current Citizen Journalism contests and let your voice be heard.

 

Write for Haiti

Few things are as frustrating as seeing the images and stories of those affected by horrific disasters and not being able to do anything to help.

In response to many requests to Helium that we find a way to help, we have created the Write for Haiti campaign. We just set up the Helium Relief Fund so you can donate article earnings — or your monthly payout — to one place. As donations to the fund grow, we will designate the charity where the money will be sent to help Haiti.

Read more about the Write for Haiti campaign. We’ll post the link to the Write for Haiti contest later this morning.

Janice

 

Teacher Connection Contest: Congrats to winners and contest results

The Teacher Connections Writing Contest, cosponsored with Teachers Without Borders and Helium, yielded high writer participation and quality articles. More than 100 writers participated and created 391 articles. Seven writers shared the $400 in prize money.

Congrats to: Rachelle de Bretagne, Amanda Dcosta, Colette Georgii, Elaine Sihera, Nan Avery, Joan Schroeder, and Jeffrey Ober. And thanks to all the writers who shared, in their articles, knowledge that will help teachers the world over.

 Through this special co-sponsored contest, new members joined both Helium and Teachers Without Borders. And Helium writers added significantly to the article earnings donated to this highly-valued non-profit partner—with over 1,200 articles now collecting donations to help the vital work of Teachers Without Borders.

 Teachers Without Borders Membership Director, Michael Moran, reported: Through the Teacher Connections Writing Contest, we were able to bring new members from Helium over to Teachers Without Borders and increase the quality of discussion revolving around pertinent issues in international education and development.

 Michael continues to welcome in new Teachers Without Border members and thank donors for aiding the success of their organization.

Thanks again for sharing expert content to help those involved in education around the world. Thanks also for your donations to Teachers Without Borders. And thanks especially for sharing your time and talent with Helium!

 

New Features for Helium

Today Helium introduced a number of new features and enhancements. In many ways, this is one of the biggest changes to Helium since we introduced Marketplace. The features in this release reflect Helium’s continued strategy of advancing new and innovative solutions aimed at empowering our members to produce high quality content while also advancing our objectives of creating the world’s largest and most supportive writing community.

New Products Introduced: With this release, Helium is advancing a new approach to creating and publishing new forms of content. Up to this point, Helium has solely enabled members to create articles. With this release, we are introducing How-To Guides, News Events and Topics pages.

These new products are based on a closed community approach.  Members must apply to each community to participate and each piece of content created will be reviewed, edited and approved by members of the closed community.

 Instead of leveraging Helium’s relative ranking engine, these new products rely on an application process and a peer approval process. This leverages an underlying collaborative editing capability (wiki model) to enable members to collaborate on creating the best content possible.

 Whereas the Helium relative ranking model works well to enable many people to create competitive articles on a subject (lifestyle content, evergreen content, creative writing, opinion etc), the new content types, such as News, allow members to cover breaking news and to collaborate on creating unique resource centers in our new Topics pages. 

 Added to this release is a new payment method for these new content types for compensation based on a clear formula of views of their work.

 New and improved community tools:

New Messaging Center: Comparable to email inboxes and social networking messaging abilities, now we can send, receive, delete and archive messages on Helium. Members can create their own personalized signatures for messages. Contact this Writer will now use the Helium Inbox (a link will appear at the top when you’re logged in).  Whenever you receive a message in your Inbox, you’ll be pinged on your email — we’ve even included preferences so you can change the frequency of receiving emails regarding your Helium inbox activity.

Easier Access to New Social Tools: Links to social activities, friends, groups, etc., are found from your My Helium, Inbox, and About Me pages via the new top navigation bar.

 About Me pages reflect changes. All of the new products and changes are shown through your About Me page on Helium. Members of How-To, Topics, News and Zone communities will now have tabs presenting their content on Helium — along with your articles, as always. There is also a Social tab directing readers to your expanded profile that embraces your friends, followers, groups you are a member of, and interests you’ve uploaded.

As an aside – I’d like to ask each of you to take a few moments to make sure that you are presenting yourself in the most professional manner possible with your image, and bio. The publishers that  come to Helium to source content for their publications want to know that you are serious about your writing efforts on Helium.  

 Making the site faster and other infrastructure upgrades: Lastly, this new release introduces some improved infrastructure for how Helium serves ads on the site that will dramatically improve the speed of the site. A faster site should lead towards more page views per visit – resulting in higher earnings for all of our members.

As with all new releases and changes at Helium, we welcome your feedback and hope to answer all of your questions. For a more detailed explanation of all of these new features, please review our Helium  Help Guide and for questions regarding preexisting features please visit our community forum, and for all other questions regarding new products, features, and navigation visit our group help forums.

From all of us at Helium, we hope you enjoy the new features and continue to enjoy the site.

Mark Ranalli –  CEO, Helium Inc

 

Making Helium Work For You

Myself and others have explained many times how you can harness the power of Helium to make money for you.  The following is what I hope is a simple tutorial to show you a powerful example.  I am going to show you how to set up an RSS feed for a leaf channel that will update you any time a new empty title shows up.

What does this mean?  This means you will have a page you can go to that will regularly update with empty/shallow titles in channels that directly interest you.  It will be like every morning (or however often you check it) someone shows up at your door and delivers a list of potential assignments for you to make money on.

Let me repeat that.  This will allow you to add any leaf channels that interest you to an RSS reader (I use Google Reader in this example, but any will do) and as long as you check said reader periodically you will be presented with fresh, minty empty/shallow titles to potentially earn empty title bonuses and upfront payments on.

Sound good?  Let’s go.

First Step – go to Helium

Simply navigate to the Helium home page.

Second Step – pick a channel

I like to write to Computers and Technology.  So I clicked on that one.  Pick whatever channel you want.

Third Step – Navigate down to a Leaf Channel

A leaf channel has no children.  You can tell non-leaves because they’ll ahve that red down arrow next to their name.  I continue down the tree by clicking Internet.  If you didn’t pick the same one as me, just pick the one that interests you.

Finally I find a leaf channel I like, I choose and click Web Design.  At this point you should be on a leaf channel that interests you.

Fourth Step – find the empty titles container

This is at the very bottom of every leaf page. It’s called “Writing Assignments” right now but could change at a later date.  Click the RSS Feed link in the bottom of the box (not the one at the bottom of the page).

Fifth Step – copy the RSS feed URL

Once you click the RSS Feed link above, you’ll be taken to the RSS feed page.  Just copy the URL in the address bar.

Sixth Step – subscribe to the feed

Our more advanced users (ones who use RSS readers and feeds) can probably skip the rest of these steps.  For beginners, it’s not enough to know how to find the feeds of the empty titles.  The real power comes in harnessing all of these feeds and making them work for you.

You do this by inputting them into an RSS reader.  You can find these in most browsers, most ISP home pages (AOL, Yahoo, Google, even Comcast I believe), even in some e-mail clients.  I’m using Google Reader only because it’s simple if you don’t already have a reader and many people already have Google accounts (for GMail, AdSense, etc) so you have a Reader account as well.  You can find Google Reader at www.google.com/reader.

But I don’t use/like Google!  Fine:

• Adding RSS feeds to Yahoo.
• I couldn’t find any other ones, sorry.

Now, back to the steps, you just copied the feed url and navigated to your Google Reader.  You’re going to see a navigation button in the top left.  Click that to show a drop down.  The very first link should be “add a subscription”.  Click that to show the box below.  Post the feed url in the box and click “Add.”

Seventh Step – make money

Now you have the feed in your reader.  Repeat for all the channels you like to write to.

Hope that helps.

 

Recent Helium Citizen Journalism Award Winners

We’re excited to announce the latest winners of Helium Citizen Journalism Award contests.

Barb won the 1H20 Citizen Journalism Award by writing about the main source of pollution in America’s rivers and lakes and how experts think the problem can be resolved. Be sure to check out more information on this contest and the current winner on the 1h20 website.

Elizabeth M. Young won the Center for Responsive Politics/OpenSecrets Citizen Journalism Award by writing about changes she would make to the nation’s campaign finance system.

Be sure to check out the current Citizen Journalism contests and let your voice be heard.

 

Teachers Without Borders staff shares Teacher Connection Contest reflections

Meet Teachers Without Borders staff member, Michael Moran. Michael has collaborated with Helium staff to bring you the Teacher Connections Writing Contest . This contest is open to all those passionate about education, and it’s attracted scores of educational professionals. Check out the contest titles. Share your knowledge and research on these important topics — topics designed to help teachers and communities around the world. Many Helium members are donating ad revenue share for their contest articles to Teachers Without Borders, who has been a long-standing Helium non-profit partner. Many others are also joining Teaches without Borders, to contribute more directly to their work in the world, especially through their Teachers Network online teacher support system.

Well, we are officially one week into the Teacher Connections Writing Contest and so far it has been more of a success than I could have ever imagined. Over 150 articles contributed so far! It is so exciting to read all of the title responses that Helium’s talented writer-members have written regarding the importance of education, especially on a global level. I have read them in both my personal and professional time and have been inspired to explore new ways of thinking in my role as Membership Coordinator as a result of some of the ideas that have been published.

 

I think it is so great that we have opened up a discussion about important issues affecting international education in such a wonderful venue. The issues about which Helium.com members are writing are so relevant and pressing. I cannot thank Helium.com enough for allowing Teachers Without Borders to partner with them for this contest to help us draw attention to these issues and our cause. We hope that our membership continues to grow as a result of all of that attention. We have so much to offer at Teachers Without Borders, and all that we have to offer is driven by our members who are teachers and strong advocates for education equality. The more members we receive, the more we can accomplish as an organization (TWB), as a profession (teachers) and as a world.

 

And there is so much that still needs to be accomplished. The latest UNESCO statistics on the state of global education are positive and we are seeing many increases in the number of new teachers in developing countries. However, with these new teachers must come better professional development opportunities in order to sustain and support those who have committed themselves to a life of leadership. These statistics also show that there are still some disturbing realities that need to be addressed. For instance, as of 2008, the pupil to teacher ratio in Malawi is 93:1. This raises new questions that need new solutions - how do we support teachers with so many students? Is it possible to support those teachers? What resources can we as individuals or groups provide teachers in such situations? I believe we can all agree that any teacher who agrees to teach 93 students in one classroom is a truly dedicated teacher. They deserve our respect and support.

 

If you haven’t done so already, please visit our website to sign up as a member to show your support and contribute your ideas and expertise. Signing up is free and easy. You have so much to offer and we would be honored to have you as a member.

 

And remember, the contest isn’t over yet! I look forward to reading the many more articles that will trickle (or flood) in as the days move forward. Good luck to everyone!

Michael Moran

 

Check out the Teacher Connections Writing Contest, read the articles and see where you might want to contrbute. If you write for the contest, do consider donating your articles to Teachers Without Borders. And check out their work: You may be interested in learning more about ways you can help support teachers and children around the world.

 

Member Colin Morley tells his Helium journey to professional recognition and rewards

Colin Morley, is a journalist and long-standing Helium writer, who has found new excitement and opportunities with professional recognition and Marketplace assignments targeted to professional journalists. Here’s his Helium success story:

I came to writing through an accident which took me off my feet and out of work for a year. I needed something to fill the time to recovery – and longer term, a way to earn  without the physical work. I had always enjoyed writing, but had never seriously considered writing for a living.

I discovered I needed qualifications; my school certificates were inadequate.  I enrolled in a part-time writing course, but wanted more.  Once I was able to walk and drive again, I got myself some part-time work to help pay the bills and embarked on some serious education. Over the next two years I obtained a journalism certificate.

Disappointment followed.  There was a recession and editors would only entertain university graduates.  Despite hundreds of applications, I secured no job.  I took stock and enrolled in a university course.

Happenstance took over once I graduated.  I took on a temporary job in a Human Resources department, still applying for journalism opportunities.  The company liked me, offered me a long-term contract and allowed me to master some intricacies of information technology and learn how recruitment worked.  After eighteen months, a rival company offered me a better position. I wrote for some papers and magazines periodically.

I spent five years in Human Resources, rising to the lofty position of manager and enjoying a salary higher than I could have achieved in journalism until circumstances dealt me another blow.  The company was in telecommunications. The market collapsed, along with my position.  Enter Helium!

I discovered Helium soon after its launch while surfing for opportunities and spending my redundancy money.  I wrote several articles and started to watch the earnings trickle in.  I discovered if I wrote for competitions I could earn more. I won first prize on one happy occasion.  I even managed to sell a couple of articles via marketplace. 

When I took another job in England, I never completely left Helium behind, but spent less time there.  Now, living and working in France, I have re-discovered a new and improved Helium, where professionals are recognized and rewarded. 

As an accredited professional I recently sold two pieces in Marketplace while earning residual income from my older articles.  Helium pays accurately and promptly; and though I don’t envisage giving up my day job tomorrow, it is probable that I will secure more paid writing work through my presence on Helium, thanks to the opportunities it offers professionals.

Thanks Colin, for sharing your Helium success story, and for providing a longer glimpse of Helium and your own evolution as a writer!

If anyone wants information about writing for Helium and getting your professional credentials recognized, write to Barbara Whitlock, New Member Outreach Manager and Credentialed Professional Program Coordinator, at bwhitlock@helium.com.

 

Don’t miss the Teacher Connections Writing Contest with Teachers Without Borders – starts Nov. 18th

The Teacher Connections Writing Contest — co-sponsored with Helium’s non-profit partner Teachers Without Borders – brings together passionate educators throughout the world to share their knowledge and help students everywhere.

•  What?  The theme focuses on building connections among teachers and across geography. Writers will compete on 30 titles about teaching techniques and international issues and support for teachers.

 

• When? The contest starts noon EST on November 18^th. There will be a 3 week writing window: Nov. 18-Dec. 9. Then one more week of ratings, and winners will be announced on Dec. 16. Payments must be requested by month’s end, and deposits will be accessible in your PayPal account (set up upon registration at Helium.com) by Jan. 10.

 

• Who? Any writer passionate about education, and who can write high quality articles that meet Helium’s Writing Standards, may participate. Professional educators can apply for recognition badges that position them for extra article-earning opportunities at Helium: teachers, university professors, adjunct professors, college instructors, school administrators and school counselors. Homeschoolers, who have a letter of approval from state officials or a private school, can also get recognition badges as educators. Send verification information and your Helium About Me page URL to experts@helium.com.

 

• How? If you are new to Helium.com, register on the site and set up your writer profile page (called your About Me page). Be sure to showcase your professional background and areas of writing expertise for publishers when you create your bio. Add your photo to complete. We’ve found that writers with complete and professional bio pages get selected by publishers 75% more often. Then just go to the contest page on noon EST on Nov. 18 to see the titles and to start submitting.

 

• Why? Help teachers the world over and support the work of Teachers Without Borders. You can further support Teachers Without Borders by donating ad revenues on your Helium articles to their cause. Just click the “donate” button and choose Teachers Without Borders’ non-profit listing on the drop down menu, when you submit each article. You can also share in the $400 cash prizes, if you place well in the contest.

 

Share the Teacher Connections Writing Contest with educators you know, and let them know of other opportunities for educators at Helium.com.

 

If you’re new to Helium, need help or more information, my inbox is always open: bwhitlock@helium.com.

 

Why professional journalists are choosing Helium for added freelance income

Meet L. Woodrow Ross, a professional journalist and contributor to Helium.com. Ross writes about his experience freelancing at Helium.com. As an established journalist, with a rich background in print journalism, Larry shares insights for professional writers who are tapping into the vast opportunities offered at Helium.

As a professional journalist, you might question what participation in a group such as Helium would contribute to your success.  You may have worked hard and achieved some level of success and feel that Helium is for “amateurs” only.  Nothing could be farther from the truth!

 Helium offers the opportunity to polish your craft.  Your articles are rated by your peers, so you get immediate feedback on the acceptance level.  In addition, you have an opportunity to supplement earnings for your writing.  By meeting certain criteria, you will earn for each article you write.  Publishers post writing topics, and you can earn significant dollars for your articles selected in Marketplace.  This also is a barometer of the quality of your writing as more publishers select your articles for publication. To be chosen for publication over many fellow writers is very gratifying as well as profitable.

The site has a place for biographical information, and allows the writer to reach a wide range of readers and increase their readership.  The wide range of topics will allow you to hone in on subjects that fit your qualifications, but also stimulate you to branch into new “genres” and expand your capabilities.

 On a personal note, my wife was cynical when I told her I was planning to join Helium and write articles to be posted on their site.  The first couple of months were uneventful, and then the dollars began to accumulate.  Needless to say, she has a new opinion of Helium.

 You will find Helium to be very professional in their dealings with writers.  They are punctual in payment and honorable in the way they conduct the business end of the organization.

On the flip side, don’t expect a free ride.  If your writing is sub-par, it will show up in ratings, or the site stewards will provide feedback to let you know where the problems exist.  They want to see you succeed, but you have to be willing to work in order to earn at a reasonable level.

 If you are looking for a way to improve your writing, expand your horizons and earn some extra dollars, you couldn’t find a better place to start than Helium.

 L. Woodrow Ross

 Ross is a newspaper columnist/photographer, writing a weekly outdoor column for the Anderson Independent Mail.  He is a contributor to outdoor magazines, including South Carolina Sportsman and maintains a blog for the Greenville News.  He lives in Travelers Rest, SC, with his lovely wife Margaret.  

If you are interested in learning more about opportunities at Helium, email Barbara Whitlock, New Member Outreach Manager, at bwhitlock@helium.com.