The official blog of Helium.com

So you’re surfing the web and stumble upon this “Helium” thing. And it looks pretty cool. Lots of people are writing on it, making money and having fun. So you join. And you get a bunch of links to new user guides, and writing areas, and it’s all a little overwhelming. So you sit there and ask… what now?

Well I’m here to help.

For the most part, people join Helium because they want to write – after all everything else like rating and making money all require that first off you write. But where do you start? How do you find some title to write on? Well, the title finder is a good place to start:

Here you can search through all our titles for what interests you. But man, that’s a lot of options… what are they all for? Well, first you need to pick the terms you’re going to search for:

You have 3 options. You can search that the title has all of certain words, for an exact phrase, or with at least one of a subset of words. You can do some pretty advanced stuff with them, which Tracy explains here.

Then, there’s the “sort by”:

What does this do? It allows you to sort the results you’re going to get anyway you want. Maybe you want to see the titles with the most views (and likely the highest earners). Perhaps you want to find a newer title or one with fewer articles – so you can get your view in early. Or maybe you just want to sort by what is most relevant to your search terms. Just pick the one that applies to you.

You can also narrow your search. Maybe you want to write only about stuff that’s in the Web Design or Business channel? Well, you can do that by using the channel selector:

Here you can go from broad – like anything in “Computers & Technology” – to narrow – like anything in “Internet” or even just “Web Design.” Depending on your title you may want to narrow your focus. Like if you want to write about iPods – do you want to write about picking the right one, how they work, or the difference between models? Narrowing by channel can focus the results you get back.

Ok, now you’ve narrowed your search, selected how you want to search, put in the terms you want to search for at the top and have clicked “Search”, now, if you’ve done it right, you should see a results page looking something like this:

Here it lists all the titles that matched, highlighting the terms you searched for. If you got a lot of results, you can also resort them based upon the criteria mentioned before.

So now you look through and find one you like, click on it and see something like this:

That little red arrow denotes our “write now” icon. All over the site you can find these icons denoting places where you can immediately write on a title you find interesting. Once you click that, you’ll be taken to our write form which looks like this:

We don’t currently have an auto-save feature, so ideally you should write your article in an outside editor like Word or Notepad, and then copy and paste that in here – that way you have a local copy saved just in case. Not sure about the rules and standards for Helium are, or anything else you need to know? Just hover your mouse over that little “tips” box in the top right and you’ll see some… well… tips:

Ok, so you’ve written your article in Notepad, saved it and copied it and pasted into the form. Now you scroll down and you see this:

… search phrase? What is that? Well, we have some text there and you can even get some more tips by hovering over the box there:

Ah, well that helps. Basically these are terms you think users searching the web might use to find your article. For example if you’re writing about “Bringing home a new puppy” you might put “puppy, puppy chow, dog toys, crate training.” You wouldn’t put “britney spears, monkeys, chuck norris.” Get it?

Whew, that’s done, now you scroll down and… wait, there’s more?:

Don’t panic. That’s just our publish box. Here you can donate your article to a charity if you’re feeling charitable. You also must agree to the writer’s agreement – basically that it’s your own work and not offensive. Then you click publish.

Wow, you got your first article done! Sweet! Now it directs you to this:

Whoa.. what.. is.. that?  Again – don’t panic.  It’s just rating.  Remember back when you were reading articles you saw things like “3 of 24″ or “1 of 394″?  Rating is how we get those rankings.  Users just like yourself provide input which we then use to calculate ratings.  Titles come up for rating based upon recent changes to the title, what channels you’ve written to and any marketplace or contests that may be coming due.

You earn based upon having at least one rating star and earn bonuses based upon how many writing stars you have – among other things.  Well, how can you tell how many stars you have or how close you are to getting more?  Simple, just check your “My Helium” page and you should see something like this in the top right:

As you can see, while this user is a good writer – with 2 stars including a bonus star for having a writing score that’s 85% or better – they are very bad and have not been rating.  Rating helps the whole community, which is why it’s required to have 1 rating star to earn.

Well that’s pretty much it.  Wait, didn’t I say something about marketplace and contests?  I bet you’re curious about those huh?  Ok – marketplace.  Marketplace is where publishers post titles they’re willing to buy content on.  Each has a purchase price and certain guidelines to follow:

From here you can see what titles are currently posted, how many days are left before the title closes, how many people have written to the title, the payment the publisher is offering and you can sort by channel if you want to only wrote on titles in certain areas.  You can click the little “show assignment guidelines” to see what criteria the publisher is looking for:

Awesome!  Now, what are contests?  Contests are things Helium does – basically we find titles that we may want more content on and offer bonus money to you to write in those.  They are highly competitive but many users have a lot of fun competing to see how can finish first:

Here you see we’re offering 5 contests.  If you click on one of the contests, you’re taken to the contest page where you can see the current standings and what titles you can write to – as well as any specific rules for the contest:

I think that’s finally it.  Start writing, start rating, and, most importantly, start having some fun!