Many hours have been spent – on the boards, emails, etc – talking about earnings. Upfront payments, empty title bonuses, and other one time payments are often focused on as a quick way to earn money. Not enough time is really spent on revenue earnings and how valuable they can be.
The likely reason that many discount these earnings is that they are low – for some people. But others make lots of money from revenue earnings. What sets these people apart? What makes one have more revenue earnings? Simple: page views.
This is an oversimplification and not a “canonical” explanation of how revenue earnings work. However, the basics are as follow:
- Each time a page is viewed on Helium some number of ads are displayed.
- Helium earns a certain amount of revenue for “ad impressions” – i.e. someone has seen the ad.
- Helium earns a much higher amount of revenue for “ad clicks” – i.e. when someone clicks on the ad.
- #1 and #2 are discounted somewhat by the ad servers with regards to abuse – i.e. don’t bother refreshing your articles over and over and clicking on ads to make more money. The ad networks are smart to this, as well as Helium, and you could have your account terminated for abuse.
- Helium uses some algorithm to determine the value of a page – i.e. how many times it was viewed versus other pages – to determine what part of the incoming revenue should be shared with that page. I say page and not writer because a channel page might have contributions from a dozen writers, for example.
- Revenue earnings are assigned to articles based upon #1 and #2.
So, using the above, it’s easy to see that in order to increase one’s earnings one must increase the number of times one’s page (i.e. article, bio, article snippet, etc) is viewed. The more page views, the more ad impressions. The more ad impressions, the more ad clicks. The more of both, the more Helium’s revenue is associated with your contribution and rewarded as such.
But – doesn’t Helium control how many page views you get? Yes and no. SEO has two facets – internal and external.
- Internal SEO is the construction of site architecture that will enable easy browsing (so all content is found and indexed), associate certain site coined keywords with the content (channel names, article titles), and linking strategy (designing a browse strategy that implies internal importance of pages – i.e. article pages are more important than list or channel pages).
- External SEO is the collecting of links (specifically deep links – links to specific pages [article] versus general pages [home page / channel page]) pointing to the site (Helium) to assign keywords (anchor text [i.e. what text is actually contained in the link, typically blue and underlined]) and importance (the number of inbound links to a page is commonly accepted as one of the most important factors in defining it’s importance – both to keywords and in general).
Helium has designed – and continues to modify – site architecture in order to maximize the gain for internal SEO. However, no matter how much we market – by getting partners to link to us, linking from our own blogs/sites, etc – the sheer numbers of links we can generate is dwarfed by even a token effort from the community.
What do I mean? Say every employee of Helium (around 30-35) is a power link creator and creates 100 inbound links to Helium (setting aside what kind of links for a second). Now take the active writers on Helium – commonly quoted as 10K but we’ll be conservative and say 5K. Say each of them makes a token effort to get 5 inbound links to Helium.
- Employees: 35 x 100 = 3500 links
- Community: 5000 x 5 = 25000 links
Or, in other words, by even a token effort from community members to link their signatures from boards they post in, their blog sidebars, mentioning specific links in board / blog posts, or simply saving links to social networking sites (typically nofollowed, yes, however likely to still add value and keywords) the community can produce 7x what Helium could produce with a fraction of the effort.
“But Eric, you’re always telling us to craft keyword rich articles and titles.” Yes I am. And it’s important. But equally or more important is getting inbound links to your articles – the more links and, specifically, the more quality links (from trusted sites) you get, the better off you’ll do.
Let me use an example. I believe I can be safe in assuming that most people have heard of Wikipedia. Wikipedia is great for pop culture information – who the guy third from the left is on the Jedi Council in Episode 1 – however it’s not always the best for factual information – which is why many high schools and universities prohibit or limit it’s use as a resource for papers. Yet if you do a search for anything on the web you stand a good chance of seeing a Wikipedia link in the top 10 search results. Why? Massive amounts of inbound links.
A big thing with SEO – and when I say SEO for Helium, I really mean Google as you can pretty much count out any other search engine at this time – is trust. Google assigns rankings for keywords based upon the amount of trust it has in a page. While some amount of trust is earned by internal SEO the vast majority of it comes from inbound links. Which makes sense. If a page or domain has a large number of inbound links what it basically means is that other sites see value in the content (i.e. they trust it) and use it as a resource. In spidering sites, Google sees this and assigns trust to that domain or page. That value is then used to assign ranking order for search results.
In other words the single most important factor to increase your page views and your earnings for an article is the number of links to it from other sources.
Many of you spend hours researching for your article. Leapfrogging it multiple times. Proofreading it. Crafting your prose into a well thought out article. How much time do you spend getting links to it? Save it to your Delicious. Share it on your Facebook. Use it as a source in other articles, in blog posts, or in a board post. I’ve done this many times where I’ll discuss something in a post or on the boards and link to something else I created so if someone doesn’t know what it means (“link juice” is one I commonly do) or wants to learn more, they can click through and find out more.
Even if the links don’t specifically pass link juice – like Facebook – they can still go viral – meaning people will pass on the links and share it. Have you ever seen the memes – those funny links/videos people share on Facebook or their blog? How do you think that starts? Someone makes something interesting and shares it with their friends. Some part of their friends find it funny/interesting and share it with their friends. And so on, and so forth.
So I challenge you to work the SEO angle. Set aside a part of your Helium time – that time which you use to write, leapfrog, rate, edit, etc – for marketing your articles. Set a goal – for every article you write get 3 inbound links to it or others in your portfolio. Be mindful of opportunities – “Interesting board post about issues with litter training your cat. I had some luck with some methods you didn’t try.” where “some methods you didn’t try” is a link to your article. Etc.
If you have a portfolio of articles that’s larger than 100 you’re sitting on a potential revenue source. Think about your 10 best earning articles – now what if you could earn 10x on just those? Where would you be? Not marketing your articles is akin to making amazing artwork and then sitting in front of your house selling it off a table. Sure, some people will stumble by and you might sell a few. But imagine if you put up signs in your neighborhood. Or ran an ad in the paper. Or got mentioned on tv. Inbound links are just another form of advertising. You’re only hurting yourself by not taking advantage of it.
I covered a lot of information and went a lot longer than I had originally planned. I hope I helped you to better understand the opportunities that exist for you to maximize your income. I hope you take my advice to heart and 3 months from now, I hear from you about how your revenue earnings have gone up 3x, 5x or even 10x.