Writing on Helium for Money or Personal Satisfaction?

Posted on: July 1st, 2009 By: Shen-Li

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When I first signed up for Helium, the intention was to generate another source of income through writing. Unfortunately, it soon became evident that I was not going to make much of an income out of writing on Helium unless I had hundreds of articles on the site. In short, I got lazy, I hardly wrote any articles and two years later I only have 19 articles to show for myself.

Recently, I started a project to increase the number of articles I have on Helium to determine just how effective Helium is for generating an income. Unfortunately, I didn’t get very far with it. My plan to write more articles was set in motion over a month ago and, to date, I’ve only added eight new articles. To further the disappointment, none of the articles I’ve added has earned even one cent.

It seemed almost like a purposeless exercise until I edited an article for resubmission and discovered that my article went straight to the number one position. Inspired, I wrote a few more articles in non-competing categories to add to my collection and eventually got brave enough to attempt the more challenging categories.

Another three more articles made it to number one – I’m talking number one out of twenty over articles, not number one out of one or even two (well, they were number one at the time I wrote this blog post).

The satisfaction of seeing my article at the top of the list has only fueled my desire to write more for Helium, irregardless of the financial rewards. I guess my desire to write stems from more than just the desire to generate some extra pocket money. There truly is some personal satisfaction derived from excelling in the craft above and beyond being paid for it.

Although I’ve always known this deep down inside from the fact that I would happily continue blogging with no financial rewards (for indeed that was initially what I did do when I started my first blog), the problem with blogging is that there is no way to gauge just how good your writing really is.

Sure, the number of loyal readers can be one way to measure the popularity of your blog, but blog readership is more a matter of successful marketing with quality writing being secondary. Your blog could be one of the best blogs in terms of quality writing and you could still have very few readers if your blog marketing efforts are poor. Similarly, a poorly written blog with useful content and excellent marketing could have a blog readership in the thousands. Blog readership doesn’t really tell you how good you are as a writer. It just tells you how interesting your writing content is and how well you market your blog.

The main benefit of writing on Helium is the ability to see how well your articles rate against other similar articles which offers some guide to how well you fare as a writer as opposed to being a marketer with interesting information to share.