What are zones?

Dawn Goossen, M.A.

Hi Dawn,

Thanks for posting your questions here. This is a great place to have your questions answered as well as see previous member's questions answered.

I've answered your questions below and put them under yours which I have placed in bold. 

I started a group and I see Google ads on the side. If I started a group and people join do I get any credit towards payments for those hits?

No, these advertisements are included on the page and help our groups, Zones and other content types to continue. Since there is no official and unique content on these pages such as an article, members are not given payment.

Also for my published articles is there a way to see if they have been read by anyone?

Your published articles will earn ad share anytime they are viewed. You can see if they are viewed by watching them increase in earnings. With Zones, however you can see which URL the person came from and any of the URLS they selected while viewing your Zone. This is visible in the "Stats" section of your Zone in edit mode.

How do I know when I am close to receiving a payment?

You will know you're close to receiving payment because your "Earnings and Payments" page will reach the $25 payout amount. We pay twice a month, so once you've built up a strong enough base of earning content you can request payments up to twice a month.

What is the average amount of hits per article?

Every article is different. There is really no average amount of hits per article.

If I forgot to fill in the key words when submitting an article will that affect my outcome?

I am quite confused here. Do you mean that you forgot to add in keywords to a title when suggesting or did you forget to add it into a Zone? While this is not a major issue, it does cause you to lose quite a bit of your article's SEO value. If you'd like to fix this, you can write to content@helium.com and provide them with yoru User ID and the article ID for which you'd like to include the keywords to.

What are zones?

Zones are comprehensive pages that Helium members create as one-stop overviews of a topic. You can add your own text and images to a Zone and also add content from Helium, YouTube, Flicker, Google Maps, weather-forecasting sites, polls and charts, and a wide variety of other web sources.

Hope this helps,

Sarah