by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: January 27, 2009

I have a full time writing job. I write what I want, when I want and for whom I want. I don't get involved with any of those sites which encourage bidding for articles yet I make a good and sustainable living out of my writing, even though the hours can be a bit long at times!

How?

I do it in several ways and the first is by writing for Helium, the site upon which you are reading this article. Helium offers writers of all abilities and from all backgrounds the chance to write to any one of thousands of subjects posted on its pages, or alternatively to suggest to the editors a subject upon which they would wish to write. In return, royalties are paid the writer from advertising revenue received.

The articles a writer posts to a subject on Helium are thereafter rated anonymously by his or her peers against other articles posted to the same subject. In this way, the quality writer rises up the ranking table for that subject and when this has been achieved to various certain degrees, writing stars are awarded. Possession of writing stars earns a writer payment for each article written in the previous month to qualifying categories, which are numerous, provided that they have also performed a modest number of rates on the writing works of others.

Helium also hosts regular writing competitions on nominated subjects, in which writers familiar with the subject compete for cash prizes. There is also the "Marketplace," where publishers post titles to which they are seeking a quality article. Writers submit their work over a period of usually a few days and the publisher selects or doesn't as desired. Payment in this area can be quite lucrative at times.

When we have written our Helium articles, it is then a good idea to promote them around the web, on such as our blog or any other Web 2.0 sites which we utilise. I have several blogs with Blogger but my other main sites are Squidoo and Hub Pages. These sites allow writers to build an online presence in the form of pages which are comprised of a series of modules. Text modules are obviously important as they are those which contain the content of whatever message we may wish to get across but there are a series of potentially very lucrative modules, such as Amazon and eBay, through which we can sell items on our sites for commission.

We can have as many Squidoo and Hub Pages as we desire. It is always a good idea to build them on a subject which is as specific as possible in order to target a particular "niche" in the market. By this, I mean that if we were to build a site on "Recipes," we would have far less chance of attracting traffic than if we built one on "Great Chicken Noodle Recipes." The reason is simply that the volume of searches on "recipes" far outweighs that on "great chicken noodle recipes." Squidoo also has a revenue pot which it shares with its writers on a monthly basis, tiered depending on the level of success of the pages, while Hub Pages allows the writer to add their own Google AdSense affiliate ID.

Links to our Helium pages and to and from our Squidoo and Hub Pages are very important. Link to relevant Helium items from the other two sites. Link to everything from your blog. Come up with other innovative ways of obtaining links and remember to keep your Squidoo and Hub Pages fresh with quality new content on a regular basis.

This is a very simplistic overview of all that I get involved in online but I hope that you can see the potential in the system and decide to make it work for you.

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