by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: February 05, 2009   Last Updated: February 12, 2009

Finding the right sites to write to was a very slow and difficult process for me when I first started working on the Internet. I quickly learned that there were a great many scams going on in the big wide virtual world but determining which sites did and did not fall in to this category was not so easy. A couple of years down the line, I have around half a dozen sites to which I write regularly and do receive the promised payment. I will therefore cover a few of them here in greater detail.

The site which you are presently viewing, Helium, is probably the best I use in terms of receiving payment. Payment can be requested right up to the 4th of each month for payment on the 10th of that month, provided that the writers earnings are at least $25. Articles written up to and including the 24th of each month, which are liable for up-front payments through the Helium star rating system, are also paid on the same date. This makes Helium not only a very reliable paying site but the one which pays out quickest on accrued earnings.

Hub Pages is a very different prospect in that it does not provide direct payment. It does, however, allow the writer to add their own Google AdSense ID to their pages in order to accrue pay per click revenue and provides some very powerful and user friendly tools for the writer to sell Amazon and eBay products through his or her own private affiliate account with these respective online giants.

Squidoo offers direct payment in the form of pooled Google revenue each month on a tiered system depending upon the performance of your sites. This is definitely the most versatile site to which a writer can subscribe as there are so many fantastic money making tools as well as the option to write to around virtually any subject under the sun. It is possible for the writer to use their own Amazon or eBay affiliate accounts but much simpler to use the tools provided for selling items in this way and splitting which is far higher revenue percentages with the site. Payment is made a month in arrears, so for example, revenue generated in January is paid at the beginning of March.

Today is a blogging site which pays its writers both per post and upon the number of visits their blog receives. Payment is made at the rate of $1 per 100 word post per day for the first thirty days of the blog's existence and is thereafter reviewed and payment amended, up or down, dependant upon the blog's individual performance.

Gather and Associated Content are two further sites which do offer the writer options for earning reasonable revenue - but only if they are resident in the United States! Associated Content in particular is not very forthcoming about advising overseas writers of this fact at the time of sign-up and I know of two people who spent a lot of effort writing to this site only to discover much further down the line that they did not qualify for payment at the enhanced rate and only accrued a mere few cents of page view revenue.

The first four are therefore from my experience by far the best paying sites I have encountered in my extensive experience online and ones which I would heartily recommend to anyone.

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