by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: February 06, 2009

As someone who earns his full time living writing and creating sites online, it is natural that my three favourite websites be the three which afford me the greatest revenue generating potential. I have over what is now a considerable period of time experimented with a great many sites around the Web but have absolutely no hesitation in naming the following three as by far the best of an extremely varied collection in this respect.

1) Helium

Helium is the website upon which you are reading this article. It is a site which affords the writer to write articles to a huge variety of genres and sub-genres. It offers payment for said articles in several distinct ways and it is far from being beyond the realms of possibility that the truly dedicated and talented article writer could in fact earn his or her entire living from this one site.

When we sign in to Helium, we will see a list of categories on the left of the home page to which it is possible to write. Each of these categories has a number of sub-categories, so it is worthwhile doing a bit of exploring in the first instance. Subsequently, we can write our article to a specific title and it will be rated by our fellow Helium members through Helium's unique rating system. The better it performs, the more likely we are to accrue advertising revenue.

It is also possible on Helium for the productive writer to accrue writing stars for his or her writing. This is based on both the number of articles written and their quality as determined by the rating process. One rating star entitles us to a one-off $0.50 payment per article written while five rating stars entitles us to $2.50. There are some few categories of writing which do not qualify for such payments but they are clearly posted on the site.

Helium also offers weekly competitions for prizes of up to $60.00 and features requests from external publishers for articles on a fixed topic for a fixed price. Writers write to these titles in the hope that their article be chosen and a payment of sometimes in excess of $200.00 obtained.

2) Squidoo

A Web 2.0 site of some distinction, Squidoo is probably the most versatile site I have ever come across. The idea on Squidoo is to build first one page - or lens - and then ever more of them on very specific subjects. We build said lenses with a series of specially constructed modules, just like building bricks for a house, and sell products on our lenses for commissions through such as Amazon and eBay. We also have the possibility of participating in Squidoo's AdSense revenue sharing each month depending upon the success and internal league table ranking of each lens. The revenue potential on Squidoo is therefore more vague than on Helium but is without question unlimited if we can just find the correct subject and approach it in the correct way.

3) Hub Pages

Very similar to Squidoo in a lot of ways, Hub Pages also allows us to build pages with a series of building blocks, called capsules. There are not nearly so many of them as on Squidoo and they are not as widely functional but Hub Pages allows us to include our Google AdSense ID on the site for pay per click revenue and our own Amazon and eBay affiliate codes for direct sales commissions.

These three sites have therefore become my favourite three on the Web by a long, long way. Why not try them out for yourself?

Learn more about this author, Gordon Hamilton.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.