by Gary Allen

Created on: February 08, 2009

Absolutely not! If Helium were to allow affiliate links into the body of articles, it will only be a matter of time before the spam monsters come running like a pack of dogs with inside information about the butcher's trash day.

Link articles would completely change the Helium experience. The writing qualities on this site ranges from writers that are quite good, to those of us that are trying to learn how to string together enough words to complete a sentence. When a group of people work toward the same goal, such as the writers at Helium, they have a tendency to push each other in achieving a certain level of competence. When new writers arrive at the site, their first efforts can sometimes not reflect the time, effort or research that it can take to write a quality article. If their initial work is not rated high by their peers, they begin to understand that some thought and effort must be put forth in order to have their work accepted by the other participants.

The process of work can then begin to take hold. As the writer's work starts getting better, the level of their articles starts to rise. Most people will react to the positive influence and continue to spend more time improving the quality of their articles.

If the focus shifts to how well someone can write ad-copy for a widget that is offered for sale, then Helium becomes a very different workshop. It will be one more website filled with articles that scream "click here." Whether it is ad-copy or merely an article designed to bounce a person to the ad-copy, it is not the type of work we do here.

Writing product reviews solely for the purpose of inserting links falls under the category of disguised ad-copy. I understand the current form of article marketing just fine: Write a compelling article that interest the consumer just enough to get them to "click here." The interesting point about this style of marketing is that the writer is trying to disguise the fact that is nothing more than an advertisement. As if the fact, that you took them to another site for the actual selling of the whiz bang, super toy , absolves the writer of trying to sell something. Guess what, there is a reason that the print magazines moved toward disclosure on what is a advertisement. Everyone has probably seen the word printed in red letters at the top of the page.

Ad copy is a separate set of writing skills. The only way it can be rated is by how much product is sold. The only person with that information is the marketer. Ergo, the community at large doesn't have the tools to rate the piece and it is a complete waste of the communities time to try and rate it. If Helium would like to include ad writers into the group, perhaps they could make a different site dedicated solely to the purpose of writing advertisements. I am sure those professionals would like the same type of input from their peers that we at Helium currently enjoy. The main problem with allowing links into the main group, is the fact that people will just start dumping their trash here.

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