by Gordon Hamilton

Created on: March 15, 2009

There are a great many websites which accept writers from around the globe but which will only pay writers from the United States of America. Some of these sites, to be fair, are extremely upfront about this and do not even allow writers from outwith the United States to sign up with them but there are those which, although household names in the online writing game, only advise non-US writers that they will not be paid for their work after it is too late and the writer has already submitted in some cases a considerable amount of work to the site. Yes, it is always advisable to read the small print in its, "War and peace," entiretybut how many of us actually do? Some of the sites which international writers should avoid in this respect include eHow and Gather - which are fairly up-front about not paying non-US writers - and Associated Content, which is anything but.

There are equally a number of sites, however, which do pay writers from around the globe, provided that of course that person's country does facilitate payment vehicles such as PayPal. Probably the principal site which falls in to this category is Helium, the site upon which you are presently reading this article. Helium is constantly developing new ways in which its writers may earn money by writing articles either for inclusion on the site and/or as submissions to its many contests, or by submitting articles to the external publishers which advertise upon Helium for same. Writers are paid by PayPal and are paid on equal terms in whichever country they happen to reside.

Other article writing sites which pay international writers are such as Bukisa and ReviewStream. These sites however pay only upon page views in the case of Bukisa and on page views but also upon acceptance of a very lengthy and sometimes ill-defined list of criteria in the case of ReviewStream. International payments, yes; reliability of payment s in comparison with Helium, no.

There is another site which pays international writers for writing what could loosely be described as articles. Squidoo is a site upon which writers build essentially a series of small websites as opposed to writing articles but if we examine the site, we can often see that each of these websites consist of blocks of text - among many other things - each of which in their own right could be defined as a short article.

I suppose the overall message here is that we should take the time to read the small print before getting involved with any writing site or anything similar in our lives, regardless of which country we happen to reside, if we do not want to be the victim of a nasty surprise perhaps some way down the line.

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