by Ruth Belena

Created on: October 03, 2009

Accomplishing a goal to write 20 articles in a day is possible at Helium, for an experienced article writer. If you want to attempt to do this as a personal writing challenge, there are a few important points to consider, and some careful planning to be done, ahead of your task.

- Preparing to write your articles

You will need to make, in advance of your writing, a list of titles to which you will write your articles. Otherwise too much time will be taken up with searching for suitable topics, particularly if you want to write to some empty titles that will qualify for an extra bonus payment.

Helium articles need to be factually correct. Unless you are writing opinion pieces, taking part in debates or writing personal recollections, you will need to find original source material to back up your article. All research should be done in advance so you can focus on writing your 20 articles in one day.

Creating a brief outline for each title in advance will cut down on actual writing time. An article outline provides you with a list of points to cover, your source references, and a clear idea of the approach to take to each topic.

- Writing and publishing your articles at Helium

Each article should be written first by typing into a document using Notepad, Microsoft Word, Google Docs or any sort of word processing program. If you attempt to type each article directly into the box on the Helium website, rather than pasting in a completed article, you risk losing a whole article if there is a slight glitch when you click the submit button.

* Even if you save a copy, before submitting an article online, you are not publishing completed articles if you publish an initial draft, without taking time to make corrections and improve what you have written.

When you write all your articles very quickly you can save them on a document and then proofread, spellcheck and edit each one later, before you submit to Helium. This allows you to focus on the task of writing the first draft of all 20 articles, within a given time. The process of producing a final draft of each article will take up additional time, but it is necessary to allow time for fact checking, spellchecking, reviewing and revising.

* Writing is only part of the process. You will need to do a final spellcheck, even if you know you can spell correctly. Spellchecking can highlight any typing errors missed in proofreading the text.

You should also preview each article before you publish it at Helium. Using the preview button allows you to see any errors in presentation, such as solid blocks of text or incorrect spacing between paragraphs. The preview also allows you to check any live links, if you have embedded these into your articles.

* When pasting from a Word document you need to remember to click the "Paste from Word" symbol at the top of the box, otherwise be sure to paste in plain unformatted text.

If you write and publish fewer articles in one day, you will succeed in increasing your portfolio of articles at Helium. You can then plan another marathon writing session for a later date. Having had some useful practical experience, you could find it gets easier to write more articles in a day at Helium.

If you are inspired to write 20 articles of more than 400 words, and are willing to spend less than half an hour writing each article, you could successfully complete your own writing challenge, provided you spend some time in advance on research and planning, and you allow sufficient time for publishing each article at Helium.

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