by C.V.Rajan

Created on: January 23, 2010

Using Facebook, Orkut, Twitter or any such social media sites to leverage your earnings from your articles at Helium (or any such sites) involves a lot dedication and sustained effort.

No tangible benefit will be obtained unless you take lots of pains to “socialize”; it means making lots and lots of friends, preferably in thousands. You have to systematically post links to your Helium articles from your “wall” (your publicly visible opening page) with catchy introductions which will enthuse some of the droppers-by to click the link and read your articles.

Sites like Helium and AssociatedContent pay you page-view pennies based on the number of readers who visit your articles. While Helium does not openly declare “how many pennies for how many page-views”, we can safely assume that it could be somewhere in the range of about $1.5 for 1000 page-views, which AC is offering.

Assuming without bothering about any specific rhyme or logic that you will be content at getting somewhere around $3 per article per month through your page views on each of about 10 articles you post in a month, it requires (3/1.5 multiplied by 1000 multiplied by 10) 20,000 readers from the internet. Assuming once again that about one third of your readers end up in your articles from search engines or from any other web-links, you have to get about 13,300 visitors from Facebook alone to read your articles!

Now you can get an idea of what a hopeless proposition it is to rely on social media to dream of any substantial earnings from your Helium articles!

Let us see what is practical. Assume that you have managed to get about 600 friends through Facebook. Assume that a fourth of them will be gracious enough to read all your articles regularly (which itself could be an over-optimistic figure). This means that in a month about 150 of your Facebook friends will read all your 10 articles and thus give you a page visit count of 1500 per month that can give you about $1.5 additional income!

It’s purely up to you to decide whether it’s all worth the effort and promotion. If you enjoy your time spent at Facebook otherwise and you don’t mind spending some extra time there in posting your articles, its fine.

But there is something more. Social media sites thrive only on “I scratch your back and you scratch mine” basis. If you have to get visitors to your articles, you have to reciprocate the gesture to your other friends too. This means, you have to visit their blogs, see their photo albums, offer comments to their posts and so on, so that they will feel obligated to reciprocate. Not otherwise! Again if you really have the time and enjoy doing all these, there is no problem. But at some time or other a question may linger in your mind – is it all worth the effort?

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