by Penne Cole

Created on: June 04, 2010

Helium has many earning opportunities, from the popular marketplace to upfront payments and stock content. However, the only way to generate passive income on Helium is through ad revenue. To maximize your ad revenue, you will need to drive as much traffic to your articles as possible and one of the best ways to do this is to promote your articles in Twitter.

Promoting your articles in Twitter can be a bit of a pain, particularly as there are so many steps involved. From getting your article URL to shortening the link and posting it in Twitter to writing a catchy keyword filled blurb to go with it, to scheduling your tweets so that you have a constant presence on Twitter, the process can get pretty tedious after a while. The returns from tweeting the links to your articles are enormous so you should definitely be promoting your work in Twitter. However, if you get lazy, you can always use your RSS feed from Helium to stand in for a while.

The link to your RSS feed is located in your Helium profile. This can be reached by clicking on the “Edit About Me” tab in the left column of your My Helium page or going to www.helium.com/users/xxxxxx where the x-es are your Helium ID. For example, my Helium profile page can be found at www.helium.com/users/526630. Next, click on the “Articles” tab and click on the “RSS feed” link just below the “+ More bio information” link. The URL of the page that opens is your RSS feed URL.

You can use several programs to automatically tweet new articles in your RSS feed to Twitter but my program of choice is Hootsuite, simply because I’m already using it to monitor the tweets from my followers and monitor tweets that mention me. In Hootsuite, go to the “Launch” button at the bottom left corner of the webpage, then click on “Settings” and “RSS/Atom.” This will open the RSS/Atom tab. To add a new feed, simply click on the “Add New Feed” button at the top right corner of the page, then enter your feed URL in the box provided.

You can choose how often Hootsuite should check the feed URL for updates and how many new posts to tweet each time it finds one. For example, if you go with the default of 24 hours and 01 post each time, Hootsuite will only check for updates once a day and post only one link to new articles each time, regardless if you have written ten articles that day. To make sure Hootsuite tweets all your new articles, you should choose the shortest time period (every hour in Hootsuite) and the most tweets each time (five at a time). You can also choose to append text to each tweet, for example “New article.”

One of the advantages of using Hootsuite is that you can choose several networks to post your updates to. Aside from Twitter, you can also choose to post your links to your Facebook profile as well as your Facebook fan pages, to ping.fm, LinkedIn, WordPress, MySpace and FourSquare. With this simple setup process, you will be able to automatically propagate links to your new articles across several social media network – instant promotion and higher hits on your articles!

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