by Rachelle de Bretagne

Created on: July 10, 2010

Writing at Helium offers writers the opportunity of a lifetime. Many writers make the mistake of not seeing the potential of Helium as a platform for their written work, which can be used as a professional tool or reference guide used to launch their writing career. The shame of it is that by missing out on the opportunity by making two fundamental mistakes, writers lose their credibility and also a chance at making money from unexpected sources. These two fundamental mistakes can bite back and indeed are explained in detail below.

Getting up close and personal.

One of the most fundamental mistakes people make is writing in first person. What writers who do this forget is that what they are writing is about the subject. The least important person in a professionally written article is themselves. The reason this is so is because by doing so, not only are they standing a chance of exposing their lives worldwide to an audience who may not receive it well, but they are denying themselves a chance of selling their work to publishers who are constantly on the lookout for talented work to place on their websites. Publishers scour the website for such articles as meet their criteria, and buy this content as stock content, putting extra money into the writer's account.

By writing in first person, writers take away much of the professionalism of an article, and may regret the decision to use first person in the future. Let's show an example of the kind of thing a writer may regret writing. Going through a divorce, the writer is spurred into writing emotionally charged content on how they feel about their own divorce situation. In years to come, the article will have little value, but may actually be perceived as a picture of how they normally feel. Imagine the case scenario when they make a new relationship. A simple Google search of their name will reveal what they said. The difference between writing a personal account based on emotions and a factual knowledge article is that knowledge articles don't bite back or live to be skeletons in a writer's closet, whereas the personal emotional instability of the writer at the time of writing remains on the website, and cannot be taken back.

One may argue that a writer can leapfrog their article and make it more professional, although by the time they do, they have often gotten into the habit of writing personal articles and may even have hundreds of articles of this nature which they cannot remove because they have given

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