by Max Lehmann

Created on: July 28, 2010

Helium, like many successful websites, hinges on its community for success and draws a good deal of revenue from advertising as a result. As many a blogger has discovered, it is easy to throw together some content and cover it in advertising, but without an audience the advertising is to no avail. Helium has other avenues for gaining income, but the most visible is this omniscient advertising and a shrewd method of optimising content for search engines.

Having gained a foothold in a crowded market in 2006, Helium started life as a site for sharing knowledge in the form of questions and answers, the answers being voted up or down by the burgeoning community. As time has passed, bringing us to 2010 as I write, the focus has shifted and that community has grown and altered due to greater emphasis being placed on writing and expanded content rather than the answers it first sought from its users. Further, the interaction between contributors has shifted across to specialised areas of the site in the form of forums, while the basic content involves less visible interaction between members as each article exists as a piece of stand-alone content. That interaction still exists as the users are encouraged to continue rating their peers' work, but each writer for the site builds their own niche. Each has a profile, a portfolio of articles and the power to raise well written articles to the top of the pile.

Why is this valuable? Well, as any SEO expert will tell you, the key to success when building or expanding a site and looking for advertising revenue, is to have unique, relevant content that advertisers can hang their wares upon. Further, the better linked a piece of writing is, the better ranked it is. On the internet, visibility leads to gain. Through creating titles for users to populate with their works, Helium builds large pockets of content tailored to fit potential advertising. By linking it all together and encouraging the user to add their own valuable meta data in the form of tagging, the profile of the content is raised. Finally, each and every user is given an incentive to bring in new readers because they are offered a form of reward in the shape of monetary gain. Each link from an outside site, signature files, blogs and links littered elsewhere, raise the profile of Helium in the robotic eyes of the search engine giants.

Reward, however, must be earned, and the contributors are expected to not only produce content, but also peer review that of others,

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