by Lorelei Cohen

Created on: November 05, 2010   Last Updated: November 06, 2010

Comparing the writing experience on Helium.com and Squidoo.com is relatively easy. These are two very distinctly different online publishing venues.

Both of these wonderful writing communities provide a writing platform for Internet writers, each offers you access to a very supportive community forum, and both will provide you with monetary compensation to have your written words appear on their site. But this is the point where these two sites separate and become unique Online entities.

Helium prides itself on being a respected member of the writing community. Helium offers their writers the opportunity to have their work recognized, purchased, and published, by external newspaper, magazine, and Internet publishers. Through Helium, writers are able to gain access to prestigious writing awards, contests, and other journalism organizations.

Helium writers select from titles that they are knowledgeable on to create their written articles. These articles are then published on the Helium website. Helium writers earn income through daily ad revenue, upfront payments for the articles that they contribute, selling marketplace articles, or ranking high within the Helium writing contests. 

Articles are peer rated for professionalism. Articles with a lower standard of writing sink to the bottom of the lists, or are removed, while higher quality articles rise upwards and gain higher visibility on the site. The higher ranking articles are paid a higher amount of daily revenue than are lower quality articles. Helium's writing standards are quite high. They seek out quality work and pay accordingly for it.

Spam is strictly forbidden and even ones own personal promotion is restricted to within the private profile sections of Helium. This site strives to maintain a high regard and respect for itself and it's writers. If you write well, and write often, then you can fare very well on Helium.

Squidoo's writing platform is quite different from that of Helium. At Squidoo you are given a template, and the option of using hundreds of helpful modules, on which to create a web page. Squidoo refers to these web pages as lenses.

You have a large amount of flexibility in what you choose to write, or promote, on Squidoo in comparison to Helium. Perhaps the greatest difference, though, on Squidoo is the use of images to bring your ideas to life. The template is yours to do with pretty much as you wish so long as you do not spam, promote X-rated material, promote prejudice, or incite

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