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Helium is a great platform for the new or amateur writer to build their skills, get valuable feedback, and possibly make some money in the process. Helium is simple to use, has a friendly community, and offers a lot of variety and ideas to be applied to develop your writing skills.

However, many of us make a basic mistake about Helium or perhaps we suffer from a common misconception early on: that you can write almost anything, post it on the site, and expect the money to roll in. In other words, some Helium newbies think that posting articles will magically make your bank account swell beyond your wildest dreams.

By contrast, I would argue that there are three things that any Helium member needs to realize in order to avoid this common pitfall:

1. Quality counts: writing, grammar, style, format, spelling - you need to be doing your absolute best at each of these with your Helium articles if you want them to be read and, correspondingly, if you want them to generate income for you.

2. Subject matter: needs to be of interest to a broad swath of potential readers in order to be noticed by a large number of readers. If you want to write about very specialized subject matter, that's perfectly fine, but you need to manage your expectations of how successful you will be at attracting an audience and making income.

3. Promotion/advertising: this may be the biggest shock to new Helium users but yes, you do need to find ways to promote your writing. Even if you excel at producing high quality articles on interesting topics, readers need to find your work in order to read it. That means you have to find ways to tell your readers where your work is! That's promotion and advertising - it's necessary to make yourself stand out amongst thousands of other writers. The good news is that you can do a lot of great and useful things to promote your writing without spending much money. The bad news is that promotion takes a significant amount of time with no guarantee of a quick payback.

I don't mean to discourage new writers - I'm more interested in encouraging people. However, it's best if you enter into your Helium experiences with your eyes wide open and with realistic expectations. Otherwise, you may be sorely disappointed. That would be a real shame, because if you're willing to invest some time and effort, Helium can be a very good platform to launch a writing career. Think about it.

Learn more about this author, Mark Dykeman.
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