2 of 15

Write now Article Tools

If you are one of those who put articles on a site like Helium, you might ask yourself, "how can I take a shortcut to shoot to the top?", or "How can I achieve instant success?", or even "How can I make it so everyone simply loves me!"

Being new to a web site like Helium to publish my writings, I knew I had a lot to learn. I also knew I needed to gather an audience of readers somehow, in order to accumulate the most views possible of my writings. In that way, I would be able to reap the monetary benefits of many people viewing and reading my content.

So, I did my best to follow the advice of the web site. I sent emails to all my family. I sent emails to my friends. I posted bulletins on myspace.com. I supplied everyone I could with my URL. In general, I did as much self promotion as I could afford the time doing it and my self-respect would allow.

I am a systems administrator on web technologies. I work for a rather large health insurance company out here on the west coast. Therefore, the people on my team at work are all very technical, very savvy individuals.

They are also a friendly and caring lot.

Therefore, I was not overly surprised when the responses to my group email, notifying them of my writings on Helium, of how I benefit from it and of where my writings can be viewed, suddenly took a turn. Let's say, a turn for the technical.

Or, perhaps a turn, for the process oriented.

Or more accurately, a turn for the somewhat larcenous.

Now I knew of course, I would get some interesting comments and I even said so in my email to them: "I know I'll get some comments about this that I don't need or don't want, really; but...."

The first reply to my team email was that I should hook up some kind of a "spider", just like search engines use to repeatedly "crawl" and catalog web pages; thus generating many, many visits; over and over again, and well, you get the picture.

But allow me to give you a more direct sampling of what I had to go through. The first team member to respond offered this insightful suggestion just mentioned:

"You should install some website spider software and hit the site like a billion times [he's referring to just my content area on it, anyway] ....you'll be a millionaire in a couple weeks." :)

Another team member offered this thoughtful and generous comment:

"$50 and I'll write a Perl script for you to do that and more."

From our "direct report", management type, a pleasant enough kind of guy; usually, he offered:

"$1000 dollars and I'll hack the global DNS servers so that whenever anyone goes to sex.com, it gets redirected to your blog... (oh and probably a good defense attorney would help after that also)."

Now on that one, I finally HAD to respond:

"You are all so very kind and thoughtful that I am simply beside myself with what to say exactly. Possibly, if I did put your suggestions into practice, would any of you think to bring me cigarettes? I hear they are much like currency in prison...."

Finally, one more team member felt a worthy cause to speak up with some actual advice:

"Yeah, but you know, you need to look at the silver lining here. All this chatter about how to beat the system (just so a friend can make a few extra dollars) could be a good topic for your next article! The length friends are willing to go to get you in trouble!"

Well what are friends for, after all?

So, I took his advice. The best way to get readers, perhaps, is simply to produce. Produce well. Produce often.

And so, here we have come full circle.

Now, you might as well go and read more of the objects of all this discussion.
Because, that stuff is actually about something.

Learn more about this author, JZ Murdock.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.

Add your voice

Know something about Satire: Computers?
We want to hear your view. Write now!