by Mark Dykeman

Created on: December 22, 2007

The interesting thing about writing for Helium, which rewards its writers based on a share of the ad revenues generated by their articles, is that you absolutely MUST find a way to market your articles if you want to receive any significant income. Marketing the article can be much, much harder than writing the article, but it is possible to make some decent income if your marketing efforts are successful. Here are some ideas to help you market your Helium article.

It's important to remember that there's an immense amount of competition for the reader's attention on the Web. Just think of how many thousands of Web sites are out there offering content for people to read. Could you read all of them, or even a small percentage of them? It's unlikely that you could spend the time and effort to do that in one lifetime. Therefore, you've got to find ways to bring your work to the reader so they will read your Helium article.

My experience shows that there are three main methods to try to help people find and read your article:

(1) Through scanning or searching of Helium.com or one of its affiliates
(2) Through search engines like Google, Yahoo, Live, or Ask.com.
(3) Through your own article marketing efforts

Method (1) can be successful, but your article must do well in the article Ratings at Helium. If your article is voted near the top of the article ratings (the top 10% or higher, preferably #1), it stands a chance of being found and read. Otherwise, it probably won't be seen.

Method (2) can happen but you need to understand how search engines index and rank pages, like the page that will host your article. Search engines will find your Helium article if it's properly written and if it follows certain techniques that search engines use to find web pages. It would be worthwhile to learn about SEO (search engine optimization) and the other techniques that bloggers and webmasters use to attract search engine attention. I don't have any solid experience to explain how to do this successfully, but I believe that it's possible.

Method (3) has yielded some success for me, but requires you to spend some significant time and effort in making friends. Marketing your article through word-of-mouth at an individual level or a group level can be successful. Social bookmarking, social news, and social networking sites are some of the best outlets to market your work, but you need to be aware of a few things:

a) Each of these types of social websites are supported by communities. These

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