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The writing contests are just one of several ways you can earn money on Helium. However, if you're interested in these weekly competitions there are ways to keep yourself motivated:

SEE THE BIG PICTURE:
Helium pays you a portion of the income generated from the advertising surrounding each of your articles on this site. That means, the more articles you write, the more residual income you've created. So you're not wasting your time if you don't win the contest, what you've done is found a way to generate a large number of articles in a short period of time. If you keep this up fairly consistently, then you'll have a good little earner on your hands in a few years, even if you never win a competition.

CHOOSE THE BEST TOPIC FOR YOUR PERSONAL INTEREST
The weekly contests usually has at least 1/2 dozen main topics, take a minute and choose one. There's no way you're going to be able to complete multiple contests in one week, because these topics generally require some research and a bit of time to craft your words just so...

PACE YOURSELF, BE CONSISTENT

If you want to write 25 articles in 7 days, then you need to plan on completing 3 to 5 a day on average. Don't leave it to the last possible minute because it will put un-due stress on you and will probably affect the quality of your writing and not for the better!

RESEARCH IT, WRITE IT, THEN LEAPFROG IT

Look up your article title online and take 10 minutes to read up on it, then write what you've absorbed about it, in your own words, as if you were explaining it verbally to a good friend, then hit spell check and publish. Wait a while, a few minutes to another day, then read what you published and leapfrog it if you're numbers aren't that great or you have too many errors for comfort.

REMEMBER IT'S AN ARTICLE, NOT A NOVEL

Yes, you need a 'hook' at the beginning of your article, but it's not 'War and Peace' if you simply re-state the title in an engaging way that leads into a sentence, then you'll probably be fine. At least readers will know that your article is on-topic.

Don't beat yourself up over it, the competition itself is merely a tool to expand your repertoire of work to display and earn money from.

TRY MARKETPLACE ONE WEEK (Quality over Quantity)

Maybe the writing competition is not for you and you should try Marketplace instead. You can earn a lot more cash if you win and you're paid per article, not per lump of articles as in the weekly contests. So if you prefer to take your time and write a finely crafted article, then try Marketplace and write 1, 2, 5 or 6 articles instead of 25 per week.

I did this after doing the weekly competitions and ended up winning $120 on Marketplace for 3 articles, when I would have only won $50 for writing 25 in the contest! So think about what you want to achieve quantity or quality. You're very fortunate if you can acheive both.

Whatever you do.... be sure to write!

Learn more about this author, R Marie Taylor.
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