Goes to show you how education and web-savviness do not mean you can forget to use spell check

So I requested information about how the dollars are divied up (not in an agressive way, I’m just trying to understand so that I can do beter!)…and again, got a vague answer. Doesn’t reassure me as a writer, trust me. I even wrote another e-mail to Helium folks, outlining what I suspected was the formula, i.e., “look guys, I’m guessing that you are sharing your adsense revenue with me, that’s cool, I pay about .13 per click in my other life and I understand…but is that the case? Or is it something else??? Help so I can write better and make more!”

And again, a vague blah blah blah response about how valuable the site is, and how I should just write more and I’ll make more money.

Otherwise, I enjoy the site. I don’t appreciate being treated like a mushroom though. Being an educated, somewhat intelligent (’cause the two don’t always coincide!) web user, I expected more.

Oh well!

I will go back to Helium, however, as the idea of paying way less than $250 per article is very appealing to me. I will do that when I have time to devote to editing the article(s).

Cheers.

Thank you for the write-up on Helium. Anne Kennedy has been on our Board of Directors since the beginning, and is a wonderful person. Our Marketplace product is a new feature and is really starting to take off. As for the difference between Helium’s Marketplace and eLance (and others like them), Helium’s Marketplace is a Web 2.0 approach to Freelance content. The other models try to connect a publisher with a freelancer via a request and bid model, whereas Helium’s Marketplace creates an open competition between writers based on the quality of their articles. So, in the old model, a publisher posts a job, and 50 people respond with a desire to do the work (send in resumes, portfolio’s, etc) and someone is picked. At Helium, the writers actually compete by writing the article and then the articles are ranked via Helium’s peer review process. The best articles rise to the top, and the publisher picks the best work. This process provides better content for the publisher, it removes all of the barriers for the writer to get a chance for the job, and opens far more doors for the writer.

Thanks again for writing about us.

Mark Ranalli
President & CEO
Helium Inc.

Thanks for the info on Helium. I have been a registered user for nearly a year but am yet to utilize the system in the ways you identified. I also and am in need of retrieving content at a low rate for my blog marketing product so I might have poke my head around more.

John – I am not familiar with e-lance. What I know about Helium from using it is that you can submit articles and rate articles. Writers can even produce income from ad revenue their articles generate. A lot of the writings I came across were sub-standard in my opinion but like most things you have to know how to dig in order to find the gold nuggets.