The new year brought a lot of changes in a lot of different locations. One of those was Helium. For those that don’t know, Helium is a site, like many that allows authors to publish articles on their site and make money based on article performance. The earnings there aren’t a ton, however January brought about the Helium Reward-athon.
January-April Reward-athon. For this reward-athon authors could write articles in almost any topic and make a set fee doing it. Authors earned money according to their writing stars. Writing stars are awarded for writers that have a certain number of articles with an average in the top 25%. If you got one writing star then you were given $1 for each article. Two writing stars was worth $1.50 for each article, three stars was worth $2, four was worth $2.50, and five was worth $3.
In addition to the fact that you writing stars could be used for these bonuses, you could increase the number of stars you had and get more per article. Where you stood on the last day of the reward-athon was how much money you made for each article within the time period.
The only catch was that you had to do enough rating to get three rating stars. For those that hated rating (I am definitely one of them), this was the hardest part of the reward-athon. However, once you had gotten to the point where you had rated hundreds of articles then it was fairly easy to keep that up.
All in all, I ended up with five writing stars at the end of it and was awarded $3 for each article. I wrote 480 articles and was paid $1440. Plus all of those articles that I had written in turn continue to make money with the performance based money that Helium normally makes.
Economic Stimulus. April passed with a lot of people happy. However, earnings seemed to go down after the reward-athon and then people were unhappy. The economic stimulas package was given out to Americans. It was then that Helium announced their economic stimulas package which would give you a bonus each month (based on your writing stars). This boosted earnings, especially for five star writers who were getting an additional 150% of their pathetic earnings. This is to continue until November.
Summer Reward-athon. This summer another reward-athon was announced. This one was a little different, but could make you as much as $3 an article (according to your writing stars). You have to have three rating stars and you can only write to the summer reward-athon’s titles (there are 1000 released each week) limiting how easy it is to make the money. However, you can still make some money. The summer reward-athon is running till September 22, 2008.
With a second reward-athon running this year it looks like these will be here more often then at first imagined. It lets you increase your earnings in a wonderful manner. You can write and make a sum upfront, as well as the passive earnings.
Writing a lot for the Helium reward-athons can be a lot of work. This summer reward-athon hasn’t been working with me all that well and so far I have made $24 toward the check in September. I hope to make it a little bigger before that time comes, but I am not working much there or working hard to make it happen.