I have been conducting an experiment over the different websites that pay to publish content and how to maximize my earnings per article on them. This is not a formal experiment, since I am the only test subject and I have limitations on both the time I can spend writing and the sites I can write to. First a bit of background, I write from the UK and mainly use two sites, Helium.com and Associated Content. I started in Helium on June’09, but didn’t start writing for AC until about October’09.

Since I am not a USA resident, my revenue options for Associated Content are limited to performance payments (Payment based on how many pageviews your content has) and cannot access their upfront payment offer, that requires you to be a legal USA resident. Helium allows for upfront payments (from 1.5$ per article to 2.5$, on eligible channels) for non USA residents, as well as an empty title payment (1$) if you are the first to write to an empty title.

Associated Content lets you choose whatever title you want for your article, whereas getting a new title approved at Helium involves using the Suggest title feature and hoping that a moderator will like it and place it on the channel you think would suit it better. Helium allows for publishing on real time, whereas AC reviews your first 3 articles and may let you publish instantly if they are good enough from the 4th onwards. Also, Helium articles are rated against others in the same subject, and your earnings will depend on how high your ranking is (How many of your articles are among the top ones for a title) since the first 5 get more visibility on the site. Your writing percentage will also affect the number of stars you have, and so influence how much upfront payment you receive for each article. Associated Content works differently, into that your pageviews are what affects your earnings. You start earning 1.5$ per thousand views of your content, and it becomes slightly higher once you have more than 50.000 pageviews. Currently I am on 4 stars (90% writing percentage, aprox) for about 120 articles on Helium, whereas I get the basic rate on AC for only 27 articles.

Helium also offers other features such as a marketplace (I sold an article there for about 60$ out of two written for it) and contests with prices ranging from 30$ to 60$ for the winners. There’s no limit on how many contests or marketplace entries you enter/win per month. Since I cannot access that same feature on AC, I am not including it on my calculations (apart from being really random). It also has stock sales, where publishers can buy articles from the site for between 5$ and 10$, managed by Helium staff.

So, after the background is done with, now to the numbers. Both sites allow you to publish work that has been published elsewhere, provided you have the rights for it. Which means that I publish the same articles on both sites.

Earnings on Helium: Number of articles per month*upfront payment+Number of articles in empty titles+pageviews

Earnings on AC: pageviews  (1.5$ per 1000 views)

This for me means that the most effective way of making money out of my articles is writing to Helium first, preferably on empty titles (3.5$ per article, clean), on channels that are eligible for upfront payments.

Afterwards I publish the same article to AC, just for the pageviews earnings.

Right now my maths say that the pageview earnings from AC articles (on the 11 days I’ve been running the experiment) are slightly higher than in Helium, and their minimun payment is 1.5$ which means even if I don’t make much at least I can get it as soon as I want. Helium has a minimum payment of 25$ a month, which isn’t difficult to reach considering upfronts and everything else. Also, AC shows statistics on every article views, which Helium doesn’t. That means is easier to see how an article is performing. So yes, it’s worth the 2 minutes it takes to copy and submit an article there.

So, if I was to start doing all of this again, my best bet would be:

- Get over 100 articles on Helium (3 writing stars) and get an average being 85% over the other titles on that channel for the competitive ones (3 or more titles on an article makes it count towards statistics). This means having 4 stars at the end of the month, when the upfront payment calculations are done (so every one of those articles will be worth 2$ when the calculations are done). This means writing 3 or 4 400 words articles a day, which can be done in a couple hours if the subjects are familiar to you. Only 10% of your articles need to be on competitive titles, so, theoretically, you could write 90 empty titles and 10 competitive, but that would make very risky to keep 4 stars at the end of the month when the payments are done. So to be on the safe side, I try to keep my competitive articles rating at around 30%. This means 70 empty titles (you can submit new title ideas from the control pannel), so 70$ extra.

- Keep writing on Helium at least 10 articles a month, just to get to 25$ at the end of it and get the money (since they only pay once a month). Once you have 4 writing stars, losing them is more difficult since it means your writing percentage needs to drop to about 75% (they grandfathered 4 and 5 stars writters) but you can always leapfrog a couple times a month the articles that are doing worse.

- Publish articles both in Helium and AC for the pageview earnings.

- Participating on Helium Marketplace can be a nice boost to your earnings. The contests are an entirely different pot of tea, and it’s really difficult to win (and a lottery, since the ratings fluctuate a lot). There’s a lot of talk in the forums about it, so they might change. But from my relatively short experience, my contest articles always rank much lower _during a contest_ than my average article. They rise afterwards, but if the contest is being rated during the end of the month (when payments are calculated) your stars can be affected, and so your upfront payments.

- Rate in Helium to get at least 1 rating star and keep it. Otherwise you won’t get pageview earnings. If you have 5 rating stars at the end of the month, you get 3$ extra (that’s about 10 rates of two pairs of articles a day, so hardly a problem).

Writing is right now just a hobby, so I don’t have time to do it full time or write for a myriad different sites. I choose Helium and AC because the articles doesn’t need to have pictures, and unlike HubPages you don’t need to “design” a page every time you submit an article. I can have an article on both Helium and AC in less than 10 minutes. So I guess I’ll stick with those two unless anybody can recommend a better alternative  Definitely, not quitting my day job in any case…