Have you heard of Helium? It is an article site, but not your traditional article site. With most article sites you create your article, include a few links in a resource box and submit. With luck, others will pick up your article and publish it, links and all. You can check it out here.

Helium is more like a huge knowledge base. The articles are there for reference, not for reprinting on web sites. As a writer, you submit articles to predefined titles (you can create your own titles and have them approved). Your articles are then available for the world to view. Based on the number of views you receive, you can earn an income from each article.

Some Helium writers have around 1000 articles submitted. I said in the post title you can earn residual income after submitting your articles and you can – just don’t expect to earn a fortune. In fact, top paying articles may pay around $1.50 tops. I have articles that are now earning around the $0.50 per month.

I can hear you laughing. Who wants to write an article that only pays a buck fifty? And you’re right – except I said residual income. The $1.50 becomes $18 in a year – $90 in five years. If I asked you write an article for $90 – what would you say?

Write 1000 article – and I know that’s a lot, but let’s say you wrote an article every day for three years – that 900 articles with time off for Sundays and public holidays. Average just $0.30 per article and you are still receiving $300 per month – virtually forever.

Keep adding to your article numbers and who knows how much you can earn. Don’t image this is a set and forget type process. To earn income you need to maintain your account, ensure your articles rank well, and to undertake a minimum number of quality ratings.

Ratings is the process used to determine which articles are the best quality. Articles from the same titles are compared by members and they effectively vote for one over another. Keep your articles in the top ten percent, maintain at least two or three ratings (that’s about five minutes work each day) and your income will keep rolling in – not enough to retire on – but it sure makes for some useful pocket money – actually, really useful residual income.

Disclaimer: Although I am a member of Helium and the graphic links to my user page, Helium does not have an affiliate program as such. You can invite writers and if they join you can earn 5% of their income. However, the links on this page do not provide any financial reward for me nor is this a paid post – this a review and hopefully a helpful guide to earning a few extra dollars legally and morally.

Do you have a WordPress blog and at times have titles that are a little long? Are there times when a sub heading could be a nice addition? If so then there is a little trick to modifying your post’s title that you may find useful.

This post has a modified title. Because of the way the style sheet is setup, the various H tags act very differently to each other. You could add your own styles to the style sheet if you knew how (and I will write about that in another post), or you could just modify the titles when you need to.

I wrote in an earlier post about modifying H tags within a post. A similar set of commands can be used to great effect in the title. In the title to this post I have used the command:

[h3]Modifying WordPress Titles On The Fly[/h3>]It’s A Pretty Neat Trick

When doing it yourself, be sure to replace the square brackets with the code placeholder tags <>. You can also use the BR tag to wrap the text to a new line when you need to.

You will need to play around with your H tags to see what sort of effects you get. What it is does do is create a different style of heading for your post titles. It can certainly make them look more interesting.

A word of caution – if you have the post url rewrite on so that the post title is written to the url, you want to consider using a plugin like the Platinum SEO Pack or similar that allows you to rewrite the title. You can then strip the code away for a clean url – otherwise, you are likely to see some strange url’s for your pages – certainly not SEO friendly urls.

A recent announcement from the FTC that implied that bloggers that wrote pay for post articles could be in trouble may just turn out to be a storm in a tea cup. For the majority of bloggers, including those that do write pay for post articles, the crack down will miss them by the proverbial country mile.

It’s all in the wording really. The FTC has bee in its bonnet over anyone who endorses a product for exchange without disclosing that an exchange has taken place. You don’t have to disclose what the arrangement is, but, according to the FTC, you do need to include a disclosure for each and every endorsement – a site wide disclosure may not be sufficient.

Now I said the issue lay in the wording – and it does and the word that is of utmost importance here ‘endorsement’. For many pay for post writers, they are not actually endorsing any product, service or website. For many, they are writing in general terms about the genre, for example, kitchen sinks, and including a link to the appropriate web site. Often the web sites products are not mentioned. Is this an endorsement? I think not – it is a paid link, but it is not a direct or even indirect endorsement.

If you do receive something in exchange for writing a positive review about a product or service, in other words a recommendation or endorsement, then be sure to disclose the fact. If you disclose, you have nothing to worry about. For most bloggers, if you don’t actually endorse the product, you are free to continue your pay for post careers.

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim has a more in depth look at the issue in his article titled – Should You Fear the FTC’s Sponsored Blogging Crackdown? – in simple terms – no unless your a big name in the blogging world since they are the group most likely to receive product endorsement requests.

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WordPress has a lot of features and functions built in that most people rarely use. Themes themselves come with a style sheet that pre-sets many of the functions that could be used. One of those functions is the heading tag. These come in the form of H1, H2, H3 and H4.

There are suggestions that if you use these tags for headings in your posts you can increase the headings value when it comes to SEO, for example, having a heading that includes your keyword or keyphrase. Use one of those heading tags and you are telling the search engine it is important.

However, I often find that headings are set for the site and do not always sit comfortably within a post. They are too big, too small or the wrong color. What many writers don’t know is that each heading tag can be modified on the fly so that it does suit your post. Take a look at the following examples:

Heading 1

Heading 2

Heading 3

Heading 4

Now let’s see what happens when we modify them:

Heading 1

Heading 1

Heading 1

To achieve this result, you need to start with heading tag – for example the h1 tag – these are inserted between <>. To modify this tag you need to use the correct formatting command. These are also inserted between <> tag holders:

font size=”-1″ or -2, +1 +2 etc

You can adjust the size to suit your post. The size of the text in my posts means the H1 tag is far too big – by using the size=”-1″ option it looks much neater and suits the size of the text around it.

font color=”red” or blue or black or white

In the last example shown, I used the font size=”-1″ color=”blue” combination all within the one tag placeholder <>.

A typical command would like the following – to make life easier I have used [ ] instead of the <> to make it easier to read. Remember to replace the square brackets when you try these commands.

[h1] [font size="-1" color="blue"]Your text here[/font] [/h1]

The last two pieces of the command are particularly important. They effectively close the command at that point which means the formatting wont flow through to the rest of your site.

There you go – it’s quick, it’s easier, and you can do it on the fly whilst creating your next super post.

The Australian government has recently announced the budget for the 2009-2010 financial year – as a budget, it wasn’t too bad. Raising the old age pension has been on the cards for ten years now – I am surprised it has taken this long to implement it.

Infrastructure spending was always going to be the center piece and I guess you can thank the Howard/Costello era – they ran infrastructure spending into the ground so there are plenty of areas to spend big dollars.

Australia has been called the lucky country and to an extent we are. We have ridden on the back of a resources boom for the last decade and it will be resources again that take us out of the recession. China is one country that will be hit hard but it will bounce back faster than most countries – and they are one of our biggest customers when it comes to resources.

So the budget was a ho-hum affair really. The biggest issue to come out of it has been the mean testing of the private health insurance subsidy. I don’t quite follow the argument. I cannot for the life of me see why someone on $75,000 a year or more, would drop their health insurance because they lose a couple of dollars a week in a subsidy. In fact, I don’t know why we are subsidizing families on $150,000 plus with a seven dollar a week subsidy (and that is all it is really). It seems to be a storm in tea cup used to try and knock the budget.

No-No Mal, leader of the Liberal Party and supposedly our alternative Prime Minister, has been on a negative track since taking on the role. In Australian political history, no opposition leader has ever won office with a negative campaign. In fact, they have often lost ground.

His latest suggestion actually has me wondering what economic credentials he has – but of course, he was a banker before entering politics – and who got the world economy into its present state? Bankers!

The Liberal Party has suggested a return to the old days where beer and cigarette taxes are used to fund government spending. There is are number of problems with this approach – first, beer and cigarette taxes tend to hit those on lower incomes the hardest. Their suggestion to increase the tax on cigarettes by three cents per stick sounds harmless. However, the effect is an increase of around $1 per packet. With about 1.5 million smokers, that is effectively 1.5 million dollars taken out of the economy – each day.

Can our economy afford that at present? I think not. The 1.5 million would be better off going through the cash registers of local businesses, keeping people in jobs and keeping the economy moving.

Once we start to come out of the recession, and once we need to start cutting the federal governments budget deficits, that will be the time to increase these taxes.

My question is – when will we get a federal opposition that really is thinking of Australia’s future rather than their own? Right now, Turnbull and his team of negative pollies are doing neither!

It is hard to put Aldi stores into a category. Whilst they are predominantly a grocery chain, they do also sell a wide range of non grocery items.

It is also hard to determine if they are low quality, medium quality or high quality. I have always placed them in the medium to good quality range – however recent purchases leave me wondering.

Aldi Stores are a European setup that have established themselves in Australia with a wide network of stores. Their products in the main have been good – some products very good. Apart from a narrow range of grocery items, they have weekly sales items which are only stocked until sold out. These items range from televisions to computers to dishwashers amongst other big ticket items to smaller items like clothing, toys, electrical goods and million and one other items.

I recently purchased one of their electric kettles – one which is along the lines of the old fashioned kettles. It works well – in fact it actually boils water, it doesn’t switch itself off at the first sign of steam.
Unfortunately, for a kettle that isn’t exactly cheap; looks and works well; it has a simple design fault that makes it almost

unusable and decidedly dangerous. The kettle is built using a tiny little screw to hold the handle in place – two screws actually, one at the spout and one opposite where traditional handles sit. Within weeks one screw works itself loose and, like most things in life, if they are going to break they will do it when you least expect it – like pouring boiling water into a cup.

I was fortunate – I felt it giving way and stopped before wearing the contents. I wonder how long it will be before someone does wear a pot full of boiling water.

This is not the first product. We recently purchased a salt and pepper mill. Again – they look great and the price was okay – not dirt cheap but not expensive. They only problem is – there were no instructions on how to open the darn things to put the salt and pepper in – I still haven’t worked that one out!

Simple issues like these will eventually turn people away from products. Trust is an important issue so if you cannot trust a business to provide value for money – they will shop elsewhere. For a supermarket chain that is still trying to establish itself in the Australian market, I am surprised they have allowed these products through their quality inspections – if that is, they have a quality inspection team to start with. I wonder – is Aldi now sacrificing quality for profits? Long term they may be sacrificing profits by losing reputation.

It seems that as businesses grow, one of the first areas of business to get left behind is ’service’.  If you have noticed my extended absence it is for one simple reason – moving house. What does that have to do with service – don’t get me started.

We recently moved to a new home. The move went surprisingly well. I wouldn’t say we were well prepared but the removalist were good and, whilst we had budgeted for four or five hours – they had the job done in three.

That was a great start to the move. The electricity had been connected, no drama. We even had the telephone connected with little drama. However, when it came to getting our ADSL internet connection working – forget it. Talk about a run around.

Once the telephone connection was up and running, we called the internet service provider (the same company as the telephone) and requested the move.  No problems, once the line was tested it would take around 12-24 hours. That was okay – we had planned for that delay.

Day two – still no internet. Rang to find out why and got the push button option merry-go-round. After following prompts and answering questions we finally arrive at the help desk. No problems they said the internet should be up and running by noon the following day.

Day three – you guessed it. Still no internet. Back to the telephone for another dance with computer generated prompts. This time I had to reboot the modem, reboot the computer, reboot them simultaneously, nothing of course worked. So we end up with yet another help desk person who takes us through the exact same routine.

Now it gets tricky. “Your computer is at fault – get a new computer” was the first response. Hello – I have three computers that I have tried, two of them brand new – not only that, everything was working fine until the move.

“Okay, it’s the modem then, it must be failing. Get a new modem.” My response, it is six months old and you supplied it.  “Okay – we will escalate this to a major fault – someone will get back to you within two working days”.

A week later and still no joy – we are a total of ten days without the net, the so called ‘two days’ was a joke. I finally managed to talk my way through to someone who actually new their job. Fifteen minutes later and the problems were solved and we were back on line.

What I want to know is – WHY COULDN’T I ACCESS THIS PERSON FROM DAY ONE – sorry to shout – but why the runaround? Why all the drama and why the wait?

For Australia’s major communication company to stuff up a simple house move, and we are only talking a short distance – a long walk at most – is beyond me. More importantly, why I couldn’t access a help desk that new what they were doing is also beyond me. As I said in my heading – big business generally couldn’t care about service. Add to that a limited number of competitors and you can see why service is no longer important.

I can tell you now – I still want SERVICE – I don’t care about the smile – but I still want SERVICE.

Most bloggers would be aware of google’s dislike of paid posts – more importantly, paid links in paid posts. If the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) gets its way, paid posts as such will be illegal.

The FTC is looking at plans to update its policies and their sights are set fairly and squarely on bloggers, paid posts and viral marketing. For bloggers who earn their small dollars each month writing paid posts – the time may have come to look else where.

Why the attack on paid posts? I said Google doesn’t like the paid links. For the FTC, they see paid posts as dishonest reviews – in other words, rather than writing a truthful review of a product or site, you are being paid to write a positive review.

Now I know there are a couple of pay for post sites that pay for the link. You don’t have to actually review the site or the product. If the link is to a kitchen sink site, just write any old post about kitchen sinks and include a link, it doesn’t have to be a review. Now, I wonder if the FTC will include them in their ban?

The next question is what will the FTC do to those bloggers that do write paid reviews? Will they prosecute and turn them into criminals? That is fine if you are based in the US. What if your based in Britain, Europe or Australia – will the law cross borders?

This is the biggest hurdle to any government agency trying to control the internet. You may be able to control what is happening within your own border, you cannot control the events from outside your borders. Still, I guess they will try. In the meantime, the poor old blogger is the one that will cop it on the chin – again!

Affiliate marketing can be a rewarding career – yes career. Some people make a good living by becoming good at affiliate marketing. However, before you go rushing out to start a career in affiliate marketing, be sure you are right for the job.

That is one of the most important keys – it is a job and like any other job, you either have the skills (or can learn them) and you have the attributes (or you can develop them – much harder).

From my observations, and from trying my own hand at it, affiliate marketing is not for everyone. There are several key areas that must be addressed.

Time: You need to be able to devote a lot of time, and the better you become, the more time it can take.

Dedication: You have to stick with it although having said that, you have to know when to move on with each affiliate program you run.

Organization: Don’t think you can get away with just one affiliate site. Some of the top affiliate earners are running 2-300 sites or more.

A Good Eye: The final attribute is to have that good eye for finding the best paying affiliate programs – not so much highest, but top as in good conversion rates.

Colin from FeedFlare is a good example. He is now making good money despite a humble start. With forty plus web sites and growing he is finding the time component difficult.

From my perspective, I find it hard to dedicate myself or my time. I am very much an instant now type person. With affiliate marketing, you build a site and work your SEO and article marketing to achieve a good search ranking.

For me, I want the good ranking yesterday and so tend to rush things. From my one attempt, I achieved a ranking of 15, page two of the results, two days later it was 95, page 10. I obviously overdid it and got a Google ping. It has climbed back to 33rd a few days ago but is on the drift out again.

My forte of course is writing, not marketing. Others can do the web design, the SEO, the marketing and the like. I am happy to spend my days researching and writing.

I have left the most important aspect to last. Desire. Desire to succeed, desire to make money and the desire to bury yourself – at least initially.

My problem is that I don’t have the desire to make ‘big’ money as in $10k a month. I would be happy to earn around the $1k each month. That is sort of no man’s land in affiliate marketing.

If you want to get into affiliate marketing, don’t think of it as easy money. It takes time and effort to succeed. Colin is a good example of someone who has dedicated both and is succeeding.

For me, I will stick to article writing and ghost writing. One day I will get to my target of $1K per month.

I had an online conversation with a fellow blogger recently and we were discussing guest posts and whether or not they were worth doing. I mentioned that I did a lot of ghost writing which half caught his attention.

He had two hurdles he couldn’t get his brain around. The first, why write for someone else and not at least have a by-line. The second related to the dollars – funny how things all come down to the holly dollar!
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Ghost writing for fame

To cover the first aspect. I have spent half my life writing for others with no by-line. I have written in house training materials, letter templates and, more recently, worked with the unemployed to write resume’s and job applications. I have never thought to have my name added to any of these documents – it was just work and I am sure there are millions of others out there who have done the same.  photo credit: peasap

I have to admit there are times when I write what I feel is great post and would love to have my name attached to it – but as a ghost writer you can’t – that’s life. I know in the past I have written training materials that are still in use today – it would have been nice to have my name attached.
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Ghost writing for dollars

As to the dollars – ghost writing doesn’t pay a fortune but that is in your own hands. I can type at around 40-50 words per minute. A 300 word post takes 6-10 minutes. If I can knock out around 4 posts an hour and make around $20 per hour (Australian $) then I am happy. That equates to an annual salary of $40k roughly and I am working from home, at my leisure, with no overheads. photo credit: hartboy

What about research? I subscribe to a lot of blogs and my subscriptions are always email based. If you don’t have an email subscription service then I don’t subscribe. I also prefer full post feeds. Each day I go through all those emails scan reading and absorbing what is important to me.

I like bloggers like Andy Beal and his Marketing Pilgrim blog. He may publish several posts in one day but only sends out the one email. I can scan read and if I find anything of interest – it gets stored away in the brain and comes to the surface when I need it. Subscribing to these emails is also a good way to find what is important – what other bloggers are talking about – it’s all research. As I surf the net, even in leisure, the back of my mind is always on the lookout for useful bits and pieces.
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Ghost writing because I can

What is important for me is that I am doing something that I am reasonably good at – and that I enjoy. Allen Taylor on his post - Why You Need A Ghost Writer – makes a really good point – I am not a motor mechanic! In fact, with the fancy engines in use today, I open the hood and I am lucky to find where the water and oil goes. I leave the motor repairs to the experts.

The same can be said for the online world. Business people are busy running their businesses – they may just be that mechanic. They use a professional ghost writer to keep their blogs up to date the same as I use a professional mechanic to keep my car running.

Yes, I am a ghost writer and I am proud of the work I do. I may not be able to show you what I do – but then, I have my own blogs for you to judge on that. As a footnote – if your looking for a ghost writer, let me know. You would be surprised at the range of niche’s I can cover.  photo credit: maistora

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