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.