Helium is a website kind of like Triond. You can submit articles to generate royalties. The only difference is that Helium’s articles are ranked in categories. They aren’t ranked by the admins. No! They’re ranked by the users. There’s also a more strict policy when it comes to word and character count. You must have 2400 characters or 400 words to submit an article. That’s the main thing I hate about Helium. I usually end up trying to add things to my articles to get them to the minimum requirements.

Helium also has two opportunities that I love. One is the writing contests. I came in 5th place in one of the contests and won $5.00. The other is the marketplace. It’s kind of like the Writer’s Market except a lot smaller and easier to access. There’s articles you can write and the companies will pay between $15 and $150 per article. You can also see how many other people have applied and how many days are left. Once all the submissions are in, you can read each other’s articles and they are ranked by other members.

I checked the purchase date for the article that I wrote. It was about the freshman 15. (Something I know a lot about) The purchase date was Oct 16. So at about midnight on the 16th, I checked my ranking. I was number 1 out of 8! That means they are more likely to buy mine! (If they don’t, I’ll be so pissed). So at about noon I went back to check if they had made their selection yet.

“Helium is undergoing maintenance and will be back online at 2:00 ET.”

So I checked back at 1:00 because I live in Illinois which is in Central Time. It still said 2:00 and then I reloaded it. It changed to 3:00. So an hour later I checked back. 4:30. Ugh! So after my class I checked at about 6:30 CT and it said 4:30 ET. I was very confused. I kept checking all night. I guess they mean 4:30 the next day. So here it is the next day and it’s 2:00 here. I guess I have to wait until 3:30 to see if I won $32. This is very frustrating.