While both Triond and Helium have stellar benefits for online writers, my experiences have uncovered at least five ways in which Triond is the superior mechanism for making money with your online writing:

1.  No Article Rating Requirement

A requirement for making a share of the traffic revenue from your posted articles is that you rate the articles of your peers. It’s a flawed system to the core, trust me. Let me explain. Without rating articles, you don’t get paid the passive income from your work. Therefore rating is money motivated. The average rater is not looking to improve the list of top-ranked content so that it is an accurate representation of quality. A true rating would take the time to read both entries, analyze the content, and compare the overal worth of each article as an information resource or creative endeavor — depending on the category. Let’s face it, not many people are willing to do that just to get paid for work they have already done. Not to mention, how many people actually have that level of analytical skill? You aren’t given articles to rate based on specialty. A creative writer may have no idea what information is valid or what style is more appropriate for a finance oriented article set, and yet that’s what may be given to them.

Furthermore, and this has happened to me more than once, after submitting articles to an ongoing writing contest I have actually gotten sets of articles to rate in the titles that I submitted to. What kind of impartiality does that provide? None. How would the contest rating system be impacted if I were to rate the lesser of the two articles higher? Would it give my submission an edge if it were neck and neck with the better of the two that I was asked to rate? Sure, averages come into play here, but let’s face it you should never be given titles to rate that you have submitted to — period.

The only way I could see this working out would be to remove the rating requirement and add it back as some kind of community leader system. Tweeks would need to be made that wouldn’t allow a person to rate on titles they’d already submitted to. And some kind of benefit would have to be added for the members who participated that doesn’t relate their ability to get paid for the revenue their work continuously earns the site. (Or maybe it could give them a 5% bump in periodic earnings… just so long as not participating doesn’t stop earnings.) As for now, it’s a major pitfal when compared to Triond’s superior passive income system.

2.  No Community-based Ratings to Impact your Earnings

Has this ever happened to you? After submitting a top ranking article, you feel good — real good. You watch it dominate the field for weeks, a month, a month and a half… and then one day you log in and your king of the hill is now a smear at the bottom of the ranks. What happened?! You, my friend, have likely been smacked by the ugly stick of the ratings system. Sure, your article will probably work its way back to the top, mine generally do, but for a time your article will suffer and likely because some rater didn’t take the time to actually rate the articles they were given.

This is a problem. Helium’s rating system implies that everyone is required to rate articles and that they will rate them with their full attention. But let’s face it, you wrote articles to get paid — you want to write more articles so that you can get paid more. So this rating business, it just takes time away from writing articles and stands as one more thing they can use to separate you from the money your articles make for them.

3.  Low Payout Requirement

Helium’s current payout requirement is 25 dollars. At this point in time, I’ve written probably three to four times the articles on Helium than I have on Triond. Some have made me a few dollars, others only pennies. All told, I am sitting at just over 20 dollars as of this writing. In theory, I have made a few dollars more with Helium than I have with Triond, but it has taken a lot more effort to do so. Sure, by writing to empty titles and using the spam technique of entering the writing contests (where you aren’t rated for just one article, but your score for multiple articles within the category) and any other titles you may find that interest you, you could make a decent amount of money with Helium and the payout requirement wouldn’t be much of an issue. But then you also have to worry about getting your article ratings in so that you can get paid for periodic visits to your articles. You have to worry about some schmuck randomly rating articles to meet requirements to get paid. You have to watch your top ranking articles sink to the lower end of the pool, causing you to lose writing stars, and then hold your breath as they slowly climb their way back up again.

4.  Superior Traffic Analysis Tools

When I log into Triond, I immediately scroll down and check out my traffic analysis graph. It shows me how many visits I’ve received and allows me to track trends based on top sources of the traffic. That’s amazing! It didn’t take me long to realize that my gaming articles were pulling in the most weight, and thus the most revenue. This gave me an edge, because I could also see the search phrases that were used to get to my articles.

When I log in to Helium I might browse through some of the article titles and wonder what I might want to write about, but I really have no clue which article will perform the best for me. Sure, certain categories make more than others in general, but Triond’s tools allow me to write to my full potential by delivering valuable keywords to use in my articles. It doesn’t get much easier than that.

5.  No Random Article Deletion

I was completely floored the first time this happened with Helium. My article had been submitted and going to work for me for weeks when out of the blue I received an email stating that it had been removed. The piece was not controversial in any way, it was well written, and wasn’t innundated with grammatical errors. The reason? They said that it didn’t fit the topic, which seemed weird to me. The title for the article was supposed to be on how to start a garden. My article explained that there were several types of gardens that one could start and gave hints on how to do each. It was clear, concise, and to the point, yet the information covered readers who had space in their backyards for a garden plot and included appartment dwellers-and those who might choose to use community provided garden spaces instead of tearing up an existing lawn. Okay, so they didn’t think that met the requirement of the title, so what did? Apparently an article on how to grow inverted tomatoes. Yeah, don’t ask, I haven’t a clue how that fit the topic more than mine.

This wasn’t a competition, now mind you. It was an article title that anyone can post to and be rated on. How would that make you feel? I’ve never had Triond say that an article I’ve had on the site for weeks has been deleted. With a good portion of my articles making me consistent, even if small, returns — well, that was just one more potential passive income source. If you learn anything in this game of article writing for sites such as Triond or Helium, you generally learn that the more earners you have, the better your earnings will be because it all adds up over time.

Of course, writing with Helium has its benefits. If used to your advantage, the upfront payment system can be quite lucrative. But think about it this way, if more people write articles just for the sake of the upfront payment and don’t consider the long term value of the piece, what do you think would generally happen to the quality of the articles? Triond’s system requires writers to think about their articles and write them to be valuable resources for people looking for answers. Why? Because those visits, repeat visits, and resource sharing practices of random strangers are what make you money. And over time, it adds up to more than just an upfront payment.

Looking for other ways to make money with your writing? Try my other article:

Can You Win A Writing Contest?