Helium

I write for Helium in their Market Place. The thing I like best about Helium is that there are several different ways to earn on their site. They have the regular write an article and get a share of the revenue based on page views. I never write for that section.

Helium also has Market Place, in the Market Place magazines post topics that they need and how much money they will pay for it. So when you find a topic you want to write about, you write about it. So do several other people, then your stories are voted on, I haven't quite figured out the reason to vote on these, but once the deadline for the article has arrived, the publisher who needed the topic goes through the submitted articles and chooses the one they wish to purchase. If your article is chosen then you get paid. If your article is not chosen then it goes into the Helium site for page view revenue.

Helium also has contests. They post topics and people write on those topics and then everybody votes on the submitted articles and you can win cash prizes. I believe first prize is $60. That's not bad at all.

They also have Journalism Awards. I've not written for any of these yet, so I'm not clear on how that works.

So, with the different types of writing and pay structures with Helium, it is probably my favorite place to write. Check it out. I'm sure there will be something that will catch your attention and beg for you to write it.

Personal News Network aka PNN

What can I say about PNN? It is going to be REALLY hard for me to find something good to say about it. I can say that pretend to offer stipends for writers, but you have to be part of their inner circle and you have agree 100% with everything that the "in" crowd does or you will not get a position. I say this because that was my experience. I applied for one of the stipend positions. By Lauren's (the developer of the site) own admission I had more page views in one month than most people who have been writing for them since the beginning. One of their stipend writers hit the 10,000 page view milestone about two months after I left PNN and she had been writing for them for almost a year. I personally had over 11,000 in my first month. They have a very nice rating system there. Viewers can click on the red star to give a writer a star if they like the writer's blog. A person can only star a writer once, so that keeps cheating out of the equation. I personally left after five weeks with over 90 stars. The closest to me at the time was their star writer who had 30 something stars.

Why was I "blackballed"? I wrote a political blog from the POV of a Conservative Woman. Apparently, they are all PC there and were shocked that I would write anything against Obama and for Sarah Palin, so...whatever, it was their site and they had the right to make those decisions. I just felt that they should have been upfront in their Craigslist posting and said they were looking for a political blogger that would only write about PNNs political stance.

What was good about PNN? It was idiot proof. I learned a lot about blogging from that site. It was incredibly easy to set up a blog with all the bells and whistles. There are also very nice people who post on there. There are also blow hards who think if they talk down to people in the comments and in their blogs that it makes them look more professional. It's a good place to learn as long as you have no expectations to make any money blogging there.