What is your experience with Helium.com?

This is the way helium works: You rate the articles others have posted and earn rating stars in order to get paid. How much you get paid per article depends on the number of writing stars you have earned. If you have at least one rating star as well as one writing star you will earn and upfront payment for every eligible article you publish. To earn your first writing star you must publish an article to three different titles that already have articles posted to them. In order for the title to be considered competitive it must have 3 or more articles already. Stars are difficult to maintain in the beginning so you should try for a goal off 20 articles and post 5 articles to competitive titles and the rest to empty titles. Every time you publish to an empty title you earn an additional $1 bonus. The more empty titles the better your writing score. You never want your writing score to dip below 85% With rating you want to just rate like it is going out of fashion until you get 5 rating stars, which will also land you a $3 bonus each month if you can maintain them. Once you have a few stars they are easier to maintain. Good luck!

Wow that is a lot to take in all at once. as for right now my goal is to write at least one article a day and see where it takes me. Is it true that publishers look at these articles to shop for freelancers?

Yes someone who also uses myLot had something purchased just recently. You can submit articles for publication with other publishers in the Marketplace section.

I like Helium. I've received several payments from them but I don't like some of the changes they've made to the site like having to rate other articles in order to earn from your own as it's time consuming although I can understand why they brought the changes in.

I used to see article rating as a waste of the time I could have been using to write more. Then I learned about the rating bonus. Then I saw more and more poorly written articles with horrid spelling and careless grammar and realized my articles needed to be rated in order for me to earn as well as the better writers contributing to the site. You get out of helium what you put into it and as a source of passive income it far out performs the average savings account or CD and you don't have to put any money in.

I can not imagine helium before the upfront payments and bonuses! I am an empty title fiend! If not for the money earned from those and the rating bonus it would hardly seem worth it to established writers.

Last year, I probably would not have agreed because payments were based almost completely on the number of visitors you receive. However, recent changes in Helium's payment policies have greatly changed this. The upfront and empty title bonuses make it very easy to get paid. These bonuses make it easy for anyone to get a payout.

They show exactly how it works in their help pages.