NOTE: On December 6, 2010, Helium changed their payment policies.
The fastest way to find articles on a specific topic on Helium.com is to use the “Title Finder” feature. However, if you’re not a member of Helium, then you would need to access the Channel Menu in red down the left side of the computer screen or go to search engine like Google.
Whether you are a Helium member or not, skip Helium.com’s “Search” feature, because this is too slow. It brings up individual articles instead of article titles. If there are 200 articles to a title, then you have to wade through 200 results to get to the next article title.
Helium Members
You do have to become a Helium member in order to access this tool, but it’s free to join Helium. Once you log into Helium, go to the “My Helium” tab at the top right of the screen. Click on that and you’ll come to a menu in red letters on the left side of the screen. Click on “Title Finder”.
Once you get there, you’ll be presented with several options. You can type in a particular search word where the cursor is blinking under “With all of these words” and just click the grey “Search” button. That’s the fastest way, which may be best for very specific subjects like “Imitrex.” But if you enter a very general description, like “pain”, you’re going to have to wade through over 780 results.
To narrow your search down, you have several options. The first is to add more words to “pain” such as “head pain” and see what comes up. You can also scroll down to a Channel menu, if you happen to know what Channel your topic is in. “All Channels” is the default option. Perhaps for “head pain”, you’d click the “Health and Fitness” Channel. You also have the option pf picking a subchannel, but you do not need to pick one in order to make the Search work. Click “Search” and that takes you to about four articles.
Non-Members
If you have a good idea of what you are looking for, then you can go down the left side Channel menu to find content. Let’s stick with “head pain”. “Health and Fitness” seems the most likely category. You are taken to a homepage of the entire channel to give you a feel for the types of articles in each sub-channel. Now you have two options. You can keep clicking and guessing or you can go off of Helium.com completely and continue your search there.
This writer recommends the later course. The only catch is that you type “helium.com” or “Helium” before your key words. Otherwise, you’ll get results from all over the Internet.
Reference:
Author has been a member of Helium since 2007
