10 Ways to Lose Rating Votes at Helium

Helium is a content aggregator that has been in existence since 2006. Although Helium has gone through many changes, one thing still remains - its rating system. Articles on the same title are pitted against each other by public vote. This system certainly has its disadvantages, but members must do at least 10 ratings per month in order to get any payments.

Since disenchanted Helium members are forced into rating in order to get paid, raters are already annoyed. Doing anything to encourage this feeling will make your articles get bad ratings.

What Rating is Like

Most Helium raters will not bother to compare every single word and punctuation mark in the two articles presented to them for rating. We do not keep scorecards on how many spelling or grammatical errors we find. In fact, most don't rating pairs don't need to be read beyond the first paragraph or so. Some just scan both articles overall look, making sure the article is readable before they actually read it.

This isn't because good Helium raters are lazy. It's just that there are so many bad articles on Helium that raters can quickly eliminate them and move on.

For example, over half of the Helium articles that I see fail in just their overall presentation. Since I'm a keep varying between a four and five-star rater, you can bet your stuff is going to go past my eyeballs sooner or later.

The Ten No-Nos

Your job as a writer is to make the reader interested enough to read your entire article. You can loose many readers (inlcuding me) by doing these ten things:

1. Writing the entire article as one paragraph. This hurts the eyes and tries the patience. Articles need paragraphs and spaces in between these paragraphs. If you are not sure of how to write a paragraph, then one of the best ways to learn is by sending your Helium article to the Community (online forums for Helium members) and ask for a writing mentor or suggestions for what writing books or websites you need to use.

2. Writing an article as long or longer than War And Peace. If it's more than two computer screens long, forget it. We raters just don't have that many days left in our lives.

3. Anything that starts off with a Bible verse, ends with a Bible verse and quotes pretty much nothing but Bible verses unless the topic is Christianity.

4. Anything with a complete disregard to spelling, English grammar and punctuation. EE Cummings could get away with it in his poetry; you can't in a Helium article. Don't even kid yourself.

5. Writing an article or creative writing piece entirely in capital letters. This is not only considered rude, it hurts the reader's eyes. Writing in all capitals should be banned worldwide, but for now all it will get you is a bad rating.

6. Writing an article or creative writing piece that has absolutely nothing to do with the title.

7. Writing an article or creative writing piece filled with a lot of swear words for no reason whatsoever. Swearing gets boring fast and is also a cause for an article to be deleted.

8. Check your facts! If you don't know if something is a fact, admit it. I have come across wrong facts ranging from the minor to the utterly ridiculous in the non-fiction articles on Helium.

9. Plagiarism. I don't mean using a sentence or two as a quote, but whole pages of material cut and pasted from other articles online. If I can recognize it's plagiarized, that's bad. And I'll let Helium staff memebers know about it, too. Anyone caught plagerizing is banned.

10. You need to get your point across. This might sound harsh, but if you have no writing ability whatsoever, don't be surprised if your articles get terrible ratings. I've seen far too many Helium articles ramble on in a dozen different directions and impart no useful information. No one likes to read articles like this, so please don't publish them.

References

Helium.com

Author's personal experience