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Blogging is a lonely game. You decide on your blog title and theme for yourself, you write your blog entries by yourself, and it may be a long while before your blog generates any sort of readership.

Helium is a community of writers. Most of the questions or topics you write on will have been written by someone else, although from time to time you may propose a title yourself. Once you have written, your work will be rated against others written to the same title and will rise or fall on its perceived merits. In this way you will get loads of feedback on your writing.

The rating system on Helium is not perfect, of course. People may rate hastily or in ignorance, causing your article to fall below others of less objective worth. But by seeing how your writing fares in the Helium rating system, you can get a general idea of how well you are writing, and which of your articles are better than others. This will give you clues as to how to improve your writing.

The Leapfrog process is another useful aspect of Helium. You may do a rewrite of an article you have written and both versions will be compared. The higher rated version will be the one that remains. For this to work well, you are best advised to make significant changes in your article. Nothing is worse in Helium rating than scrolling through two Leapfrog articles that seem to be word-for-word identical.

Writing for Helium on a regular basis may help you overcome your writing flaws, like ignoring spelling and grammar errors, or writing incomprehensible articles filled with long words and convoluted sentences. It will help you write things others want to read. This will help you in your writing for your blog.

In addition, your profile page on Helium can include a link to your blog. People who've gotten to know your work on Helium can go to your blog to read more of your writing.

Your blog can also improve your Helium results, if you do it in the right way. Now, you don't want to post a Helium article on your blog, or a blog post on Helium, this duplication will not fare well with your readership. But you can post a link to Helium articles on your blog, perhaps giving the title and first sentence to whet the appetite, and a 'read more' link leading to the Helium page. And if you've researched and written a good blog post, you might decide to write a Helium article that is original, but is based on the same research or ideas, so long as you make sure to make each one substantially different.

Blogging does have its advantages in that you are in control of what you blog about, and if other people don't care for it, that's their look-out. The rules for writing for Helium are different. But there is no reason why you can't do both.

Learn more about this author, Nissa Annakindt.
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