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Writing poetry for Helium is like any form of writing, you must first recognise your readership and what they desire from your writing.

Yet seeing as Helium is primarily an outlet for non-fictional articles, this can be a little complicated as your readership may know little or nothing about the conventions of poetry. The unique nature of Helium, that its readers are also its judges of worth through the rating system, further complicates matters: how do you write for a readership who not only may not understand your poetry, but who have the power to resign it to the bottom of the pile and obscurity forever?

Whether you are writing new poetry or editing an existing poem for publication on Helium, this article can help you.

Here are a few tips designed to help you overcome the potential problems of writing poetry for Helium.

1. Make sure you are writing to the right titles.
The most essential element of publishing poetry through Helium to to make sure that you post it under the right title. Many of the titles in the poetry channel are very broad, covering such large topics as Love, Resentment, Praise. When this is added to the fact that the poetry channels at Helium are extremely popular, you can have a single title with literally thousands of poems in it. Given this volume if you post a poem that does not quite fit the title at best it will simply be rated down and end up buried under thousands of more appropriate poems; in the worst case a rater will flag it as off topic and it could be removed. So, if your poem does not exactly fit the title, consider starting a new one.

2. Spelling and Typos
It really does not matter what kind of article you are writing, whether it is poetry or a review of the latest hair cream, having correct spelling is essential. That said, as poems are commonly much shorter than normal articles correct spelling is even more vital. If there are spelling mistakes they are much more visible in a poem with a dozen lines and less than a hundred words than in an five hundred word article. In a poem every word is placed exactly and has meaning; if you have spelling mistakes it not only detracts from the meaning of the poem, but shows that you do not really care about what you are writing.

Raters may not always know much about poetry, but they will always spot poor spelling and rate it down. We all make spelling errors and typos once in a while, but these should not make it into your published poem. It is frankly unforgivable given that Helium has

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