Do you Leap Frog in Helium?

Hi Mommaj, there is another way to improve on your writing score, without leapfroging your current articles. You can find those popular titles under Arts and Humanities (particular Philosophy) or Society and Lifestyle (particularly Morals, values and norms). Choose a very popular title, meaning those titles with more than a hundred articles. Once your article is ranked near the top, it will improve your writing score. For example, your article is rank 9/123. The writing score is more than 90% for this particular article. It will push the average writing score of all the articles up. There are a lot of titles about money and love, relationship etc. Just hope that your article do not dethrone mine!

You can leapfrog an article right after you submit it or later on. You can also leapfrog an article multiple times. The catch is you have to wait a week between leapfrogs on the same article. It is a good idea when you want to tweak your article or simply to jump start the ratings system again. Also, it does take a week or so for the ratings to settle down. I have had to leapfrog when my formatting got screwed up between word processor and Helium. When I first started writing to the web, my articles weren't always that great. So I would get some advice and then leapfrog the article to make it better. Yeah, I still need to do some leapfrogs but haven't gotten around to it yet. Also, make sure you are saving all your work in your word processor first.

I have used leapfrog on Helium, with mixed results. Quite often, I am just annoyed that my article is so low-ranked and I have moved on to some other topics, so the whole idea of re-writing my article is just not appealing. But sometimes, it helps to take an objective look at it and see why it might be ranked low. The most obvious things are spelling, grammar and formatting. If it's the content of the article or the approach, chances are I will really not want to change that. Other times, I feel that the higher ranked articles take too light-hearted an attitude towards a serious subject. There was one about third degree burns that I thought was a bit too full of cuteness but got high ranking. Personally, I don't want cute with my third degree burn. Okay, enough of my whining. Yes, sometimes leapfrogging works to move you up in rank, sometimes it doesn't help a lot, but usually you will gain a little bit. You can leapfrog the same article more than once, but there is a waiting period. Check under article options on the article you want to leapfrog the second time and when it is eligible, it will show up there. Stars twinkle on and off. My problem is rating stars, even if I rate a thousand articles in a month I still can end up with disappearing rating stars. Seems I don't agree with the majority often enough. I must say, I am glad of that. I never, ever, want to give up my individual perspective and accept the majority view simply because there's more of them than me. ;) Good luck with your quest for stardom, keep writing. Always do it for yourself and not for the stars, because in the long run, they only mean that a majority of people on Helium think that way. It's always possible they are wrong...

The rating system at Helium is as mysterious as the earning system at myLot. I do use the leapfrog option regularly, so I never drop below my three writing stars. My writing score is usually around 80%. If some of my articles drop in the ratings it does not matter, but I will still leapfrog them to get my score to rise again. If an article of mine is rated 3rd out of 23 I will be very happy, but if it is 3/3 I will leapfrog to try at least to get it into second place. It does not always work, sometimes the article will appear as number 1, and then it drops again into 3rd place. Leapfrogs give me the opportunity to revise and improve my writing. It is part of the learning process, as well as being an important part of the writing process. I do try to make sure there are no errors in the final draft of an article when I submit it to Helium, but I can always find a way to improve on what I have previously written.

Hi mommaj, Leap frog is provided so that you improve on your article and resubmit it. You can do it once only, and also depending on the number of articles you have posted you are given a few chances to leap frog your articles, it will be mentioned on your profile. i think you should do it so that your article becomes better and you are able to obtain a star. I am on helium and i feel that it is a great site. You need to maintain your stars in both rating and writing and you can get a steady income from it...all the best to you

I only leapfrog if I spot typos or if someone points out mistakes during rating. I always make sure I am happy with the article before posting, as I'm sure you do. I usually write it in Word on my own computer, rather than directly to the Helium site. Then I leave it for a while and check through before I post. I started this when I first joined Helium and lost my Internet connection before the article was finished. I had to rewrite the whole thing! Some articles, which I think are really good, rate low, while others that I've just dashed off seem to get better ratings. As we've all pointed out, with other people rating, there are bound to be discrepancies, and for this reason I only use leapfrog for obvious mistakes. Remember too that when you submit a leapfrog, that has to be rated and approved before it can supersede the old article. My own opinion is that once you are happy with an article, leave it and move on. We writers have lots of writing in us, and tinkering with old articles is just stalling the creative flow, as far as I'm concerned.