A Marketing Dept Update

Illumination Spotlight has already had 141 submissions in it’s first week and 33 contributors

A quick Illumination Spotlight update

As of April 11, 2020, we’ve had 141 submissions to Illumination Spotlight.

Also, 33 ILLUMINATION writers and editors have submitted their story links.

Dr Mehmet Yildiz has inspired many ILLUMINATION authors to use Illumination Spotlight to give an additional advantage in marketing their stories to Google, Bing, Duck Duck Go and other search engines.

I’m seeing new ILLUMINATION authors submitting their story links daily.

A view of the Illumination Spotlight database

I have been getting nice traffic to the website. I have two different kinds of analytic monitors — one for human traffic and one for all traffic coming into visit. The search engine spiders are visiting. I ping them automatically with every new post I create. Google and Bing are hungry for new links to fit into their algorithm, so we are feeding them the information they crave.

Stats

Sessions are up 80% since April 4, 2020 to 249.

Users are up 30% to 129, April 4 to April 10.

Pageviews are up 46% to 591 for the same period as above.

More stats are in the figure below:

The Goal

The goal is to boost outside knowledge of your stories by showcasing them on Illumination Spotlight. The way it is set up, the Medium content should always be higher up in the search engine listings. I am not listing the links using anchor text, so the full value of the post should flow back over to the ILLUMINATION post.

A look under the hood

I always love seeing behind the scenes. Here’s a little sneak peek into the control panel so you can see some of what I see when I look at the site.

Most basic info: Live server stats (traffic is the lifeblood)

My service provider lets me see real time stats, so if I’m curious — or if something is broken on the site — I can look to see how much of the server’s CPU is being used by any particular process. I can coordinate with the customer server to fix the problem or reboot the server remotely. I had another site in the past that kept going down, so I used this feature to figure out which plugin wasn’t working right and disabled it.

I can get all sorts of other analytics. I use outside providers to get more information for that is useful for marketing — Google webmaster tools and Analytics are great for this. I also am set up for another service, but I haven’t activated on this site yet since my service provider’s stats are pretty good about giving aggregate information on where people are coming from.

If I was advertising or working with someone on a project where we needed greater detail, I would use the additional service since it provides greater geographical information that just the top level country. That information is useful for projects that are set up for specific regions so people can see where their web traffic is coming from. For example, are users coming from New York or New Jersey and what city or town.

I don’t really need that information for what we’re doing here since I’m not paying for advertising and our audience is the universe — maybe some intelligence is reading our work from beyond the confines of our planet. It could happen.

The automation: Postie Plugin (free)

Postie is the Word Press plug in that converts the form submission to a draft post. It saves me the work of having to be a data processor. Before I set up Postie, I was cutting and pasting the emailed copy of the form.

The nice thing about Postie is that it gives me the ability to post a draft to my blog via email. There might be a more elegant solution — I should check Forminator Pro to see if it has the ability to create a draft on it’s own since it creates a database on my server. If there is, I can cut out Postie which would mean one less program running on my server. I’ll report back if I discover that functionality in Forminator Pro.

A view of what Forminator Pro sends me

This is what I see when I get your form submission. The content Forminator Pro sends to WordPress is rearranged so that field four — the story synopsis is listed first. That saves me from having to cut and paste to move the information to the top. The the draft post has field three — the link to your story. Following that is your name field and your author @ name.

We won’t necessarily see results overnight, but in a few months, we will see the results with increase traffic and visibility as Google indexes the links to your stories and assigns its algorithmic value to your story.

Special thanks to Illumination Spotlight contributors

Thanks for all of your contributions, Karen Madej 💛, Bill Abbate, Terry Mansfield, Paul Myers MBA, Livia Dabs, Rasheed Hooda, Rene Jung, Besom & Bletherskite, Desiree Driesenaar, Selma, Marty de Jonge, Kathryn A. LeRoy, Ph.D., Brian E. Wish, PhD, Robert Locke, Eliot Kersgaard, Salam Khan, Sherry McGuinn, Catherine Delia, Kevin Buddaeus, Tom Byers, Michele Thill, Julián F. Fernández, Sylvia Love Johnson, Aurora Eliam, CMP, Stacey Christiansen, Chrissie Morris Brady Ph.D., Charles Roast, Corrine Roberts, Erin King, Ann K Frailey, Annelise Lords, Gurpreet Dhariwal, Dr Mehmet Yildiz,

Chris Hedges 🦄, BA, JD, is a photographer and writer who also enjoys creating web designs and blogs using WordPress.