Day 6 of Illumination Spotlight: Automate or Fall Behind
A lesson I’ve learned since setting up Illumination Spotlight
How Illumination Spotlight works, statistics, and automation goals
Key takeaway from six days of work on Illumination Spotlight
Automate
Thanks for your submissions
I have been working on Illumination Spotlight for the last six days. I have learned a couple of things from this activity.
The response has been fantastic.
I am glad for the submissions to Illumination Spotlight. It will help with outside exposure for Illumination here. They have helped me with designing the system and figuring out what I will need to do to scale it upward to handle more submissions without it becoming overwhelming to process all the forms.
Luckily, there are solutions that are easily implemented with a little bit of thought and testing to see which one works the best for what we hope to accomplish.
Goals:
- Increase visibility for our stories and Illumination.
- Increase paid subscribers and revenue for our stories.
- Increase search engine rankings for our individual stories so they rank higher in search results.
An explanation of search engine optimization is here, if you are interested in learning how search engines decide how to display their results:
How Illumination Spotlight works
My workflow for Illumination Spotlight is as follows:
- A writer fills out the submission form.
- The form is sent by by server to my gmail address ([email protected]) as a “noreply” email from my service provider.
- I only require a Medium link and short synopsis of the story. All of the additional information is nice, but not required.
- When I receive the emails, I usually wait until a couple of times per day to check and create a post for them on Illumination Spotlight.
- I usually try to embed a link to the post you’ve helped create on one of your posts so you can see what it looks like.
Illumination Spotlight is bespoke right now
Illumination Spotlight is bespoke at this time.
I manually go in and cut and paste the information from the forms (usually only the first four data fields — name, profile name, story URL, and synopsis.
It has been great to work on the project. The amount of submissions have been easy to handle. My stats show that there has been a steady increase in visitors to the site.
Key Stats for Illumination Spotlight’s audience
Between March 30, 2020 and April 6:
- 182 Sessions (up 86%).
- 119 Users (up 45%).
- 479 Pageviews (up 211%).
- 63% new visitors.
- 19% returning visitors.
Automation is the future
I am looking for an automation solution to reduce some of the manual labor in cutting and pasting posts.
I am examining various solutions and have tested some.
If you saw an additional form that wouldn’t submit a completed form, you were witnessing a test.
I may move testing away from the main site to prevent any confusion until the best solution is developed.
I’m hoping to have it set up in the next day or two as it will allow greater use of the site. And, quicker posting of the stories about your great Illumination works.
If you wish to use Illumination Spotlight, please navigate to:
Chris Hedges, BA, JD, is an editor at Illumination and also at several other publications. My latest project is Illumination Spotlight. I enjoy web design because it’s a never-ending process of continually building, testing and improving sites makes life interesting and fun.
