Have You Noticed an Exciting Change in Your ILLUMINATION Stats?

Let’s convert our views to reads, shed our cocoons and become butterflies!

Here’s a round-up of the tips Dr Mehmet Yildiz has shared with us over the past few weeks. I’ve only highlighted the ones I’ve adopted, to demonstrate that they do work as you’ll see from my stats.

Some might think the above stats are not that amazing. But to me, they are double or treble my usual views per day. That’s exciting to me and for our community because three of the stories were published in ILLUMINATION, and the fourth was one of the tasks we were given — to introduce ourselves.

I did my interview with Authors and Peeps. The editor, Kabir, offers this innovative service to the likes of you and me. His finished article has flair. Beware those flowery swirly section breaks, as they are pretty distracting.

I’m going to let you in on what I’ve been doing since the good Dr posted the communication below, to his community on April 1st.

“Meaningful engagement for community members is another tool and communication method to transform our weaknesses into strengths.” — @DigitalMehmet

Engagement, collaboration, survive and thrive

His words, particularly ‘collaboration’ inspired me to write this.

When Dr Mehmet invited me to join ILLUMINATION, I felt included in his vision from the beginning.

The post addressed everyone in the ILLUMINATION community. I shared some thoughts on what I’d seen of the drafts submitted, and how the quality could easily be ramped up a notch — inline with Medium Curation Guidelines and formatting and quality guides. Taking this action made me feel as though I was doing something that would help us all do well.

“Cultural vitality through meaningful engagement is our key success factor.” — @DigitalMehmet

Responses and claps

Have you ever checked out your responses tab in the stats section? You can see all the stats on the responses you left for writers.

In three days I left 32 responses and got 28 fans from those responses!

I clapped for 130 odd responses and stories over three days. Not all for our publication, because I’m also looking out for writers who I think are interesting and might like to join our community. Something that will help the incredible growth and momentum of ILLUMINATION.

Reciprocity works and it feels wonderful

We’re here at the beginning of the life of our publication. We can all play our parts in it, as much or as little as we can offer. Dr Mehmet is keen for us to use the tools we have to attract as many views and reads and fans and new writers. Read his post here.

I have received love from top writers. E.g. Sinem Günel replied almost instantly. I was chuffed. Maybe she’d do us the honour of joining.

There are so many prolific clappers, commenters, and sharers in our group. I’ve started a list of all the people whose work I’d like to make sure I don’t lose sight of for too long. There are nearly a hundred people on it, and I intend to keep building it. They also reciprocate my enthusiasm for their words.

If you really want to show an excellent piece of work some love you’ll need to read it in depth. The Correct Way of Reading — I kid you not — is about an experiment which gives the results of different reading types. It could really help us all out!

Twitter, Facebook, Linked In Tools

You might have cottoned on to the brilliant Twitter tool that you can use. Highlight the words or sentences that you think are so meaningful in a story, click on the bird, remember to add @medium #illumination #medium to the tweet, so the Dr can keep track of the traffic.

The quote below provides instructions for retweeting other writer’s article links.

Consider to retweet at least ten articles published on ILLUMINATION using @medium #illumination #RT. If you see an ILLUMINATION article on your twitter handle or ILLUMINATION Twitter List, please like it and retweet it with using @medium #illumination. — Dr Mehmet Yildiz

Do you find your hands moving to highlight articles outside of Medium? I frequently try when reading The Guardian. That’s how automated my highlight and clicking the bird to tweet is. You too can tweet on autopilot!

Use friend links for your articles that will appeal to audiences outside of Medium, especially anything you write about the current pandemic is likely to be lapped up by Google.

Sharing on your own Facebook and Linked In accounts, may convert to new readers and writers for Medium, and ILLUMINATION, and you. Several of my friends have joined, and my dad has even become a paying member!

I’m guilty of not sharing any of my articles on ILLUMINATION’s FB page. Went crazy and added all my stories that I love but didn’t do well when I first started writing prolifically. Will you add yours?

Full details of Social Media for Content Strategy can be found here.

Chris Hedges 🦄 is working on the SEO angle and would love for you to share three of your own ILLUMINATION posts using this simple form.

What are your stats doing?

I’d love to hear from you so we can compare notes.

Slack

When I first saw the word I didn’t know if I should be insulted or curious.

I joined and I’m a little more involved with the movers and shakers behind the scenes.

Click here if you’d like to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in.

I hope to chat with you on Slack soon.

The Takeaways

The purpose of this post has been to highlight some of the easy collaborative, marketing, and chat tools we can use to promote our work and the work of our fellow illuminators.

I can’t handle anything too technical, I leave that to all those younger and or cleverer than me.

I think my stats prove that prolifically reading, tweeting highlights, and responding to other people’s stories is a very worthwhile activity to build your and ILLUMINATION’s audience.

Go be a bee and cross-pollinate.