Leadership

ILLUMINATION Achieved 6th Milestone

60,000+ Followers in 10 Months. Now we are preparing for the 7th milestone.

As pointed out before, ILLUMINATION was not even an idea last year this time. It manifested in late March 2020 and grew rapidly for good reasons.

Measuring the performance of my publications based on milestones give me a good indication of progress.

ILLUMINATION has now 60,339 followers contributed by 7,000+ writers.

According to toppub, we are a significant publication now, showing ILLUMINATION on page 6 among the top 100 publications on Medium.

We host 100,000+ articles of Medium writers.

This significant venture requires a lot of effort from multiple stakeholders. Writers, editors, and readers contribute to its growth.

I see myself as an orchestrator of this large band. Our editors and writers create this beautiful symphony. Our readers enjoy it.

We never stop growing. Our next goal is to reach our seventh milestone.

What do we need to do for 7th milestone?

I have five strategies in place.

1 — Improve quality

Quality is essential to delight our readers.

Even though the quality is a relative term, what I mean is publishing type stories that our readers would enjoy.

My editorial team members and I keep highlighting to improve quality.

Here are a few practical suggestions to our writers.

Before submitting your stories, you can use this checklist. By using this checklist, you can contribute to our quality improvement goal.

Please ensure that you use Grammarly before submitting your articles. I don’t want my editors to waste time with simple proofreading. Their voluntary time is precious.

Our editors are senior writers, and they know how to improve quality and create visibility for your content. Please help editors to help you.

Grammarly is free and available to everyone. You can benefit this useful tool. It is not bulletproof, but it can identify lots of issues. When writers shoulder a bit of load, editors would have breathing space and give you more strategic advice.

2 — Support quantity

We host stories of 7,000+ writers. Quantity is in abundance in our publication. Therefore, our readers love the variety, and they ask more and more.

However, Medium publications have severe constraints. Current publication system has limited capacity. For example, I cannot add more than 30 editors even though 56 editors volunteered to help.

To address the capacity issue, I created a mirror version of ILLUMINATION. This new venture helps us to scale out and give ample opportunity to our prolific writers.

While I limited submission numbers one article per day for ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated, our prolific writers can submit as many articles as they want to ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR because we added remaining editors to shoulder the load to this new publication.

Details are in this story.

3 — Empower writers

Our publications aim to empower writers to become better writers.

I have a clear transformation plan for our contributing writers. We have aspiring, experienced, and accomplished writers. I created ILLUMINATION-Curated to support this strategy.

Since I established this special collection, several hundred writers leveled up and started producing outstanding stories.

You can learn more about ILLUMINATION-Curated from this story. It includes relevant artifacts.

We continue mentoring and coaching.

I created a virtual collaboration tool using Slack.

Our Slack workspace has now over 5,500 members. It is proliferating.

I created several clubs like Poetry, Fiction, Technology, Vocal Writers, News Break Writers and many more channels bringing writers together and collaborate. We have many of top writers and media influencers.

I have an inquiry line to answer questions of writers. You are not dependent on Medium’s private messages. I am one message away via email or Slack to help you.

I created many social media platforms to give writers to share their stories and amplify them.

You can check the details from this story.

If you need more resources to improve your writing skills on Medium, I compiled a collection with several artifacts. You can review it.

I give an opportunity to writers to take benefit of Medium’s new short-form stories. You are welcome to submit short form stories to create visibility of your long for stories.

However, use short-form with caution to stay compliant with Medium’s rules especially focus on preventing duplicate content.

4 — Delight readers

We delight the readers by providing quality and variety of content.

I thank all our contributing writers and volunteering editors to enhance quality.

Timely publishing gives fresh stories to our readers and they love it.

Readers want to meet more writers. Please consider introducing yourself in a a story. If you haven’t submitted your writer bio yet, please use this story to get ideas. I distribute them to our reader in various ways.

You have no excuses. Despite my busy schedule, I created a writer bio even though it was belated.

I took several measure to speed up publishing process.

The focus is on automation.

5 — Automate and streamline processes

With strong technology background, I enjoy automating process.

I invested on state of art tools and automated several tedious process but automation is an ongoing journey. I invested in some tools that help us distribute our services to target audience efficiently.

Unfortunately, Medium does not give us administrative power on platform, so I cannot use my programming and scripting skills. But at least using the RSS service I create some automation.

There is and will always be room for improvement. I will do my best.

In addition, my editorial team come up with innovative ideas each day. Their brilliant ideas help us overcome some challenges and limitations of Medium’s publication system.

At the moment we cannot even sort the submission queue based on the submission date. Scheduling is buggy, fails frequently, and causes a lot of grief. I don’t want to go into details, but my fervent wish is to improve the publication system to streamline the process and automate them further.

I am relatively new on Medium but made substantial progress within 12 months. I want to transfer my knowledge and skills to our news writers to make good progress too.

Thank you for reading my perspectives.

I wish writers joyful writing and readers pleasant reading experience.

Prospective writers interested in becoming a contributor to ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, and Technology Hits, please send a request via this link. Please point out the name of the preferred publication in your request form.

You are welcome to join my 100K+ mailing list, to collaborate, enhance your network, and receive technology, leadership and writing tips on newsletters reflecting my industry experience.