Leadership

ILLUMINATION Achieved 7th Milestone

With 70,000+ Followers we are preparing for the 8th milestone.

I established ILLUMINATION on 19 March 2020. I was new on Medium. It was not even an idea last year this time. Within fewer than 11 months the publication grew rapidly for good reasons affecting writers and readers.

I measure the performance of my publications based on milestones. This approach gives me a good indication of progress. You may have read my announcement on 12 January 2021 titled: ILLUMINATION Achieved 6th Milestone.

In the last 25 days, our publication gained another 10,000 followers. As of today, ILLUMINATION has now 70,120 followers contributed by 8,000+ writers. Every day new writers join to contribute more.

Toppub.xyz showing ILLUMINATION on top of the page 6 as a significant publication among 70 most followed Medium publications.

Our publication hosts 120,000+ articles of Medium writers.

This remarkable venture requires a lot of effort from multiple stakeholders. Writers, editors, and readers contribute to its growth substantially. Dealing with noise is also part of this journey.

As founder and chief editor of my publications, I orchestrate day to day activities. ILLUMINATION receives, publishes, and distributes hundreds of articles each day.

By completing the seventh milestone successfully, now it is time to prepare for the next milestone.

What do we need to do for the 8th milestone?

As I did in the previous milestone, I set new goals. My focus is on four primary areas: quality improvement, balanced quantity increase, writer support, and reader satisfaction.

1 — Quality Improvement

ILLUMINATION holds a high-quality focus because it is essential to delight our readers. The higher quality of our content and delivery mechanism, the more followers and subscribers we gain.

We publish the type of stories our readers desire to read. Our diligent editors work hard to increase the quality of content contributed by our writers. I work hard to coordinate the delivery. It is a 24X7 virtual shop. Our virtual doors never close. There are always some hardworking editors in many hours of the days.

I am pleased that a majority of our writers submit reasonably high-quality material appealing to our readers. Many thanks for following guidelines and using the quality improvement checklist.

We continue the focus on quality. Photos on Medium stories consume most of our precious time. The guidelines provided by Medium do not seem to be adequate based on feedback received from writers. Image copyright infringement and unforeseen liability is a concern for our writers. In this milestone, I will radically solve this issue with help from our editors. I mean it. We cannot afford wasting time for trivial matters. We will demonstrate our leadership.

2 — Balance quantity increase

ILLUMINATION hosts stories of 8,000+ writers. We have no shortage of quantity. There are many prolific writers, and we support their needs.

Due to Medium’s limitations on the number of editors for publications in January, I created a mirror version of ILLUMINATION. This new publication called ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR helps us scale-out and give our prolific writers more publishing opportunities.

Since Medium allowed only 30 editors per publication, I shared our 60 editors’ load among multiple publications. We are juggling. I truly hope Medium will fix the publication limitations and provide us a reasonable way to serve our readers.

As a measure, I recommended our writers submit one article per day for ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated. And I allowed our prolific writers to offer as many articles as they want to ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR. I shared the approach and details of this interim period in this article.

We will continue with this policy until we receive good news from Medium.

3 — Additional support for writers

As a leader of multiple publications, my aim is to empower writers. I want each writer to become a better writer and earn maximum income from their stories.

I designed a clear transition and transformation plan for our contributing writers. My publications support aspiring, intermediate, experienced, and accomplished writers. I established ILLUMINATION-Curated to support this strategy. More information about this curated collection is in this story.

An enormous demand comes from writers. Rightly, they want to earn more money. Some writers depend on income from freelance writing. I analyzed these requirements and shared my experience and thoughts in a recently published article. It is titled How To Make Six-Figure Income On Medium.

To empower writers, I established an innovative publication called SYNERGY. This new publication aims to give voice to thousands of writers. It is designed to showcase concerns, aspirations, achievements, and progress of writers on Medium. In addition, SYNERGY will collaborate with writers from other platforms such as News Break, Vocal Media, Hub Pages, Patreon, Subtack and more. I will help bloggers to convert their blogs to Medium stories.

Our editors will continue mentoring and coaching. To enable collaboration, I created a virtual collaboration tool using Slack. Our Slack workspace has now over 6,150 members. It is growing rapidly. This virtual space has several clubs like Poetry, Fiction, Technology, Vocal Writers, News Break Writers and many more channels bringing writers together for collaboration. We have many top writers and media influencers on Slack.

My publications have an inquiry line to answer questions of writers. We still use Medium’s private messages for those writers who haven’t joined our virtual space on Slack yet. However, our volunteering editors and I are one message away via email or Slack to help you.

As writers need visibility to extend and enhance their offerings to a broader audience, I created several social media platforms. They can share their stories and amplify them in these platforms.

I compiled a collection with several artifacts to guide writers. I offer an opportunity for writers to benefit from Medium’s new short-form stories. Please be careful and use short-form with caution to stay compliant with Medium’s rules, primarily preventing duplicate content. Always handcraft them rather than copy and paste from our main stories.

In the 8th milestone, all writer resources will be available in a single space called ILLUMINATION Blog. I highly recommend all writers create writer bios, submit them to our publications, and add them to the end of their stories. Readers need to know writers before they follow them. Despite my hectic schedule, I created a writer bio even though it was belated.

Now for the 8th mile, I offer a new collection concept and distribution model. I called it Storybooks On ILLUMINATION. My goal is to create a storybook per topic and distribute them to our subscribed readers. The storybook will include collections on the chosen topic.

4 — Reader satisfaction

My ultimate goal is to delight our readers by providing high-quality and variety of content.

I regularly communicate with our subscribed readers using multiple tools and techniques. In addition to 70,000 followers on Medium, we have now over 80,000 subscribers following our newsletters.

Last ten months, our distribution and newsletter services were fragmented. I am relatively new to Medium and did not know how to integrate my network with my followers and publication followers.

I investigated and obtained helped from marketing strategists. With my new learning, I designed a new communication and distribution system. Even though I have multiple landing zones for our mailing services, I am now integrating them into a single platform.

ILLUMINATION distribution lists and newsletters are now hosted on Substack. However, the landing zones are hosted on Convertkit, MailChimp, WordPress and several other mailing and blogging platforms. The interest in our publications both on Medium and other platforms is substantially increasing. Here is a diagram showing our daily subscription progress this month.

We posted our first integrated newsletter from Subtack to subscribers. The distribution lists will be posted soon. I highly recommend all our writers to create their storybooks for future distributions.

One of the reasons our subscribers prefer our publications is due to quick publishing. I take several measures to expedite the publishing process. We aim to publish submitted stories within 24 hours if they meet the guidelines. The delays are caused by writers who do not follow the guidelines. Timely publishing gives fresh stories to our readers, and they love it.

To speed up publishing, I focus on automation. I automate tedious tasks and streamline processes as much as possible. With my technology background, I enjoy automating the process using various tools. I invested in tools and automated some tedious processes. It is a never-ending journey. There is and will always be room for improvement. I will do my best with collaboration.

We have smart editors volunteering to help me with automation. They come up with innovative ideas each day. Their brilliant ideas help us overcome some challenges and limitations of Medium’s publication system.

I am relatively new on Medium and learning each day. However, I have made substantial progress within the 12 months. My goal is to transfer my knowledge and skills to our new writers using our publications as a tool. I recommend each writer to create their own publication, blog, and writing platform. When you need help and guidance, please feel free to contact me. Sharing my knowledge and expertise is a passion for me.

There are still many challenges in running publications. For example, we cannot sort the submission queue based on the submission date. Scheduling does not work, and it fails frequently. But we find some workarounds each day. In general, there are never dull moments when we are helping our writers.

Many thanks to all our contributing writers and volunteering editors to enhance quality. I am also grateful for our supportive readers and subscribers of our services. We appreciate wonderful support for achieving seven milestones and I look forward to your support for many milestones in the future.

Thank you for reading my perspectives.

On behalf of editorial team, I wish our creative writers a joyful writing journey and discerning readers pleasant reading experience

Our editors work hard to help our writers succeed. They invest their precious time volunteering for smooth publishing of your stories. Please support them to support you. ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION, Dr Mehmet Yildiz, Brian E. Wish, PhD, Dr Ron Pol, Dr Michael Heng, Dr John Rose, Paul Myers MBA, Karen Madej, Joe Luca, Dipti Pande, Kevin Buddaeus, Kate Maxwell, Arthur G. Hernandez, Bill Abbate, Michael Patanella, Aurora Eliam, CMP, René Junge, Geetika Sethi, Ahmed Jamal, Britni Pepper, Selma, Earnest Painter, Dew Langrial, B. A. Cumberlidge. Lanu Pitan, Agnes Laurens, EP McKnight, MEd, CR Mandler MAT, The Maverick Files, Sumera Rizwan, Liam Ireland, Tony Young, Jr., Neha Sandhir S, Tree Langdon, Desiree Driesenaar, Stuart Englander, Ntathu Allen, Thewriteyard, Haimish Mead, Maria Rattray, Cristo Lopez, PhD, Dr. Preeti Singh, Holly Kellums, Kristina Segarra, Yohanan Gregorius, The Dozen, Audrey Malone,janny’s heart, Sabana Grande, Jennifer Friebely, Zen Chan, Aamir Kamal 🚀🚀🚀, John Cunningham, [arlie] PEYTON, Georgia Dimitrious, Kim Petersen, Josh Balerite Acol

About me

I am the founder and chief editor of ILLUMINATION, ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR, Technology Hits, and SYNERGY. I established these significant publications supporting 8,000+ writers and serving 87,000+ readers on Medium. Join my publications requesting access here. You are welcome to subscribe to my 100K+ mailing list, collaborate, enhance your network, and receive technology and leadership newsletters reflecting my industry experience. You can show your interest to support my publications as an editor. My free content strategy and marketing newsletter can be accessed from Substack. I also write for News Break and Vocal Media.

Most of my content can be found on my Medium blogs.