avatarDr Mehmet Yildiz

Summary

ILLUMINATION, a Medium publication, has reached its 8th milestone with over 80,000 followers and is preparing for the 9th milestone by focusing on improving quality, increasing quantity, providing better support to writers, and giving more options to readers.

Abstract

The ILLUMINATION publication on Medium, founded by Dr. Mehmet Yildiz, has achieved significant growth since its inception on March 19, 2020, amassing over 80,000 followers and hosting more than 150,000 articles from 8,500+ writers. Despite facing challenges such as platform restrictions and technical issues, the publication has adapted by creating additional publications like ILLUMINATION'S MIRROR and SYNERGY to support its writers and balance the workload. The leadership team is committed to enhancing the quality of content, increasing the quantity of stories published, offering robust support to writers through resources and mentorship, and expanding options for readers, including a central newsletter and distribution system. The publication's success is attributed to the collaborative efforts of its writers, editors, and readers, with a focus on continuous improvement and innovation.

Opinions

  • The founder, Dr. Mehmet Yildiz, expresses pride in the publication's growth and the writers' adherence to quality improvement guidelines.
  • There is a positive outlook on the publication's ability to overcome platform-related challenges, such as Medium's restrictions and technical bugs.
  • The editorial team values timely publishing, aiming to publish stories within 24 hours unless problematic.
  • The leadership is grateful for the constructive criticism received, as it has helped to attract more readers and writers.
  • There is an acknowledgment of the importance of high-quality photos and proper captioning in articles, following a new policy implementation.
  • The publication emphasizes the significance of writer support, offering various resources, mentorship, and opportunities for increased visibility and income.
  • The introduction of new publications and the use of social media platforms are seen as effective strategies for enhancing writer exposure and content distribution.
  • Reader satisfaction is a top priority, with the publication striving to provide a

Leadership

ILLUMINATION Achieved 8th Milestone

With 80,000+ Followers, we are preparing for the 9th milestone.

image courtesy of Dr Mehmet Yildiz — digitalmehmet.com

I started ILLUMINATION on 19 March 2020. It is still not one year, but we gained 80,000 readers.

Measuring the performance of my publications helps me understand the progress and take corrective actions. You may have read my announcement on 6 February 2021 titled: ILLUMINATION Achieved 7th Milestone.

In less than a month, our publication gained another 10,000 followers. As of today, ILLUMINATION now has 80,145 followers contributed by 8,500+ writers. Many new writers join to contribute more.

image screen capture by Dr. Mehmet Yildiz

Toppub.xyz showing ILLUMINATION on top of page 5 as a significant publication among 65 most followed Medium publications.

Our publication hosts 150,000+ articles of Medium writers.

Multiple stakeholders contributed to this progress. We are grateful to our writers, editors, and readers. We had to deal with some noise, but it is part of the equation for growth. We are also grateful to those who criticize our noble venture. They help us bring more readers and writers. Only fruitful trees get attention.

I enjoy orchestrating day-to-day activities. ILLUMINATION editors receive, review, sort out, guide, publish, and distribute hundreds of articles each day.

By completing this 8th milestone successfully, we prepare for the 9th milestone.

What we achieved, and what do we need for the 9th milestone?

Our focus for the next milestone is on four critical domains:

improving quality,

increasing quantity,

providing better support to writers, and

giving more options to readers.

1 — Improving Quality

We have utmost importance on improving quality. The higher quality, the more satisfied our readers are.

We listen to our readers and guide our writers.

I am pleased that many new writers follow advice, use our resources, and submit high-quality materials. The quality improvement checklist provides a useful guide to new writers to improve the quality of their content.

Editors always bring new ideas and they diligently work to improve quality.

Many thanks for following guidelines and using the

Dealing with photos has become a big issue. However, we developed a new policy just a few days ago and noticed substantial improvement in the quality of photos in articles. Many writers submit copyright-free photos, and they properly caption them. I am very pleased with the progress. And I am very grateful to our editors who successfully implemented this policy.

2 — Increasing Quantity

We support 8,500+ writers now. Some of our writers are prolific.

We have 66 editors who serve these writers. However, not all of them serve ILLUMINATION because of restrictions Medium puts on publications. Only 30 editors are shouldering the load of these many writers.

Unfortunately, Medium caused delays in our progress, but we understand the technical challenges. Instead of getting upset with this restriction, we took responsibility and created a new publication named ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR. This publication helps us balance the load as we added remaining editors to this publication.

Until Medium fixes the bug on the publication system, we will keep juggling.

As a measure, we allow our prolific writers to submit their additional stories to ILLUMINATION’ S MIRROR as guided in this article.

3 —Better support for writers

Our aim is to empower our writers. Our editors make every effort for each writer to become more successful and earn maximum income from their content.

We created a clear transition plan for our contributing writers. ILLUMINATION family of publications support all levels of writers, including aspiring, intermediate, experienced, and accomplished. We established ILLUMINATION-Curated to support our transition and transformation strategy. You can find related information about our curated collection is in this story.

Many writers want to gain more visibility, more readability, and earn more income from their content. As of publication leadership, we do our best, but our writers face challenges since November after Medium made some changes to the platform. Stats dramatically decreased. It is not only in our publications but many others, as heavily discussed in several articles on different publications on Medium.

Many writers want to gain more. One of the factors to gain more income is to write desirable and viral stories. I shared my honest views on this article titled How To Make Six-Figure Income On Medium. I hope it provides useful perspectives to our contributing writers.

Leveraging the power of ILLUMINATION and ILLUMINATION-Curated, we created a new publication to support our writers. It is called SYNERGY.

We designed this innovative publication to publish concerns, aspirations, achievements, and progress of our contributing writers. We invite collaborators from other platforms such as News Break, Vocal Media, Hub Pages, Patreon, and Subtack to add new perspectives on diversifying. We also help bloggers to write Medium stories.

During this milestone, our Slack workspace has gained more members. 6,500+ members network and collaborate meaningfully. Our editors mentor and coach new writers.

Our Slack workspace includes virtual clubs like Poetry, Fiction, Technology, Vocal Writers, News Break Writers and includes several more channels. Our Slack workspace has many top writers and media influencers.

We have an inquiry line to answer the questions of writers. But we noticed that there are some bugs in the writer registration system on Medium. Even after adding some writers, they cannot see the publication. I am glad that writers can directly contact me and some moderators on our Slack workspace, and we quickly add them to publications.

These additional services to enhance Medium features are free services to our writers. I point out this because some critics do not understand the additional values we give to our writers and take them for granted.

To increase the visibility and readability of content, I created several social media platforms. Our writers can share their stories and amplify them on these platforms. These are free services.

We compiled a collection with several articles to guide writers.

We offer opportunities for writers to benefit from Medium’s new short-form stories. To meet Medium’s rules, for preventing duplicate content, I advised our writers to always handcraft short-forms rather than copy and paste from our main stories.

We moved all writers' resources and publication-related stories to ILLUMINATION Blog, which is a new publication. This implementation gave more space to the stories of our writers.

I recommend all writers submit writer bios. Readers want to know writers before they follow them. I created a writer bio even though it was belated.

Last but not least, we introduced the concept of Storybooks On ILLUMINATION. Our goal is to increase the visibility and readability of stories. In addition, I recommended the writers to index their publication. I created a sample to guide the writers.

4 —Giving More Options to Readers

Our goal is to delight readers by giving them high-quality and a wide variety of content on multiple topics.

We regularly communicate with our readers. We now have around 100,000 subscribers following our publications and newsletters.

We now have a central newsletter and distribution system for ILLUMINATION on Substack.

Here is the growth of our mailing list and newsletter in February.

image screen capture by the author — ILLUMINATION subscribers

We posted our second integrated newsletter from Subtack to subscribers. And will post the third one tomorrow.

Our readers appreciate the newsletters and distribution lists.

Readers are also happy with our fast publishing as they get fresh stories timely. Based on our guidelines, unless stories are problematic, we publish them within 24 hours.

We keep automating our tools as there are still challenges in running publications on Medium. I don’t want to go into details, but we find new workarounds each day.

Conclusion

I want to thank all our contributing writers and volunteering editors who helped us achieve our 8th milestone.

Thank you for reading my perspectives.

On behalf of the editorial team, I wish you all a joyful writing and reading journey.

Our hard-working editors invest their precious time volunteering for the smooth publishing of your stories. Please support them and connect with them to serve you better. ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION, Dr. Mehmet Yildiz, Tree Langdon, Brian E. Wish, Ph.D., 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, Desiree Driesenaar, Stuart Englander, Ntathu Allen, Thewriteyard, Haimish Mead, Maria Rattray, Cristo Lopez, Ph.D., 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, Terry L. Cooper, [arlie] PEYTON, Georgia Dimitrios, Kim Petersen, Josh Balerite Acol, Noorain Hassan, BMS, Mallika Vasak, Ikram Al Mouaswas, Linda Kowalchuk, George Blue Kelly, Scott Hughey (TheWriteScott)

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 8,500+ writers and serving 100,000+ 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.

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