Quick Tip

ILLUMINATION Third Activity Invite: Promoting Your Work

You don’t have to sell your soul. But show your followers how delighted you are with your efforts. We can conquer the world another day.

Selling ourselves and our skills to employers are things we have all done and will likely continue to do. It doesn’t mean you have Sales or Marketing or Promotional Wizard in your job title.

Have you interviewed for a job? You were selling your abilities to the interviewer.

Did you want to get someone on your side to support your idea or plan? The use of persuasion, negotiation, and likeability means you can sell.

Debbie Walker recently used all the ploys in her arsenal to convince her husband to do something he was determined to not do. You can read her story here.

To ring my own bell for a few lines …

I was a successful operations manager for a communications company due to my passion for fixing problems.

I sold two-year marketing plans to business owners because they believed and liked me. This allowed me to pay all my bills for six months.

I also had a semi-successful business on eBay for a while and I sold Avon door to door as a teenager.

I had no professional sales training or qualifications. I just used what I had to make the sale, all while maintaining my integrity. I have never been a low cut top or shirt unbuttoned one button too far kind of gal and never will be.

Being ‘discovered’

As writers, the only way to success, these days, is to be discovered, published, marketed and promoted.

Most of us will never achieve a publishing deal worth thousands (I apologise if I just burst a bubble or two) and even if we did, we’d still have to do a tour of book shops, be interviewed on TV and radio and for newspaper or magazine articles.

We’ve all heard the adage that the most famous author on the planet, J K Rowling, had her Harry Potter pitch rejected by 12 publishers.

This Is The ‘Harry Potter’ Synopsis Publishers Rejected Over …

Now imagine what we’d have to do to become successful on Medium.

Hitting Publish is not enough. Not even on ILLUMINATION.

But there is good news, you can read all of Dr Mehmet Yildiz’s daily articles from the beginning to find all the tasty tips.

The easiest way to find them all is to go to his profile page Dr Mehmet Yildiz. They are well worth the read and I’m still finding new things to read on my second and third reads!

Dr Mehmet Yildiz has been providing the tools necessary for building our success since the beginning of his novel publication.

His article Vision, Discovery, Strategy, & Promotion holds all the information about his rationale for this activity.

Here is the excerpt from the Dr’s article regarding the activity from 20th March 2020.

The key concern is the fear of being spammy. There may be a truth in this fear. However, there is a fine line between promotion and spam. It is not too difficult to distinguish smart promotion from stupid spam.

I endorse the smart, ethical, considerate, relevant, contextual, and professional type of promotion, especially in content strategy and marketing.

We must promote our ideas, vision, strategy, and goals consistently in the right context to the right audience to achieve our goals. Period.

Recommended Productivity Actions

1. Introduce yourself in an article attaching a few sample articles representing your capabilities. What are your differentiating traits? You might like to add this to QT 2 Hello, Would you Care to Introduce Yourself?

2. Read at least 3 articles, show your appreciation, provide feedback, share in on Twitter, and other social media you are connected to. You might like to add this to QT 1 ILLUMINATION First Activity Invite: Adding and Using Twitter

3. Introduce ILLUMINATION to at least 3 followers and encourage them to showcase their best articles.

Point 3 might be a tricky one to do.

Yet it is a great opportunity to get to know your followers as well as inviting them to join as a reader or a writer. A super welcome to ILLUMINATION, no?

If it helps, I use a standard or tailored invite to writers whose work I’m impressed by.

Would you like to write for ILLUMINATION? Join Medium. Click on the link and leave your medium id in the comments @wrtwrds, for example, is mine.

Or …

We love poetry at ILLUMINATION. If you’d like to write something, please leave a comment and your medium id @wrtwrds, for example, is mine, at the bottom of the article below for Dr Mehmet Yildiz to add you as a writer.

I’m looking forward to seeing more of your work in ILLUMINATION.

Don’t be shy to promote yourself, your capabilities, vision, and goals. Your readers need to know you to consume your valuable content. Illuminate your creativity! ~ Dr Mehmet Yildiz

This series of Quick Tips is for anyone who’d like a shortcut to learning how to raise your profile on the ILLUMINATION publication, on Medium, and — this is the best part — on Google via Search Engine Optimisation.

I have tried to keep up with every suggested activity and challenge but I missed a few!

If you have a fear of missing out (FOMO), don’t panic I’ll be summarising them all.

Karen Madej is usually an English Language Coach to French business people but currently, due to circumstances outside of her control, she is carrying out all her ILLUMINATION writer and editor activities on her mobile phone from a call centre in Scotland that fortunately, has two or fewer calls per person per day.