Inspiration and Productivity
Short-Form Stories Not For Income But Visibility and Findability.
Think of them as a metaphorical tripwire.
Creative and productive use of short-form posts on Medium
I introduced short-form stories in December 2020, confirming: Yes, We Accept Short-Form Stories. Then as a follow-up, I guided how to use them creatively in this story titled Give Your Long Stories a Second Life. I emphasize the use of short-form posts due to the great benefits.
Even though some writers understand the value of short-form stories, some are still not convinced and don’t benefit from this opportunity.
The main concern is that short-form posts do not generate income. This is true. However, the purpose of short-form posts is not to generate income.
Short-form posts can be seen as communication tools to generate new leads in sales terms.
Short-form posts resemble the concept of a tripwire in marketing. Tripwire marketing offers leads by providing low-cost products and encourages converting them to more expensive ones later. The purpose of tripwire marketing is customer acquisition.
Your customers are your readers on Medium.
There are many ways to gain new readers. One of them is your usual post in long story forms.
Think of Medium as a vast ocean. Or you may think of it as a gigantic city with millions of shops. How can you generate traffic to your shop? Every shop sells something, but the products reach only a particular range — the ones in your suburb.
How to reach out next suburbs and districts?
The algorithm determines this.
Algorithms favor a specific type of content in platforms. We certainly don’t know the exact criteria, but from observations, we have some ideas.
For example, content distribution algorithms favor well-crafted stories with enticing titles, keywords, and tags attracting reader attention. These type of stories triggers the algorithms.
The more engagement in the article, the more weighting the story get. The story starts showing in the tags and goes to the top of the lists attracting reader attention. It is a mechanism for stories to trend and go viral on Medium.
And as a secret, the more you post, the more active your profile will be. This means that algorithms can amplify the content of busy and active profiles. Please keep this secret between us. Some high-earning top writers and bloggers told me this confidentially.
How does short-form help to this case?
Your short-form is like an advertisement for your long-form story. It creates visibility to your long-form story. The chance of a reader reading a short form is much higher.
Many readers don’t have much time for reading. From my surveys, people read Medium stories during their short breaks at work, while waiting in a medical appointment queue, in airports, in shop queues, and even during toilet breaks.
This fact can give us ideas about reader behavior. If you have a 15-minute read story, the reader’s likelihood to open that story is lower than opening a one-minute read during these short breaks.
If crafted well with compelling reasons that resonate with the reader, your one to two minutes read short-form content may be an excellent opportunity for the reader to save it and read in the future.
Moreover, search engines index short-forms. So the link in your short-form story serves as a back-link to your long-form story. This can increase the chance of traffic to your long-form story.
These are simple scenarios. There may be many other scenarios in short forms to create visibility.
Rather than going on theories and delving into details, I want to provide a practical guide to start using short-form posts meaningfully.
How to start
When you submit a long-form story, just summarize the key points showing the value of your story to your prospective readers.
The key questions to ask are:
Why should a reader read this story?
What value do they get?
How does this story help the reader?
As pointed out in my previous posts, ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications have six publications serving a different purpose and different reader audience.
When you submit a story to ILLUMINATION, you can post several short forms to other publications. For example, if your story is related to writing, freelancing, and writing platforms, you can post a short form of your story to SYNERGY. If your story relates to technology, the future, science, and entrepreneurial matters, you can post a short form to Technology Hits.
By doing this, you tap into two audience types. In addition, the chance of your story being seen doubles.
I recently recommended that published authors contributing to ILLUMINATION Book Chapters create short posts of their stories and submit them to ILLUMINATION-Curated, ILLUMINATION’S Mirror, SYNERGY, and Technology Hits based on the content of the book. Several authors started doing this, and they gained new readers from multiple publications.
Creating a short form does not take long. It is worthy of your effort.
Short-form stories must be maximum of 150 words. I saw many great short-form stories with 50 to 100 words performing well.
If you want to increase your views, read times, and gain new readers, you can benefit from short forms.
We allow three short-form stories per writer in each of our publications in the ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications circle.
Caution
The only caution is not just copying and pasting your long story instead, handcrafting them, as pointed out before in a story titled Medium’s Algorithm May Flag Your Short-Form Stories as Duplicative of Your Long-Form. Please consider this point to stay compliant and protect your account.
Examples
Here is a short-form post on ILLUMINATION to introduce chapters of my book hosted on ILLUMINATION Book Chapters and summarized in Technology Hits.
This simple approach increased views of my original chapters substantially as short-form posts helped me reach out to three publications. This is the power of ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications.
For published authors, here is a creative short-form example posted by Øivind H. Solheim today.
Conclusion
We created the integrated platform giving you an opportunity to develop meaningful engagement and visibility.
We also provided guidance and removed the roadblocks for you.
It is up to you to take the opportunities and shine.
Let’s take personal responsibility to find our readers. Let’s create visibility to our stories. Unless you make an individual effort, it is tough to get the attention of buyers from your little shop in this gigantic city.
Thank you for reading my perspective. I am here to help and support you. Please comment if you need clarification and further assistance on this opportunity.
Here is a fresh challenge to get implement this idea.
An Overview of ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications on Medium
You can post your short-form stories to the following publications. We accept up to three short-form stories per day relevant to each publication’s purpose and guidelines.
ILLUMINATION
ILLUMINATION, as one of the significant publications on Medium is visited by over 50,000 unique members daily and gained two million minutes of reading this month. In addition, some stories went viral and brought many new readers. As a generic publication, we accept every ethical topic meeting Medium’s guidelines. Link to publication.
ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR
This generic publication was designed for the requirements of prolific writers who need to submit multiple stories in a day. You may submit several stories to ILLUMINATION’S MIRROR within a 24 period. Please check this article for details: Balancing Load of ILLUMINATION. Link to publication.
ILLUMINATION-Curated
We designed this unique publication for experienced and accomplished writers. Senior editors select the contributors for this publication using stringent criteria. If you are an experienced and accomplished writer, we allow you to post your storied to this publication upon your request directly. Please find details in this article. You can check some sample stories from this publication in this recent collection. Link to publication.
SYNERGY
SYNERGY is another specialized publication serves freelance writers who want to share writing, blogging, and editing content. It connects writers, editors, and bloggers through their stories. We invite freelance writers from other platforms such as Vocal Media. Here is the purpose of Synergy. Besides, you may find a sample collection to get an idea for the type of stories we publish on Synergy: Engaging Stories on SYNERGY. Here is a collection of sample stories hosted on SYNERGY. Link to publication.
Readers Hope
This new and generic publication was designed for absolute beginners. You may submit raw content to this new pub. We don’t edit content submitted to Readers Hope. But, our editors provide valuable and helpful guidance via private notes or in our Slack workspace to members. Here is a story introducing the purpose of Readers Hope: What If We can Transform Readers into Micro-Writers. Editors introduced values of Readers Hope. We compiled their perspectives into a single story. Our editors are willing to support new writers to gain experience. Please check their stories. You may contact editors on Slack when you need support. They can help you learn and grow. Here is the Vision and Mission of “Readers Hope”. Link to publication.
Technology Hits
We designed this special publication for writers and readers interested in technical topics, digital entrepreneurship, digital transformation, information technology, artificial intelligence, IoT (the Internet of Things), Cloud computing, quantum computing, tech news, digital economy, blockchain, bitcoin, Nun-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), and futuristic topics related to emerging technologies. You can submit science-fiction in this pub. More info about Technology Hits Value Propositions of Technology Hits. Introduction to Technology Hits. Inviting Storytellers From All Aspects of Technology. Here is a collection including some sample stories from this publication. Link to publication.
ILLUMINATION Book Chapters
We designed this special publication for published and indie authors. We help new writers to get published and become authors. Details about this publication are in this story: ILLUMINATION Book Chapters: A publication giving voice to published authors on Medium. The following articles provide additional information about ILLUMINATION Book Chapters: How Can Published Authors Create Visibility. Here is a sample editorial bulletin to promote ILLUMINATION Book Chapters to readers: ILLUMINATION Book Chapters: Editorial Bulletin #9 New resources. And here is the Index of Published Book Chapters. You can find some sample book chapters in this collection. Link to publication.
ILLUMINATION on YouTube
This unique publication aims to create a bridge between YouTubers and Medium writers using our YouTube channel and seven prominent publications. Many YouTubers are also bloggers, and we believe that Medium is an excellent platform for them to tap into a new audience. This publication is owned by Illumination YouTube Coordinator. You can contact him on Illumination Slack workspace. Link to publication.
ILLUMINATION Blog
In addition our chief editor keeps all publications related stories in a seperate publications called Illumination’s Blog. This publication can be helpful for new writers to find guiding articles. This publication is not for writers. It is for editorial purposes. Link to publication: https://medium.com/illumination-blog. Dr Mehmet Yildiz hosts his personal stories in his publication called Euphoria. If you enjoy health and fitness type of stories, you may check his personal publicaiton. Link to publication.
How to Create Visibility of Your Stories
7 Tips for Freelance Writers Dealing with Chronic Stress Effectively
Science-Based Therapeutic Value of Expressive Writing for Mental Health
Mentoring on ILLUMINATION: Peer support is essential for success.
To create further visibility of your work, you can join our Slack workspace and collaborate with other fellow writers. We have around 11,800members. You can share your story links on these two channels.
#post-your-own-writing-here and
#chosen-for-further-distribution
Here is an Introduction to ILLUMINATION Slack Workspace
How to Increase Your Income
Meet Writers from Their Pen
Curated Writer Bios
Learn about contributing writers of ILLUMINATION written by their pen
medium.com
Meet Editors
Our editors play an important role in guiding our writers. You may meet some of them from this curated collection compiled by ILLUMINATION-Curated.
Invitation to Illumination Fiction Club
This is a collaborative effort for fiction writers.
Featured Stories by Editors
Please enjoy stories featured by our editors.
Here are the links to our recently curated stories by ILLUMINATION so that you can easily access them. Each collection has around 100 chosen stories, including eclectic topics from experienced writers. We will update this list as we have more collections.
Curated Collection #1, Curated Collection #2, Curated Collection #3, Curated Collection #4, Curated Collection #5, Curated Collection #6, Curated Collection #7, Curated Collection #8, Curated Collection #9, a collection from SYNERGY, Curated Collection #10, Curated Collection #11, Curated Collection #12, Curated Collection #13, Curated Collection #14, Curated Collection #15, Curated Collection #16, Curated Collection #17, Curated Collection #18, Curated Collection #19, Curated Collection #20, Curated Collection #21, Curated Collection #22, Curated Collection #23, Curated Collection #24, Curated Collection #25, Curated Collection #26, Curated Collection #27, Curated Collection #28, Curated Collection #29, Curated Collection #30, Curated Collection #31, Curated Collection #32, Curated Collection #33, Curated Collection #34, Curated Collection #35, Curated Collection #36, Curated Collection #37, Curated Collection #38, Curated Collection #39, Curated Collection #40, Curated Collection #41, Curated Collection #42, Curated Collection #43, Curated Collection #44, Curated Collection #45, Curated Collection #46, Curated Collection #47, Curated Collection #48, Curated Collection #49.
Sample Collections that I created
The Power of Freelancing for Writers: Freelancing Collection
Featured Stories About “Writing” From The Top Writers of SYNERGY
NFT Story Collection on ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications — Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs)
Interviews with Writers: Featuring inspiring writers of ILLUMINATION
Discover ILLUMINATION Writers: BIOs of writers from their pen
Sample Book Chapters: Discover 70+ published authors on ILLUMINATION Book Chapters
Do You Want to Become A Sexy Entrepreneur? Entrepreneurship:
Publication Resources
Essential publication-related stories can be accessed via this collection.
Publications of Our Writers on Medium
Onboarding Pack for New Writers
Reviewing this information pack is essential for new writers. It includes guiding points to get started and benefit from our publications.
Latest Newsletter from Illumination Integrated Publications
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Sample Health Improvement Articles for New Readers
Defeat Metabolic Syndrome and Slim Down Waistline with Three Tips
Why 442 Million People Live Diabetic and What We Can Do About it
Six Tips to Prevent Brain Atrophy and Lower the Risks of Mental Disorders
What Can We Do About NCDs Killing 41 Million People Yearly?.
Reduce the Risks of Neonatal Disorders to Prevent Infant Mortality.
Reduce the Risks of Major Diseases with Healthy Lifestyle Habits
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Thank you for subscribing to my content. I share my health and well-being stories in my publication, Euphoria. If you are new to Medium, you may join by following this link.
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