The Incredible Impact Of Publications

How You Can Grow Tenfold With The Right Outlet

Today I want to do something different. I’m going to share my stats and numbers with you. 100% honesty. I let these numbers speak for themselves. I got inspired by Desiree Driesenaar, who has been uplifting, motivating and most of all, 100% honest in her journey.

So let us dive right in.

I’ve started writing on Medium on April 3, 2020. I was registered long before, but never used the account. Until I noticed my inbox over flooding with their mails, so I visited the site and started using it.

I published my first article “Charisma and Appeal”, which was a small excerpt I translated to English from one of my published German books.

As you can see, the book itself got overwhelmingly positive reviews (92%) from 154 readers. I never advertised it, though the publisher who got it out for me said he paid someone for an excessive mailing list.

It was the first book I ever published.

So how did my English translation here on Medium fare in comparison?

Not that great, eh?

Well, maybe it wasn’t written that well anyways. I tried to fit good parts of my book into an article without over blowing it. It’s an 8 minute read as is. The book itself has more than 30,000 words in it.

But more importantly, I have not published the article through one of the publications here on Medium. In fact, I didn’t even know they were a thing.

I stumbled upon the whole system by accident, thanks to Google.

After I did some research, I contacted “Be Yourself”, a publication that seemed to be a good fit for my article, as self-improvement was my goal. Unfortunately, they’d only agree to publish work that does not partake in the “Medium metered paywall”.

I went with it and wrote about how I got to where I am now, living in Japan with a wife and kid. How I learned to be myself in the process. And it was fun.

But I also learned that Medium favors articles that are part of the metered paywall over free articles. This means I’d never find many readers or get curated by publishing free stuff. And let’s be honest:

Writers deserve compensation for the effort they put into their writing.

If I write a lame article that nobody wants to read, then I won’t get any views and therefore no payment. So it’s a fair system. I get paid if I write something that people actually want to read.

How A Strong Publication Changed My Situation Drastically

A friend, Salam Khan (love you, bro) introduced me to another Publication on Medium: Illumination. He told me that they accept all kinds of articles, work together, support each other and grow as a community.

Perfect!

I got in touch with their founder, Dr Mehmet Yildiz and quickly became part of something I did not even fathom. I knew nothing about them before and would slowly learn about the goals and hopes for this publication.

Now back to the stats, who cares about the meet and greet, right?

I published two more articles on April 5th, my first day at Illumination.

“My Journey so Far” and “How I used The Art Of War To Grow Personally”

Here are the stats as of today:

This is a huge difference, isn’t it? Do you see that “Distributed by curators in SELF” tag on my second article?

I received this notification about 2 or 3 hours after publishing the article. Here the E-Mail I got:

So, wow, right? I was on Medium for two days only. I honestly didn’t even know how good that is. Until some other writers told me that they haven’t been curated in almost a year of writing.

I’m honored!

Two days ago, nobody even read what I was writing. Now I’m curated? That’s a success story to me!

Now the best way to showcase this impact is by sharing the stats across the board. Please, take a look:

I started April 3, now it’s April 12. That’s 9 days since I got here. I joined Illumination on April 5. You can clearly see the difference there!

So from 5 to 12 (7 days) I got from 2 views to 1,108.

Note that this number also includes my responses to other articles!

That’s an increase of 55300%!!! (I had to double check that myself!!)

My Articles total at 744 Views, which sums up to an increase of 37100%, still a darn big number!

And here is a full list of my published articles and their stats:

There are many writers among us, whose numbers are ten times as large. I’m still just starting out. But I really enjoy this journey so far and am glad that I reach people with the stuff I write.

And I think my start wasn’t too bad for being active for only a week. I also started my own Twitter account. In 3 or 4 days, I grew from 0 to now 571 followers. (growing daily)

I read about others who would record their journey. One mentioned to get 1,000 views in his first month and he earned about $10 during that time.

For me it’s been 9 days only. I’ve so far earned $14.29 and got over 1,000 views in that first week.

I hope you found this as interesting as I do and can take something home from it. The bottom line is:

Join a publication!

Why I recommend Illumination

You can pick any publication that interests you. As I’ve pointed out in this article, others are way bigger than Illumination as we speak.

BUT

Illumination is growing rapidly. Like seriously. They started in March 2020 and got more than 1,700 followers as we speak. This number grows daily by over 100 new fans and followers. Here some stats from yesterday:

87,414 minutes of read

91,015 views

1.7 K+ followers

877 new visitors

215+ writers

48 editors (knowledge curators)

We gained 289 new followers since yesterday. We had an unexpected traffic spike to our publication today. It must be our insightful topics.

(Courtesy of Dr Mehmet Yildiz)

Not only that, but Illumination puts no restrictions on you as a writer.

While other publications only focus on single topics like business, entrepreneurship, poetry or something else, Illumination collects all of it and presents it through a handpicked list of top topics for the day.

If you can think it, you can write it. And Illumination makes sure that people read it.

Finally, Illumination is using Slack, an app through which we all stand in contact with, just chatting about our days, inspiring each other, helping each other out and all that. It’s our personal chatroom.

I am more than grateful that I’ve been invited. It’s an open collaboration from many talented writers, dedicated editors, marketing and networking experts and a visionary on top who has not only the ambition, but also the skill set and leadership qualities to make this group effort shine a light on us all.

We all work together. And you can be a part of this too. It’s worth it (my stats hopefully have made that clear)

In case you decide to join us, let me be the first to welcome you!

Kevin is an editor and writer for the ILLUMINATION publication. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Here is some of his latest stuff

The War Within — A Poem

The Toxicity of Trust Issues

If I wasn’t a writer