CURATION BY COMMUNITY
How to Help the Editors with Curation
There is more than one way to skin a cat
When I first started writing on Medium, I read everything I can about how to be successful on the platform. Every so-called Guru I read emphasized one thing over everything — you must get curated, they said. They also agreed that it was easier said than done.
No one really knew how it worked, and every suggestion, trick, and hack came with the caveat that it was not a guarantee that you will be successful.
What everyone said, mostly, was that if your story meets all the criteria of high-quality content and SEO, your chances of receiving the blessing known as curation was significantly higher than otherwise.
In a nutshell, do your best, and good luck.
I was fortunate to receive the blessing early on, but not often. More exposure didn’t always translate into more money. My experience told me that when a curated story was published in a significant publication, it usually did better than when I did it on my own or in a lesser-known pub.
Not all the Big Guys are created equal. Some promote your work better than others, and you will see the difference in results accordingly. When I joined a writers community called #ILLUMINATION, set up as a Medium publication, I was blown away with the resulting success.
What makes it different? In a word, community.
One of the things the experts recommend for the new writers to do is to join Facebook groups and support each other. I actively participated in eight groups for four months by promoting myself and reading what interested me from others. It seemed like they were all the same people in all eight groups, and my success from all the engagement was minuscule.
Not all communities are created equal.
Everyone supports everyone else in this community. You don’t have to take my word for it; find out for yourself.
Of course, you can’t read all of the one hundred or so stories published every day; the stories are curated by the editors and listed by topics, so you can pick out the ones you want to read. With nearly 250 writers and over 2,000 followers, everyone receives a fair amount of reading love.
My views haven’t gone up by much — yet, but my read ratio is better, and the read time is phenomenal. People are actually reading your stories. They are highlighting, commenting, and clapping; the engagement is fantastic. I have earned more in the first two weeks of April than any full month in the past six months.
What about the quality?
The quality of content is superb, written by well-known and not so well-known writers on Medium. The diversity of subjects covers the full gamut of topics on Medium, and the readers can choose whatever they want to read, and they usually do. Don’t take my word for it; see it for yourself.
But wait, there is more
If that wasn’t enough, some of the writers curate their own favorites from the community, and in the process, introduce new writers to their followers.
How long is the wait time?
I know that most of the writers on Narrative choose to write here because they want to control when it is published, rather than wait for several days to a week for the Big Guys to release it for them.
My stories on Illumination take a few minutes after I have submitted them. I see many of the writers who publish here also write on Illumination, so this may not be news to some of you, but for others, I would like to extend my invitation for you to take a look at it. We all contribute our work to different publications; this can be another one.
As I said, it is a community that looks and feels like a publication, and we are growing fast. We’ve just started the fourth week of our existence, and we already have almost 2,500 followers. Get in on the ground floor, and you can only go up.
As more and more readers start following us, they will see your work as it is curated in the community; They’ll get to know you and support you, and when your writing shows up elsewhere, they’ll know who you are.
Have fun writing, reading, and connecting, and as always, thank you for reading.
Rasheed Hooda regularly writes on #ILLUMINATION, a writers’ community on Medium, where we support each other.
He is a self-proclaimed weirdo living a Freedom Lifestyle and writing about related topics — Travel, Personal Growth, and entrepreneurship. (Join the Tribe)
“You can let others tell you what it means to be successful, or you can decide it for yourself.”
