I Published Six Articles on Vocal
By: Dr Mehmet Yildiz
Tags: Leadership, Entrepreneurship, Business, Writing, Freelancing

Possibilities / Entrepreneurship

I Published Six Articles on Vocal

This is what I learned.

Introduction

I published a story about my initial experience of Vocal. The readers well received the story on my experimentation. More importantly, the responses motivated me to write a follow up on my findings.

My purpose was to introduce my findings and initial impression on Vocal+. I mentioned the basics and provided adequate information to get you started writing for Vocal. Many writers found Vocal useful as a freelance opportunity.

Several writers enhanced my messages. From your comments, I learned about new features. Thank you all for your excellent input. Through this initiative, I met new writers and started collaborating. One simple story can open new communication path. I am grateful for the outcome.

Purpose of this post

In this post, I will share my findings based on six articles I submitted to Vocal. Here are the links to my six articles for two reasons:

a) To show you type of articles for Vocal

b) To indicate the communities and topics.

I highlighted the communities in bold format. You can find the topics when you click on each link. Some topics nicely surprised me as I did not know their existence on Vocal.

I deliberately selected these six articles representing different topics and audience for my experimentation.

I am still experimenting to discover new features. I will continue to record my observations and share with you in another post.

You can find my observations in the following sections. I created subheadings to make it easy to read and understand.

Power of Vocal communities

One of the key findings is the power of communities on Vocal.

I am discovering new communities with each submission. In the last three submissions, I found Blush, 01, and Motivation communities.

Even though there is no follow feature for writer profiles, it is easy to find the contributors. Each contributor has a profile. The profile includes a list of stories. The stories give a hint about the communities the writers follow. They are highlighted in various colors.

I came across several Medium writers publishing stories on Vocal. It was a pleasure to notice familiar faces especially contributors to my publication.

Challenges and nominations on Vocal

I discovered a new feature that you can nominate your stories to competitive challenges. The latest competition is called “The Perfect Pairing”.

Your nominated story has a chance to win a prize. How cool is this!

Here is some information about this specific competition which I extracted for you from Vocal site:

First place: $2,500 + $100 Gift Card

Second place: $1,000 + $100 Gift Card

Third place: $500 + $100 Gift Card

Indication to views and reads on Vocal

My six stories received reasonably good views.

When I say reasonable, it means that the number of views for my stories exceeded my expectations

To give you an idea, my stories on Vocal received at least 20 times more views than what they did on Medium in my first week.

To put this into perspective, it took me six months to get reasonable views on Medium, but it took only one week on Vocal. So, it looks promising.

The main reason for this 20 times more views is leveraging my Medium experience. I had no idea when I joined to Medium. I was in the total dark and felt lonely. Whereas, with Vocal, I knew how to promote my content.

It is not the platform only, but my informed approach to content marketing helped me gain 20 times more views on Vocal in my first week.

This approach indicates that success for writers depends on taking personal responsibility for marketing. Unless you meaningfully engage and promote your content, the platforms, whatever their sizes are, would not make a real impact on the outcome.

Self-publishing versus moderated publishing

It is a great benefit to self-publish our stories. I found this feature useful on Medium. We cannot self-publish on Vocal. But it is not a big deal. In fact, it served as a blessing in disguise for me.

When we submit our stories, they are reviewed by moderators and published in relevant communities and topics.

Even though I was initially concerned for not being able to self-publish, moderated publishing brought a new advantage to me. Let me explain.

There are many communities on Vocal. I couldn’t find any description of those communities, and some names are not even descriptive. For example, I did not know what community 01 mean until I saw my cybersecurity story on this community. However, moderators found the right community and the topic fitting the purpose of my content.

With the help of moderators, my six stories were published in different communities. I discovered the topics of specific communities. Learning about a topics is an advantage because when I click on the link for each topic, I can find the writers who write about a specific topic.

My initial frustration and confusion turned into joy by discovering new topics and writers. Maybe Vocal created this ambiguity on purpose. Sometimes mystery can be a good thing. I can see some psychological benefits from my experience.

Earning and compensation

I shared the earning scheme in my previous post.

Vocal pays based on views. But in reality, they mean actual reading time for your story. Just clicking on a story and scrolling it would not register as views.

There are two streams for each based on membership levels.

For the free account, they pay $3.80 per 1000 reads. For the paid version (Vocal+), they pay $6.00 per 1000 reads.

The paid account (Vocal+) subscription price is USD 9.99. There are some additional benefits for Vocal+ membership mentioned on their website.

I mentioned the creative tips feature in my previous story. Readers can give tips using their credit card, which can be paid to the writers via their Stripe accounts. Tips range between $1 and $20.

Since the last post, I found out that there was a minimum payout notice: Non-Member — $35 and Vocal+ Member — $20. My understanding is that you cannot withdraw under $20 tips if you are a Vocal+. There is also a small fee deducted by Vocal for earning from tips.

As earning money is not the primary motivation for me, I prefer not to focus on it and not go into details. The income for my level of writing is negligible both on Medium and Vocal hence not worth fussing about it.

However, to give you an indication of earning from Vocal stories, 40 views equated to around 20 cents per the stats of my stories in the Vocal dashboard. You can make comparative calculations based on this indicative figure.

Major benefits for me

My key focus on writing in content platforms, including Medium and Vocal, is to enhance my network by meeting new writers, readers, and collaborators.

Medium helped me meet thousands of new writers, readers, and collaborators. I am grateful.

I started experiencing a similar effect with Vocal.

With my engagement on Vocal in a week, I noticed some improved traffic to my content on my websites. The number of views of my blogs increased by at least 10%.

I believe readers from Vocal communities are discovering my content, exploring my profile, and subscribing to my blogs. This is one of the essential benefits and desired by-product of publishing on Vocal.

You may find other reasons to publish on Vocal.

Anecdotes and Validation

There are always good and bad comments about any platform on social media. It is inevitable. Based on my experience with social media, I take reader comments with a pinch of salt as there may be different motives that we may not know.

I read some negative and discouraging comments about Vocal on social media. However, most of them turned out to be noise. When I fact-checked those statements, I found out that some people just make arbitrary claims with no evidence. For example, some writers were trying to judge the platform with only one story they submitted and did not perform.

Some made comments that it was a scam with allegations such as they don’t pay earning to the writers. However, I noticed that one of the engaging Medium writers, Aamir Kamal 🚀🚀🚀 debunked most of the claims by providing his personal earning history publicly.

Aamir also interviewed one of the high earning members on YouTube. I noticed that the high earner is a founding member. I don’t know yet what a founding member means. I will update you when I discover this membership type.

Will I continue publishing on Vocal?

Several writers asked me on whether I would continue for submitting content to Vocal.

Based on my current findings, the answer is yes.

The main reason is: I had immediate benefits for publishing six stories on Vocal. My experimentation proved it.

I want to continue experimenting and discovering opportunities.

Should you write for Vocal?

Another frequently asked question from writers is “should we create an account and write for Vocal?”.

This is entirely up to you.

I don’t endorse any writing platform, tools, or services.

However, if I were you, I would give it a go.

Let me share my reasons for the encouragement briefly with an example.

A year ago, I did not know anything about Medium. In such a short time, I gained thousands of followers, met amazing people across the globe, created significant publications followed by 45K readers and contributed by 5.6K writers. This all happened with an open mind and by giving it a go despite the initial ambiguity on Medium.

Yes, in the first six months, exposure to my content was extremely slow on Medium, but once my content and profile were discovered in the second six month, the exposure was exponential.

The reason I share my Medium experience is the same potential for Vocal. Since there are many communities on Vocal, who knows your profile and content can be discovered by some communities, and you may gain substantial exposure to a new audience.

Vocal offers a free account. It is risk-free. You have nothing to lose. If you see some benefits, you can upgrade it to Vocal+. The best thing is that you can cancel it anytime. They even provide a one-month free membership for Vocal+. Why not try and see?

Simply put, if you don’t buy a lotto ticket, you will never have a chance to win.

Re-purposing Content

One of the benefits of writing for another platform is re-purposing your content. This is a critical content marketing strategy.

I have been successfully re-purposing my content for three decades. Content management experts such as Jeff Herring, Tim Maudlin, and MaryJo Wagner, PhD are big on this topic.

Content re-purposing provided me many benefits. For example, I published academic papers in peer-reviewed journals for a narrow audience. However, converting the content to public language, and publishing them in popular platforms, my content gained a new audience, in fact, a bigger one.

I use the same approach for my Medium content. For example, I re-write some of my Medium stories appealing to a specific community on Vocal. As long as you provide a disclaimer for your content indicating the original content belongs to you, Vocal allows you to publish your previously published material.

Ability to publish your prior content is an excellent opportunity for content re-purposing. This is a substantial premise for freelancers.

I can now answer the question on whether you can publish your previously published stories on Vocal. The answer is yes, based on my recent finding.

All you need to do is to provide a disclaimer with a link so that moderators don’t have to waste their time to validate the copyright ownership.

Conclusion

In this story, I shared my recent experience in a new content development and publishing platform called Vocal.

As I mentioned in my previous article, the learning curve for Vocal was gentle for me. I became self-sufficient in a week.

I gained noticeable benefits by publishing for Vocal. Publishing as few as six articles brought immediate benefits. The biggest gain was visibility to my blogger profile and content on multiple platforms.

Yes, there will always be negative comments or hypes about any platform. We have the power to filter these extreme viewpoints by applying logic and by low-risk trial and errors.

It can be useful to give a try to a new platform. We never know unless we try it. Keeping an open mind is a sign of growth mindset. You have nothing to lose but a lot to gain with a growth mindset.

I wish you all the best in your writing career.

If you want to collaborate for success on Vocal, please join my Quora Space specifically designed for Vocal writers and stories. I will help you succeed.

You can find my Vocal profile from this link.

Thank you for reading my perspective.