I Published Six Articles with Vocal

5 min readNov 21, 2020

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.