10,000,000 Reads Later, Here Are My Thoughts on Everything VOCAL

I just crossed 10 Million Reads!!! Oh my god, I knew it was coming but actually seeing the number today, I actually burst into tears because my gosh. When I decided to really return to Vocal and take it seriously, it was such a gamble, I didn't know what to expect. In fact, my greatest hope was to get at least 1,000 consistent readers who liked what I wrote. Now, here we are at 10,000,000. I honestly still cannot believe it.

I knew I was going to write this story quite a while ago but I had been going back and forth because I'm not the type of person who likes unnecessary attention and I don't really like putting my business out there like that. However, seeing some people's frustrations and doubts and complaints, I also felt this duty to at least come on here and answer some questions as well as give people some hope that honestly, truly, if you keep going, there is value in this water. I have so much I want to say but I've been racking my brain because every version of what I have in my mind is incredibly long-winded.

Some time ago, I saw this post on The Vocal Creators Lounge group on Facebook where one of my fellow Vocal authors, Amanda Grace, gave a very nice quick summary of my main thoughts about Vocal when she wrote about it:

This about sums up all I'm going to say in this post, but there's still a lot more I want to address. After racking my brain for weeks about this, I've realized the only way to tackle something like this is to do it FAQ style. So here goes.

When Did I Join Vocal?

I joined Vocal 4 years ago. 28th May 2017 to be exact. I posted my first story 10 Crazy Nigerian Myths - Part 1 on June 4th, 2017.

I thought all I had to do was post that story then watch the money come falling. Boy, was I WROOONG! In my post, The Myth of the 'Respectable Job', I wrote a quick summary of my journey with Vocal and because I think it does a good job of quickly summarizing it, here is an excerpt:

Back in June of 2017, I stumbled upon a website called VOCAL who promised they'd pay me for my writing. Another one of these, I told myself but decided to still give it a try. You never know with these things.

I wrote an article called "10 Crazy Nigerian Myths - Part 1". After about two weeks of persistently checking, I saw that the numbers weren't doing anything really. So I left.

About a year had past when I got a random newsletter-y email from Vocal. It reminded me of who they were and I decided to check on updates for my story. It had grown in reads but not by much. I decided to post a few more stories. Again, after about two weeks of checking, the numbers weren't looking good. I abandoned Vocal as a viable way of making money and moved on with my life.

Fast-forward to 2020 after my horrible stint with my novel. I was broke, desperate and needed to do ANYTHING for money. I decided I was going to go into dropshipping. I didn't WANT to go into dropshipping, I didn't LIKE dropshipping, all I wanted to do was write, but that wasn't paying and people on Youtube said dropshipping does so there I was at the beginning of 2020 creating my dropshipping website and Facebook page, entering my payout information when oh, they needed my Stripe email address.

I entered my Stripe e-mail address and was told that it was already being used somewhere else. Somewhere else? I decided to go through my emails and discovered that I had connected my e-mail address to my Stripe account through Vocal. I needed to go back to Vocal to rectify the mistake.

This was three years after my 10 Crazy Nigerian Myths - Part 1 post and when I logged back into Vocal, that story was at about 10,000+ reads.

I. Was. SHOCKED!

I had never done any kind of promotion for it, I had no idea how it happened, but you know me...I wasn't about asking questions, I was about getting that money! I withdrew that money with a SWIFTNESS and when after a few days I actually saw it reflect in my bank account, a bulb in my head lit up. I had just made money from my writing. Not a lot of money AT ALL but money regardless.

I knew this world. I could write about this world. I could write A LOT about this.

So, with a huge leap of faith, I cancelled the domain and hosting on my dropshipping website, got a refund, and put all that money towards a ONE-YEAR membership for Vocal+. This was a huge risk for me, doing 1 Year at once but I knew that if I did just a month, I wouldn't work as hard because I had only 5 bucks to lose. Committing $99 of money I didn't really have, that was sure to light a fire under me to REALLY do the work to at least get my money back.

I started writing.

Every.

Single.

Day.

And now, reader, here we are! 10 Million Reads and counting.

Is Vocal A Scam?

I can't tell you how many times I've come across an iteration of this question but 10,000,000 reads later, I can confidently tell you Vocal has never missed a payment every single time I've gone to request a payout. Never not once. If you see money in your wallet, trust me, you can get it out and have it in your bank account. I've done it many many times and I'm going to do it again really soon. I don't know what you consider a scam but if you mean a financial scam? Like they'll take your money and run away? No baby, no. Vocal is not a scam.

Can I Really Make Money From Reads?

All my years on Vocal, I've won a total of ONE challenge and it was for a story about my love for Onlyfans 😂.

Other than that, the rest of my income has come from $51 in tips and reads, reads, READS.

Okay, But Can I Make Money From Writing Fiction?

Absolutely YES! When I started writing, I knew personally that I wanted to write about Nigerian content because it is what I know the most about and also what interests me. Over the years, I have written a whole bunch of stuff. I've written literally every kind of story except poetry.

For me, my readers (which we'll talk about in a bit) really started to gravitate towards my entertainment stories and entertainment listicles and so, I started writing a lot more about that and that is still what I write about the most today.

STILL, from time to time, I write fictional stories and some of my most read stories have actually been fiction. The key is to build your audience. When you do, they'll read ANYTHING you give them. Of course there are some things you'll learn they like more than others but for the most part, if you can give them a killer first couple of paragraphs of a fictional story, trust me my darling, they will EAT. IT. UP.

How Do I Build My Audience?

I could do a whole Masterclass about this. Okay, so the first thing I'll advise you to do is pick a platform. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, pick one platform and really stick to it as your MAIN page. For me, that platform is my Facebook page where I now have about 72,000 likes and 81,000 followers.

So, you've picked your platform. Next, and this is the part that some people get discouraged about, but you need to pay to sponsor some of your posts. As a person starting with 0 likes and 0 followers, it is quite literally the only way to get eyeballs on your work. So, what you do is you pick your BEST piece - let's use as an example, my story Why Women Have Long Hair (titles and cover images btw are E-VERY-THING).

Now take the first couple of paragraphs and make a post about it that ends with "Read More" or whatever iteration of that you like.

So in the end, if you're using Facebook as a platform, you'll have something like:

You send that out to the people who you think would be your best audience and well, you take it from there. A step-by-step technical break down of this is too long to fit into this page. When I tell you I can make a MA-STER-CLASS about this?! I mean, a masterclass! And this post cannot possibly fit that.

What I can tell you though is that I am so confident in my ability to replicate success using this technique that I so badly want to start another page on Facebook with a new Vocal account and dedicate that simply to other kinds of writing that I know the audience on my Jide Okonjo page might not appreciate enough. Sadly Vocal is very strict about the one account per user rule and when I asked if I could open a second account, they didn't allow me do it. That's one of my complaints about the site but we'll get into more about that later.

Basically, pick a platform, promote your best posts, convert the fishes that bite into dedicated readers, and trust me, within no time at all, you'll be able to stop doing sponsored posts and just have readers that read your stuff simply because you write what they like. I personally haven't done a sponsored post since about August 2020 and I've been making payout requests every single month.

What Don't I Like About Vocal?

First of all let me start by saying that Vocal has quite literally changed my life. I went from being very very VERY broke to now doing more than okay in the financial department.

At the same time, there are still some things I HATE about the site and have also told the Vocal staff about so this isn't coming as a shocker to them.

1. As someone whose stats page is now at 62 pages in length and still actively writes every single day, it is ridiculous to me that there is still no way to SEARCH the stats page. Like literally if there was a magnifying glass at the top that I could press to find specific stories, it would make finding out how specific stories did a whole lot easier. Let me tell you, waking up every morning to sort through 62 pages in search of 1 story, it's tedious.

2. The. Wait. Times. I know that Vocal is working on a feature for authors to be able to publish directly to their page immediately and I CANNOT wait for that to finally come around because my timezone and the Vocal timezone are completely different. So, sometimes I submit stories by 4pm my time on a Wednesday for example and don't get it approved until 6pm the next day, Thursday. This is not an ideal time to make a post on Facebook as I prefer to make my posts in the day time (11am - 2pm is my personal preference). Organizing and posting stories on a schedule is also impossible because you literally have no way of knowing when your story will be available. This is by far my biggest criticism about the site right now. I hate the wait time SOOO MUCH you don't even know.

3. One user per Vocal account. I don't personally like this because for example in my case now, I have built up a very specific audience that likes very specific kinds of content. My current audience isn't interested in poetry for example so if I want to establish myself as a poetry writer, I can't do that under this Jide Okonjo name because it already has its own identity. I would like to have a second account to write under a different pseudonym because there are certain stories I want to tell but not under this specific account or to the currently existing audience Jide Okonjo has. I want to reach a different audience but with Vocal saying I can only have this one account, it kind of binds my hands and forces me to only write stories that cater to this specific audience.

Otherwise, these three things aside, I cannot say enough good things about Vocal. Their team is chef's kiss! You may not know this but when you cross a million reads, you get a surprise physical gift in the mail. I will not tell you what it is so you have something to aspire and work towards to now. Also, the more milestones you cross in reads, the more Vocal celebrates you for it. I know they do bonuses now but in my day coming up, I didn't really enjoy that so you know, lucky YOU GUYS!

What I did get in my inbox and I'll show you just three of these so you're motivated to see the rest by yourself are these way-to-go emails that I just really appreciated getting after every milestone. It was a cool graphic and a beautiful message attached. Here is a teaser of what I got when I crossed 25k, 50k, and 100k reads. At 1 million, you get something physically delivered to your house, and well, I'll tell you what happens after that. 1 million was the last milestone I got celebrated for. I've now crossed 10 million, let's see what happens.

Should I Get Vocal+?

Okay, now this is completely up to you but as I said earlier. For me, I didn't really start taking Vocal seriously until I paid a $99 one-year fee up front for a Vocal membership. This was a ME thing. I did it because I knew how broke I was and I knew that putting that kind of money down into the site, I HAD to, I NEEDED to work my butt off to make sure I got it back. So for the motivation, I say if you're going to do it, do the $99 package. It's easy to write the $5 plan off as 'oh well, that was a bust', but when you put down 99 bucks, my darling, you'll have no choice but to work harder than ever to get that money back. That hard work believe me will get you much much much more than 99 dollars. Trust Me! Also earning $6 instead of $3 per thousand reads, WORTH. IT!

In Conclusion

I struggled about posting this. I'm not a person that likes to brag or talk about money or accomplishments really, but I know that some people get very frustrated and have all these questions about if Vocal is actually real or if you can actually make money or if it's worth it and I just thought, I've been doing this now for a couple of years, let me give some input into the conversation and I hope I've been able to do that in some way.

I'm so proud of myself. It's not easy. TRUST ME, it's not. But if you keep going and keep pushing yourself, believe me baby, one day, you too will get to 10 million reads, and I'll be right here cheering you on as well.

To 100 Million and Beyond!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!