With A Little Luck

Introduction

I have over 22K reads on Vocal accounting for $137 of read payments. However my top three most read pieces have virtually no interaction from my Vocal friends and audience yet account for almost ten per cent of my reads and therefore read income.

You Gotta Go For SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

I have been advised and berated over SEO in order to get reads for my work, and if I look at my blog I have over eight hundred thousand visits though I feel that most of them are robots.

For SEO I include relevant words in my story title, subtitle and chapter headings, but while these might be useful for SEO, for me, they are there to make the story or article more readable for the person who has dropped in.

My belief is that if people think that the article looks interesting then people will actually take some time to investigate it. I never solicit people to read my work by telling them to follow me, read my work or drop my link in their threads (unless they ask me for it) and ignore people who demand those things of me.

Any SEO in my posts therefore is almost accidental and if I benefit from that thet I certainly won’t complain.

Art For Art’s Sake

I write because I enjoy writing. The creation of stories and articles is the reason why I do this, to share my ideas and creations with my friends and audience. Although I do want people to read, the feedback and love that I get as a result of sharing my stories is the thing that really makes my day. The remuneration from Vocal for my writing is a very pleasant addition to that, so in this I am almost considering myself as an artistic creator.

A Little Luck

Back to the point of this post, you can see the results of my top three most read posts, and I will share them at the end of this article. None of these are Top Stories or Challenge entries or winners and as you can see the Vocal Member interaction is very small in relation to the story reads.

I share on Facebook in the Vocal Facebook Groups, sometimes other related groups, Pinterest, Twitter and sometimes Instagram (you can see all these links on my Vocal Profile) but I do not know where the reads on these stories actually came from.

That means that I just got lucky with my posts and reads got picked up by Vocal. It would be great if I could see where those reads came from then I could add those places to where I drop my stories, but that is not an option at this point in time.

In Conclusion

I love to see the stats that show that my Vocal Stories have been read and I love getting positive comments on them, but am pursuing artistic creations, not financial rewards, although I have to be honest, if I did not get money from Vocal I might just post on my blog, Seven Days In, but I really would not want to lose all the friends I have made because of the Vocal Platform.

So, again, I will praise Vocal, for most of the time getting things right. Yes, they can be exasperating, but they have given me great friends and a belief in my own creative abilities.

Those Three Stories

I am really not sure why these stories were read that many times. The articles are fine, but I have done better, but these are the ones that account for nearly ten per cent of my reads.

If you drop into to them maybe you can tell me why they are so popular.

Thank you for reading my work, it really is appreciated.