Online Publishing: Lessons From Five Years at Social Media Examiner

Have you ever wondered how Social Media Examiner started?

Do you want to know the strategy behind this large online publishing platform?

For this episode of the Social Media Marketing podcast I'll share how we built Social Media Examiner into what it is today.
More About This Show

The Social Media Marketing podcast is a show from Social Media Examiner.

It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

The show format is on-demand talk radio (also known as podcasting).

In this episode you'll discover the business strategy behind Social Media Examiner, how we built a larger following and how it has been monetized over the years.

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Here are some of the things I'll share with you in this show:
Online Publishing
Social Media Examiner back in 2009

In the beginning, I gave it 3 years. First of all, it was a great experiment. I didn't even know if someone like me, who knew absolutely nothing about social media, could even start a blog and become a leader in this space. I actually call Social Media Examiner an online magazine.

In 2008/2009, when I was exploring this idea, I did notice that not a lot of people were talking about the "how" of social media. It was more about "What's wrong with social media?" or "Why should I consider social media?" It was the "how" stuff that was really popular.

One of the first things I noticed was that the articles detailing the how-to stuff were going crazy-viral on social.

You'll hear two examples of articles that I wrote for Copyblogger and Marketing Profs. Those articles turned out to be two of the most popular articles written on those sites.

It was the response to those two articles that drove me to start Social Media Examiner almost 5 years ago to the day. Little did I know then that a million+ people a month would consume our content today. It's hard to believe that it's been 5 years.

Listen to the show to find out the type of approach I took when it came to writing the articles for Copyblogger and Marketing Profs.

Where the idea for Social Media Examiner came from

It all started when I contacted Ann Handley, chief content officer at Marketing Profs, to ask if she wanted to connect on LinkedIn. Her response was, "Are you on Facebook?" At that time I thought Facebook was just for college students. This was probably in 2008 or early 2009.

So I opened a Facebook account, and started to notice that there was a whole new community of people, not just students, who were having a great time on there. This opened my eyes to what could possibly happen. It was where it all started, I guess.

Every idea has a genesis point, if you will, and that genesis moment was when Ann said, "How about Facebook?"

Listen to the show to discover how the name Social Media Examiner came about.

The business strategy behind growing Social Media Examiner

Before the launch of Social Media Examiner, I put together an online event under my White Paper Source brand. I called the event Social Media Success Summit. This was to see if a segment of my White Paper Source audience would be interested in social. This month is actually our 6th annual Social Media Success Summit.

The success of this first summit made me decide to run the idea of Social Media Examiner by several of the presenters.

The first summit included Mari Smith, Denise Wakeman and Chris Garrett, who all helped me put on this online conference.

The idea behind Social Media Examiner was for me to write one article a week. Then I would recruit the others mentioned above to write one article a week. So the plan was to have a spread and hopefully be able to publish on the site three times a week.

This group originally did not think it was a good idea.