The Social Media Examiner Success Formula – Interview with Michael Stelzner

Denise Wakeman: Hi.  I’m Denise Wakeman.  You may know me as the founder of The Blog Squad, and today I have the pleasure of chatting with Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner.  Before I jump into the questions I’d like to do a brief introduction to give you some background about Mike.  Now, Mike I had to do a little research, because I had to figure out when we first connected, and I think that it was in 2007 and we connected to do a teleseminar on white papers for my community at that time. 

 

What attracted me to Mike is that he’s smart, savvy, and really a pleasure to work with, one of the most organized people I have ever had the pleasure of doing any business with.  Now I want to give you the official bio so we have that out of the way and everybody gets all the good stuff too aside from my glowing fan fest here.

 

Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner, a popular online magazine that helps businesses answer social media questions with useful how to articles, in-depth case studies, expert interviews, and original research.  And he’s the author of the new book Launch: How to Quickly Propel Your Business Beyond the Competition.  He also authored the book Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged and The Social Media Marketing Industry Report.

 

As an innovative thought leader and experienced marketer Mike has gained the full respect of social media leaders and business marketing experts alike.  In less than 18 months Social Media Examiner grew from infancy to boasting over 80,000 subscribers and is now the top small business blog in the world according to Technorati.  He also pioneered the highly popular Social Media Success Summits which have sold out for two years in a row in the middle of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

 

The principles that Stelzner teaches are the very concepts that helped him build two highly successful businesses that made him a leading expert in both industries.  Mike, thank you for spending some time with me today and sharing your insights and experiences with my community of service professionals and entrepreneurs.

 

Michael Stelzner: Denise, this is an absolutely special privilege because as the audience I’m sure will learn as we go through this discussion, you were there from the beginning.  And you have a very unique perspective on what we’re gonna be sharing today.  And you’ve been very instrumental in my success so let me publicly proclaim right here, thank you Denise.

 

Denise: Well you’re welcome, because it’s been my pleasure to know you and be part of this spectacular success that we’ve seen.  So I want to start with a little bit of background on Social Media Examiner, because that really grew out of something else.  And it’s really propelled you to an amazing level of success in a short time.  What was the initial inspiration to create Social Media Examiner?

 

Michael: I used to be pretty well-known in the world of white papers, and as you mentioned early in the call here I had been involved with lots of training and teleclasses and helping marketers and small business owners figure out how in the world they could use this thing called the white paper.  Along the way I began to see this hot new thing called Twitter, which I had no clue what it was, and Facebook.  And I saw this gal named Denise Wakeman who seemed to get it, and she was everywhere on Facebook.  I couldn’t believe it.  So I called up Denise and I said, “Denise, I’m thinking about doing an event and summit, and I had done other events related to white papers, but never in social media.  And she said, “Oh my gosh, you’ve gotta come meet this gal named Mari [Smith].”

 

So we went to this event in San Diego with the sole purpose of saying hi to Denise and meeting Mari.  And I invited Mari to come speak at this event and then also Chris Garrett who co-authored ProBlogger, who was aware of me and I was aware of him.  So it all really started with I looked at my network of people that I had a relationship and I asked myself, “Who in that world is doing well in social media?”  And Denise and Chris were those people, and then Denise recommended Mari, and that’s how it all started.  And of course I could keep going with the story, but we had a really great event and then we were eating dinner at a fish house on Coronado Island, do you remember this Denise?

 

Denise: I do remember, very well.

 

Michael: And I was kind of floating an idea across the table to Denise and Mari about possibly starting a blog.  And I know the response wasn’t exactly, “Yeah, let’s do this.”  I love telling this story.  But I found out I was going to be speaking at BlogWorld and so was, I believe, Denise and Mari.  And I was also going to be speaking at a Marketing Profs convention, and so I decided it’s time to move this thing along, and I just asked everybody if they’d be willing to contribute one article a month and be part of this little movement.  And to, I think, everyone’s surprise it became much bigger than we all expected.

 

Denise: Absolutely, it was huge.  I do remember that both Mari Smith, and I said something like, “Well I don’t know, I guess.  You know the Social Media Jungle –”

 

Michael: You were probably thinking “What the heck does this guy know about social media?”

 

Denise: You’re a fast learner.  

 

Michael: Well I mean that’s been the key to success really is that I knew – and this is a premise that I talk about a lot – is that you need outside experts to help your business to grow.  You can’t expect to do it all on your own.  If me, who was an absolute no one in the world of social media, and literally I had only been using Twitter for months.  I could never have done it without you, Denise and without people like Chris and without people like Mari and also people like Jason Falls.  If I didn’t have these folks that I call my fire starters who were here to kind of help get things started it would have never happened.  And I think it’s just a testimony to the importance of not trying to do it all yourself, but to reach out to people and figure out something that was mutually beneficial for all parties so they wanted to be part of it.

 

Denise: And it worked.  I want to ask a specific question about Social Media Examiner.  You made a deliberate decision to call it an online magazine instead of a blog.  Why did you do that?

 

Michael: Well I knew that even though the circles that I had been in for a while – I’d been a blogger since 2005.  You probably had been a blogger longer than that.  I knew that the word blog still confused some business people, but I knew everybody knew what a magazine was.  And what I wanted to try to do was separate this from the thousands of other social media blogs that already existed at the time.  And I kid you not; there were thousands at the time.  

 

So when you think about a magazine you think about longer articles; you think about richer content; you think about something that people want to hold on to.  So I chose that term first and foremost because I always had a dream to have a magazine.  As a kid I wanted a Mac magazine, but as it turned out I got Social Media, which is even cooler.  But I just think it resonated with more business people who didn’t necessarily know what a blog was who wanted to learn social media.  And had I called it a blog I think it would have been difficult to resonate with a particular core audience of constituencies that I was trying to reach with, which was the business owner who is still totally new to this whole online media thing and a blog, they might not even know that that means.

 

Denise: Great.  And so now we know the truth though, that you always wanted to have your own magazine.

 

Michael: There you go.  You’re the first one to get that story.

 

Denise: Oh good.  I have a scoop.  Okay, then let’s segue into your book, your new book Launch, because what you write about directly relates to the really impressive growth of Social Media Examiner.  So in a nutshell what is Launch about?

 

Michael: Okay, well the premise of the book is this thing that I call the Elevation Principle.  And the elevation principle says, “If you think of your business as a rocket ship, your job is to navigate this machine, this powerful machine to new frontiers,” and the key to doing that is to focus on people.  And what I talk about is the fuel for your rocket ship is the content that you create.  And I talk about two different kinds of fuel.  Let me back up and just say what the formula is.  The formula is great content plus other people minus marketing messages equal growth.  And great content are things like how to articles, success stories, interviewing experts like what we’re doing right now, and sharing some of their insights that you think your audience will find valuable.

The other people component – and this is what most people get wrong.  They don’t think about how they can reach out to people that may even be considered competitors and figure out how to share the platform.  So Social Media Examiner is always going to trade shows, doing video interviews with experts, bringing that great content to our audience, which is a form of content, those interviews.  But some of that stuff also flips the top and develops into possible strategic relationships down the road that could be very important to the growth of the business.

 

And the last thing is minus marketing messages.  I talk about how everybody hates commercials so why not just throw out the commercials and just deliver your content commercial free.  And I postulate that if you can do all three of those things then you can rapidly grow your business.  And just to back up one more second, Denise, everybody wants a couple things.  What I mean by everybody, the readers of your blog they want great insight, they want access to great people, or they want recognition.  If you can figure out how to do that, if you can figure out how to give them the insight, the access to the people, or/and the recognition, then what will happen is they’ll want to keep coming back.  And they’ll start sharing all your content and content is what ultimately enables that, and it’s so scalable.

 

You produce it once and it can be shared by tens, thousands, or millions of people.  So instead of you as a person constantly coaching people for free, and by the way, I talk about giving it all away for free, create the content and let it work for you.  And I know at a very high level there are a lot of things we’ve talked about, but if you can just focus on the needs of people and you do that by creating content that’s commercial free, then you can grow rapidly.  And that’s why Social Media Examiner grew as fast as we did.

 

Denise: So was that a deliberate strategy?  Did you have that worked out before you started Social Media Examiner?

 

Michael: I did.  I didn’t have a name for it, and I didn’t have the formula simplified, but I did know all along what made great content.  And I knew all along that it was very important to work with experts, and just a quick little story, Denise.  Back in the day when I was writing white papers, I wrote this little thing called How to Write a White Paper, a white paper on white papers.  And I asked people, “Do you want to sign up for my newsletter?”  And I didn’t even have a newsletter.  Once I got 4000 people on my newsletter I went out to this guy named Andrew Goodman who wrote the book on pay-per-click advertising, and you could say he was my apprentice although it was just through the reading of his stuff.  And I said, “Andrew, I’ve got 4000 people on my list, would you be willing to write for me?”  “Four thousand’s pretty healthy,” he said, “I’d be happy to.”  So I provided some great insight from his brain which is how to use pay-per-click advertising to promote white papers.

 

That was the beginning and then eventually I started doing interviews with experts and different industries and bringing all their knowledge to the table.  So I had learned before that it was really important to figure out how to cooperate with people that may even be competition.  I call it co-opition.  So by shedding the spotlight on others essentially you create a movement instead of competition.  And when you create a movement it gets exciting and everybody wants to participate.  And when there’s no marketing messages there’s no threat because it doesn’t appear to be completely self-serving for your business.  So yeah, I knew all that before.  When I wrote the book is when I figured out the simple formula.

 

Denise: Okay.  Well that makes sense then.  So you’re not shy about the fact that Social Media Examiner and the Success Summits have made you a millionaire.  It’s on your site.  Specifically, how does giving away the great content minus the marketing messages translate to the financial success?  Where does that come in, because eventually you have to market, right?

 

Michael: Yes, so in the case of Social Media Examiner we waited till we had at least 10,000 subscribers before we did any kind of marketing or advertising, because we wanted to have a loyal base of readers that were coming back to our trough, if you will, time and time again.  The key to everything is having people want to subscribe to get your updates.  So in the case of Social Media Examiner, I created this little thing called the Twitter marketing video tutorial.  And we had this little box pop up to first time visitors to the site that say, “If you sign up for our daily updates we’ll give you the free video tutorial.”  Now that video tutorial is something different.  It’s about Facebook, and Amy Porterfield recorded it.

 

But the key to our growth has been to have people come to our site, love our content, and give them an easy way to subscribe.  On the sidebar to our site we have a little box that says the same thing.  On the top of our site on the navigation it says “free subscription.”  We want people to sign up via e-mail or to become a fan of our Facebook page so that they can be fed our content on a regular basis.  Once they become a subscriber and they love our stuff we’ve established a relationship with them; we’ve established trust with them.  Through those back channels, as I call them, we can begin to market.  So the way we want that first experience to be completely commercial free.  And we’ve experienced with advertising for a short period of time and it just – there was no money there.

 

And we do occasionally advertise our own stuff, and I’ll talk about that in a minute.  But the moral of the story is it’s virtually commercial free.  And when people receive the e-mails in their inbox everyday – and we have 84,000 people now that subscribe – when we have an event coming up we just have – the way our e-mails our conditioned is you have a 50 word summary and a link to read the article, and underneath that is typically a little 50 to 70 word ad.  And that ad is to something free.  So when we have a summit it’s to a free class.  When I promoted my book it’s to a free sample chapter of the book.  So it doesn’t even appear to be really an ad.  It appears to be just another way to get free content.  And through these channels, what I call these back channels of e-mail and through Facebook and Twitter, those are the channels upon which we can market and that’s where we make our money.

 

Denise: Okay, is this what you call under the radar marketing in the book?

 

Michael: Absolutely, yes.

 

 

Michael: Okay, so here’s the thing about marketing.  I talk about marketing as friction for your rocket ship.  I know you need to do it, but when you do it it’s like flaps on the airplane popping up when you’re landing.  Your rocket ship is gonna slow down.  So if you’re always marketing you’re never going to be as fast as you could go.  You’re never going to be going as fast as you could go.  You’re never going to be growing as fast as you could grow.  So what I like to do is think about moving levers up and down.  So at Social Media Examiner we never market more than 50 percent of the year.

 

So we have events that are three different times of the year and we have a promotional cycle that happens, it’s about 60 days for each one of those events.  So six months out of the year we’re promoting the events the other six months we’re not promoting anything.  So the trick is to know when to push those levers up and down.  And typically for businesses that are like coaches or something like that what you might want to do is instead of just saying, “Hire me as a coach” at the end of each one of your articles, instead what you might want to do is do some maybe quarterly webinars where you can give away some of your free advice in a live capacity.

 

You could advertise the heck out of those webinars.  They’re free, so it doesn’t even come off as an advertisement.  And at the end of those webinars you could offer people to join up for your quarterly coaching open slots, if you will.  And then when they’re full, they’re full, and then boom, the levers turn off and you’re back to generating great content.  You just have to kind of decide how often you want to promote.  Because the more you do it, the less people are going to receive your content as a gift and the more they’re gonna see it as really a lure that’s designed to get them to do something.

 

Denise: Right, okay.  You’ve been talking a lot about giving away free stuff and that’s a big part of the message of Launch.  And in fact you describe yourself as a "giver."  So that giving – what you’re saying is that by giving and giving and giving the free webinars and the free reports and the industry report that the – the Social Media industry report that you produce, all of that is in fact building the business.

 

Michael: Yes, because what it’s doing is it’s bringing people to you and you’re giving them what they want without asking anything in return.  And by the way, I want to just briefly talk about giving.  It isn’t give to get.  So, so many of us have been taught, I think wrong by  misinterpretation of Robert Cialdini’s rule of reciprocity.  The rule of reciprocity says that if you give something to someone they’ll fill this innate desire to return the favor.  And so many marketers have been taught that if you just do the right thing at the right hand, you know like you get in your handy dandy boat and you put your lure out there and wiggle it the right way you’ll force someone against their will to buy.

 

And I think that consumers now are so much smarter and have access to so much great stuff for free, that we need to kind of move away from that and just give it away and know that you’ll build a loyal following as a result of it, and they’ll want to keep coming back for more.  And some of those people will never buy from you Denise, but what they will do is they’ll share your content which means that they’ll send more people to you that could become prospects.  And along the way you’ll build a big, big faithful loyal following.  Some of those people will read your content and say, “How much more will I learn if I hire Denise to do this out of the other thing?”

 

So it is really about giving a gift without any expectation of anything in return so it truly is a gift.  Have you ever been to a wedding sponsored by Nike?  Have you over opened a present and had to watch a commercial before you could dig into the present?  Have you ever received a gift wrapped in advertisements?  Of course you haven’t.  That’d be ludicrous at a social level.  Why do we do that with our content?  If we really want it to be received as a gift then we need to give it as a gift and truly not expect anything in return.  And if we do that we will really establish that trust that is so hard to achieve with people.  And through that process we’ll develop relationships with people and they’ll share stuff, they’ll love us, and some of them will become paying customers.

 

Denise: Okay, great.  You eluded to the two types of content. Could you go into a little bit more detail about primary and nuclear content, because content is the heart and soul of both Social Media Examiner and the Success Summits.

 

Michael: Absolutely.  So content to fuel for your rocket ship, primary fuel is like the gas you put in your gas tank.  It last for about 72 hours and then you gotta go get filled up again.  Primary fuel is what brings people back time and time again to your business.  It’s the content you produce on your blog.  It’s stuff like how to articles that are really deep.  It’s stuff like sharing success stories of other people that may or may not be your customers, but just sharing their stories and their insight; it’s the expert interviews that you do with people that perhaps are really smart and that you know have access – you know that has things in your brain that your audience would just love you for if you could figure out how to share that with the audience.  But you got to produce it regularly, and if you don’t produce it regularly what happens is your ship starts to stall and begins to crash back to earth.

 

Now nuclear fuel is more complicated just like in real life.  It’s not easy creating a clear fuel, you don’t use it all the time, use it in very careful circumstances.  Nuclear fuel are things like reports that are based on surveys, like we do this thing called the Social Media marketing industry report where we survey thousands of people and produce this really cool free report, give it away and it’s read by thousands of people and written about everywhere.  We’re written up in the Wall Street Journal and just today on Fox Small Business.  That’s the kind of stuff you want to use when you’re just getting started or when you need a boost or like if you have some big product you’re gonna be launching, and it also includes contests too.

 

And I know you’re aware of these contests we’ve done, Denise, like the Social Media top ten – Social Media blog contest where we give people like Ann Handley from Marketing Profs or Scott Monty from Ford to be the  judges and then we ask nominees to nominate their favorite blog, and then we get these little badges that people can put up on their site.  It’s exciting; it’s fun.  And you don’t need to do nuclear fuel very often, maybe once, twice a year.  But it has a long tail, unlike the primary fuel that’s got 72 hours; it can work sometimes for more than a year.

 

Denise: Yeah, I noticed that sometimes I see comments come in from the Social Media report from – when was it?  The last one was four or five months ago, right?

 

Michael: Yeah, absolutely.  I mean, just today Fox Business wrote it up and we published that thing in February.

 

Denise: Wow, that’s terrific.

 

Michael: So we still have people retweeting our 2009 Social Media marketing industry report.

 

Denise: It’s amazing.  It’s like “It’s been updated, folks.”  Do you have somebody reach out and let them know?

 

Michael: We say, “Click here for the newest one,” but they still do it.  It’s just a testimony to the power of this kind of content.

 

Denise: Right.  What has surprised you most about the success of Social Media Examiner?

 

Michael: A lot of things.  I was not prepared for the fact that four times someone wanted to buy Social Media Examiner and once was literally within our first two months.  I said, “No way” every single time “Thank you.  I’m honored that you would ever think that.”  What’s also surprised me is these advertisers that want to advertise on our site that are constantly reaching out.  Now once again – and some of them for very respectable brands that if I mentioned their names you would know who they are.  I’m not gonna say who they are.  I was also surprised at the caliber and level of people that wanted to be part of this, especially in the beginning.  Once we started publishing with folks like you, a lot of other really high profile people came out of the woodwork and said, “I’d like to be part of it.”  I was shocked when Guy Kawasaki came to me at our most recent summit out of the blue and said, “I’d like to present, Mike,” and I’m like, “Okay, I’ll make a spot for you guys.”  I’d already had the whole line-up done.  We didn’t even think about them.  So this is – I’m surprised by the level of response that I’ve gotten from people.

 

I got an e-mail from somebody in Canada that said, “Mike, if you have anybody up here in Vancouver that you’d like me to give a ticket to, I will personally hand deliver a ticket with a hot Starbucks in my hand and if it’s a woman I will give her a bouquet of flowers.  I will literally dedicate an entire day of my life to you; whatever you want.  I am so indebted to what you’ve done for me with this great content you’ve produced.”  I get stuff like that all the time.  It’s just amazing.  It’s just amazing.  It’s very gratifying.

 

Denise: Wow, that’s fantastic.

 

Michael: It’s pretty cool stuff.

 

Denise: Yeah, so before we wrap up, I just want to ask a couple more questions.  My audience, as we said, is primarily service professionals who need to leverage the web to grow their business.  And while I could just tell them, “Oh yeah, go read Social Media Examiner,” which I do all the time.  I’m constantly directing people, “You want the best one?  Just go there.”

 

Michael: Thank you.

 

Denise: What words of advice do you have for a service professional who really sees the light; they say, “Okay, I get it.  What do I need to do to start implementing the principles of Launch?”

 

Michael: First and foremost do not let the fact that there are many other people, competitors if you will, that are out there stop you.  And I know that this is a real thing that everybody deals with.  I mean, back when I was writing white papers wanting to specialize in this I Googled “white paper writers” and I saw two other people and I’m like, “Oh man, someone’s already doing it.”  It’s a legitimate concern.  Do not let what I call Internet paralysis stop you, because there are many other people out there.  Had I let that stop me I would have never launched Social Media Examiner even though there were thousands of other social media blogs.  So that’s the first tip is do not be discouraged.

 

The second tip is to study people that are in industries that are outside of your industry.  This is a tip that I learned years and years ago to look for inspiration in places that you never would normally think of looking.  I find inspiration when I walk into Panera Bread of all places.  For example, you see that they have these little bowls – have you ever been to Panera Bread?

 

Denise: Yes, a few times.

 

Michael: They have this free bread and you walk in and you sample the bread and it’s like, “Oh, well I didn’t come in here to buy bread, but I came in here to get a sandwich, but maybe I’ll get a loaf of bread.”  Or you notice how much people are just hanging out in there restaurants with their lap tops open.  I spoke to my Panera Bread manager when I was writing the book and he said some people spend six hours a day in there and they don’t care.  They built an environment where they wanted it to be welcoming for people.

 

And I took a clue from that when I was thinking about Social Media Examiner.  I wanted it to be a welcoming community, and just looking in these places that you go every day for ideas and inspiration, for concepts or philosophies that can influence you.  For example, on our Facebook page we have a policy that every single person that posts on there gets a reply, and we have 46,000 fans.  But we want everyone to feel welcome, and it comes from these kinds of ideas of looking outside of your areas of influence.  

 

Another tip would be to set up an idea vault.  If you read great content bookmark it or print it out and just have it be in what I call your idea vault, a place that you can come back to later when you’re stalled or when you’re not sure how to do whatever you need to do to create great content.  These are just silly little tips, but these are the kind of things you need to do when you’re getting started.

 

Denise: So finally, what’s next?  What’s on the horizon for you and Social Media Examiner?  What can we look for?

 

Michael: Well, honestly I’m just going to keep doing more of the same.  Social Media Examiner was a big experiment that was very successful.  I love what I’m doing.  I love being a publisher.  We’re just gonna keep doing what we’re doing.  We’ve got a good thing going.  I don’t want to mess with it.  I know it sounds crazy to say that.  For me, for Mike Stelzner, what I want to do some day is I want to write children’s books.

 

Denise: Wow.

 

Michael: Yeah, so someday I figure this will help me write children’s books.  And I know it’s crazy, maybe it’ll be a cross between Sandra Boynton, how he writes his little visual books, and Harry Potter books, but someday that’s what I want to be known for.  In my legacy I want to be known for writing children’s books, which has nothing to do with what I’m doing right now, but you know, when I was a white paper guy, social media didn’t have very much to do with what I was doing either.

 

Denise: Right, well, and you know, Social Media Examiner is probably going to give you the opportunity to write those books too.

 

Michael: Yeah, I figure it’s a five, ten year thing.  It’s gonna be a while before I ever figure out how to get into that market place, but I know – one thing I knew when I started Social Media Examiner was I knew it was maybe a three to five year thing.  Everything changes, and everybody needs to know that what they do today may not be what they do tomorrow.  So I’ve gotta be thinking about the future, and that’s a word of advice to everyone.  What you’re doing today may not be what you’re doing tomorrow.  And I’ve learned that over the many years that I’ve had my business.

 

Denise: Exactly, well I think that’s a great place to leave it.  Mike, I want to thank you for taking time out.  I know you’ve been very, very busy with all the launch of Launch, and so I really I appreciate you sharing your insights with my audience today.

 

Michael: Denise, absolute pleasure.  I wish you all the success in the world and I look forward to seeing you at some big events in the future.

 

If you haven't done so yet, pick up a copy of Launch and study it. Mike provides a detailed blue print of how he built Social Media Examiner. It's a formula you can apply to your business as well. The book is also available on the Kindle and you can get the first chapter free.

 

Got questions or feedback about the interview or for Mike? Post them in the comments and I'll see if I can persuade Mike to stop by and answer them!