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Michael Stelzner Show Notes Michael Stelzner is the founder of Social Media Examiner, author of the books, Launch and Writing White Papers, and the man behind Social Media Marketing World–the industry’s largest conference. He’s also the host of the Social Media Marketing podcast, founder of the Social Media Marketing Society, and host of the weekly Social Media Marketing Talk Show. Most passionate about I recently started something brand new, called The Journey, which is episodic documentary – a weekly short documentary about my company and the impossible mission that we are on to take the conference to a bigger place, which seems impossible right now. And every week, I’m documenting the struggle and how I’m breaking through in a short 5-7 minute videos, and so far my community loves it. We plan on doing it for five months, until the Social Media Marketing World conference. I think it’s one of the most fun things I’ve ever done, because it’s a real documentary about a real company that struggling to become successful. Our conference, Social Media Marketing World, had 3100 people there in 2017, and we want to grow that by 62% year over year, and then another 100% a year over year. We want to get to 10,000 people on the conference of 2019, which would more than triple our growth in 24 months. And we hope that, by sharing this journey, people will help us accomplish our mission, and a lot of people would find it entertaining, exciting, and learn from it along the way. Michael’s Career I started as a writer, and then in 2009 I did what I call ‘my great experiment’ when I was able to secure the website, SocialMediaExaminer.com, for 10 dollars. And I connected some of my friends that were writers and encouraged them to write for this movement that I was starting that was called Social Media Examiner. In 2009, there were not a lot of websites that were giving out a lot of free information and this thing just took off, and in months, all of a sudden I had a crazy successful blog in my hand! And then the rest is history… right? From that blog we were able to launch online conference, and then a physical conference, and then a podcast and live show; all these things that we are doing today, over eight years later. Michael’s customers Anyone who understands the importance of doing marketing with social media, so it’s typically somebody who is either a self-employed person who has a business and doesn’t have a lot of money, and wants to figure out how to use Social Media to grow the business or it’s somebody who works for a business, and their job is to do marketing for that business. I classify all these people as the label marketers. Social Media changes every week, this is what gives us longevity because unlike other industries, like science for example, where once you discover something that’s true, you can kind of rely on that forever; in the world of social media marketing, things change constantly and as a result, marketers need to keep up with it all and that’s where we come in. Michael’s best advice about approaching the customers I think that when you get started, you really need to talk to a lot of people to really understand what their problems are. That could be through going to an event where a lot of people that met your customers happened to be and talking with them to understand what the customers’ problems are. If you already have some people in an email list, you can send an email to them, asking them a lot of questions to understand what their challenges are. But somehow survey or ask what the challenges are, I think it’s the number one way that anybody can be successful. A lot of times we guess we think that everyone is like us, which is totally not true, and we say “if everyone is like me then they would be interested in that,” and then we just throw it out to the world and hope it sticks. Biggest failure with a customer I was already very successful, and in my mind I...