I’ve been working with Search Engine Journal for the past 2.5 years as an Editor (both Managing Editor and Editor-at-Large). Ever since I joined Search Engine Journal I have had a blast interviewing some of the best minds in the industry.
Stats: 2011 (before I started SEJ) to 2014 (last month I was with SEJ)
- 300% increase in Page Views on Search Engine Journal
- Average Session time increased by 20 seconds per visitor
- 240% increase in Unique Visitors to Site
- 22% increase in organic traffic
- 38% increase in referral traffic
- 600% increase in YouTube traffic and video views.
It’s been amazing to see the growth that I’ve seen over the past 2.5 years. Before I started with SEJ we were just another big site that 250k people came to each month. Now we’re in the millions. It’s been great to see the growth over the years. We’ve grown from a 5 person team to over 13 people on the team in the past 3 years.
What I learned while being Editor at SEJ:
- It takes a team to grow a big site like SEJ. Every person on the team is crucial to growing a website. Nobody is more important than anyone else.
- Building community is very important and will help you grow. Learn from your community and listen to what they are saying. If your community is behind you, you will go far.
- Going to events and shooting videos will help you put together a LOT of content. A video is a different form of media that a lot of people consume. Remember: people consume content in different ways. Some don’t like to read, they like to watch. YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine in the world.
- Mistakes happen. Learn from them. Next get past them and move on!
- Meeting people face to face will help your readers know you’re there for them. This was a large factor in us growing. We started attending events and conferences and having a large presence there. Our fans started noticing. You can see it in our traffic. We would have people come up to us and tell us they are now paying much more attention because we’re everywhere.
- You have to just roll with things. There were so many times that people didn’t show up, posts didn’t go live or WordPress didn’t function correctly. You have to roll with the punches.
- Trolls are everywhere, you have to just ignore. If it gets out of hand, delete their comments as it’s not worth it for your community to see them.
- Negative comments really do hurt, but you have to just let them go and move past them. Being a writer you receive a lot of negative comments. Haters gunna hate. It takes a truly exceptional writer to brush those off and keep putting up amazing comment. Something I’ve learned over the past 2 years.
- Having contributors is awesome and I’ve worked with some of the best contributors on the planet. Special shout out to Jayson Demers, Amanda DiSilvestro, Larry Kim, Stoney deGeyter, Albert Costill, Pratik Dholakiya and countless others that wrote countless articles for me while at SEJ.
- Meetings don’t need to last an hour if they are scheduled that long! Meetings sometimes aren’t event necessary.
- You have to claim responsibility for your own actions.
- People rat on everything, grow a team that is mature. Don’t have a team that bitches out others in every opportunity possible. People that throw others under the bus aren’t needed on any team. It also destroys relationships and doesn’t promote a positive working environment. This should be instilled from the top down.
- Disclosure upfront is key.
- Podcasting is big, bigger than most people think. I’ve seen the numbers doubling each month since we started. This opens up a whole new audience to your brand. Note: Test all podcasting equipment before you run your first meeting. Learned from personal experience that when you lose a podcast, it sucks!
- Stay away from toxic news. There are people that will go after it and report about it. If it hurts someone, it will destroy a relationship. That’s not worth it no matter who it is.
- Pay attention to the competition, but don’t let it dictate how you do things
- Breaking news should be a strong component to any online publication. It drives a LOT of traffic. It also drives new users to the site who will keep coming back over and over.
- Partnerships are key. Having the right partnerships is even more important.
- Syndication can help your business fill in holes and allow you to publish a lot more content then you normally would. It also allows you to have deeper partnerships with potentially larger partners. This can give your publication large credibility.
- Processes and guidelines make a publication. This was something I didn’t do well at and we implemented towards the end of my managing editor position. It helped everyone know what guidelines we had. What they can and can’t do. This helped streamline automation.
- Copyediting is a big part of a blog post. Didn’t realize this till we had it. It makes publication life 10x easier. Special thanks to Danielle who’s made my life a lot easier.
- Having a designer on staff makes things look a lot better. Paulo is one of the best designers that I know and makes pages looks a lot better. He also made every persons slides look way better than we could have ever done. It made our team stand out while speaking at conferences.
- Final note: Team. I’ve said it before, but team is key. We have one of the best teams in the world and growing a publication requires a good team. Cheers to every team member on SEJ.
I still plan on being active in writing for SEJ and being a large part of their community as they are very dear to my heart. I’ve literally learned so much while being there. Here’s to more good memories!
Here is what I told SEJ prior to leaving:
It’s been an honor to work with SEJ over the past 2+ years. I’ve worked with some of the best and brightest people in the industry as well as been able to help double SEJ’s readership. I’ve learned so much that’s helped me to get to where I am today. When I started with SEJ I was blogging on a few sites. Because of SEJ, I’ve been able to leverage my online reputation to be able to write for Forbes, Entrepreneur, Inc and several other sites. I couldn’t have gotten there without it!
Other incredible memories at Search Engine Journal:
