It’s really quite amazing when you think about it. Mike Stelzner founded Social Media Examiner a short 18 months ago. Today,the site spans more than 75,000 email subscribers, 700,000 page-views per month, 60+ blog contributers, and is recognized as one of the world’s Top 100 business blogs on Technorati and AdAge.

If you’re a small business and you want to learn how to best use social media tools like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to find leads, increase sales and generate more brand awareness…this is where you go.

The site doesn’t monetize through advertising but rather Mike and the team hosts 2-3 Summits per year such as the Social Media Success Summit and the Facebook Marketing Summit spanning thousands of attendees.

How did he do it? Content. Content. Content.

All principles that Mike discusses in his latest book, “Launch” (you can download a free sample book chapter on the site).

Here’s my video interview with Mike Stelzner at LinkedOC below…

(If you can’t see the video, click here)

Key Takeaways from Mike’s Presentation:

• Think of your business as a rocketship and people are the what moves your rocketship.
• You need to set proper goals early on in order to navigate your ship to new heights.
• People want three things: 1.) Insight (to learn something), 2.) access to great people (think interviews with industry experts), and 3.) they want recognition (at Diverse Solutions for example, we do a monthly Client Spotlight Series).
• Stop treating people like fish – in other words, build relationships first. Seek to be helpful, selling comes later.
• You have two huge obstacles to overcome: 1.) Channel syndrome overload, 2.) the default position of customers is distrust! So how are you going to reach people through all of the noise and what are you doing to earn their trust?
• Primary Fuel = regularly produced content (blog posts for example). This type of content generally has a 72 hour shelf-life.
• Nuclear Fuel = Reports, Contest, Webinars, etc.

Now here’s the million dollar question…

Does your company have a content strategy? More importantly, are you sticking to it?