10 years since my first mention on Entrepreneur Media, I had to pull the plug – and look for a new business journal for a column.
💼 Entrepreneur[com] was one of my few original pillars of light and inspiration in an era of 9gags, TikToks, shorts, Farmville, and millions of ways to unproductively waste time.
As education is dear to my heart, I spent years looking into ways to climb onto the earned media ladder of business outlets and follow my vocation outside of my day job as a CEO.
This took different turns since 2014:
1. Taking my Inbound Marketer certificaiton from HubSpot and investing in 2 full-time writers for DevriX, leading to an epic journey winning organic search for over 8 years, solidifying my trust in content and brand mentions
2. Using HARO for brand mentions – and a first commentary in a February 2015 piece on the platform 📝
3. Discovering Josh Steimle and his writing journey as an Entrepreneur columnist, following his best practices – later on, collaborating together in different capacities (including a thought leadership project far before all the LinkedIn ghost writers appeared here)
4. Uncovering the power of Quora after deciding to write daily in 2016 through 2018 – major props to Adrienne Gomer for placing my work voluntarily on Entrepreneur, Inc, Forbes, HuffPost, Apple News, and many many other incredible outlets 🙏
5. Getting introduced to Aashika Jain as an editor (back in 2017) for Entrepreneur India – content hosted on the same domain, but under the hat of the Indian branch, securing ongoing access and making an impact one article at a time.
6. Signing our first deal with Kathy Berardi on earned media and thought leadership, featuring more and more of my work to authoritative sources (later expanding into a myriad of new opportunities), signing my YEC and Forbes Councils memberships in the process.
7. Drawing inspiration from Dorie Clark and her publishing work, along with the diversified revenue streams from “Entrepreneurial You” (and publishing my own “126 Steps to Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur” in 2019 with book signing sessions in LA and San Francisco, also managed by Kathy!)
8. Discovering the “Entrepreneur Leadership Network” – an annual 4-figure Entrepreneur+ subscription including writing access with an editorial process to get published regularly.
🧙♂️ It was all well and fine, besides one pet peeve that I kept hitting with my YEC and Forbes Council submissions as well: a rigorous editorial process and a publishing cadence taking 4 to 5 weeks on average.
I got a few articles in, but writing about a turbulent global market in the 2020s isn’t something as evergreen as we’d been used to over the 2010s.
