Search Marketing Standard (SMS) is a print publication that first appeared in the spring of 2006. I was a bit skeptical when I first heard about it, not because I knew anything about it, I just didn’t want to get my hopes up too high. But I tell you what, my skepticism went away with issue number one. I’m a fan and am always happy to see a new one arrive. The magazine has well respected names in the industry doing the writing, the content is fresh and informative, it’s laid out well, pleasing to the eye, and easy to read.

So lets jump ahead a year to the present. Search Marketing Standard is a year old and continuing strong out of the gate. Boris Mordkovich, publisher of SMS surprised me with an email offering a complimentary subscription. I eagerly accepted and figured it was a great time to ask him for a short interview after I go through the latest issue. I received the Summer issue along with a dandy dark chocolate bar to go along with it. I was set for a quiet evening reading Search Marketing Standard, munching on my dark chocolate bar, and sipping a cold one,…. or two.

Here’s the Q & A I had the opportunity to do with Boris about him and Search Marketing Standard magazine.
Q: In my eyes I see Search Marketing Standard as a success simply because I enjoy reading it. As a publisher of the magazine how do you rate the success of the magazine?

A: In my eyes, the magazine is a success when our readers enjoy reading it, too.
Overall, it’s hard to measure “success” as it means different things for different people. For example, for our advertising director, the success of the magazine lies in the relationships he cultivates with our advertisers, while our editor-in-chief considers the issue a success when the readers’ feedback is positive and contributor line-up is top notch.
For me, there are two aspects that I strive for. First of all, it’s important to develop the publication into a trusted resource and a community, where our entire team, our contributors, and our advertisers work together to educate our readers on how they can grow their businesses through search. We want our readers to be able to rely on us and be able to put our information to practical use.
Secondly, and this is the business person in me speaking, success is when the magazine became a commercially-viable and profitable business on its own. In the beginning, we faced some criticism saying that “print” is a dying dinosaur as everybody is switching to online news sources, blogs, etc. While we acknowledge some of our limitations, we feel that there is still room for print and we have the ability to cover our industry with a different approach by providing insightful commentary that’s well selected, researched and edited. When the magazine became a profitable venture, it showed us that we are on the right path.
So, all of those things combined coupled with our readers being happy is what I would say makes for a successful publication.

Q: What is your search marketing background and what were you doing before you launched Search Marketing Standard?

A: My search marketing background started off, as for many people in the industry, by accident. A number of years ago, I was running a web hosting company and GoTo.com just launched. Although everybody was saying that their concept would never work as people would not search paid listings, we decided to give them a shot and got terrific results for our company.
Fast forward a few years and we’ve sold the hosting business and began developing a service that would help advertisers track the performance of their search marketing ads and detect and prevent fraudulent activity. After a year of R&D, AdWatcher.com came into existence.
After that, it all went uphill from there. A few years later, I co-authored a print book on Pay-Per-Click, launched another website for PPC advertisers – PayPerClickUniverse.com, as well as a bid management service – AdScientist.com.
In late 2005, I was approached by a colleague who was working as an SEM consultant at a print wedding magazine and he proposed the idea of a print publication for the search marketing industry. Although my experience with that was minimal, I liked the idea that no one else in our field was targeting that space, so we funded the idea, gave it a go and six months later produced our first issue.

Q: You have a great collection of contributors writing articles for you. Did you have connections with these folks before you started planning the magazine or how did you get these well known and respected people on board?

A: After working in the industry for a few years, you find that it’s a very close-knit community where everybody knows everybody. I had established relationships with a quite a few people prior to the magazine, but we all worked very hard to cultivate even more relationships with people in the industry, after the launch.
In terms of contributors, we sometimes approach people pro-actively about writing for us. However, as we’ve been growing, we get more and more people contacting us, so that makes it easier to find talented writers. We’re certainly extremely pleased with the caliber of our contributors, although we are more then open to lesser-known writers, as long as the quality of their work is superb.
Ultimately, our readers read the magazine because of their content, so fully understand that they are the key to an interesting and successful magazine.

Q: Are there any magazines out there that you modeled SMS after, either in or out of the industry?

A: Prior to the launch of Search Marketing Standard, I had a good relationship established with the Publishers of two other magazines: Practical eCommerce and Ping! Zine. I used to write and advertise in both of the publications and was on very good terms with them.
When we decided to launch Search Marketing Standard, I went to them and asked them a million questions. Kerry Murdock, the Publisher of Practical eCommerce, gave us an incredible amount of advice and knowledge for which I am extremely grateful. It’s amazing how helpful it can be to just have somebody share their own experience with you. Keith Duncan of Ping! Zine was also very helpful and shared a lot of information with us.
Both of them helped us avoid making a lot of the common beginner mistakes and steered us in the right direction.

Q: What is the print competition like out there for SMS?

A: Currently, there are no other magazines dedicated to solely covering search marketing, but there are a few in adjacent industries who often overlap with us.
A terrific magazine that we read and enjoy tremendously ourselves is Revenue. They focus on affiliate marketing, but cover search quite often. They’ve been around for a bit and set a great example of what a top notch magazine should be like.
There is also Website Magazine (formerly Website Services Magazine). Their area of focus are webmasters and everything related to them. It’s also a wonderful publication, but their search coverage is generally somewhat basic.
Personally, I definitely think that there is room for every publication – especially since everybody targets a somewhat different niche and does so from their own angle.
Lee Odden, an SEM expert and consultant, recently ran a survey on his blog regarding the most popular publication for search engine marketers. I invite you to check out the results at http://www.toprankblog.com/2007/04/reader-poll-best-search-marketing-magazines/ - it also makes for a great list of related publications.

Q: Where is SMS headed? Is there any thing new in the works?

A: Considering that within a little more than a year, we released 5 issues, attracted 50,000 readers, secured distribution at all major (and smaller) SEM events, and earned the trust of a number of terrific advertisers that help us finance the entire thing, I hope that we’ll be able to continue the same pace over the next few years.
Ultimately, we want to firmly establish our publication as the authoritative magazine in our field – both for regular marketers and business owners and SEM professionals – by gaining their trust and confidence in our content. Everything else will follow.

Thanks for the interview Boris! Here’s a quick summary of the Summer 2007 issue of Search Marketing Standard.

The Summer 2007 feature article is Insider’s Guide to SEM Training & Certification by David Temple. I think this was a very timely feature article with all the different training courses that are becoming available now. David did a great job with it. The magazine is nicely categorized hitting major topic areas including Industry Analysis, SEO, Pay per Click, Interview, Local Search, Beyond Search, Under the Hood, a Conference Guide, and Industry Statistics. Jaimie Sirovich’s articles in the Under the Hood are always a favorite of mine. The advertising in SMS is relevant and full of well knowns including Yahoo! Search Marketing Search Engine Strategies and Search Marketing Expo. Below is an index of the articles in this issue.

• Industry Analysis
• Persuasive Web Design by Kim Krause Berg
• Mobile Marketing & Usability by Barry Welford
• Google Dives Into Old Media by Tom Dahm
• Should Yahoo! Search & MSN Live Search Capitulate to Google by Chris Boggs of Avenue A | Razorfish
• SEO
• Think before you Link…Bait by Eric Ward
• Pay Per Click
• Paid Search’s Quality Scores by Kevin Gold
• Interview
• Current State of the SEM Education in the Universities with Kristi Serrano of Prime Visibility and Perry Drake
• Engaging your RSS Audience with Rick Klau of Feedburner
• Local Search
• Why Big Companies need Local Search Advertising by Patricia Hursh
• Beyond Search
• Cultivating Your Blog Community in 10 easy steps by Joe Whyte
• Under the Hood
• Search Engine Friendly HTML with all the Trimmings by Jaimie Sirovich