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How Ben McCarthy built a Salesforce-focused media company with 400,000 monthly readers

Ben McCarthy didn’t set out to create a media company focused on Salesforce, he just began blogging about his use of the product as a way to document the various use cases he encountered. As it turned out, there were thousands of other people who were encountering those same use cases, and they began landing on Ben’s blog posts via Google searches. 

Fast forward 10 years, and he now runs a 20-person media company that generates over 1 million pageviews per month and is the most authoritative resource for Salesforce customers. 

In our interview, we discussed why there’s such a huge audience for Salesforce content, how he monetizes with webinars and white papers, and whether he wants to launch more media outlets centered around other cloud technologies.

Watch our discussion in the video embedded below:

If video embeds don’t work in your inbox, then go here.

If you want to listen to an audio version of this interview, subscribe to The Business of Content wherever you get your podcasts: [Apple] [Spotify] [Amazon Music]

I’m looking for more media entrepreneurs to feature on my newsletter and podcast

One of the things I really pride myself on is that I don’t just focus this newsletter on covering the handful of mainstream media companies that every other industry outlet features. Instead, I go the extra mile to find and interview media entrepreneurs who have been quietly killing it behind the scenes. In most cases, the operators I feature have completely bootstrapped their outlets.

In that vein, I’m looking for even more entrepreneurs to feature. Specifically, I’m looking for people succeeding in these areas:

• Niche news sites

• Video channels like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram Reels

• Podcasts

• Newsletters

• Affiliate/ecommerce

Interested in speaking to me? You can find my contact info over here. (please don’t simply hit reply to this newsletter because that’ll go to a different email address. )

Quick hits

Are we going to see more nonprofit newsrooms team up? "It’s simply too expensive to run all these different nonprofit news companies. Industry leaders hope that by sharing line items like payroll, technology, and business-side positions, they can conserve resources and put their business models on firmer, more sustainable ground." [Nieman Lab]

The New York Times profiles the publicist behind Alex Cooper and other famous influencers. [NYT]

I just had a phone call this week with someone who makes a good living from advising clients on their LinkedIn accounts. Given how many content tools LinkedIn offers and its influence within the business community, it makes sense that companies are investing in LinkedIn optimization. [Business Insider]

This will be an interesting partnership to watch. Given the paltry returns of display advertising, publishers will need to get much better at driving actual sales to products and services; that means huge investments in the ecommerce space. [Adweek]

One of the world's biggest bestsellers sold over 600,000 book copies on just TikTok's native ecommerce store alone. [The Atlantic]

Writing fan fiction used to be a niche hobby, but not it's become the launching pad for some of the world's most successful authors. [Sherwood]

"[Axios co-founder Jim] VandeHei says he is already preparing for the bot news singularity by refocusing Axios’s business around star talents like Mike Allen, his longtime business partner, and Dan Primack and Sara Fischer, rather than aggregated news items synthesized in bullet-point form, which has historically been one of Axios’s chief value propositions." [Puck]

I was interviewed about why I think AI-generated content is overrated! [The Upgrade]

ICYMI: How the Wonder Tools newsletter grew to 39,000 subscribers

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