How To Create A Content Marketing Business: Joe Pulizzi - The Tilt

SPEAKER_00 0:04

This is the Beyond the Story Podcast, a show that goes way beyond the story. Joe Pulitzi's in the building.

SPEAKER_01 0:25

It's been way too long, buddy. It's been too long. My goodness. We were talking about when we last saw each other, and we can't remember.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

So it's been a long time. I know. I well, we did track down a uh an estimated date when you were on my podcast way back when. Uh, same show, different name, social buzz on air, rest in peace. Um, and on blog talk radio, which broke my heart.

SPEAKER_01 0:50

Is that still going on? Is that still a thing? I don't think so. I mean I had to call in and I had to wait. It had the whole music going on, and I'm like, I don't know if I'm actually gonna do this. Is this gonna happen?

SPEAKER_00 1:00

And all of a sudden, the countdown and you're on. We were there. Yeah, it was like I would bring the guest in the beginning. Like, I had like this obnoxious siren beginning of the whole setup there, which uh, you know, it's good times. I had we also had uh Jay Bear join me on the show in those blog talk days. Maury Smith join me on the show in this blog.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

That was like the early days when we were all scratching around trying to figure out what we were doing. Yeah, it's amazing that whole group of people back then, and they're all still you sort of doing it. They're just everybody's they're just doing their yeah, they're mostly doing it because they love it, because they've done well in business. So it's it's nice to see.

SPEAKER_00 1:38

It really, really is. It really, really is. It's been a it's quite the quite the adventure. I mean, I look back to like the Gary V days when people were like, Who couldn't pronounce his last name now? And uh, you know, I call the guy a friend and still can't pin him down these days because he's just a worldwide phenomenon.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

So I saw that. Like you put you love Gary Vee so much, he's on your homepage. So I'm like, either he's just he's really a friend with Gary Vee, or he's just leveraging off the aura of the Gary V Vayner, Chuck, sports, yeah, enterprises, whatever it is.

SPEAKER_00 2:12

Yeah, it's an it's an absolute empire. It was, you know. Well, I I had started because I read I read Crush It. Somebody, I was so broke I couldn't afford to buy the new book. So he let me his Audible login and I downloaded the file, put it on my iPod, not to be confused with an iPad. Yes, and I listened to it, and then Gary would give his email address out and like non-stop. And so I hunted him down and we connected, and then his second book came out and he had a book stop in Miami, and then we linked up and it just stayed in touch and it didn't became, you know, every time I was in a different city, we'd run into each other in the in the green room, which was even crazier. And then in 2018, he made an introduction uh to Jordan French owns Grit Daily, and I now host that show with Jordan. So, like that ripple effect of Gary, it still continues to go on and on.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

But you know what? Say what a lot of people don't like Gary, but Gary's a giver, man. He really does. He I mean, he did some interviews for me back early when I was trying to find my mark in content marketing, and he's always been out there. And it really does. I see him post on LinkedIn. He talks a lot about life and happiness and treating people right the right way, and he really does believe that, even though a lot of people, oh, that's his thing. He's a good dude.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

Oh, he's a great dude and and humble, man, humble and engaged. He's just it, he's he's there. Like my my sister always liked to say, it's like those people that when you're talking to them, make you feel like you're the only person in the room. And uh that that's a that's a special gift. Well, dude, it's so great to uh to to catch up, of course, through means of a podcast, because that's just how I roll. You're a podcaster. You get that too. But we've been uh we've been friends on Facebook for a minute now, and I saw the uh the new book came out, the second version uh of um Epic Content Marketing. That was the first I think I interviewed you. No, was that the first time?

SPEAKER_01 3:54

First time yeah, the first the first one was uh the first one was 2013, and honestly, I wasn't gonna update it, but when people I I actually felt bad when people continued to buy because it did pretty well, yeah. Like it was it's probably still my best book of the eight that I've that I've written. And when people are going through and say, Oh, here's how you handle Google Plus. I'm like, I just can't I don't want people to buy that, yeah. So we updated it, but about 60 is new, of course. Then you're adding you got to add all the AI content stuff. We added a couple chapters on web three and the creator economy, and then we're like, Okay, this is a brand new book, so it's got the content marketing uh framework to it, yeah. But whole new deal, good continues to roll.

SPEAKER_00 4:38

I did the same thing in social media sucks. Uh, I put a whole chapter about Google Plus, and I told myself, I'm gonna write this book so it's evergreen.

SPEAKER_01 4:46

And uh, well, there's no well, you know, what are you gonna do? There's no books that are really evergreen, except maybe like atomic habits or think and grow rich or those types of books. Maybe think and grow rich, uh, a completely chauvinistic book, but still I put that in my top five. I know we're not like talking about book recommendations here, but if anybody's listening, that book changed my life. Just about focusing on the right things and getting my getting my act in order when I was trying to build a a business and support my family. Yeah, it's definitely a classic. On this episode of Joe's Book Club. Yeah, what else do you want? I could hey, I read uh I read as much as I can. Like Andy Rear's new book, Project Hail Mary, fantastic if you like science fiction. I just read uh The Institute by Stephen King, amazing book. We can go on and on if you want to do uh do book reviews.

SPEAKER_00 5:39

Well, there we go. Those are those are some great recommendations.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Those are two, yeah. And I but and I I I'm told this is probably not good to say, but people that don't read at all, I I have a problem with them. Like I totally judge them. Like if you're like if you if you don't want to play games on your phone all the time and not read a book, that's your choice. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna judge it, but I do. I think you should read more.

SPEAKER_00 6:04

I think P the world would be a better place if people read more books, that's or the contracts that they get into, or the you know, whatever, you know, just reading in general. That's the first question my attorney asks me every time. I'm like, I can't believe this happened. He goes, But did you read? Did you read? That's right, exactly. Did you and yeah?

SPEAKER_01 6:23

I but we can get into attorney conversations all day long. Because my my attorney always like when I read an email from my attorney, I can visualize him shaking his head. Right. Joe, what is wrong with you? That's their job, though. Oh, yeah, that's that's when you when you start a business. I don't know where we're going with this podcast, but when you start a business, you need a really good attorney and an amazing accountant. If you get those two people that are on your side, you're gonna have an amazing business. If you don't, it's a it's an issue always runs into stuff, yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 6:54

So so what have you been up to since 2013? I know that uh you uh you exited from content marketing world. Um, how'd that all go down?

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Yeah, um, so I started the business. I don't know how much you know about the you know when I got started, but I used to work at a B2B publishing company, Pent and Media. I always wanted to start my own business. I saw this opportunity coming in content marketing and said, said, Oh my god, brands are gonna actually have to tell their own stories and create content, and they have no idea how to do that. So we we created something called the Content Marketing Institute, which boy started in 2007. I was ready to give up in 2009. My wife convinced me and said, Look, you gotta stick with this, and you know, you start a business, it takes years, it takes three, five years. You really got to scratch at it. So we were losing money like crazy, did a pivot and called everything content marketing institute 2010. I could see it, the market was moving our direction. People like you know, Brian Clark, who you know from Copy Blogger, he adopted the term, people started to move with it. I said, Well, if we're gonna make this thing big, we've got to have an event. Uh, created content marketing world in 2011. I swear to God, this is a true story. I've told it a million times, but I was hoping for 100 to 150 people to come to Cleveland in 2011 for our first content marketing world. I said, How do I get 100 people to come to Cleveland, 100 marketers to do this? We had 660 people come to Cleveland that year for that event, which in 2015 became 4,000 people for content marketing world. It's just amazing. Everything like lined up, is as everyone was trying to know. As you know, social media was going crazy, but nobody knew how to create really good, valuable, um, credible, compelling content on a consistent basis. And that's what we taught. And I always wanted to exit, it was always a goal. I had it down. I know you're a big goal setter, I'm a big goal setter. I wrote down in 2008, I said, I want to sell uh my company by the year 2015 for over 10 million dollars. So that's what I had down there and on and on in 2015, didn't work, but 2016 worked just fine, and we sold to a company I stayed on until 2017, took a sabbatical year, best year of my life, 2018. Just woke up, had nothing to do. That's when I stopped. I had two podcasts going at the time, Content Inc. and this old marketing, stopped them, paused them, and then now I'm kind of back into it. I wrote a novel called The Will to Die, which I'm I still want to write another follow-up to that one. But now I'm all in on the creator economy, where I wake up every day teaching creators like you and I, you know, how they can make a full-time business out of their content niche. So we talk to email newsletter uh providers, whether it's YouTubers, people that are on TikTok, podcasters, as you know, and we teach them how to create a full-time business. That company's called the Tilt. And then we have an annual event called Creator Economy Expo, which is May 1st to 3rd in Cleveland, kind of replicating the model of what we did at Content Marketing Institute. But instead of talking to marketers with a lot of money that bring 20 to 30 people that don't care about a budget, we're talking to individual content creators who have no money trying to convince them to come to an event in Cleveland, Ohio. And uh we we did it in Phoenix last year. We had 400 people, it was fantastic. We're doing it again this year, and it's more of a passion area for me as I realize and you do too, talking to podcasters that they don't understand that you are an entrepreneur first, and then you are a content entrepreneur. So there's different things that have to happen. It takes time, it takes 18 months in a lot of cases, just to get things going, just to get to somewhere you can support each other and get a regular stream of income in. So that's kind of where I'm at right now. And um, I'm I'm a content creator myself, first and foremost, but I have my business now around uh the idea of making content creators, what I call content entrepreneurs successful.

SPEAKER_00 10:52

I love the 18 year uh 18 month uh uh time frame. I I teach the same thing. In fact, my program's 15 months, but I always say give uh podcasting 18 months before you step back, evaluate, and give yourself permission to throw the talent. Because if you put your if you put the blinders on for 18 months, I guarantee you one or many great things are going to happen. What those many or great things are, I do not know, but I've experienced them in my own uh personal life. So it's it's you know, it's that that whole patience thing, which is a little challenging when it comes to uh you know content creation. But then again, you know, we've been at this for a minute now, and it still takes time when we've got something new to be able to bring to the market on where it's all at because things are constantly, you know, moving and changing.

SPEAKER_01 11:40

Well, that's a real number too. Like we've done research at the tilt for three years. We just finished our third year of our content entrepreneur benchmark, and it takes about four to six months to get your first dollar. Why does it take so long? Because you don't have an audience yet. You probably don't even know the niche that you want to focus on yet. So all you're just figuring this whole thing out, and generally 18 months is the average number of what it takes for people to feel like they're supporting themselves, and then 24 months is the number where you might hire your first person. So you're two years in and you're still a very, very small business getting things going. But I always tell people like you do as well. They say, Joe, I want to do this podcast, I want to do this newsletter, I want to do this YouTube thing. What should I expect in six to nine months? I say, nothing, you should not expect anything because you probably haven't figured anything out yet. You haven't built a what we call a minimum viable audience yet. It takes time to do those things, it takes sometimes years. So I want to make sure. I mean, I I I told somebody the other day, it's like what they or it was an interview, what's the most important skill a content creator should have? And I said, Patience, yeah, because most people don't make it because they give up before almost like I did in 2009, and maybe it's because I have that. It took it was two years I was into my content creation journey and I still wasn't making it, and I felt like a failure. And a good thing I had people around me that supported me. Then it was six months later that everything pivoted and I could see it moving, and it was in a positive direction, and we were gonna make it. But you know, if you're if you're in the weeds and you're doing the work and you're not making it, you feel like, oh my god, I gotta go work for somebody else. I can't make this thing happen. And it's a sad day when that happens if they don't have people around them saying, Hey, look, you or set the right expectations to your point about what this thing's supposed to be.

SPEAKER_00 13:22

Yeah. So, what are some of the things you do for people? I mean, first things first is like, you know, what do you want to do? What's your thing? What are you gonna talk about? And then you got to build an audience around that. So, like, what are some just kind of 30,000-foot perspective, reader's dialogue version, if you will, of how that's there's a whole process in in my uh 21 book that's back there that you could see?

SPEAKER_01 13:42

Uh, it's called called Content Inc. And I have this methodology that I've been using for about 10 years. And the first thing is you sort of find your sweet spot. What is a sweet spot? It's that area of you know, on the one side, what is your knowledge or skill area that maybe you're a little bit better or you're gonna do the work at to understand better than anyone else, and then the other side side, what who's your audience and what's their pain points? And the intersection of that creates something that evolves into step two, which is the most important one, is what we call the content tilt. The content tilt is your area, your the way that you differentiate to cut through all the other content clutter out there. So, for me, if I look back on my journey in 2010, we positioned everything around this term, this phrase called content marketing. We put that that was our differentiation area. Nobody called it that at the time, and we put a lot of effort, resources, and money behind that, and then the market came to us. Right now, we're trying to do it again with a with content entrepreneur. But you might differentiate by saying, Oh, that's I'm gonna do a niche of a niche of an audience and focus on that, or I'm gonna be like you were talking about your comedy journey before. Maybe you're you have a sense of humor that's better than anyone else, and you can differentiate. So find that differentiation area, and then three, you basically focus on one platform, one content type, one platform you consistently deliver over a long period of time, and where a lot of people make mistakes in step three is they do all the things like, Oh, I'm gonna do the podcast, the newsletter, I'm gonna be on Twitter and LinkedIn and TikTok and YouTube, and they do 13 to 16 different things. Well, that is basically a recipe for failure. We've seen it a million times. You can't be great at all these things, you basically become mediocre at all of them, and nobody finds you interesting, and nobody subscribes to your stuff. And so, like from your, you know, you talk to an audience of podcasters, you say just focus on your podcast. The other stuff you do can market for that podcast, but your home base is your podcast. You've got audio, plus you know, your whatever you're distributing on Spotify and then Apple, uh, iTunes or whatever the case is, right? You're gonna focus on that, and that's your thing. With me and with the tilt, our thing is our newsletter. So everything or we send a newsletter out every Tuesday and Friday. That's our thing, that's our focus. We're gonna try to become great at that, like kind of like Morning Brew did or the hustle did with that one, and that's where a lot of people lose it because you want to do all the things, but you like great strategy. You have to say no to as many things as you can, pull back and say, I want to say no to all these other things, so I can say a big amazing yes to that one thing that I can be better than anyone else in the world at. So that's the whole beginner's part of the content entrepreneur's journey, and that's your you know, that's your nine to 12 months, and you're just doing that, and then it's all about okay, then audience building, getting subscribers, revenue mix. I mean, the average content entrepreneur has between seven and ten different revenue generation activities that they have. I mean, that's when you get into and then you think about exit strategy and all that other stuff, but it's those first three are key finding that content tilt, that differentiation, and then picking your home. You can test it out at first, but at some point you're gonna have to say, What's my home base? And then go all in on that.

SPEAKER_00 16:54

Love it. Quick plug for the newsletter as well. Too go to the the tilt.com, just like it sounds, there'll be a link in the show notes, but you can subscribe to that twice a week newsletter, uh, jam-packed with all the information that'll make your bride your your brain melt, uh, which is exactly what you need when creating content. The more you know, we it's like a fire hose approach, and then whatever lands for you, grab it and take massive action with it. But I love what you said about stop trying to be all things to everybody. My gosh, I've been letting that roll off my tongue since the beginning. Uh, because that was that that is like social media 101. It's like pick one thing, that's right, one platform and get really, really, really good at it. Um, and then once you do, then you can start focusing on maybe moving additional things into the fold. But first things first, you know, build your build your tribe and you know, one central, I love what you said, home base there.

SPEAKER_01 17:50

So a lot of people don't realize that. I mean, that's this is just a media one-on-one model. I just happen to have a history of it because I've been in it for 25 years. But if you look at how any successful media company from New York Times, the Huffington Post, the BuzzFeed, the Financial Times, to any of them have done it, they've done it with this model. And even though we have more and more platforms and more and more ways to communicate, and consumers have more ways to get information, that's still the model. You focus on doing one thing really, really well, and then you get that audience, and then you diversify and do all the things, but we tend to jump toward all the things, just not the right way to go.

SPEAKER_00 18:25

Absolutely. So, when it comes to content marketing, where does this whole artificial intelligence come into play here? I mean, I know it's coming, it seems like it's shown up overnight, which I think a majority of people would agree it has, it's grown rapidly, but welcome to technology, it's going to always move faster and faster, whether we like it or not. But how does it fit into the fold of the whole content marketing world?

SPEAKER_01 18:44

It's so I was talking to somebody the other day about this because I remember I was in the publishing industry. So I was in the magazine industry when we moved from you know, basically doing it all with a designer doing it by hand, and you're making copies and you're trying to figure out how am I going to lay this page out, and it's very much a no-tech uh way to do it. And then we moved into things like you know, Adobe and Illustrator and Photoshop and Quark Express and everything. This and then we were they're like the designers, oh, I can't, this is automated. This is this is too much computer, this is not real, this is not the way it's just a new tool, folks. We're gonna keep getting it, we're gonna keep getting new tools for the tomorrow and the next day and the next day. And this is everybody's looking at this bright, shiny tool right now, and they should be, and it's very interesting. And if I'm gonna make a recommendation, I'd say go experiment with it, figure out how it's gonna help your process. We see a lot of content creators using it right now to make title headline suggestions to help them with editing, to help them with different perspectives. I've tried it a couple times because I was looking for okay, I'm gonna do a part two to my novel, The Will to Die, and where do I want to go? And I wrote in some prompts and out came a bunch of different ideas that I can just use as brainstorming. That's wonderful, but it's a tool, it's just like my email marketing tool, it's just like using a podcast distribution tool. So you can save time so you can focus on the strategy and getting the work done the right way. So, this whole thing about human content versus um AI content or robot content or whatever. Well, I've been you've been seeing that for a long time. You can I've been in fantasy sports doing that for 10 years. In the last five years, I've been getting my updates through automated insights, which is basically a robot telling me how I did every week. This is not new stuff. Yeah, I would say if it could help you create more better content and that's helping it be more compelling or relevant in some way, or you learn an insight about your audience you didn't know before because a robot is helping you do that. Great, we do it. You don't shy away from it. Um, so it's just interesting to see where this is going. And of course, that we dedicated a whole chapter to it in the book, Epic Content Marketing, because we have to and we have to focus on this. But again, just a tool. It's fine. We're not gonna, you know, nobody's taken over the world yet. You know, we still we we're still human beings, we're still sort of running the place. I don't know what's gonna happen in five to ten years.

SPEAKER_00 21:07

I don't know when the singularity's coming, but right now, just a tool. Just a tool. Great, great advice there. Again, epic content marketing. Uh, this is the second edition of this uh epic book, pun intended. Uh wherever books are sold, there'll be a link to grab it. I grab a copy in the show notes uh as well. Uh well, as we close things out here, let's chat a little bit about this uh upcoming event you got going on in May.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

So I honestly I didn't think I was gonna get back at the event business after content marketing world. And here we are, folks. Well, and here we are. It's they just keep pulling me back, just like the Godfather. Um, but there there are no there are some really good events for content creators out there. There's uh Vidcons out there, there's a lot of really good, as you know, podcast events. But I was like, is there any events for entrepreneurs that really focus on the business of how to do this to how to really Make your your this content first business model work. And I didn't think there was where you could actually talk to the speakers, where you could get great networking opportunities, where you could educate yourself, where could be part of something that's going to help you in your career and get going. This is not a fan thing, this is not an influencer thing. These are individual business owners that are trying to make it, and they just happen to have a content-first mentality. They have a podcast or a newsletter or a YouTube channel and all the things that surround that. And so I said, Well, if there's no event, maybe we should do an event. So, of course, last year we put an event together, it worked out okay. It worked out well enough to say we're going to do another event. We've had some really good support from Lulu and from HubSpot and from Kajabi and from Convert Kit. And so a lot of people are on our team saying, Hey, let's let's do this, make it, let's make it a go. So May 1st to 3rd in Cleveland, we're bringing it back. My Cleveland's my hometown. So we're able to bring it back to Cleveland. Cleveland's beautiful in May, as we were talking about before. And uh, I'm just happy. I guess what I love this is a great group of people. It is, it is, it's nothing wrong with content marketers, which I'm still love and I'm still part of that community. But I love entrepreneurs probably more than any other group of people. And I love the business model that you and I are talking about on the show because I think it's the greatest business model on the planet. So you mean I can set my own hours and I don't have to go travel and I can get up and do whatever I want to do, but I'm trying to focus on the needs and pain points of a specific audience and help that audience do something. That's my job. Sign me up, man. Yeah. Sign me up for more time with my kids. Sign me up for, I mean, a lot of the content entrepreneurs that are in our audience, they're not multi-millionaires, some are, but they make enough that they can live a great life. And that's and they can they can impact the world in a positive way. And that's and I like that because when you talk to a marketer, marketers can't do that sometimes. I can give really good ideas to a marketer that they'll run up and bump up against all kinds of politics and red tape in an organization, and they can't get it done. With an individual who's an entrepreneur, they can do it in five minutes. I'm gonna I'm gonna do a target a new niche. Like you're targeting, like I watch your Facebook feed. Hey, today's a great day to start a podcast. So somebody says yes, today's the day they can make that decision in five seconds. I'm gonna be a podcaster, I'm gonna talk to Sebastian, he's gonna help me, I'm gonna do this thing. And so I like that uh because I think that entrepreneurs make really quick decisions based on the information they have and they focus on saying no to all those other things that are distractors, and they focus and they say yes to this great business model. So I'm definitely partial to it, definitely biased to it. Um, and people don't know that it's the it's like the fastest growing business area in the world right now is becoming a content creator, a content entrepreneur. I don't think enough people are talking about it.

SPEAKER_00 24:44

Yeah, funny. Gary was predicting this 10 years ago. Everyone will be creating content on their phone and posting it on the internet. People are like, Yeah, right, this guy's crazy and he cusses too much. Well, well, well, here we go. Here we go. Who was right? That's right, absolutely. Joe been great to catch up, brother. I'm gonna make sure I include all the links to the book and the event and also the tilt.com uh biweekly newsletter. So, or no, not bi-weekly, two times a week. Two times a week. You got it. Said that wrong there, but uh, you get an email twice a week, damn it.

SPEAKER_01 25:12

All right, the email twice a week. It'll help you out. It'll keep up with the news, with content creation, it'll help you be a better creator. So there you go.

SPEAKER_00 25:19

Love it, Joe. It's been so great to catch up, brother. So good to see you uh continuing to shine. You're one of the uh most brilliant minds I know uh in our space here. So it's great to have an opportunity to have another conversation with you. Can't wait to dive into the second edition of Epic Content Marketing. I'm sure there's a couple things in there that I just do not know. So I'm excited to uh maybe a couple.

SPEAKER_01 25:40

I don't know. Hey, thanks for all the support, Sebastian. Really appreciate it. And we'll the next time we talk, we'll we'll have it be a little bit less time than it was in this this most recent. So I'll talk to you soon.

SPEAKER_00 25:51

I'm gonna get to Cleveland before too long, do some comedy, grab a beer with you, and see your see your stomping grounds there. Thanks again, ladies and gentlemen. Joe Pulitzki, epic content marketing on shelves. Wherever books are sold. There'll be a link in the show notes to grab a copy. Thanks again, Joe. Thank you, sir. Until next time, friends. Thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Beyond the Story Podcast. We're sure to appreciate it. If you haven't done so already, make sure you're subscribed to the show. This way you'll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined, please leave us a review. Signing off from the podcast, launch lab.com studios. We'll talk to you next time.