Podcasts about killing marketing

From the archive: This episode was originally recorded and published in 2021. Our interviews on Entrepreneurs On Fire are meant to be evergreen, and we do our best to confirm that all offers and URL's in these archive episodes are still relevant. Joe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a Must-Read Business Book by Fortune Magazine. His novel, The Will to Die, was awarded Best Suspense Book of 2020 by the National Indie Excellence Awards. Joe's latest version of Content Inc. is now available. Top 3 Value Bombs 1. We're all creating content in some way. Do a basic content audit. Know what content you're creating and where you're spending your resources. 2. Be lean and know that it takes time to build a viable audience. 3. It's ok not to know your exit yet. Write down your goals, figure out where you want to go financially, mentally, and spiritually. Take every step to get there. Sign up and get 5 dollars in Tilt coins! Turning Content Creators into Content Entrepreneurs - The Tilt Sponsor HubSpot Grow better, faster with HubSpot's all-in-one intuitive customer platform. Visit HubSpot.com to learn more

From the archive: This episode was originally recorded and published in 2021. Our interviews on Entrepreneurs On Fire are meant to be evergreen, and we do our best to confirm that all offers and URL's in these archive episodes are still relevant. Joe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a Must-Read Business Book by Fortune Magazine. His novel, The Will to Die, was awarded Best Suspense Book of 2020 by the National Indie Excellence Awards. Joe's latest version of Content Inc. is now available. Top 3 Value Bombs 1. We're all creating content in some way. Do a basic content audit. Know what content you're creating and where you're spending your resources. 2. Be lean and know that it takes time to build a viable audience. 3. It's ok not to know your exit yet. Write down your goals, figure out where you want to go financially, mentally, and spiritually. Take every step to get there. Sign up and get 5 dollars in Tilt coins! Turning Content Creators into Content Entrepreneurs - The Tilt Sponsor HubSpot Grow better, faster with HubSpot's all-in-one intuitive customer platform. Visit HubSpot.com to learn more

In this special #ThisOldMarketing episode, Joe and Robert review their presentations from Social Media Marketing World 2024. Robert shares his insights, including: The Value of Relationships The Product Content Mindset The Point of View Architecture The Trust Exercise - Audit Your Experiences Joe runs through his secrets for content marketing success, including: Building the Base The Content Tilt Acquiring Content Assets Creators over Content Pillar Content Projects The NEW Print Opportunity Email, Email, Email The Content Revenue Model For the full content marketing revenue model, check out our book, Killing Marketing.  Sign up to CEX and use code TOM100 to win a guest spot on This Old Marketing. ------ This week's sponsor: Smart sales software for today's multitasking reps that's built to help you manage every stage of your sales pipeline with ease. Work smarter, not harder at Hubspot.com/sales ------ Liked this show? SUBSCRIBE to this podcast on Spotify, Apple, Google and more. Catch past episodes and show notes at ThisOldMarketing.com. Catch and subscribe to our NEW show on YouTube. Subscribe to Joe Pulizzi's Orangeletter and get two free downloads direct from Joe. Subscribe to Robert Rose's newsletter at Experience Advisors.

Welcome to episode #914 of Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - The ThinkersOne Podcast - Episode #914. In a digital world where content is king, Robert Rose stands out as a master craftsman (and good friend), shaping narratives that resonate and drive business success. As a seasoned author (Managing Content Marketing, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, Killing Marketing, etc.), consultant, and content marketing rock star, Robert has been at the forefront of defining and refining the strategies that make content a pivotal part of contemporary marketing. Robert's latest book, Content Marketing Strategy, is a beacon for marketers navigating the choppy waters of the digital age. The book is not just a treatise on content marketing; it's a comprehensive guide to crafting a strategy that aligns content with broader business goals. Drawing from his extensive experience, Robert elucidates how content can be a transformative force, turning audiences into advocates and browsers into buyers. The journey of Robert as a content marketing strategist is one marked by a deep understanding of how stories can shape brand perception and consumer behavior. His work has not only helped businesses find their voice but also fine-tune it to echo across the digital landscape. His approach goes beyond mere content creation, delving into how to manage, measure, and monetize content effectively. As the founder and chief strategy advisor of The Content Advisory, Robert has been instrumental in steering businesses toward narrative-driven growth. His consultancy work has seen him collaborate with global brands, helping them to craft content strategies that are both innovative and impactful. His insights are sought after in boardrooms where the conversation is about turning content into a competitive advantage. Beyond his consulting and writing, Robert is a prolific speaker, bringing his thought leadership to conferences and corporate workshops worldwide. His keynotes are a blend of practical advice, industry insights, and forward-thinking ideas - all delivered with a storyteller's flair. Robert's contributions to the field extend to his role as a Chief Strategy Advisor for the Content Marketing Institute (which is also the home of Content Marketing World - originally created along with his This Old Marketing podcasting co-host, Joe Pulizzi). Here, he has been a guiding force, helping shape the discourse around content marketing and ensuring that practitioners have access to the latest trends, tools, and tactics. The power of smart and strategic content cannot be denied. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 1:07:00. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at Apple Podcasts. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. Check out ThinkersOne. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Robert Rose. Content Marketing Strategy. Killing Marketing. Managing Content Marketing. Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing. The Content Advisory. This Old Marketing. Content Marketing Institute. Content Marketing World. Check out Robert on ThinkersOne. Follow Robert on LinkedIn. Follow Robert on Threads. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.

Join Dots Oyebolu as he talks with Robert Rose, Founder and Chief Troublemaker at The Content Advisory. They explore the pivotal role of content-driven customer experiences and offer invaluable guidance for marketers aiming to direct their campaigns toward success.Key Takeaways:[02:46] Marketing's transformation has led to a nuanced approach.[07:59] Robert emphasizes the pivotal role of content in marketing through his decade-long podcast and book "Killing Marketing."[13:20] Modern marketing prioritizes trust and "spirit share" with consumers over brand boasting.[21:09] Marketing now values storytelling over older advertising methods.[22:37] Content marketing aims to add value, not directly monetize content.[32:14] AI's role in content personalization is uncertain and may add noise.[45:06] A common pitfall in marketing is a lack of defined objectives; it's essential to agree upon goals and measurements to determine success.Resources Mentioned:Robert Rose -https://www.linkedin.com/in/robrose/The Content Advisory | LinkedIn -https://www.linkedin.com/company/thecontentadvisory/The Content Advisory | Website -https://contentadvisory.net/Toyota Production System by: Taiichi Ohno. -https://www.amazon.com/Toyota-Production-System-Beyond-Large-Scale/dp/0915299143Thanks for listening to the Marketing Leadership podcast, brought to you by Dots Loves Marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, leave a review to help get the word out about the show. And be sure to subscribe so you never miss another insightful conversation.#PodcastSEO #PerformanceMarketing #PodcastAds #MarketingStrategy #MarketingIntelligence #PaidMedia

In this episode, Kirby Hasseman talks with Ryan Ruud about getting marketing and sales aligned, how to judge a new CRM, and how technology is killing marketing. Watch now!

If we haven't said it enough, creating content online is so important for businesses today. But where do we start and how do we choose what type of content to create? In this episode, we've invited the founder of the Content Marketing Institute and Amazon best-selling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi. He is going to share his expertise on building an audience, reaching them through the diversification of the content we create, picking a platform to release our content, starting it right and so much more.In this episode you'll find: Joe tells us about The Orange Effect Foundation. Why you should build an audience as a coach or solopreneur. Creating your future customers when you are creating content. Different ways you can focus on building an audience through the 3 and 3 model. Indicators for starting to diversify your content. How to pick your platform and what you need to do after. Launching books in 3 different ways. Public speaking options for people looking to diversify. 3 common mistakes people make when they start to diversify content. The best way to start building a content channel. Joe tells us about the new Content Inc. Book. Links: Content Inc. The Tilt

Welcome to episode #825 of Six Pixels of Separation. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - Episode #825 - Host: Mitch Joel. Web3, the creator economy, Discord servers, social tokenization, decentralized technology, Twitch streams… and so much more. When it comes to this new world of content marketing, social media and personal brands slamming into newer platforms and creators, you will meet some of the sketchiest people. Lots of talk with little protein. Joe Pulizzi is the real deal, and since his first Content Marketing World back in 2010, I count him as both a good friend and one of the kindest, smartest minds in the business. Joe has founded five companies including his latest, Creator Economy Expo (the inaugural event takes places next week in Phoenix from May 2nd - 4th, 2022). Joe also recently launched, the content entrepreneurship news site, The Tilt, and the Content Marketing Institute. In 2014, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award by The Content Council. His podcast series, This Old Marketing with Robert Rose, has millions of downloads. His charitable foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 35 states. Joe is also a bestselling writer. He is the author of Content Inc. (which was recently completely updated and expanded into a second edition), Killing Marketing, Epic Content Marketing and more. His novel, The Will To Die, was awarded "Best Suspense Book" of 2020 by the National Indie Excellence Awards. What does the creator economy and content entrepreneurship mean for you as the world of Web3 grows? Let's break down this new world of influencers, content marketing and more. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 59:22. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at Apple Podcasts. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Joe Pulizzi. Creator Economy Expo. The Tilt. The Will To Die. This Old Marketing. Content Inc.. Killing Marketing. Epic Content Marketing. Content Marketing Institute. The Orange Effect. Follow Joe on LinkedIn. Follow Joe on Facebook. Follow Joe on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.

Robert Rose is the Founder and self-proclaimed Chief Troublemaker at The Content Advisory. For more than 10 years, Robert has worked with more than 500 companies including 15 of the Fortune 100 companies. He has provided strategic marketing advice and counsel for global brands such as Facebook, Salesforce, NASA, CVS Health, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is also the author of three best-selling books including Killing Marketing, which he wrote with his colleague, Joe Pulizzi. Robert co-hosts a podcast with Joe called This Old Marketing, which has run for the last eight years.  Robert Rose, the Founder and Chief Troublemaker at The Content Advisory, is John Corcoran's guest in this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where he talks about creating and managing content. Robert also shares his tips for coming up with new ideas, talks about the importance of SEO strategies, and explains how his business was impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Stay tuned.

Everything matters to your marketing message: font, colours, even direction (as in images and your own body movements in video, livestreams and on stage). With direction being extremely important to effectively communicating your marketing message. Yet getting direction wrong is one of the most common conversion-killing mistakes people make in their marketing. Today I'll explain why and what to do to fix it!

Every start-up and entrepreneur faces the challenge of reaching and attracting clients. However, content marketing comes in handy when surviving and thriving in the industry without pitching the goods. Hence, developing an online content platform that draws new clients is critical to business success. First, however, it is vital to understand how to position yourself as an informational leader in your niche and create well-liked content produced by traditional media companies. Today, our guest is someone who coined the term "content marketing" way back in 2001. It has since grown to become the fastest growing industry in the internet marketing industry. Joe Pulizzi, the author of 'Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses,' joins us today to share his wisdom on content creation and content marketing.Content Inc. has been a top direct marketing bestseller since September 2015. Through this book, Joe introduces a new business model that uncovers how entrepreneurs with limited resources can build a massive online audience as the engine that drives their entire businesses. In addition, this book suggests a systematic process any entrepreneur or small business owner can use to dominate the market without initially selling anything.Other than being an author, Joe is a successful entrepreneur, speaker, and podcast host. Over his career, Joe has spoken at over 400 sites in 16 countries to promote content marketing. From Fortune Magazine's Leadership Summit to SXSW to NAMM to Nestle to DuPont to SAP to HP and Dell, he has given keynote talks at various high-profile events and organizations.Starting the conversation, Joe states how his two children and his desire to help people motivate him right now in his life. Joe started his career in publishing, and then he found out something called content marketing. Although Joe shifted his writings to mysteries and thrillers later, he is back as a content creator, focusing on a whole new business. In his words, these days, he is going down the rabbit hole. In 2007, Joe left a six-figure job as an executive to start his own business. He has founded several companies, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). It is the top content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, which Inc. magazine named the fastest growing business media company in 2014 and 2015. Moreover, Joe is the founder of The Tilt, an email newsletter. Through this, he aims to assist lonely content creators in turning their business into a content empire. The Content Council named Joe as the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award. In addition, fortune Magazine named Joe's third book, Epic Content Marketing, one of the "Five Must Read Business Books of the Year" in 2013. Killing Marketing, his most recent book, was released in September of this year. ResourcesConnect with JoeLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/joepulizzi/Twitter: twitter.com/JoePulizziInstagram: instagram.com/joepulizzi/Mentioned in the podcastContent Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses: goodreads.com/book/show/26222932-content-inc?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=0nro1aQ24E&rank=1MrBeast YouTube Channel: youtube.com/c/MrBeast6000

'Tis the night before Christmas, and like many good things, this episode starts and ends in the bar - The Rockstar CMO Virtual Bar. This podcast started as a lockdown project, and over the last 85 or so episodes, Robert Rose has joined Ian Truscott in the Rockstar CMO Virtual Bar to help us escape. While sharing a cocktail each week, he's transported us to somewhere exotic (and Wales) for a marketing thought. But, who is this guy that has inspired us to drink quite so much gin?  Robert Rose is a sought-after consultant, best-selling author, keynote speaker, and one of the world's most recognized digital content strategy and marketing experts. Robert is the author of three best-selling books, including Killing Marketing, Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing, and Managing Content Marketing. For more than 10 years, Robert and his firm The ContentAdvisory have worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. He has provided strategic marketing advice and counsel for global brands such as Facebook, Salesforce, NASA, CVS Health, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In this special holiday episode, Robert shares his favorite cocktail (which might surprise you), discuss Roberts career, what has inspired him, books, the story of content marketing and what he would throw into the Rockstar CMO swimming pool. Finally, we drop the track that gets his marketing mojo working.  Enjoy! The people Ian Truscott on LinkedIn and Twitter  Robert Rose on Twitter and LinkedIn Mentioned in this week's episode Marketing Myopia by Theodore Levitt (on Goodreads) Different by Youngme Moon (on Goodreads)  Rita Gunther McGrath Robert's books Robert's Content Advisory Blog This Old Marketing podcast Music  Piano Music is by Johnny Easton, shared under a creative commons license  Bad Man's Song - Tears for Fears on Spotify Rockstar CMO Show notes: Previous episodes and all show notes: Rockstar CMO FM Subscribe - We are available on all your favorite platforms, including Appleand Spotify  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Growth Hack we bring on Joe Pulizzi to talk about content marketing and how to take advantage of the best moments of influence on the consumer journey.Joe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. He has founded four companies including content creation news site The Tilt as well as Content Marketing Institute. In 2014, he received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Content Council. His podcast series, This Old Marketing with Robert Rose, has millions of downloads from over 150 countries. His Foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 35 states.It's safe to say Joe is not an expert when it comes to content marketing but a great human.For more episodes and information, visit us at www.papidigital.com/podcastFollow Papi Digital for Marketing Expertise and Insights on: Facebook: www.facebook.com/PapiDigitalLinkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/papidigitalInstagram: www.instagram.com/_papidigital/

Special thanks to Gary Busey for his amazing introduction, to Pamela Muldoon for her sultry voice, and to JK Kalinowski for his design chops. Welcome to a very special 300th episode of This Old Marketing. Big shout out to the sponsor of this episode, Parse.ly, who stepped up and supported this show when no one else would. How does this show work? Joe and Robert are going to take your questions - and we've assembled 10 of the finest and best questions -  yeah, pretty much the ones we felt like answering.  Some of them came through audio...and some of them came through our hashtag on Twitter...but all of them we assume came with love and affection.  For those ten people who submitted questions: we'll be reaching out after the show to find out how to get you your prizes. As we mentioned, we're giving away a copy of Killing Marketing (either in print or in Kindle version) AND $50 in $TILT Coin. We've separated the questions into two basic categories: industry trends and questions about us and the show. INDUSTRY QUESTIONS SEGMENT QUESTION #1 Our first question comes in two parts... The first part is via the Twitter Hashtag and it's from Dennis Shiao. On this show for the last 300 episodes, you've advised us forever to not build our content house on rented land.  With Web 3.0 now facing us - is it possible that the entire concept of rented land goes away? The second part comes from email - and is from José Delameilleure. I am a free lance content writer from Belgium. I work in the niche of B2B IT, and usually in even deeper niches like Identity and Access Management, IoT, Artificial Intelligence,... In these niches, we are usually forced to use 'rented land' like LinkedIn to get our messages out. What can we do to claim our own piece of land and attract visitors to it?  QUESTION #2 Our next question also comes via the Twitter Hashtag and is from Jared Opfer. What business had the biggest miss in the last 12 months?  Who has the biggest opportunity in the next 12 months? QUESTION #3 Our next question is from our friend Bernie Borges through the Contact Form on our Website. I'm looking for examples of blockchain solutions for B2B and I don't see them. All the talk about brands planning their NFTs are B2C brands like Disney and Starbucks. What can B2B brands like HubSpot, Oracle and CMI do on the blockchain? Should they mint social tokens? Etc. What's your take? QUESTION 4 The next question comes from Eddie Naranjo via the contact form on the site. The question is given the current transition from Web 2 to Web 3 - which business model and tilt would you use to bootstrap a new business for a person who loves Wordpress design, content marketing, affiliate marketing and is really curious about crypto, NFTs and a way to tokenize products or services. QUESTION 5 Our next question is the last in our industry space from Yen Yee  who asked this question via the hashtag on Twitter. What is the current content marketing technology stack at CMI Content, The Content Advisory and The Tilt? ------------ This week's sponsor: Parse.ly Is your content team still split between creative types and numbers people?   How many people on your team actually use Google Analytics every day?   Parse.ly is a content analytics platform built to make it easy for your writers, creators, and marketers to become data driven.   Make it easy for your team to understand what content drives conversions. Make it easy for them to see what's working—and do more of that. Make it easy to prove the impact content has on your business, every day.   In one study, a forty person content team only had eight people using Google Analytics frequently. In other words, they weren't data driven.   Then they switched to Parse.ly. Now, 33 out of 40 people are using Parse.ly to drive results for their business. It's just that much easier. They're no longer split between creative types and numbers people—they're both.   If you're ready to start understanding the true value of your content and get out in front of your competition. Get a free content analysis from a Parse.ly product specialist by visiting: parse.ly/joe. ------------ QUESTION 6 Our question number six comes from Annie Schiffmann and it's our first audio question. How has the show evolved over 300 episodes.  If I looked at episode 99, 199 and 299 how would you say the show has evolved? QUESTION 7 The Next question is from Esben Johansen and comes via the Twitter Hashtag. If you could add one thing to your fantastic book Killing Marketing what would it be? QUESTION 8 The next question is from John Morgan and comes via the Email Contact Form. Of all the trends that you've covered over the last 8 years, which has been the most surprising, and what has lasted that you didn't think would last? QUESTION 9 Is another audio question - and it comes from our friend Ian Truscott. What is your favorite cocktail? QUESTION 10 Our last question comes from Rebecca and is through the Email Contact Us Form. As you look out to the future of Content Marketing and Content Creators - what do you guys think you'll be talking about on your 400th episode? Thanks to all our wonderful listeners for making this possible. We love you. --------- Liked this show? SUBSCRIBE to this podcast on Spotify, Apple, Google and more. Catch past episodes and show notes at ThisOldMarketing.site.

Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, podcaster, and one of the world's top content marketing authorities. He is the founder of multiple startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and digital content news site The Tilt. He is the Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing, and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. Joe is the recipient of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award for content marketing from the Content Council. His podcast series, This Old Marketing with Robert Rose, has millions of downloads from over 150 countries. His Foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 35 states.Listen in as they discuss:How Joe became passionate about marketingBeing consistent with content production for a pacific nicheFinding your audience and starting where they are atChoosing a social media niche and pursuing what you are good atThe worst advice seen or heard given in content marketingFinding that area of content differentiationHow frequently you should email your listAnd, more!TIP OF THE WEEKMark:  My tip of the week is going to change your life, which is joepulizzi.com. Check out Joe's newsletter, the books. Every aspect of marketing, he has you covered.Scott: Sometimes we just need a quick resource to go and check things out whether it's a quote of the day or site of the day, check out this website called The Reference's Desk (refdesk.com). What's cool is they have a site of the day, like a fun fact, thought of the day, a book of the month. Joe: The book that I used as an entrepreneur, that helped me through all sorts of issues was Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. The big lesson in that is writing down your goals and reviewing those goals on a regular basis. That's my secret that's not a secret to success in entrepreneurship: I write down my goals, I have 5 or 6 main goals for every year that I look at and review them every day. And when you review them in the morning, you do different things based on those goals. This new book, I was surprised because I had low expectations on this book, it's Greenlights by Mathew McConaughey. I really thought it's not a good book, but I read it, he wrote down his goals on a regular basis and review them. Great lessons and I learned a lot about myself reading that book. The real focus on that is goal setting and goal reading.WANT TO LISTEN MORE?Did you like this episode? If so, tune into another one of our exciting episodes with special guest Jeremy Greenberg as we discuss the most important key factor to customer diplomacy.Isn't it time to create passive income so you can work where you want, when you want and with whomever you want?

“The content tilt is that area of little to no competition on the web that actually gives you a chance to break through the noise and be relevant. It's what makes you so different that your audience notices you and rewards you with its attention.” – Joe Pulizzi Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, and fellow podcaster. He's the founder of multiple startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, and The Tilt – an email newsletter, delivered twice per week, dedicated to helping the lonely content creator turn their business into a content empire. Joe is famous for his work in content marketing, first using the term in 2001, then launching Content Marketing Institute and the renowned Content Marketing World event. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. His third book, Epic Content Marketing was named one of “Five Must Read Business Books of the Year” by Fortune Magazine – and his newest book, Killing Marketing was published in September 2017. His fourth book, Content Inc., has been a top direct marketing best-seller since September of 2015, and he has also co-authored two other books, Get Content Get Customers and Managing Content Marketing. Tune in to this captivating conversation between Joe Pulizzi and host Gair Maxwell, as they dive into everything from NFTs, the Facebook Metaverse, and how discovering your “content tilt” is the best way to build a solid, long-lasting business positioned for today's content-driven world.

The book we talk about in this show is #15 on the Amazon Best Seller list for Internet Marketing. Not to take anything away from past guests, but if you only listen to one of the 50 interviews we have done, I hope that you choose this one.   I think most marketers have heard of the Content Marketing Institute.  The public figure at the centre of CMI, Joe Pulizzi, started it all with a blog post on April 26, 2007 "Why Content Marketing" His hypothesis in 2007 was that companies who put content on the internet would build relationships that blossom into future customers. He then went about literally putting out content that taught others how to do this. Once they came to the CMI site and got this free content, he would sell them everything from newsletters, to magazines, to training, and an annual Content Marketing World event. For me personally, the story picks up in 2014 when I started listening to Joe's podcast with  Robert Rose  on the podcast series, This Old Marketing. I found this giving-away-expertise tactic to be quite unorthodox, as I was accustomed to thinking that companies should mainly communicate with their audience through advertising. Listening to them influenced how I've come to see content marketing's value.  While CMI was evangelizing how to grow a business on content, Joe didn't keep any secret about how well he was doing with growing his business. Already a bestselling author of several books, he came out in 2015 with Content Inc, that gave out the blueprint he was using. A year after it came out, he sold CMI in 2016 to the International Events company UBI.  He may have finished with CMI, but over the next few years, he stayed close to both corporate and entrepreneurial content creators. His keen focus on them led him to pitch his publisher on a second edition of the book, which  rounds out the model by sharing the rest of his own journey of monetizing a Content-based business. the second edition that came out this year. I was amazed as I read it; so many new examples, all the updates on marketing channels, it's a total overhaul from the first edition.  This is one high-energy conversation. I was already pumped to talk to Joe, I'm not going to lie, and it seems we both got pretty keyed up as we spoke.  People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show Shift away from the Glengarry Glenross revenue-generation model The Sweet Spot The book Killing Marketing, co-authored with Robert Rose. Joe's LinkedIn and Twitter profiles.  Site for the book, ContentInc.com and Joe's new venture, TheTilt.com Episode Reboot To get another perspective on audience-building, see Kevin Kelly's post on 1000 true fans

Joe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. His novel, The Will to Die, was awarded "Best Suspense Book" of 2020 by the National Indie Excellence Awards. Joe's latest version of Content Inc. is now available. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. We're all creating content in some way. Do a basic content audit. Know what content you're creating, or those where you spend your resources on. 2. Be lean and know that it takes time to build in a viable audience. 3. It's ok not to know your exit yet. Write down your goals, figure out where you want to go financially, mentally, and spiritually. Take every step to get there. Sign up and get $5 Tilt coins. Turning Content Creators into Content Entrepreneurs - The Tilt Sponsors: ZipRecruiter: When you post a job on ZipRecruiter, their matching technology finds qualified candidates and invites them to apply! Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com/fire. Organifi: Delicious superfood blends you'll love! Get 20% off your order at Organifi.com/fire!

Joe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. His novel, The Will to Die, was awarded "Best Suspense Book" of 2020 by the National Indie Excellence Awards. Joe's latest version of Content Inc. is now available. Top 3 Value Bombs: 1. We're all creating content in some way. Do a basic content audit. Know what content you're creating, or those where you spend your resources on. 2. Be lean and know that it takes time to build in a viable audience. 3. It's ok not to know your exit yet. Write down your goals, figure out where you want to go financially, mentally, and spiritually. Take every step to get there. Sign up and get $5 Tilt coins. Turning Content Creators into Content Entrepreneurs - The Tilt Sponsors: ZipRecruiter: When you post a job on ZipRecruiter, their matching technology finds qualified candidates and invites them to apply! Try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com/fire. Organifi: Delicious superfood blends you'll love! Get 20% off your order at Organifi.com/fire!

Welcome to episode #784 of Six Pixels of Separation. Here it is: Six Pixels of Separation - Episode #784 - Host: Mitch Joel. When it comes to content marketing, social media and personal brands, you will meet some of the sketchiest people. Lots of talk with little protein. Joe Pulizzi is the real deal, and since his first Content Marketing World back in 2010, I count him as both a good friend and one of the kindest, smartest minds in the business. Joe has founded four companies including his latest content creation news site, The Tilt, and the Content Marketing Institute. In 2014, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award by The Content Council. His podcast series, This Old Marketing with Robert Rose, has millions of downloads. His charitable foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 35 states. Joe is also a bestselling writer. He is the author of Content Inc. (which was recently completely updated and expanded into a second edition), Killing Marketing, Epic Content Marketing and more. His novel, The Will To Die, was awarded "Best Suspense Book" of 2020 by the National Indie Excellence Awards. What does the creator economy mean for you? What is a content entrepreneur? We recorded our chat live on Clubhouse, and now it's here for you. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 1:04:44. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at Apple Podcasts. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on Twitter. Here is my conversation with Joe Pulizzi. Content Inc. Epic Content Marketing. Killing Marketing. The Tilt. This Old Marketing. The Orange Effect. Content Marketing Institute. Content Marketing World. Follow Joe on LinkedIn. Follow Joe on Facebook. Follow Joe on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'.        

It seems like year after year, content is becoming increasingly important to companies' marketing efforts. At the same time, it's also become a way that more entrepreneurs make a living. To figure out the future of content, I really wanted to turn to Joe Pulizzi. He's the bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. You might know him from his podcast series, This Old Marketing, which has millions of downloads from over 150 countries. He's also the founder of the new digital content news site, The Tilt, his updated version of Content Inc. just hit shelves this May.Today, we talk about how the world of content marketing has changed since his first edition of Content Inc., how to find an area where no content exists and to address that market need, the future of the creator economy, how companies and creators figure out what content ought to be free and what ought to be directly monetized, and much more. As always, we welcome your feedback. Please make sure to subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play.

If we haven't said it enough, creating content online is so important for businesses today. But where do we start and how do we choose what type of content to create? In this episode, we've invited the founder of the Content Marketing Institute and Amazon best-selling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi. He is going to share his expertise on building an audience, reaching them through the diversification of the content we create, picking a platform to release our content, starting it right and so much more. In this episode you'll find: Joe tells us about The Orange Effect Foundation. Why you should build an audience as a coach or solopreneur. Creating your future customers when you are creating content. Different ways you can focus on building an audience through the 3 and 3 model. Indicators for starting to diversify your content. How to pick your platform and what you need to do after. Launching books in 3 different ways. Public speaking options for people looking to diversify. 3 common mistakes people make when they start to diversify content. The best way to start building a content channel. Joe tells us about the new Content Inc. Book. Links: Content Inc. The Tilt Related episodes: 3 Tips to Achieve Consistency With Your Content Creation Recommended Podcast Microphones and Gear for Your First Podcast The Secrets to Create and Nurture Meaningful Relationships with Your Audience with Luis Báez Get access to our FREE Course: Podcast Mindset for Health and Wellness Coaches. Learn how to get the right mindset to start your own podcast now! Click here to enroll right away! Check all the FREE and paid resources we have for every new podcaster in our Resources page.

Remember the training montage scene in the 1976 hit movie Rocky? What you see Stallone do in the 40 seconds starting at minute two is key to knowing how to not make this common conversion-killing marketing mistake! Almost everyone makes this mistake more than once! But it's easy to fix when you know what to look for and what to do instead. This is critical to reinforcing (and not contradicting or diluting) your marketing message. After my clients see the difference this simple fix makes, they rarely make this mistake again. Listen as I explain: - the importance of direction in marketing and digital communications, video and stage work, - how cultural conditioning subliminally influences your audience response to messaging, and - what to give your audience instead (Hint: see it at work in the Rocky scene) to improve results. PS Watch the key scene here starting at minute two to see this key principle in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YYmfM2TfUA

Fail to Win, it is all how you perceive it. Two books: "Future Marketing" by Jon Wuebben and "Killing Marketing" by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose. TIP: DO NOT buy marketing books older than 1.5 years unless you want a history lesson...LOL

Featuring Joe Pulizzi, Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content MarketingJoe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. His novel, The Will to Die, was awarded "Best Suspense Book" of 2020 by the National Indie Excellence Awards. Joe's latest version of Content Inc. will be released May, 2021.He has founded four companies including digital content news site The Tilt as well as Content Marketing Institute. In 2014, he received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Content Council. His podcast series, This Old Marketing with Robert Rose, has millions of downloads from over 150 countries. His Foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 35 states.Visit the complete episode page to learn more. Or subscribe to the GRIN Gets Real podcast where you listen to podcasts.

Joe Pulizzi is the best-selling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing, and Epic Content Marketing, which Fortune Magazine named a “must-read business book.” He is the founder of digital content news site The Tilt and the Content Marketing Institute, which he sold in 2016, and the host of the Content Inc podcast and This Old… The post Crypto Creator Coin Content Marketing with Joe Pulizzi appeared first on Eric Schwartzman.

This episode of The Thrifty Marketer Podcast is a Content Marketing Masterclass with Joe Pulizzi - Author, Speaker, Podcaster & Entrepreneur.Joe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Content Inc., Killing Marketing, and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. His novel, The Will to Die, was awarded "Best Suspense Book" of 2020 by the National Indie Excellence Awards. Joe's latest version of Content Inc. will be released in May 2021.He has founded four companies including the digital content news site The Tilt as well as Content Marketing Institute. In 2014, he received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Content Council. His podcast series, This Old Marketing with Robert Rose, has millions of downloads from over 150 countries. His Foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 35 states.Discussion The Foundation of a Content Marketing Strategy How can SMBs leverage content to "stand out" Major shifts in Content Marketing and how can brand align themselves to the same Joe's top 3 advice to SMBs and Marketers starting their Content Marketing journey Top Content Marketing trends that SMBs can leverage Lessons for Joe's bestseller "Content Inc." The Tilt - Joe's new venture And more.For more such episodes, follow The Thrifty Marketer Podcast at https://bit.ly/2EN15cJFor SMB marketing tips, visit https://bit.ly/3hHaj8V Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Topics this week: Tyler is reading a book called Killing Marketing. Rick is trying some time management hacks. Tyler has a potential job candidate using his new approach to recruiting. Less Annoying CRM had their "day of rest" where developers take over customer service for a day. Rick is working on content and SEO for LegUp Health. Rick has filed his taxes. Rick gives a shoutout to a listener that makes software that verifies financial transactions who helped him with a question from last week. We discuss Webflow's product roadmap.

Grab the free training “Building a 7- Figure Sales System in less than 3 months without having to hire or be held hostage by investors”

Surviving as a content website business nowadays means treating your site as a media business.   Joe Pulizzi, Founder of Content Marketing Institute, joins me this week to share how you can create a 6-7 figure content website business. Today’s episode is for any content website business owner who wants to learn different content creation strategies to increase their multiples. We talk about email marketing, connecting with your audience, how to choose the right content for your business, and more.   Be a content creation pro by tuning in now! Episode Highlights: Joe Pulizzi and how he increases the multiples in an online business [02:46] Why buying sites is always better than building sites from scratch [06:00] What makes content vital for any business [09:49] The necessity of having an email list for any content site business [15:07] Two steps to connect with your audience [21:14] Is using various media channels good for you? [25:17] Choosing the right content for your business [28:21] Why consistency is critical [31:41] How to create content that stands out [37:45] You don’t have to overcomplicate your media business [41:17] Resource Links: Buying Online Businesses Website (https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com)  Download the Due Diligence Framework (https://buyingonlinebusinesses.com/freeresources/) Visit Niche Website Builders and get EXCLUSIVE OFFERS as a BOB listener (https://www.nichewebsite.builders/bob/) Grab a FREE copy of Corona Marketing by Joe Pulizzi https://www.joepulizzi.com/corona-marketing/  Get a copy of Content Inc by Joe Pulizzi (https://www.joepulizzi.com/books/content-inc/ ) Visit Joe Pulizzi’s Website https://www.joepulizzi.com/ About Our Guest:   A serial entrepreneur, Joe Pulizzi has founded four startups including Content Marketing Institute, the go-to online resource for how-to information about the practice of content marketing. A bestselling author, Fortune Magazine has named his book, Epic Content Marketing., a “must-read book.” He has also authored two other bestselling content marketing books—Content Inc., and Killing Marketing—and one novel, The Will to Die. In 2014, he founded The Orange Effect, helping children and families in need of speech therapy and technology resources. If you liked this episode, please don’t forget to subscribe, tune in, and share this podcast. You may also leave us a review anywhere you listen to and share your feedback!  Connect with Jaryd Krause of Buying Online Businesses: Follow on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/JarydKrause1 Subscribe on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQ3g6G2USlnq7EgnUsajTBw See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A big hello from Portland, Oregon. Welcome to another episode of B2B Marketing & More. Today I have an extraordinary guest, Joe Pulizzi, the godfather of Content Marketing, he began using the term “content marketing” back in 2001. Joe started a business in 2007, and that became the Content Marketing Institute. Probably best known for the event Content Marketing World that began in 2011. Now he is a co-founder and board member of the Orange Effect Foundation, which helps deliver funds to children with speech therapy needs and speech disorder who can't afford it. He is an entrepreneur, investor and marketing speaker. Also, Joe wrote and published several books: Content Inc., Killing Marketing, Epic Content Marketing, a novel The Will to Die, and Corona Marketing ebook. In this episode of B2B Marketing and More, we will talk about content marketing for startups. In this episode: What is Corona Marketing ebook about? What marketers need to do or how can they think differently in a changing business environment? In what ways Covid changed content marketing and strategy? What are the content strategy lessons for Startups? How can startups marketers make the adjustment and focus on the right content? How to build a minimum viable audience first, keep the focus, and when is the right time to diversify? What should be the startup team structure that wants to build a content marketing machine? How can startups with small or no budget build their audience? What is the future of content marketing, and what is the role of technology? Quotes from the episode: "We've got to start actually doing strategy when it comes to content creation and communication. The strategy is all about saying "no" to things and saying "yes" to a few things and then creating really good organized plans around those couple of yeses." "I'd rather have 10,000 email subscribers than 200,000 followers on Facebook. Not all followers are equal, so you have to make a decision. " ————— If you want to chat, reach out to any social media channels or email me hello@pamdidner.com. You can also join my Facebook community: Build Your Marketing Skills to Get Ahead. When you join, you get a free Starbucks on me. You can go to the Announcement tab and click on the barcode of the gift card.

Robert Rose shares his insights and experience about how content marketing has evolved in terms of new trends, team composition and experiences, and its role in the organization. He talks about building experiences and architecting desire and why it’s not enough to be the FAQ of your industry. Inside This Episode: The most important trend in content marketing in 2021 What does the modern content marketing team look like? How to build experiences and architect desire The difference between B2B and B2C content marketing Where companies should focus their content marketing efforts in 2021 About Robert Rose For more than 25 years, Robert has helped enterprise marketing leaders tell their brand’s story more effectively through digital media. As the Founder of The Content Advisory, Robert has worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. In this capacity, he has advised these business leaders on how to optimize marketing operations to build experiences that customers fall in love with. His focus is on helping build and implement operational excellence for the people, process and technologies of strategic enterprise content. He’s provided strategic advice and counsel for global brands such as Salesforce, Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. His firm, The Content Advisory, is the exclusive education and consulting group for The Content Marketing Institute. Where you can find Robert: TCA: The Content Advisory The Content Marketing Institute Robert on Twitter Robert on LinkedIn Robert’s books: Killing Marketing with Joe Pulizzi Managing Content Marketing with Joe Pulizzi Experiences: the 7th Era of Marketing with Carla Johnson

Data overload is killing the profitability of dealership marketing activities. The reason for that is simple. More data triggers our human instinct to rely on muscle memory and revert to the marketing activities for which we are most comfortable. Listen as Jeremy Anspach, CEO of PureCars, shares what you can do to avoid killing your marketing profitability and begin to advance your efforts through the channels that customers are using daily.PURECARSSupport the show by checking out our sponsor over at www.purecars.com They provide powerful resources that are helping dealers supercharge their sales volume. Whether you're looking to increase market share vs. your competitors, turn inventory faster, increase ROs or expand reach. PureCars is offering DPB listeners a free digital strategy analysis so that you can unlock your dealership's true profitability potential.

Data overload is killing the profitability of dealership marketing activities. The reason for that is simple. More data triggers our human instinct to rely on muscle memory and revert to the marketing activities for which we are most comfortable. Listen as Jeremy Anspach, CEO of PureCars, shares what you can do to avoid killing your marketing profitability and begin to advance your efforts through the channels that customers are using daily. PURECARS Support the show by checking out our sponsor over at www.purecars.com They provide powerful resources that are helping dealers supercharge their sales volume. Whether you're looking to increase market share vs. your competitors, turn inventory faster, increase ROs or expand reach. PureCars is offering DPB listeners a free digital strategy analysis so that you can unlock your dealership's true profitability potential.

Want to know how to create valuable, relevant and compelling content to attract and engage your audience even more on a consistent and strategic basis? In this episode, we chat with Content Marketing superstar Joe Pulizzi. Joe is the Amazon bestselling author of Killing Marketing, Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. He has founded three companies, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) and has launched dozens of events, including Content Marketing World. In 2014, he received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Content Council. His Foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 25 states in America and His latest book is The Will to Die, his debut novel. So in this episode we've lots to chat about.

Joe Pulizzi ~ Author of Killing Marketing, Content Inc.  ~ Current Series ~ 100 Interviews with 100 Major Influencers   Today, we have the man who is known as the "Godfather of Content Marketing", Joe Pulizzi on our show!  Joe started Content Marketing Institute back in 2007 and later started Chief Content Officer Magazine and Content Marketing World. These have become the leading education and training organizations for content marketing as well as the largest in-person content marketing event in the world. There are few people in the content marketing field that haven't heard about Joe and today we get to pick his mind for almost an hour. ​ Joe will share with us what it is like after selling his business that he built for nine years. We talk about why it might be a bad idea to fall in love with your products and services. Joe shares about how he would build a community in today's world, and some practical tips about being a major influencer. ​ 02:00: Joe's Taking His First Vacation Completely Offline 02:41: Joe On Balancing His Life Never Taking Time Offline for 10 Years 06:47: How Joe Became the Godfather of Content Marketing 15:56: Should You Fall in Love With Your Products/Services? 20:54: Building a Community in Today's World 23:58: The Future of Content Marketing 33:22: Changing From the Idea of an Office Space Business to a Location-Independent Business 35:53: 6-Figure Mentality vs. 7-Figure Mentality 38:06: Joe on Hitting Monetary Goals 41:40: Life After Selling a 9-Year Business ​ ​ Contact Info: http://www.joepulizzi.com/ Twitter: @joepulizzi   “Media companies have been doing this for 200 years. They focus on building one property on one content platform they do it really well. They build an audience, and then they diversify.” Joe Pulizzi   Website: https://www.thebusinessmethod.com/joe-pulizzi Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-business-method-podcast/id1069958541?mt=2 Google Podcasts: https://podcasts.google.com/?feed=aHR0cHM6Ly90aGVidXNpbmVzc21ldGhvZC5wb2RiZWFuLmNvbS9mZWVkLnhtbA%3D%3D Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/2q8Q9t78sCL6kNkWlnV1Po

Joe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Killing Marketing, Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine.He has founded three companies, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI). In 2014, he received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Content Council. His podcast series, This Old Marketing with CMI's Robert Rose, has generated millions of downloads from over 150 countries.In this episode, we discuss:The blurring of brands and media companies in the post-internet eraFinding “riches in niches” by identifying your audience and solving their problemsDifferent ways of monetizing an audience beyond selling more productsWhy email remains at the top of the subscriber connection hierarchyThree Quick Questions:A business book you recommend? Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill (1937) and Principles by Ray Dalio (2017)Person to follow on social media or digital media? Jack Butcher @jackbutcherOne on one dinner with a living person? Billy JoelTo follow Joe on Twitter - @JoePulizziTo find out more about Joe’s current writing online or his books, visit https://www.joepulizzi.com/

CORONA MARKETING, (What Marketing Professionals need to do now, to survive the crisis) Qué necesitan hacer los profesionales del marketing para sobrevivir a esta crisis.

CORONA MARKETING, (What Marketing Professionals need to do now, to survive the crisis) Qué necesitan hacer los profesionales del marketing para sobrevivir a esta crisis.

About the guest:    For more than 25 years, Robert has helped marketers tell their story more effectively through digital media. Over the last five years, Robert has worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. He's provided strategic marketing advice and counsel for global brands such as Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Robert is the founder and chief strategy officer for The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for The Content Marketing Institute. Robert's third book — Killing Marketing, with co-author Joe Pulizzi — has been called the “book that rewrites the rules of marketing.” His second book — Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing — is a top seller and has been called a “treatise, and a call to arms for marketers to lead business innovation in the 21st century.” Robert's first book, Managing Content Marketing, spent two weeks as a top-ten marketing book on Amazon.com and is generally considered to be the “owner's manual” of the content marketing process. In the episode:    2:17 – Robert shares how he started in television, transitioning to marketing where he has been for 30 years. 3:30 – Robert talks about how he created a content marketing approach opposed to traditional marketing. 7:03 – Nancy tells how she met Robert through Drew McLellan and the Agency Management Institute. 7:43 – Robert explains the origins of content marketing. 11:36 – Nancy and Robert talk about the connection between gaining audience trust and content marketing. 14:46 – Robert shares some of the different ways to use content marketing, giving Lincoln Electric's magazine as an example.  18:47 – Nancy and Robert talk about how content marketing can be used for recruiting.  21:38 – Robert shares how PR professionals could improve their use of content marketing. 29:29 – Robert describes how he has made a conscious effort to build his network. 33:37 – Nancy and Robert talk about the importance of being able to be found online. 35:40 – Robert explains how to “get rid” of bad content someone else is producing about your brand or product. 38:12 – Robert shares some of the books that have been most instrumental to his career. Quote: “And so that lack of trust, while kind of a sad state of the world and our culture, is an opportunity for us as brands to create that trust, to create content that is valuable, trusted, and gives our audience the value that they are looking for.” – Robert Rose, Chief Troublemaker at The Content Advisory Links:          The Content Advisory: https://contentadvisory.net/ Content Marketing World: https://www.contentmarketingworld.com/ John Deere's Furrow Magazine: https://www.johndeerefurrow.com/ Lincoln Electric's Arc Magazine: http://www.arcmagazine.pub/ Bath Iron Works: https://www.gdbiw.com/ Cisco: https://www.cisco.com/ Monster Career Advice: https://www.monster.com/career-advice/ The End of Competitive Advantage by Rita Gunther McGrath Discovery-Driven Growth by Rita Gunther McGrath The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen Competing Against Luck by Clayton Christensen Evernote: https://evernote.com/ Robert's Books: Killing Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Marketing-Innovative-Businesses-Turning/dp/1260026426 Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0985957646/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i1 Managing Content Marketing: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0983330719/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2   Drew McLellan's PR Maven® Podcast Episode: https://www.marshallpr.com/podcast/episode-4-drew-mclellan-top-dog-at-agency-management-institute/ Susan Baier's PR Maven® Podcast Episode: https://www.marshallpr.com/podcast/episode-22-susan-baier-head-honcho-audience-audit-inc/   Activate the PR Maven® Flash Briefing on your Alexa Device. Join the PR Maven® Facebook group page.   Looking to connect:           Email: robert@contentadvisory.net LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robrose/ Twitter: @Robert_Rose

Is your company putting enough time and attention into the strategies behind your content writing? Are you even using a specific strategy when it comes to blogs and landing pages on your company website? 2020 is the year to follow the content operational model and provide your target audience with knowledgeable content! This week’s EDGE of the Web featured guest, Robert Rose, Chief Troublemaker (yes that is his title) at The Content Advisory! He helps us bring awareness and understanding to the importance of content creation in a tactical way, not just to get content out the door! Robert is a content marketing strategist, advisor and storyteller. He has spent his career helping fellow marketers tell their story more effectively through digital media. His bestselling book, Killing Marketing, which he co-wrote with Joe Pulizzi is considered to have rewritten the rules for marketing.Some key points we discussed during the show: The struggles of getting content out the door Investing in good quality content The Content Operational Model Social corporate responsibility when it comes to journalist

For more than 25 years, Robert Rose has helped marketers tell their story more effectively through digital media. As the Founder of The Content Advisory, Robert has worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. He has provided strategic marketing advice and counsel for global brands such as Capital One, NASA, Dell, McCormick Spices, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Content Advisory is the education and consulting group for The Content Marketing Institute. “Marketing is telling the world you're a rock star. Content Marketing is showing the world you are one.” Robert's third book – Killing Marketing, with co-author Joe Pulizzi has been called the “book that rewrites the rules of marketing.” His second book – Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing is a top seller and has been called a “treatise, and a call to arms for marketers to lead business innovation in the 21st century.” Robert's first book, Managing Content Marketing, spent two weeks as a top ten marketing book on Amazon.com and is generally considered to be the “owner's manual” of the Content Marketing process. What you'll learn about in this episode: Why Robert and his co-author Joe Pulizzi wrote their book Killing Marketing, and why content marketing is a highly effective and powerful marketing strategy Why it is important, especially for solopreneurs, to digitally demonstrate and represent the value you can offer to your customers/clients/audience Why creating digital content that can represent you online 24/7/365 is the only way to “scale” yourself as a solopreneur How to use your digital content marketing to position yourself as a visible expert in your work How to find what it is you enjoy doing and do well and then turn it into a content marketing channel How Robert made a huge mistake when he first decided to scale his business and create a media company and consulting firm, and how he recovered What Robert considers to be one of his biggest wins, and how a key realization about delegation resulted in tripling his revenue Why scaling his business smartly is the biggest challenge Robert is currently facing, and how he is educating himself to scale more effectively Why mentors and coaches have been instrumental in Robert's success, and why his mentors have changed over the course of his entrepreneurial journey Why any entrepreneur who is just getting started should be more concerned with the function of their day than with the form of their day Resources: Website: www.contentadvisory.net Website: www.contentmarketingworld.com Website: www.robertrose.net Additional resources: Elite Entrepreneurs Under $1M program: www.smartrealestatecoach.com/growwithelite Elite Entrepreneurs $1M Plus program: www.smartrealestatecoach.com/elite Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/webinar Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/termsbook Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/ebook Website: www.SmartRealEstateCoachPodcast.com/QLS

This weeks episode is sponsored by Microsoft.On this weeks episode, I sit down with the Godfather of Content Marketing himself, Joe Pulizzi. Joe is the Amazon bestselling author of Killing Marketing, Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. He has founded three companies, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), and has launched dozens of events, including Content Marketing World.During this episode, we discuss Joe's journey of starting his business, the steps he took to sell his company for millions, what his best investments were to grow his company more quickly, and what every Entrepreneur needs to know to build a loyal audience.

Episode 118: Best-selling author and Content Marketing Institute founder, Joe Pulizzi shares how important goal setting is to your personal life, business, spiritual, and charitable pursuits. Guest Biography Joe Pulizzi is the Amazon bestselling author of Killing Marketing, Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. His latest book is The Will to Die, his debut novel. He has founded three companies, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), and has launched dozens of events, including Content Marketing World. In 2014, he received the "Lifetime Achievement Award" by the Content Council. His podcast series, This Old Marketing with CMI's Robert Rose, has generated millions of downloads from over 150 countries. He is also the author of The Random Newsletter, delivered to thousands every two weeks. His Foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to children in over 25 states. In this episode, you'll learn: Tips for goal setting -- how often you should review them, change them, and different categories. We'll talk about content marketing and the power of an email newsletter. Why periodically unplugging from devices is healthy and can help you see things in a different way. Show notes: http://www.inspiredmoney.fm/118 Find more from our guest: joepulizzi.com LinkedIn.com facebook Twitter instagram Mentioned in this episode: Content Marketing Institute Content Marketing World Conference and Expo The Orange Effect Foundation Think and Grow Rich: The Landmark Bestseller Now Revised and Updated for the 21st Century (Think and Grow Rich Series) by Napoleon Hill The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change by Stephen R. Covey The 10X Rule: The Only Difference Between Success and Failure by Grant Cardone I Just Ended a 12-month Sabbatical. This Is What I Learned. Joe's blog post Video: UBM Acquires Content Marketing Institute Video: CMWorld 2015: What is Content Marketing World? Joe's books: Epic Content Marketing: How to Tell a Different Story, Break through the Clutter, and Win More Customers by Marketing Less by Joe Pulizzi Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses by Joe Pulizzi Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit by Joe Pulizzi Get Content Get Customers: Turn Prospects into Buyers with Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi Managing Content Marketing: The Real-World Guide for Creating Passionate Subscribers to Your Brand by Joe Pulizzi The Will to Die by Joe Pulizzi Runnymede Money Tip of the Week 8 ideas for picking a financial goal for 2020. Thanks for Listening! To share your thoughts: Leave a note in the comment section below. Share this show on Twitter or Facebook. Join us at the Inspired Money Makers groups at facebook and LinkedIn To help out the show: Leave an honest review on Apple Podcasts. Your ratings and reviews really help, and I read each one. Email me your address, and I'll mail you an autographed copy of Kimo West and Ken Emerson's CD, Slackers in Paradise. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts. Special thanks to Jim Kimo West for the music.

Marketing isn’t dead, but Robert Rose’s newest book suggests we should kill marketing. Discover how content marketing is changing for the better.

What if everything you know about marketing is irrelevant in the 21st century? What if traditional marketing is dead, and marketing is evolving into something completely new and unexpected? That's the premise of Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi's provocative book, Killing Marketing. It's a fascinating read that makes the case for killing off traditional marketing initiatives and transforming your marketing department from a cost center to a profit center. If that sounds a little heretical, it is. Robert Rose is my guest for this episode number 209 and he will explain exactly why he thinks you should rethink your approach to marketing and how you can turn a profit from it.  To give away a little spoiler, one secret is that you need an innovative content marketing strategy. If your marketing team can create content so awesome that people get massive value out of it, you can easily monetize your marketing and start generating revenue from it. Robert is a master content marketer. As the founder of The Content Advisory, Robert has worked with hundreds of companies including 15 of the Fortune 500. We all know that content is king, but if you want to make your content go ka-ching, stay tuned as Robert and I guide you through his ingenious strategies to monetize your marketing.

BIO: Joe Pulizzi is the founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading educational organization for content marketing, which hosts the largest physical content marketing event, Content Marketing World. In 2014, Joe was honored with the John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. Joe is a highly sought after public speaker and a 5x author, including Killing Marketing, Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. After selling CMI in 2016, Joe spends his time with his wife and two teenage boys and actively fundraises for the Orange Effect Foundation, which he and his wife founded in 2014 to help children with speech disorders pay for therapy. Joe loves the color orange and the city of Cleveland, where he’s an active ambassador to the city and a long-time season ticket holder of the Cleveland Browns. Connect on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joepulizzi/ Catch Up On Twitter: @JoePulizzi Visit and Donate To The: Orange Effect Foundation

“Qui transtulit sustinet.” He who transplants, sustains. In this episode, Content Marketing Institute’s Robert Rose explains why this Latin phrase about reinventing yourself could help save your career. Plus he offers a fresh take on why FaceApp isn’t likely to age well and shares an article that should help agencies and their brand clients make sure they’re speaking the same language when it comes to content marketing. And that’s a wrap for the week ending July 26, 2019. SPONSOR: The Content Advisory The Content Advisory was founded in 2010 by Robert Rose as the strategic education, consulting, and research group of The Content Marketing Institute. Over the last decade we’ve built a series of frameworks and approaches to help implement intelligent content strategies. We combine independent and pragmatic thinking across a group of independent thinking analysts, data scientists, journalists, and creative artists. The Content Advisory assembles agile teams to address specific challenges and help businesses to understand and meet the challenge of transforming their marketing into customer experiences. Since launching in 2010, we’ve worked with more than 200 organizations, including 15 of the Fortune 100. We’ve consulted directly with organizations such as Petco, UPS, McCormick Spices, Capital One, Dell, Caterpillar, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and 3M. This week only, Robert is offering listeners a free copy of his book with Joe Pulizzi, Killing Marketing. All you have to do is go to this website and sign up for the newsletter: http://www.returnonaudience.com NEWS ITEM OF THE WEEK FaceApp was a test. We didn't pass https://www.cnet.com/news/faceapp-privacy-concerns/ OUR CONTENT MARKETING IDEA OF THE WEEK Agencies: How to Set Your Clients’ Content Marketing Expectations https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/2019/07/agencies-clients-expectations/

Pinterest is often written off as a lifestyle site with little to no value for businesses, but you CAN use Pinterest to drive traffic, leads and sales for your business...and here's how. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Alex Nerney explains how he has used Pinterest to successfully build a following and drive traffic and revenue for not one, but two online businesses. With more than 3 million monthly views on one Pinterest account, and more than 4 million on another, Alex knows a thing or two about what it takes to not only create a successful Pinterest presence, but do it in a way that generates meaningful business outcomes, and in this episode, he's sharing all the details of that strategy. This week's episode of The Inbound Success Podcast is brought to you by our sponsor, IMPACT Live,  the most immersive and high energy learning experience for marketers and business leaders. IMPACT Live takes place August 6-7, 2019 in Hartford Connecticut and is headlined by Marcus Sheridan along with special guests including world-renowned Facebook marketing expert Mari Smith and Drift CEO and Co-Founder David Cancel. Inbound Success Podcast listeners can save 10% off the price of tickets with the code "SUCCESS".  Click here to learn more or purchase tickets for IMPACT Live Some highlights from my conversation with Alex include: Alex and his wife Lauren created their blog Avocadu.com and within a year, were making more than $100 thousand dollars a month from it. From that success, they built CreateAndGo.com, a site that teaches people how to make money from blogging. Alex has two business Pinterest accounts, one that gets 3.1 million views a month, and another that gets 4.4 million view a month. When you think about how to use Pinterest for your business, you need to focus on curating content for your target avatar. The important thing to understand is that what works on Facebook and other platforms will not work on Pinterest. When starting out on Pinterest, you should plan to have around 10 boards. Pinterest is a JQuery search engine, which means it drives organic traffic through keyword search. You can do keyword research right inside of Pinterest by typing in a keyword that you want to get found for and seeing the types of searches that come up. You can use this information to create top, middle and bottom of the funnel content, just as you would with any content marketing strategy. PINGROUPIE is a helpful tool that can be used to identify boards that are influential for a particular topic on Pinterest. Images that are 1,000 x 1,500 pixels do best on Pinterest and you can use tools like Canva.com to create them. Treat the copy for your Pinterest posts like you would web copy and ensure it is SEO optimized. Pinterest has recently introduced the ability to share video on the platform, opening up new possibilities for how marketers can use it. The key to getting found on Pinterest is to post consistently. Resources from this episode: Save 10% off the price of tickets to IMPACT Live with promo code "SUCCESS" Visit Alex's website Follow Create and Go on Pinterest Follow Avocadu on Pinterest Check out Alex's blogs on Create and Go and Avocadu Subscribe to the Create and Go YouTube Channel Follow Alex on Instagram Listen to the podcast to learn how Alex has used Pinterest to drive traffic to his blog sites and get the specific strategies he shares with clients looking to achieve similar results with Pinterest marketing. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth, and this week my guest is Alex Nerney who is the founder of Create and Go, which is an online blog which, get this, that teaches others how to start a blog and make money from blogging. So you're the blogger that teaches bloggers how to blog. Alex Nerney (Guest): I know, tragic. Kathleen: Welcome on. Alex: Pulling into this space. Thanks for having me. Alex and Kathleen having WAY too much fun while recording this episode Kathleen: Talk a little bit about yourself. How did you wind up founding Create and Go? What led you down this path and give a little bit more about your background. About Alex Nerney and Create and Go Alex: Yeah, for sure. Let's start out with explaining "the how we fell into this" for our readers. Back in 2015, I was working as a personal trainer at the time and my co-founder, Lauren, was working as a CPA, and we were really disenchanted and disenfranchised with where our lives were headed. You could kind of see the writing on the wall. We didn't have a lot of time for vacations, and not a lot of time to travel, didn't have a lot of time to do the things that we wanted to do. It felt like we were always chasing the weekend and drinking our sorrows away on the weekends. So we decided that we would start a website. Started out with a website called Health and Happy Hour and that website failed completely. It was a- Kathleen: Oh my God, but I love the name. Alex: It's an amazing- Kathleen: It's Health and Happy Hour. That's like having it all, having your cake and eating it too. Alex: Exactly, exactly. You know, the funny thing is people still to this day, I get that comment all the time. They're like, "That's an amazing name," but just another business tip is that your name doesn't necessarily mean your success, you know? So we started it and really was centered around us and we wanted to talk about working out and health and drinking, because those were the things that we liked to do. And so, we went through, and it was just where we started. It was our foundation. That blog ended up not succeeding. We started another blog called Avocadu.com. Less funny name, and hard to spell and not the most perfect name in the world, but that blog we grew very rapidly. Within a year, we were making $100 grand a month. During that time, we quit our jobs and went all in, sold all of our things and tried to make this whole blogging thing work. And so, what happened is we started this blog and it became successful, and the pain of going through that process of learning how to blog was very real, because I felt like other people who were teaching this subject about blogging about blogging didn't know what they were talking about, because that's all they had ever done was to teach people how to blog about blogging. They'd never ran an actual separate blog. And so, it was very much like, "We should do this because we can do this so much better." And so, that's how Create and Go was formed, and we teach blogging about blogging and we love what we do and we love getting to help people. We've had a few students now reach six figures and beyond, go from zero dollars to quitting their jobs in all sorts of niches, in anxiety and depression and law, and things like that. So it's just been a phenomenal process. It's been a lot of fun for us, and so, to this day, Create and Go makes over $100 grand a month. We make over $100 grand a month, but combined between our blogs, and we really teach people how to do it and how to get started. So that's me. That's us. Kathleen: That's a great story. I love that you shared that the first one didn't work, because I feel like there's so many of those stories, whether it's my first business, or, in my case, my first podcast was a big dud. Alex: Oh, really? Kathleen: I do find entrepreneurs especially tend to be very reticent about sharing their failures. I was business owner for 11 years, and I remember how isolating it can feel when you feel like everybody else is crushing and you're like, "Wait, what am I doing wrong?" Alex: For sure, for sure. Kathleen: But, under the surface, there's a lot that a lot of people are doing that's wrong, and I think if we all were willing to embrace that and talk about it more, we would all be better for it. You learn so much from those failures, and so thank you for sharing that. Alex: I totally agree, I totally agree. I think it's that necessary step of success, and it can be a very humbling thing as well, because I know you're like me, and you consider yourself a smart person and watching all these other people succeed while you are failing again and again, beating your head against your computer, it can be frustrating, but it just becomes part of the story, and I couldn't agree more that the more people that share that open process and share the facts that, "No, it's not all laptops on the beach." It's not all that dream all the time. I think it's so important for beginners starting out and having success. Kathleen: Totally, and I remember once I did research on this and I was shocked by how many seemingly wildly successful entrepreneurs, at the same time, have been flat out failures at things. Like Dyson is a famous example that most people know who tried, I don't even know how many iterations, 50 some odd, hundred some odd iterations of the vacuum before he landed on the one that worked. And Oprah got fired from her first job and network TV, and there's so many more like that where you look at these people and you think, "You're just magical. You know how to do things," and you don't see those earlier failures. Alex: Totally, totally. It's easy to see people's successes. It's not as easy to see the hard times, because the problem, too, is we don't record the hard times. Kathleen: That's right. Alex: We don't hold the camera up for the late nights in front of a computer, because we're just like, "Nobody cares." But, I think that one day someone will. So, I'm talking to my personal trainer, and I'm like, "Dude, you need to film yourself every day right now. When you're not aware, being perfect," he's young guy. He's 23, 24 now, and I'm just like, "Dude, you need to start filming everything, because if I could go back and have one thing, it would be to have the proof of those things. If you have the late nights in front of the computer where nobody's watching but you." Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. I feel like we could have a whole nother podcast on this topic- Alex: I feel like we could. Kathleen: -because I'm super passionate about it. Using Pinterest to Grow Your Business Kathleen: But, there was a very specific reason that I wanted to talk with you, because, in addition to teaching people how to blog, one of the things that is very interesting about you is that have a Pinterest presence, which, first of all, is interesting because Pinterest, the majority of the users of Pinterest are women, so I love talking to a guy whose doing well in Pinterest, break the stereotypes, and you get 3.1 million monthly views on Pinterest, and that has actually fueled the growth of your blog. I've talked to a lot of different marketers on this podcast about a lot of different growth strategies, and Pinterest has never come into the conversation, so I was really excited to talk about it for the first time, especially not just how do you do Pinterest and get followers, but how do you do Pinterest and achieve goals outside of Pinterest, using Pinterest? Alex: Totally, totally. So, humble brag, too, we also have another one that has 4.4 million as well. Kathleen: Ah! That's crazy. Alex: We got the Pinterest system down- Kathleen: That's awesome. Alex: -so I'd love to share about it. How to Monetize a Blog Kathleen: Now, before we dig too deeply into Pinterest, one thing I do want to clarify, because I want to make sure I understand it, and also my listeners. You talk about yourself and your co-founder making money with blogging and, obviously, teaching others not just how to blog, but how to eventually monetized the blog. Can you just give me the quick highlight reel of how are people monetizing blogs? How are you teaching them to do it? Is it primarily through advertising, or are there other methods that your clients and yourself are using to monetize your blog? Alex: There's a scalable system that people should start with, and I think it's almost true of any digital business, and it starts with basic things. What I've noticed from teaching just beginners is that getting those first few wins matter a lot. So what it starts with, it starts with things like sponsored content and ads, because those are layups, those are things where people can make their first few dollars, and sometimes it's just about believing that this thing is real, right? The next step up would be high-level, or affiliate marketing, just general affiliate marketing. Everybody should start there because of a variety of reasons, because it allows you to test things, it teaches you to sell, it teaches you what products are selling. It's a really valuable lesson. Then scaling up to a higher level version of affiliate marketing where you're marketing higher priced products and services. Again, another level of learning, another step. And then, the final step I actually think is creating your own products and services. I think that's the final step, is whenever you're building this community, you know how to sell things, you know what your community needs probably better than affiliate product, and then you create your own. And then you create your own products and services, and that's really how you scale something up to $10 grand a month, $100 grand a month, is by creating your own digital products and services. Kathleen: Okay. Thank you for clarifying that, and to make sure that I understand, so a lot of my listeners are actually in B2B marketing roles, and when I put on my B2B hat, what I hear when I listen to describe that, is you could start with, if you have a site with a blog, you could start with either taking advertising, or sponsored content, from companies that want to reach the audience that you have. IMPACT, my agency, takes sponsored content. So this is happening in B2B already, for sure. And then, it sounds like the second level, being affiliate marketing, for an individual blogger, it's easy to image how that might play out. For a B2B blogger, I could see things like if you are doing book reviews using an Amazon referral link so that you're getting a slight kickback on anybody who buys that, and I would presume that, in doing that, then the rule of thumb is always "be very transparent," because I believe there are FTC guidelines around that. Alex: Absolutely, absolutely. And those are serious things. Kathleen: Yeah. And then the third level being whether that's create a training course, or creating some kind of a subscription based, or membership based offering. Alex: Yeah. Kathleen: I could see it translating very easily to B2B, and have you seen that as well? Alex: I think so. I haven't personally worked in that space, but here's how I image it. So let's say you have a software business and let's say you're building out a SaaS program, what you could actually do partner with other SaaS programs, and say, "Hey, listen. I want to drive you traffic," or even then just do it for, even if they don't give you the affiliate kickback, learn how to create an email marketing sequence that sells that software, right? In that, you can prove through deliverables that sells, even if they're not giving you money, because, again, it's teaching you that sales process. Then, when you create your own, then you control the margins and everything, and it's really a plug-and-play scenario, because if you're promoting this software and it's something that you can do better, then you just plug in your own thing and be like, "Hey guys, I've now created my own. This is where you go." It's a good way to test things without, what happens with a lot of businesses, what happened with me a long time, is that you run to the end goal, you run to creating your own product, you run to creating some massive thing without properly testing it, and that's the biggest mistake ever, because you'll spend hours and hours, and sometimes it just flops. Kathleen: Yeah. I love this approach, because if anybody listens regularly to this podcast, they've probably heard me mention Joe Pulizzi's book Killing Marketing, and that's really the premise of his book. For a B2B businesses is, or really B2C, too, it's build an audience first, honestly. And then, the audience will tell you what your product should be through the dialogue they're having with you. And then, your business becomes monetizing that audience. Alex: Yes. Kathleen: But, in doing so, you have to do it in a way that also safeguards the interests of your audience, because if you're too spammy or too salesy, you drive your audience away, and if that's the base of your business, it's like shooting yourself in the foot. And so, for those B2B marketers that are interested in learning more about this, I would definitely recommend reading Killing Marketing by Joe Pulizzi, because that is the handbook for how to do this well in a B2B world. Alex's Pinterest Strategy Kathleen: But, so now that we've clarified monetization, let's dig into Pinterest a little bit. I'm so interested in hearing what you're doing here, because I'm a Pinterest user. I will admit I'm not a power user at all, by any stretch of the imagination. Every time I want to make some change in my house, I'll start a board. So it will be like, "Here's the driveway gates board, here's the board for outdoor shower inspiration." Or if I'm getting a new haircut, here's the haircuts board, or the recipe board. Alex: Yeah. Totally. Kathleen: But, sounds like this is a very different approach. So start from the beginning and describe to me what you're doing on Pinterest. Alex: So it really starts with the high-level of thinking about why people follow boards, or why people follow particular types of content. I'm into tattoos right now and really into motorcycles. I just got my license, very excited about it. So the things in the content of Pinterest that I'm personally following have to do with that, and Pinterest is sort of this curation place where you curate what you like into making it your own. I like a particular design of a tattoo, so I'm curating a bunch of those and putting those together, and it's all curated together. So, what you are doing, from a high-level business standpoint, is you are curating content around that target avatar. You are around that target person that you want to visit or come to your place. So for my business on Avocadu, our health blog, we're really in the women's weight loss space, right? So we curate everything from under the sun for the 45 to 55 year old woman who wants to lose weight, but is struggling to do that. So our entire design and everything is around curating content for that person. That's how you build up a big following and a big fanbase. Obviously, we'll get into the specifics and stuff, but that's how you want to think about it. That's how you want to approach Pinterest from that standpoint. What happens with businesses, and what happens with a lot of marketers and why they don't succeed on Pinterest is, well, number one, Pinterest is the red-headed stepchild of social media, right? Nobody really knows how to use it, it's kind of confusing, it's just very different. So it can throw people off. But, the second part is that they come in thinking that the same things that might work on something like Facebook apply there, and it's not true. It's a very different approach, and you have to know how the system works in order to have the success you can have, but once you can have success, you can have crazy success. We've had people go from zero visitors to 50 thousand visitors a month organically to their website with Pinterest within a month. Now that was a year or two ago, so the results are not always the same now, but you could still go from zero viewers to 20 thousand, 50 thousand within three months, with you doing and approaching the right strategy. Kathleen: So I'm going to pretend that I'm a business that's not on Pinterest. Well, I am a business, well, we might have Pinterest, but we don't do a lot with it. Alex: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: So let's pretend we're starting from the beginning, and you mentioned beginning by identifying your avatar, or your target audience, in a very specific one, at that. And then, you go and you create your Pinterest account, and from my past experience with Pinterest, I know at least there are a lot of different ways you can slice it. You can have multiple boards. Alex: Yeah. How to Organize Your Pinterest Presence Kathleen: And how you decide thematically what goes on each of those probably could vary quite a bit. Can you talk a little bit about how you advise your clients to approach organizing their Pinterest presence? Alex: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So it's starts out high-level, so it just depends if you're running a personal thing or if you're running a business thing. So if you're starting out, let's do an example. It's always going to be easier for an example. I actually really like the idea of an e-commerce store, because I think it really highlights the differences between what you would typically market, like on Facebook versus Pinterest. So let's say you're coming on there, let's use my sister's actually, Live Luv Lavish, and what should would first start by doing is by creating group boards around keywords on Pinterest. Pinterest is a jQuery search engine. What that means is it's like a Google, it's like a YouTube. People type in the things that they want to see. Those things are served to them. That's, again, what makes Pinterest so amazing is it has organic content, has organic reach. Organic reach only happens through jQuery search. So, because of that, you would start by creating group boards around the things that people want, with the keywords that they're looking for. She sells natural cleaners, like organic soap. One word would be "natural organic cleaners." Another group board might be, most people who are going to buy these are homemakers, right? So something like "Designing your perfect home," right? These are the group boards that you're centering this content around. Remember, you're thinking about this avatar. Who is buying my product? Who is interested in what I have to sell and what I have to say? And that is how you start, by organizing it through keyword research, essentially, on Pinterest. You go in, you type in your topic, and the great part is Pinterest will serve a lot of different results right underneath of things people are typing in, so it gives you a really good outline of "here's what these people are interested in." Kathleen: Okay, that's interesting, because it really is essentially the same thing that any marketer should be doing outside of Pinterest, which is really understanding, given my target audience, what kind of content do I need to create at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel? Alex: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Using Pinterest To Do Keyword Research Kathleen: And so, it sounds like what you're saying is, with regular marketing and content creation, a lot of these people are going to places like Google Analytics and Google Trends and SEMrush and doing their keyword research on those kinds of platforms, but from what you're saying, it sounds like you can actually do your keyword research right in Pinterest. Is that correct? Alex: You do it right there. You can do it right there. Now, it's not going to give you the same stats and data, but it will give you ideas, and that's sort of what matters on Pinterest, because content can still go viral, as well as a Facebook, so it's more like creating the specific content around the avatar, and then getting in their heads, right? So, again, we go back to that example of Live Luv Lavish, we're talking about a homemaker. Let's say they have a son and, like me, he was always bringing home dirty sports equipment, right? So a great topic would be "what to do with your son's nasty sporting gear," and have a picture of hand holding a dirty sock, a dirty football sock, like mine. That would be a good example of something to start. Something that would do well on that platform. Creating Your Pinterest Boards Kathleen: Okay. So you identify your topics, your top, middle and bottom of the funnel topics. You create a board for each. Is there any kind of rule of thumb about if you're just starting, how many boards should you have? I'm sure the answer is, probably, it depends. Alex: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: But, any guidance you can give to anyone? Alex: Yeah. We have very specific guidance in our course, and Lauren stays really up-to-date with the exact number of group boards, so I wouldn't want to talk out of place, but I would say at least 10 group boards around these specific topics that your audience is going to be interested in is a fantastic place to start. Kathleen: Now you just said something that I want to dig into a little bit deeper. You said "group boards." Alex: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Kathleen: So my understanding is, Pinterest, you have your regular straight up board where you, the person that created it, are the contributor. And then, are you referring to group boards where you create the board, and you contribute, but you open it up and invite others to contribute? Alex: I was actually referring to your own boards, but, as well, joining group boards is another huge strategy on Pinterest, joining group boards around the topics that, again, are relevant to your audience is a big way to get started. You can do that with tool like PINGROUPIE that will organize those group boards and show you which ones are most popular of that space, which groups boards were way more effective in way more important back in the day. They're a little less effective now, but they're still an important part of the process of really cultivating growing a solid Pinterest account. Kathleen: Okay. So you create your boards, and then, obviously, the next step is to start populating them with content- Alex: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Kathleen: -and I have a lot of a lot of questions here. Alex: Yeah, go for it. Creating Content for Your Pinterest Boards Kathleen: But, I'm going to just start with, talk me through what you tell people at this stage? Alex: Totally. So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to build it out with whatever content that you currently have. So whatever content you have, you have to start by creating Pins. There are images that are different size on Pinterest that work better than on a Facebook or an Instagram. I believe it's a thousand by 1,500 is the exact Pin dimensions, so it's a tall, long image. Again, another reason why most marketers and people give up on Pinterest and why you shouldn't, because that barrier to entry is there, and when there's a barrier to entry, we know that, beyond the barrier to entry are good things. So the barrier to entry is there to create the Pinterest images, and you would start by using specific Pinterest images for your target content. S o let's say you've written 10 different posts on different topics in your space. Or let's say, again, let's go back to that example, has created 10 different pieces of content. She would start by creating those Pinterest Pins and pinning them to the specific group boards that match that content. So, running it back, she has a group board named "all natural cleaners," right? So she would start by pinning her all natural cleaners on those group boards, and that would be the very, very first place that she would start. Kathleen: Okay. Now, I am not good at graphic design, and so my fall back for things like this, like Pinterest images, has always been Canva, which is great because it has templates that already know what sizes things should be. Are there any other particular tools that you recommend to people like me who are disasters when it comes to trying to go into graphic design programs? Alex: The start of how actually we got started back in 2015 was I was working on the blog and I was always interested in making an image for a program, and Lauren came over and looked over my shoulder and I was like, "Whoa, that is terrible," and I was like, "Yeah, it is terrible," and she just moved my chair over, was like, "Let me help you with that." So I, too, fall into that space of not knowing what to do. So the two strategies that I would have is, yeah, Canva's a great source, but especially for the busy marketer and busy business owner out there, Fiverr's amazing. Fiverr, $5 a Pin. It's something very cheap to get something that's actually pretty good quality. I'm sure that that is outsourced to the Philippines or something like that, but you will get great quality images for not a lot of money, and it can save you a lot of time and a lot of hassle, because, as well as just putting a Pin on each particular post, I'm going to get into the next part where you need to create multiple Pins around the same post, right? Because you're kind of split testing what works and what doesn't on there. So you're going to create four or five different images on one particular post to see which one works the best. So outsourcing that work to a place like Fiverr is a great resource. Kathleen: Interesting. Okay, so multiple images per post to see which one drives results. Alex: Yes. Kathleen: You Pin those. Obviously, you're creating these images, but you want them to live on the post so that you can pin from the post, so that when people click the image it takes them back to the post, correct? Alex: Yes, yes. You got that crazy Pinterest logic. You've got it down. Kathleen: Yeah. Otherwise you're driving traffic to your Pins, but it's not going anywhere. Alex: Right. Creating Copy For Pinterest Posts Kathleen: So, once you get the image on to Pinterest, are there other best practices as far as, do you use hashtags? Are there ways that you can use the copy that goes with the Pin to drive attention? Alex: The biggest things are having the words written on the Pin itself, having it written out. So if you have something like, again, "all natural," "the top 10 all natural cleaners," right? You want those big, bolded, easy, clear letters on there, so that when people are scrolling through their Pinterest feed, they see that. Pinterest, like everything else in marketing, in business, is a competition, so your click-through rate on Google is an easy example, right? So if my click-through rate is better, because I have a better title, Google will now favor that content, as long as we have the same read time and stuff like that. Same goes with Pinterest, right? When someone's scrolling through content, they're scrolling through and they see four different Pinterest images, right? So you have to stand out. That's your goal, is to stand out in the presence of somebody searching for your content. The easiest thing, and it's going to sound so dumb and so trivial, but it's to go on Pinterest, type in those things, look at what other people are pinning, and ask yourself the question, "Can I do it better?" And, "What would better serve this market? How can I make this image better or more interesting, or more clickable?" Those are the questions you want to ask, and then go create those things. If you do that, over a long period of time, you will be served very well. Video on Pinterest Alex: And, also, there's all sorts of new things. Pinterest just rolled out video, as well, which is going to be a huge opportunity for businesses. If you can produce videos and know how to produce videos, it's going to be a massive opportunity right now. Kathleen: I love what you talked about with finding what's already out there and doing it better, because it's the exact same advice that we give to people about creating content. If you're going to write an article about something, go to Google, find what's already showing up for that topic, and write something better, or don't write anything at all, because it's not going to get around. Alex: Yeah, or just don't, or just stop. Yeah, yeah. That was the simple process with even the product creation, was like go out there and see what products are available. Can you do it better? And then, there's a need for it. But, if you can't, do not. Don't- Kathleen: Yeah. Don't waste your time. Alex: Don't make something worse. Don't even bother. Kathleen: Yeah. Now, okay, when you said the word "video" and Pinterest in the same sentence, I was like, "Ah, we need to stop and talk about this," because I know my team, at IMPACT, is very invested in creating video. We have our own in-house video production team. So tell me more about video on Pinterest. Alex: Pinterest and video have been a long slog of a process. They tried to do this back in 2018 and just couldn't get it to work. I don't know exactly why they struggled for so long to get it, but they re-rolled it out earlier this year, and the initial results that people are getting have been really strong. It's a way to definitely stand out, like I said before, from the competition. So, again, if somebody's scrolling through and looking for all natural cleaners and they see four Pins and one is a video Pin of showing the cleaner and then spraying it and using it on something, obviously that's going to stand out by a large margin. So if you're able to produce videos on there, you already have your competitive advantage. Get your ass on Pinterest. It can serve you well. Kathleen: And especially when you think about the work that goes into creating good video. If you put all that time in and it feels like if there's just one more place you can put that video, get it out there, because it's all about distribution. Is it fair to say that, because this is so new, it's a little bit of the wild west in terms of best practices and what's going to work? Alex: All of Pinterest is the wild, wild west. Pinterest ads are the wild, wild west. Pinterest images are the, I love Pinterest, but they really struggle sometimes with just basic advertising things, the stuff that comes so inherently and so easy when you're on Facebook is not the same experience that you're going to have on Pinterest. But, again, these barrier to entries of, that make it a good thing, so yeah. It is the wild, wild west, but, again, there's really great rewards to the person and team that puts in the effort and time there. Shoppable Pins Kathleen: And hasn't Pinterest just, or are they in the process of introducing shoppable Pins? Alex: Again, this is one of those things that they've tried and fumbled, and they're there. They're there and I don't really have any good use cases of people doing it, but the one thing I have seen work really well. So back to Live Luv Lavish, because this is a great example. So she has a cleaner on sporting equipment. What's a great piece of content instead of just putting your product on Pinterest, would be to create some piece of content that that person would want. So I would create something like the five best sporting cleaners, and then list your product as number one on there and be like, "This is an awesome product, but here are some other ones that are really great." That is a really great way to do it on Pinterest, because people will share that content more than they will share something like a shoppable Pin. But, shoppable Pins do exist, and there are people that do well with it. They're not really in my circle, though. Getting Found on Pinterest Kathleen: Got it. Now, once somebody gets content up on their Pinterest account, are there tricks to getting it found and to getting that initial traction and getting seen? Alex: Not really. The biggest thing on Pinterest is this consistency of the platform. You'll see it on YouTube. If you're posting every Monday, YouTube will give you a little bump. The same with Google. If you're posting regularly or posting regular content, Google gives you a little nudge. They like that. They like fresh, they like new content. So that is what I would more say. You are essentially, there's this thought that I had when we were creating our initial Pinterest thing, it's called "shotgun theory." You know the difference between a rifle and a shotgun. A rifle, it shoots a singular bullet into a very small space, right? But, a shotgun, you spread out. The pellets explode and they spread out and they create a wide spread. Kathleen: That's the phrase "take a shotgun approach," which is- Alex: There you go. Exactly, exactly. And that's what you want to do. You want to spread out that content, because one of those things will go viral and go big. So all of the content is centered around that, right? That's why you're creating five different images, that's why you're pinning those 10 different posts, because, out of all of that, one of them will do well, but one of them will do really well, and that's the fun part. Kathleen: It does sound a little bit like, at this point, Pinterest is such a great opportunity purely because marketers haven't completely ruined it. They have some other platforms. Alex: Yeah, yeah. Like Facebook. Who Is - And Is Not - Right For Pinterest? Kathleen: I'm not saying get in there and ruin it, but there is this opportunity to be the first mover in your space for Pinterest. Is there anybody that Pinterest is not right for? Any type of business that it's not right for? Alex: I would say if you're really tech focused. I would say that Pinterest is going to be hard to come by. Pinterest has surprised me before. We have a client of ours who is in the health and wellness space. His name's Rusty Moore. A really good friend. And he got our Pinterest course way back in the day. It's a cool story, but I won't go too far into it. His blog is primarily, though, focused on men, and he was getting a million visitors a month on Pinterest to the male audience, because it was kind of underserved. So I wouldn't say that there are things that are never going to work on Pinterest, because he's kind of proof that you can make it work. I would say, though, that there are, a techy more focus is going to struggle more on there. Anything that's not visually stimulating will be a little bit more difficult. It's kind of the same as Instagram and these types of things where the things like recipes, or the things like travel photos. These images that are very visually stimulating give you a bump up and a leg up. But, I wouldn't say that there's too many topics that you couldn't work in. Lawyer, we have someone who made a lot of money with law. She teaches people how to make disclaimer pages and stuff like that, properly Kathleen: Fun. Alex: I know, right? Super exciting stuff, but she's doing really well with it. Kathleen: But, I think it all comes back to how creative you get about the content, because I don't remember the name of the product, but I read something once about, it was a blender, and the company that makes this blender created this completely viral marketing campaign, because their messaging was all about how it's very powerful and it can blend almost anything. They were sticking things like hammers in the blender, and things you would never put in a blender-they were putting in and making videos of it blending and chopping the things. And so I feel like if you're, even with tech companies, maybe you're not going to do your straight up marketing of your server, but if you can think of a creative way to demonstrate the power of your product or your service, then who knows? Alex: I couldn't agree more. I think it's all about the creativity of the individual. It's the same thing with monetizing a blog or website. I feel like it comes down to creativity. I know of an instance of a guy making $20 grand a month on his blog about herbs. And by herbs I mean the weeds you pick your backyard, and he's able to make, what, more than most high-paid lawyers, online, selling herbs. Kathleen: Wow. Alex: So it's more like how you creatively approach, again, that target person that you're trying to reach. So, yeah. If you had a tech company, or those sorts of things, I'm sure there's a way to work it in, if they can work in the blender industry. Kathleen: Well, and if you're listening and you have an idea, Tweet me or send message, because I want to hear it. Alex: Yeah, for sure. How Pinterest Has Helped Grow Alex's Business Kathleen: I guess, to bring this back to where the rubber meets the road, can you talk a little bit about the specific results that you've seen? You mentioned that you get 3.1 monthly views from Pinterest. What does that mean for your business? Alex: We can use Avocadu as an example. We get 4.4 million viewers, translates to about 200 thousand organic visitors to our blog and our website, and that is the primary traffic source driving in all of the income for Avocadu. We get Google traffic, as well, but that's a blog that does $10 grand to $20 grand per month, really on autopilot without us having to touch and do much to it. So there are some specific stats that you can expect. Out of your total impressions on Pinterest, which is what you're seeing, the 3.1 million, I can probably get, what, 15% of that to actually click or click over 15%, 20% of that. But, again, that represents a substantial amount of traffic. And then, as well, I think something that's so much more valuable than that is the fact that it's organic and searchable over time, because nothing allows you to scale more than having consistent traffic coming in and knowing that it's coming in every month, because it frees you up to focus on things like optimization and email marketing and these types of things. Kathleen: Yeah, that's pretty incredible. You mentioned 200 thousand organic website visits a month. Is that right? Alex: Yes. Kathleen: I'm sure there are lot of people listening who would just love to have 200 thousand visits to their website a month, period. Alex: Right. Kathleen: Who cares where it comes from? Alex: Right, yeah. Kathleen: So that's pretty great. Alex: And that's another good point. The average Pinterest user is something in the $70 grand per year ballpark, way above average mean and average income, so they're a good demographic of people who actually like to spend money. They're not like, I don't know, your StumbleUpon audience. I don't know much about, I just assume that it might be not as spending focused. Let's say that. Kathleen: Yeah. That's great. Well, I'm now totally trying to process all the ideas I have for what I can do on Pinterest. Alex: Good, good. Kathleen: Every time I do a podcast, my team probably groans, because I come back and I'm like, "Here's 10 more things we should be doing." Alex: Ideas. Ideas. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Exactly. People who listen know that I always ask the same two questions of every guest I have and I would love to hear your answers. The first of those being, company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Alex: I would say, let's talk about one on Pinterest. Somebody I've been super impressed with is Kate Ahl. We have recently used her team to outsource some of the things on Pinterest, to outsourced some of the creation of the content and organizing of the content. I think she does it very well. She has a Pinterest podcast. It has this really seamless approach of getting people in, learning the best about the platform. I've been really impressed with her efforts, especially as of recent. I was always a fan of DigitalMarketer. I was always a fan of Ryan Deiss's team. I always thought they provided some interesting stuff that, I don't know, that definitely impacted our business. We learned about Pinterest because of being in the DigitalMarketer Lab back in the day, because they had posted something on, like, "Yeah, we're getting tons of visitors on Pinterest," and I was like, "All right, let's check this out." Kathleen: Well, I have to agree with you on Ryan Deiss. It was funny, you live in Austin. We were just talking about this before we started recording. I was in Austin a few weeks ago, and it was to visit and meet with DigitaMarketer. Alex: Oh, it was? Kathleen: Yeah. Alex: Oh, yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Totally. Kathleen: We're a partner of theirs- Alex: Oh, awesome. Kathleen: -and we love those guys. Alex: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Kathleen: So shout-out to Ryan Deiss and Marcus Murphy and Michael Meola and the whole team over there. Justin Rondeau, I just had him on my podcast a few days ago. Alex: Oh, nice. I've always been so impressed by Deiss's ability to see into the future a little bit. Obviously, sometimes, he gets it wrong, but I go did go to Traffic And Conversion Summit, not last year, but the year before, and it's always interesting. I love his looking glass of the marketing landscape and seeing his opinions on it. I think he really does understand marketing at an unbelievable level. Kathleen: Yeah, he's a smart guy, for sure. Alex: He is. Kathleen: Now, Kate Ahl, spell her last name for me so that I know how to find her. Alex: I think it's A-H-L. Kathleen: Okay. Alex: Yeah. Kathleen: Perfect. Alex: Yeah. Kathleen: Just one I hadn't heard before and I'm so excited to have one that's a Pinterest person so we can see some more examples of that in action. Alex: Yeah, for sure. For the people who are interested in Pinterest, we have a Pinterest course that teaches people how to do it, called "Pinterest Traffic Avalanche." As well as her stuff, she sees it from a very big business standpoint. She manages tons of different companies and their Pinterest accounts and stuff like that. So, because of her looking glass, being able to see into all of their stats and these types of things, it's the same way we're able to see for bloggers and small business owners all of their results. She can, not predict the future, but she's always fresh to date on the best content on there. How to Connect With Alex Kathleen: That's great. Now, you mentioned some of the courses that you have. If somebody's listening and they want to learn more about blogging, the stuff that you guys teach, or they want to learn more about some of the other things, like the Pinterest course, what's the best way for somebody listening to find and connect with you online? Alex: There's two ways that I'd send them, and it would either depend if you're a video person or if you're written blog post. If you are a written blog post type person, createandgo.com is where we blog at. We have two epic posts, one on how to start a blog, and then one on how to make money blogging. And that level, that stepping stone strategy that I just talked about on where you need to start and what's your next steps and will pinpoint exactly where you're at and what you need to do next, that is on there. There's a link at the top. You'll be able to find it pretty easily. The other thing is if you are more of a video person, and if you're listening to podcasts, you might like to just play it and listen to it. We have a lot of fans that do that. We have a big YouTube, a big YouTube channel, we have a YouTube channel, 58 thousand subscribers. It's doing well. I actually just recently posted the video version of the how too make money blogging. Again, really breaks down this whole thing. But, we have tons of YouTube videos on there. A lot of people who buy our products, they say they just binge watch the videos. And what's cool about it is you can see the first video I did, maybe three years ago, where I look like a mess, I am in Nicaragua and I have very long hair and haven't shaved in a while, and you can listen to this kid talk about blogging and succeeding with, but it's fun to look back on. Kathleen: That's so cool. Where were you in Nicaragua? Alex: We were in, oh my god, one of the, it's been a while. Kathleen: Was it San Juan Del Sur? Alex: Oh, so it was close. Now I see you're familiar. Kathleen: Were you surfing? Alex: Oh, absolutely. The surf [crosstalk 00:42:50]. Kathleen: I don't surf, but I went on my honeymoon to a place right near San Juan Del Sur and I loved it. It was amazing. Alex: Yeah. Okay. I've stayed there twice for a month at a time. One was a WiFiTribe. Another one was another group, but, yeah, the second time we stayed right by San Juan Del Sur and the Malibu resorts up there, and it was wild. It was a great- Kathleen: It's a cool spot, and most Americans hear Nicaragua, and they're like, "Wait, what? Nicaragua?" But, it's amazing. Alex: Yeah. Have one of their $3 tacos and it will change your mind. Kathleen: Yes. Alex: One dollar beer, $3 tacos. It's, yeah, pretty great. Kathleen: It's pretty great. Well, this has been so much fun, Alex. Thank you for joining me. I have, again, head is bursting with Pinterest ideas. Alex: For sure. You Know What To Do Next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you enjoyed this episode, you learned something, as usual, I would really appreciate it if you would give the podcast as five star review on Apple Podcasts, and if you know somebody else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, Tweet me at WorkMommyWork because they could be my next guest. Alex: Five stars, do it. Kathleen: Yes. Alex: Right there. Takes two seconds. Pick up your phone right now, I want you to do that. I'll walk you through it. Kathleen: I love it. Thank you, Alex. Alex: Thank you, too. 

Joe Pulizzi is the founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading educational organization for content marketing, which hosts the largest physical content marketing event, Content Marketing World. Joe is a highly sought after public speaker and a 5x author, including Killing Marketing, Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a “Must-Read Business Book” by Fortune Magazine. Show  Notes: Content Marketing Content marketing is creating sharing relevant information online with your target market. Engaging your audience with blog posts, videos, podcast, social media, etc is much more than just sharing content. This kind of marketing needs to be undergirded with a solid strategy for it to be effective. Only when your goals are clearly defined and initiatives taken for execution can the results be favourable. Build a Fanbase Let's forget about the ‘build it and they will come' philosophy. The first thing to consider is to build a fanbase around those who care about your messaging. Think about it from an entrepreneurial standpoint and become indispensable to that fanbase. Eventually you will be able to monetize by selling products and services because you now have persons who know, like and trust you. You can build your entire business model off the back of an audience that cares about what you have to say. In this episode of The Entrepreneurial You, Joe shares his expertise on developing an effective content marketing strategy. TOP TIP: Find the content tilt - that area on the web where there is little to no competition where you have the chance of being the leading expert and consistently deliver. ---- Connect with Joe Pulizzi: Website Twitter Instagram LinkedIn Book your spot for Leadercast Kingston 2019 - 20% OFF Visit our Sponsor: Jamaica Stock Exchange Email: Heneka Watkis-Porter  

How did the team at Carney grow the wildly success Daily Carnage newsletter from just 275 subscribers to 11,000 subscribers in 18 months?   This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Carney Marketing Director Mark Rogers shares insider details on how he built The Daily Carnage and grew it to one of the most successful email newsletters in the marketing industry. Some highlights from our discussion include: Mark started The Daily Carnage in 2017 and grew it from 200 to 11,000 subscribers in its first year and a half. There are just three staff members that work on the project, which is a daily newsletter, in addition to their other responsibilities. The Daily Carnage's brand voice is distinctive and edgy, which sets them apart from other marketing email newsletters and has attracted a loyal subscriber following. Early on, Mark used Facebook ads to grow The Daily Carnage subscriber base. He began with simple demographic targeting, then moved to look alike audiences. In addition, Mark made a practice of notifying anyone mentioned in the newsletter or anyone whose content they shared. This got them several high value backlinks and spurred organic growth. When the newsletter first launched, it contained almost entirely curated content from well known marketing thought leaders. Over time, Mark began to include more of Carney's content. The team at Carney tries to limit each edition of the newsletter to around 700 words. Carney has a subscriber reengagement campaign that is triggered when someone has not opened 20 emails in a row. The Daily Carnage's open rate averages 30% and its click through rate is 4.5%. Carney's team of three Daily Carnage staffers spend about four hours per day on the newsletter. The team uses an internal Slack channel to share articles of interest and determine what will go into the newsletter each day. The newsletter has generated nine new clients for Carney in the past year. Listen to the podcast to learn the secrets behind The Daily Carnage's explosive growth. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host):Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. My name's Kathleen Booth, and I'm your host. This week, my guest is Mark Rogers of Carney. Welcome, Mark. Mark Rogers (Guest): Hey, Kathleen. Thanks, it's good to be here. Mark and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: I'm excited to have you. I am a loyal reader of your awesome newsletter, which we're going to talk about in a few minutes. But you are the marketing director at Carney. Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about yourself and about Carney? About Carney Mark: Sure, yeah. I guess I'll start with Carney. We're a pretty small creative agency in Pittsburgh. There's about 12 of us, and we do really a lot of digital marketing, and then anything from creative campaigns to website designs and really anything in between. Whatever our clients need, we pretty much have a solution for it. Me, I've been working in marketing since I graduated college seven years ago now. Just slowly working my way up and trying to do the best that I can. Kathleen: Well, you're definitely doing something right. For context, if you're listening, and you're not familiar with Carney, or it sounds vaguely familiar, Carney is the agency behind a newsletter called The Daily Carnage, which I first came across, oh my gosh ... I'm going to guess it's been at least two if not three years now. I know it was before I joined IMPACT. I used to own my own agency, and I stumbled upon it. I remember seeing it and thinking, "These people are geniuses." Because at the time, I was a subscriber of The Skimm, which is ... If you haven't heard of The Skimm, it ... How do I describe The Skimm? It's a- Mark: Yeah, The Skimm is great. Kathleen: ... mildly snarky newsletter that is aimed at delivering the news concisely and with a very dry sense of humor in a very short and consumable format. It's mostly aimed, I would say, at millennial women, although, which I am not one of, but I appreciate it. Mark: Yeah, that's all right. Kathleen: The reason it's significant is that The Skimm grew its subscriber base astronomically, was acquired, I want to say, by Bank of America, has gotten VC capital. I mean, it's just really taken off. It's a behemoth at this point. Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: When I first came across The Daily Carnage, my first thought was this is like The Skimm, but for marketers. Mark: Yeah. That was our exact goal, so I'm glad you thought that. Kathleen: Oh, as soon as I saw it, I was like, "Damn, why didn't I think of this first?" That being said with the context, let's start with how you guys first came up with the idea, and let's go all the way back. When did you start it? What was the goal with it? Walk me back ... Mark: Yeah. It's actually not too old of a newsletter. We actually started it in March of 2017, so - Kathleen: I must have found it right at the beginning then. Mark: Yeah, you might've. Kathleen: I will take credit for being one of your first subscribers. Starting The Daily Carnage Mark: Yeah, so we started it a year and a half ago, a little over a year and a half ago. Really the goal was, as an agency, we'd never really marketed ourselves. We were mostly a design and development shop until my boss was hired. Then he hired a marketing team, and it was kind of like, well, we need to market ourselves, so what do we want to do? We thought about doing traditional blogging, which there's a ton of benefits to blogging, which is why we do have a blog. But the bigger goal for us was what can we do that's different than everybody else, and how can we actually build an audience? Mark: We knew we didn't want to build an audience on Facebook or Instagram or Twitter just because you don't really own your audiences there. So, the obvious choice was to focus on email because you do own your audience there. There's no algorithm preventing you from getting right in front of your audience, and it's just a really ... As long as you're providing value to your audience, you're going to keep getting people to open it. So, it's really just as close to one-to-one marketing as you can really get. Mark: We were looking around at what are people doing in email that's cool right now, and we came across ... A couple of us are subscribed to The Skimm, which we knew of, and then there's another newsletter called The Hustle, which is- Kathleen: I love The Hustle. Mark: Yeah, great newsletter. Really, really love it. We loved the voice they had and the daily approach that they took of giving you something valuable every single day. So, we started to think, can we do this for marketing? I mean, me personally, I read a billion marketing blogs every day, so it was just ... It was a pretty organic, obvious idea just to take the best marketing content of the day from all these other blogs out there, curate this content, put a spin on it, summarize it in our own voice, and send it out to our subscribers. Yeah, we started ... When we first launched, we had 271 subscribers, so basically none. That was mostly just clients and other agency contacts that we had, so it was tiny. We've grown a huge amount. I mean, we're over 11,000 subscribers now. That's not even an accurate number because we always prune our list, too, so we unsubscribe people every single month. Kathleen: Wow, so wait. You started in what month of 2017? Mark: March of 2017. Kathleen: So, it's a year and a half old. Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: And you went from 200 to 11,000 subscribers. Mark: Yeah, and that's ... I mean, it's been crazy. Kathleen: That's insane, especially for ... How many people are in your agency? Mark: There's 12 of us, and there's three of us that work on The Daily Carnage, writing it, strategizing on it, curating the content. Kathleen: Wow. Mark: So, it's a big investment for a small agency, but it's been awesome. Kathleen: Sounds like it's paying off. Mark: Yeah. Start With An Audience-First Mentality Kathleen: Yeah. It's interesting because the approach that you took, which is let's focus on not ... Let me back up. Most agencies, if they were having the conversation about what should we do to market ourselves, would start thinking, how can we generate leads? Right? That seems to always be the first conversation. I think what was really genius about what you guys did is you didn't start with how can we generate leads? You started with how can we build an audience? Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: Because leads will naturally follow from an audience if you do it right. That's definitely an approach that we at IMPACT take as well, very much inspired by Joe Pulizzi's writing in Content Inc. and Killing Marketing. I mean, he talks in Killing Marketing about how, really, if you're starting a business today, it's almost like you should grow an audience first and then start your business or then figure out what your product is, I guess. Because your audience will naturally tell you what the product should be. Mark: Oh, yeah. Kathleen: As opposed to the reverse. Most companies do the reverse. They come up with a product, and then they try to build an audience, yeah. Mark: Then they try to ... Yeah. Kathleen: So, do you- Mark: I think another guy that does that really well, I think is Rand Fishkin, actually. He kind of built his own brand, and now he's started this new company. They haven't actually launched yet, but I'm sure when they launch, it's going to be a huge success just because of just who he is. He's built up an audience and then his product. Kathleen: Yeah, you're talking about SparkToro, right? Mark: Yeah, yeah. SparkToro, which- Kathleen: Yeah, I love his stuff. I think what makes him so successful, and it's the same things that makes Joe Pulizzi successful, and it's the same thing that makes you guys successful, is that he has a very unique and authentic voice. Like in Rand's case, he's almost radically honest and vulnerable. Like, he talks about his failures as well as his successes. There's some personal stuff on his blog, but he also does ... I mean, the reason I read it religiously is that he's producing some of the best thought leadership around no-click searches. Mark: Oh, yeah. Kathleen: And On-SERP SEO. Mark: Yeah. Defining the Brand Voice Kathleen: Yeah. But going back to The Carnage, what drew me to it ... Anybody could do a newsletter with just, like, here's the top marketing news of the day. But I think what you all did really well from the beginning is cultivate that voice. Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: Can you tell me a little bit more about how did you guys come up with that? Was it a specific strategy to have that particular voice? Mark: Yeah. Well, it was a little more ... I'd love to say it was a super-planned strategy, but it was a little organic, honestly. My writing style, I'm very casual when I write because I just think that you should write in the same way that you talk. So, it started in that exact same way. I was writing it, just putting my own voice on it. We started to notice a common theme from our new subscribers that they were all around 25 to 35 and in small to mid-size marketing companies. So, we were like, "All right, how can we position our voice to be a little closer to that?" It was about that same time, we hired a copywriter from a company called ModCloth. She came over with just this super-snarky, edgy voice that really just ... It worked so well with our newsletter, so we're like, "You know what? I'm not going to tell you to reign it in. Just run with it, and put your complete, total voice on it." She's done an awesome job just having that voice and building that connection. I think that brand voice is something that a lot of people overlook, but it's a really big differentiator when that's really all you have in the digital space sometimes. I mean, there's a billion other blogs out there. You can write like all of them, but you're not going to stand out in any way. So, that brand voice, I think, is a big differentiator for us. Kathleen: Absolutely. I think that that's actually, in my experience at least, the area where most companies kind of fall down is that they like the idea of having a voice, but especially when you talk about kind of a snarky voice or anything that anybody could potentially find either offensive or might not like, all of a sudden, brands get scared. They want to please everyone, and in pleasing everyone, they please no one, then- Mark: Yeah. They come out with this really diluted voice that just sounds like a computer talking almost, honestly. Kathleen: Yeah, corporate robot speak. Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: Yeah, so I think it takes courage to allow a distinct voice like that to be used, but obviously, it pays off very well. That's the same thing that made The Skimm successful. It has a really distinct voice- Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Kathleen: ... that not everybody likes. There are people on my team who can't stand The Skimm. It's funny. When I was coming to interview you, my thought was do I say it's like The Skimm for marketing? Because I know some people really don't like The Skimm. But that's kind of the point, right? Your audience, and the people that love you, love you a lot. Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: So- Mark: Yeah, it was interesting. We actually got some ... We've gotten some angry emails over our voice before. People are just like, "This is terrible. This isn't professional at all. I can't share this with my boss." I'm like, "Well, I would love to please everybody, but that's not really the point." Kathleen: That's- Mark: Our point is to create a really strong connection. Kathleen: Yeah. I love hearing that because I almost feel like you're not doing it right if you don't get a few of those emails. Mark: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: I remember when I had my agency, we didn't necessarily do this with a newsletter, but we had some marketing emails we sent. And there were some controversial subject lines on purpose because we wanted to start to have a voice and to ruffle some feathers. I remember one of the people that worked at one of our clients wrote back and was like, "This is completely unprofessional and unacceptable, and I don't think you should be doing it." Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: My team came back to show it to me, and I think they were really scared. They're like, "Oh, should we send an apology?" My response was, "No. If that's the way this person feels, then they're probably not a great-fit client for us." Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: I guess you have to be willing to make those trade-offs. Mark: Yeah. I think I had the exact same conversation with my team the first time we got that angry email about being unprofessional. I was like, "You know what? I think we're onto something here if this is the kind of response we're getting from people." Kathleen: Yeah, don't back down. Mark: Yeah, exactly. You know? Kathleen: Yeah. Mark: It provoked enough of a response for somebody to take the time and reply to our email, so that's pretty cool even if it was a bad email. Kathleen: You know they read it. Exactly. They spent the time to reply, so how ... Yeah, you're getting something out of it. Mark: Yeah. Growing the Subscriber Base Kathleen: Now, I'd love to learn a little bit more about how you grew the subscriber base. You said you started with 200-some odd subscribers, and it's obviously grown to over 11,000. Where are these subscribers coming from? Mark: Yeah. First thing we did, we put a little bit of money behind Facebook ads just because we needed to jumpstart this audience and get in front of other people who'd never heard of Carney, people not from Pittsburgh. We just needed to get out there, so we put a couple thousand dollars behind Facebook ads over the course of a few months, just to spark it in that way. That did a huge amount of subscribers. We were getting subscribers for like 27 cents at one point just from that, which is pretty awesome, and on top of- Kathleen: How did you target that? Who were you going after when you did those ads? Mark: Yeah, so we started ... Let's see. What was our first audience? It was a pretty general audience we started with. We knew we wanted marketers in small to medium-sized business just based off the persona of our clients, so we started targeting that. Then, as we started to figure out who our ideal subscribers were, we changed the ads to fit more into that, so adding that snarky voice to the ad copy itself and finding images that really connect with marketers, even if it's not exactly related to the newsletter. Just something that catches somebody's eye, gets them to stop scrolling, click on our ad. We were able to dial it in pretty well that way. Then, after a while, we used look-alike audiences, which is one of my favorite features from Facebook advertising is just that look-alike audience. It usually works so well in anything, really. After we got that audience built up a little bit and started to get some people talking about it, we started to do more organic promotions. Any time we'd feature somebody's content in our newsletter, I emailed that person who wrote that piece of content, and I'm like, "Hey, we featured you. This is cool. Check it out. Read it." Usually they love it, and a lot of people share it on LinkedIn or Twitter, or they email it out to their audience. Ann Handley did that, for example. We featured one of her pieces, and she loved it. She was like- Kathleen: I love Ann Handley. Mark: Yeah, she's awesome. She's like my hero in marketing and writing, especially. She sent it out to her email newsletter, and it was just really cool to see that. Then, slowly from there, we started to get a lot of backlinks from bigger blogs like Convince & Convert and Content Marketing Institute mentioned ... They're talking about how cool this newsletter is that these guys have. Check it out. We started to get a lot of subscribers that way, too. Just over the course of time from getting backlinks and mentions elsewhere, it's really built up our organic traffic.  That's where the majority of our newsletter subscribers come from now is just through organic traffic, so people searching, either word of mouth, they heard about The Daily Carnage from a coworker, or they're just searching marketing newsletters. I think right now, we get a little over 100 a week from just organic traffic sources, which is really cool. Kathleen: Wow, so it's kind of snowballed at this point. Mark: Pretty much, yeah. It's almost like it runs itself on the subscriber acquisition side. We don't spend too much time doing outreach anymore just because we have a lot of client work that we got to handle, too. So, we let it kind of run on its own as far as subscriber acquisition goes, and it works pretty well. Determining the Right Newsletter Format Kathleen: That's great. Now, I'm curious to learn more about the thinking behind the actual format of the newsletter and what you learned along the way. Specifically, let's start with the fact that the newsletter does ... You are curating content from other places. Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: Was that a deliberate choice to have it be curated as opposed to a spotlight of your content? And I'm really curious also, knowing that it is curated, how much traffic does the newsletter itself drive back to your site? Because obviously, if people click on some of those links, they're going to other sites. So, I'm wondering how that works out for you. Mark: Yeah. I mean, it was ... We definitely wanted to do it curated to start with because, going back, people have never heard of Carney, right? We were a tiny agency with not much following, so we were like, "People have never heard of us, but they've heard of Moz, and they've heard of Buffer, and they've heard of HubSpot. So, let's feature their content," and it's kind of, well, to associate ourselves with them and try to make ourselves look a little better. That approach works really well. Mark: From there, we've now started to put our own original content in there. We've recently launched a podcast. We do our own blogs, so we feature some of our own content. But as far as traffic to our website from the newsletter, it's actually pretty decent because we do have ... I mean, we have a couple call to actions within the newsletter. Sometimes, we'll really call it out, be like, "Hey, hire us. We need more clients," and that always drives ... Whenever we do that, it drives a couple hundred clicks a day to our website. Then, we also have in the footer of every email, we have our design and development and marketing capabilities. We get a few clicks on those per day, and we can always see who clicked on those. A lot of times, it's like somebody clicked on that, and they may have not have filled out a Hire Us form. But we know who clicked on it, so I might just send them a friendly little email and be like, "Hey, how's it going? Just wanted to catch up," and go that approach of business development. It doesn't drive a ton of traffic to the website, but it does drive leads and clients, which is really the ultimate goal. Kathleen: Yeah. Just like we talked about in the beginning, focus on the audience, and the leads will follow. Mark: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: What about structurally, the format? We have a lot of debate on my team at IMPACT, because we launched a new marketing email newsletter in August, about how to structure a newsletter, both for readability, for design, for deliverability. I'm really curious to know how you arrived on the structure that you have and what you've learned along the way with that. Mark: Yeah. I mean, good thing for us, we have an awesome design team. They design a lot of emails for clients, so we went to them. I was like, "I need you guys to design me this email. Give me a template for what we want this to be." They thought about it. They put a couple different iterations out, and the biggest thing is we wanted it to be not a wall of text. So, we had the opportunity to use subheaders in it and images within each section that really helped break up the text. That structure was pretty simple from our design team. The structure in terms of length has always been ... That's an ongoing debate with us is how long do we make this newsletter? How short do we make it? We try to keep it around, where are we at, about 700 words per newsletter, and sometimes it gets a little longer. Right now, we're working on dialing it back a little bit because I think it's getting a little too long. Kathleen: Are you looking at data and testing this? Is that how you're coming up with these hypotheses about the length? Or is it just more heuristic? Mark: Yeah. We always monitor our open rates, click rates, and we see people are ... We look at averages overall, so the majority of the people click on the first link that we have in the newsletter, and then it trickles off as it goes further down. The first thing we did when we noticed that people weren't getting all the way down to the bottom of the email or at least clicking on things at the bottom of the email, we added some more fun features into the newsletter. We have the Ads From the Past every day, which is we just feature a vintage ad that people absolutely love. I think now, a lot of people just open the email and scroll to the bottom to see Ads From the Past. We actually have people tell us that. They're like, "The only reason I open this is for that vintage ad. It's so cool." So, it's like trying to get people to scroll down a little more with fun content at the bottom of the email. Then, we also poll our subscribers about ... We've done it four or five times now. Just with a simple survey, we'll ask, like, "How do you think about the length? What do you think about the design of the email?" and then take their responses and go from there. Carney's Approach to Subscriber List Hygiene Kathleen: Yeah. You mentioned earlier that you are constantly kind of doing list hygiene and removing people. Mark: Yep. Kathleen: Can you talk a little bit about your approach to that, and what are the signals that you're looking for as far as when somebody should come off the list? Mark: Yeah. List pruning is ... It's a huge deal for me. It really affects deliverability. The more engaged your list is, the more likely you are to land in inboxes. It's something we do with all of our clients, too, make sure their lists are just high-engaged subscribers. With The Daily Carnage, we're pretty strict with who's an engaged subscriber. We go 20 email newsletters, and if you haven't opened a single one of those, we'll put you on basically like a probation list. We'll give you a few more chances to engage with the newsletter. We'll call it out and be like, "Hey, you haven't opened any of our newsletters. If you don't want to be on our list, you can unsubscribe right here." We'll straight up tell them that, "Unsubscribe if you're not interested." Because we don't want to clutter up your inbox if you're not going to open it. It doesn't help anybody. A lot of people immediately do say, "Oh, wait. I don't want to unsubscribe. I just have been so busy lately, I haven't been able to open anything." But the ones that don't, that's fine. Like I said, after about, ends up being about 25 emails ... Once they're on that probation list, they get cut from the list, and we move on with our lives. Kathleen: Yeah. What are you using? Are you using a marketing automation platform to track that and to automate some of that? Or how do you manage that on the back end? Mark: Yeah. Yeah, we use MailChimp, which scores all of our subscribers. It gives them a star scoring, so five stars, somebody who's really engaged, opens every single email, clicks on things throughout the email. Then, it goes down from there. One star is basically somebody that rarely ever opens an email. We take those one and two-star subscribers, and those are the ones that get put on the probation list and pruned from there. I think it's really done wonders for our deliverability, and it helps keep us in inboxes. Like I said, it's a really important thing to do, and a lot of people don't do it because they're so focused on, oh, I want this huge, massive list, which is cool. It is- Kathleen: I want to be able to say I have all these subscribers, right. Mark: Yeah, exactly. But if your huge, massive list only has a 7% open rate, is it really that good? Kathleen: Yeah. The Daily Carnage Email Marketing Benchmarks Mark: I mean, we prune our list, which helps keep our open rate above 30%. Our click rate is usually around 4.5%, so ... Kathleen: You just answered ... My next question was going to be, "Let's dig into the data." Let's start over again. Your open rate is what? Average is what? Mark: I think it's ... I just looked at this. Average is 30.1%. Kathleen: That's really good. Mark: Yeah, and that's sending five days a week. I'm just really impressed with that number. Kathleen: Yeah. Mark: Then, average click rate is 4.2%. Kathleen: Which is also really good. Mark: Yeah, really good stuff. The click rate comes a lot from just finding the right content. People want to read more about it, so they click on things. They click on inline links that we have in there, too. Kathleen: What about unsubscribe rates? What do you see there? Mark: Yeah, unsubscribe rates are pretty low, honestly. Yeah, just off the top of my head, I think we do see about eight to 10 unsubscribes a day, which honestly is ... Like I mentioned before, it's fine. If somebody doesn't want to be on our list, that's totally fine. I don't- Kathleen: Yeah, that's very negligible given the size of your subscriber base. Mark: Yeah. I don't focus too much on unsubscribes. I just focus on the overall week. Like, I see subscriber growth. That's all I focus on. As long as people continue to subscribe more than they're unsubscribing, I think we're doing something right. Kathleen: Thank you, by the way, for sharing all those details and kind of opening up the kimono as they say. I appreciate that. It's really interesting to kind of benchmark against where you guys are. Mark: Yeah. Looking to the Future Kathleen: Now, coming to today, the newsletter is where it is. You've seen a lot of growth. What are you looking at as far as future growth or future plans for the newsletter? Mark: Yeah. We just actually had this debate last week, two weeks ago, something like that. We're trying to figure out how to keep it fresh, how to keep doing different things with it, and how to keep providing value for our subscribers. Since we've launched this newsletter, we've actually seen a number of other agencies start doing the same thing. Now, all of a sudden, our unique, interesting idea is copied by a lot of people, which is ... Like I said, that's fine. It doesn't really bother me. But at the same time, we still want to be different and a little fresher than everybody else, so we're trying to figure out what sort of features we can add into the newsletter, what we can do differently if ... Can we spin the newsletter off to be its own thing and live on its own, kind of like The Skimm or The Hustle do as their own thing? We're probably not going to go that path, but it's a conversation we've had. How do we just basically put more time into it and make sure that our subscribers are getting the most value out of it? We just did a huge survey of all our subscribers to ask them, "What do you guys want? What do you want to see?" It was kind of cool to see that everybody's like, "No, I like it the way it is." Which is cool, but at the same time, I think we need to push it. So, how can we find things that people don't even know they want yet? That's kind of what we're working through right now is that process. Kathleen: Yeah, it's tough. As soon as you settle on a format, I feel like, then it has to change again. Right? Mark: Yeah, exactly. What Does It Take to Publish The Daily Carnage? Kathleen: Now, how much time are you spending on this? You mentioned you have a couple of people that are involved from your team. You're putting this out every weekday, so tell me a little bit more about what that daily rhythm looks like. Mark: I mean, yeah. It's a lot of hours a day, so I give my boss credit for allowing us to do that. It takes away from billable hours that we could be working on agency clients. It ends up being ... With the three of us on my team, it ends up being about four hours a day, which is a decent amount. But it's totally worth it from the results we've had. And really, a lot of that comes down to just summarizing the content. We don't really ... Curating the content and finding the content is the easiest part by far. Kathleen: How many people are involved in that? Is it all three, or is it more than that? Is it the whole agency? Mark: It's just the three of us, so we usually just ... We have a Slack channel, and we just throw things in there as they come up in the day because we like to be really fresh with the content. It's hard to plan super far ahead. We try to find content that was published either today, and we'll feature that in tomorrow's newsletter, or in the past few days to feature in the next newsletter just to keep that content really fresh. We have a Slack channel. We just throw content in there, and we debate things. It's like, "All right, this content isn't that good," or maybe, "We just did an SEO piece yesterday. Let's hold off on this." We try to have pretty open communication about what pieces we're going to pick and work from there. Then, it comes to summarizing and editing part, the writing and editing, which is definitely the most time consuming, but that's the most fun for me. I love writing and editing, so that's- Kathleen: Do you still have the one copywriter from ... The former ModCloth person who's doing it? Or is that a collaborative effort? Mark: Yeah. She still writes a decent amount, and then we ... I mean, all three of us write on it, so it just depends on who writes which piece each day. Kathleen: Yeah. How do you keep the voice consistent? Mark: That's the toughest part, honestly. That's where a really good editor comes in and just making sure that it all matches up with making sure that it's consistent. It's kind of a feeling more than like a strict process. It's just kind of like, "Oh, this section doesn't sound as snarky, as edgy, as the other two, so let's see where we can add in some snark to it," basically. That's- Kathleen: How does the editing process work? Mark: It's basically everybody writes their pieces. It comes to me, and then I go through and give it a pretty hard edit, read over everything. Then, I put it all together in our template. Then I read over it again to make sure once it's in the template, and we're not doing anything that's repeating ourselves, or making sure all the pieces match up, making sure we're not being contradictory of ourselves, too. Because there's been a few times where one person's written one thing, and in the very next section, somebody else has written the complete opposite. It's like, all right, we got to think about this a little more. Yeah, it's just making sure that we're consistent and keeping up with that. Kathleen: What time does the newsletter go out every day? Mark: It sends at 7:00 a.m. every morning, and we obviously write it the day before for that. Kathleen: How'd you settle on 7:00 a.m.? Mark: We used to send it in the afternoon, like 2:00 p.m., and people were just emailing us. They're like, "This is too late in the day. I need it first thing in the morning." We're like, "All right, we'll test first thing in the morning." We started doing that, and our open rates went up a couple percentage points, and we're like, "All right. Clearly, first thing in the morning's the way to go, so we stuck with it and have been doing first thing in the morning for, oh, I don't know, I guess it's been a little over a year, 14, 15 months at this point. Kathleen: Do you send it at 7:00 a.m. by time zone? So, if I'm in California, do I get it at 7:00 a.m. my time? Or is it 7:00 a.m. Eastern, and everybody gets it at that time? Mark: Yeah, it's 7:00 a.m. Eastern. Just because I feel like if we're first thing Eastern, we'll still be first thing on the West Coast because it'll be 4:00 a.m. there. The only difference- Kathleen: Super early-bird people. Mark: Yeah, super-early bird people. The only difference that I wish we could do a little better is people in Europe. We've had some of them complain that they're getting it too late now, so it's ... Kathleen: Can't please everyone. Mark: I know, I know. Kathleen: We're right back to square one on that, right? Mark: Exactly. It's like all right, you know? We'll make do. The Results Kathleen: I love it. Now what I would love to do is talk about business results for the company. You mentioned that periodically, you'll put something in the newsletter to drive leads. What has this done for Carney as an agency? Mark: Yeah. Let me see here. In the past year and a half, we've gotten nine new clients from the newsletter, which might sound small, but we're also a small agency, so a small agency who never really did business development before this. So, those nine new clients over a year and a half are pretty good for us, and some of those clients are pretty big, which is cool to see. Kathleen: It's also impressive just because if you're anything like we are, as an agency, the sales cycle is kind of longish. Mark: Yeah. Kathleen: It can be a few months sometimes, and so given that you've only been doing this a year and half, nine clients is good, I think. Mark: Yeah. I mean, it took a really long time for us to get that first client. It was to the point that my boss was like, "Is this really going to work? I don't even know." Kathleen: I promise it's working. Mark: Yeah, exactly. I mean, to his credit, he gave us a huge runway for it, so it was like ... Because before that first client, our ROI was, I don't know, negative 1,000 on it or whatever. Because we spent so many man hours into it and hadn't gotten any clients, so there's no ROI. To his credit, he gave us that runway, and we got our first client from it. I think it was actually a year ago, so last November. Then, since that client, we've gotten eight more. It's been pretty successful for our small agency, so I'm super stoked about it. Kathleen: That's great. Well, I love the newsletter. Mark: Well, thanks. Kathleen: My whole team loves the newsletter. We frequently talk about it in our Slack channel. So, if you're listening, and you're not currently a subscriber to The Daily Carnage, you need to go out and do that right now. If you want to see an example of a newsletter that is killing it, it is really a great model for other companies. Mark: Well, thanks. Kathleen: And I think you could do the same thing in any industry. Mark: Oh, yeah. Kathleen: You could be The Skimm, or now people will say, "I am The Daily Carnage of this industry." No, it's really great. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: Shifting gears for a minute, as my listeners know, I always ask the same two questions of everyone who comes on the podcast. I'm curious to hear your answers. The first is company or individual, who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Mark: Yeah, I've got a couple that are doing really awesome. One's ... It's a contact marketing agency called Animalz. I don't know if you're familiar with them, but their blogs, I mean, they're really strategy focused, and it's really, really good. They definitely take a different approach than a lot of other blogs. The strategy is kind of almost like the contrarian view of everybody else, but it just really gets you thinking really well. I think they're doing an awesome job, and they're really a young agency. I think they might only be two years old or something like that. Kathleen: Wow. Is that Animals, A-N-I-M-A-L-S? Mark: It's actually a Z at the end, which- Kathleen: That's what I thought okay. Mark: Yeah. Kind of a strange name for an agency, but their blog and the guy who writes the blog, Jimmy Daly, they're doing an awesome job there. I really respect that. Kathleen: Oh, I'll have to check that out. Mark: Yeah. Then, another one, just to throw a non-marketing out there, Bumble, the dating app, their blog and inbound marketing approach is actually really awesome, surprisingly. I know somebody on the team over there, and he was like, "Yeah, we have a blog." I was like, "Eh, I'll check it out," and it's actually ... They do a lot more than just talk about dating. They're talking about career advice, professional development advice, things like that. It's just a really surprisingly unexpectedly awesome blog. Kathleen: I'm trying to think. Because I heard somebody speak at HubSpot's INBOUND conference this year from one of the dating sites. I'm trying to remember. I think it might've been Bumble. Is that the one that lets the women ... Mark: Yeah, yeah. Kathleen: Yeah, if that's the one, which I think it is now that I'm looking at the site and it's all yellow, I totally agree with you because ... The woman from Bumble, I think she was their marketing director, she got up and spoke, and she showed an example. Her talk was about how you stay true to your core purpose throughout your marketing, so she showed this example of some things they do on their blog. They're kind of like "Dear John" letters. Basically what it is is, because it's a very female-centric dating app, they have really strict rules around what you can post and how you can interact and communicate. And if anybody is at all abusive, or if they make somebody feel, I don't know, offended or in danger, they can get kicked off the platform. So, they write these blogs, which are like letters to guys who take an obnoxious approach with women. They're basically tear-downs of these guys. I'm going to have to find some examples and throw them in the show notes (read Bumble's "An Open Letter to Connor" here). When I came back from INBOUND, I shared these with my team, and I was like, "This is phenomenal." Because not only were they super-entertaining reads, but they were 100% spot on true to the brand. Again, it goes exactly back to what you and I talked about, which is there's probably a lot of people who would read these and think "this is really not cool." Like you're totally calling out a guy who maybe didn't mean to offend somebody. But for their brand, it is completely authentic and spot on. Mark: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. For their brand and their audience, it's the perfect thing. Kathleen: Yeah. Yeah. I like that one. Mark: Nice. Kathleen: I had forgotten about that until you said it. Cool, and you're a guy who reads a lot of content because you kind of do it for a living for your newsletter. Mark: That's true, yeah. Kathleen: Yeah. It has to be hard to pick just a few. Well, the second question is the world of digital marketing is always changing and changing so quickly. What do you do to stay up to date and to educate yourself and always be on the cutting edge? Mark: Yeah. I read a lot. I read a lot of blogs. For social media, my big go-to is Buffer. I think they have an awesome social media blog. Moz is another good one. For SEO, we talked about Rand Fishkin and Moz a little bit earlier. I already mentioned Animalz. If you're into marketing strategy, that's definitely the blog to read right now for marketing strategy. Let me think. Oh, a good one for marketing design is Canva. I think they do a really awesome design blog, and it's not like ... Some of the articles are really in-depth and more for designers, but most of them are more for like marketers like me who have no design skills, so- Kathleen: I use Canva for a lot because I don't have any design skills either. It is the one place I can go and I know that even with my dummy design skills, I can create something that looks good. Mark: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: So, I'm a fan of Canva. Mark: Yeah, yeah. I'm a huge fan, too. I have zero design skills. I couldn't even ... I can barely draw a stick figure, so Canva is like my saving grace. Kathleen: Do you have any particular system for keeping track of all these blogs for reading them? Some people I know use different RSS feed tools. How do you go through it? Or is it just literally like you open up your inbox, and there they are every day? Mark: Yeah. I mean, I've tried using Feedly and some of those similar ones, but the only problem I found with those is they don't get you the content fast enough. Sometimes by the time they crawl through content and surface it on your Feedly feed, it's a couple days old. Which is fine, but especially for The Daily Carnage, I need fresh content. So, I just subscribe to a ton of stuff and have it all go to a specific folder in my email. Once a day, I go through and sort through that. The interesting ones, I'll add to my Pocket. Are you familiar with Pocket? Kathleen: Yeah, it's a great tool. Mark: Yeah. That's so good. I add them to there and read them when I have a few seconds, or skim through them when I have a few seconds. Luckily, it works with your phone, too, so I'll add it to my Pocket on my desktop. Then I can check on my phone while I'm on commute or whenever it is and catch up on some content that way. That's- Kathleen: I think Pocket just added a new feature, if I'm not incorrect, that will actually read things to you. Mark: Oh, really? Kathleen: So, like if you're ... I'm super geeky, and I listen to podcasts and things when I'm working out. That was intriguing to me because I was like, "Wow, I could actually have Pocket read me an article now while I'm working out." Mark: Oh, that's cool. I'll have to check into that because I did not know that one. Kathleen: Which makes me a giant geek, by the way, that that's what I choose to listen to when I work out. Mark: Hey, no. There's nothing wrong with that. It's a good time to do it. Kathleen: No, it's funny because I similarly subscribe to a lot, and for a while, I had it all go into a particular folder in my inbox. I had a rule set up, and the folder was called "Read This Today." I realized it wasn't working when I looked in that folder, and there were 1,500 things in it. I'm like, "Well, that's not going to happen. I won't be reading that today." So, I definitely need a better solution. Maybe I should be looking into Pocket. Mark: Yeah. That's the best solution, I've found. It's still a little crazy because I check that folder, and it's like, "Oh my god, there's a lot of emails in here." It's just like, scan through it really quick. Try to focus on the headlines that really pertain to me or our audience if I'm doing it for The Daily Carnage, and go from there. Kathleen: Yeah, if you don't look in it every day, it gets totally overwhelming. Mark: Yeah, exactly. Kathleen: Great. Well, this has been so interesting. I love geeking out on the topic of email newsletters. It's something that my team spends a lot of time talking about- Mark: Awesome. Kathleen: So, it's really interesting to hear how you're approaching it and to also get more details on exactly how it's grown and the success you've had. Kudos to you for what you've accomplished. Mark: Well, thanks. Thanks, I- Kathleen: It's clearly something that you've put a lot of work into. Mark: Yeah. How to Reach Mark Kathleen: If someone's listening, and they want to ask a question, want to learn more, what's the best way for them to find you online? Mark: Best way is either Twitter or LinkedIn, and just Mark Rogers at both places. Unfortunately, there's about a trillion Mark Rogers out there. So, Twitter, my handle is ... It's mrog91588, and that's probably the easiest way to find me. Kathleen: I will put links to all that in the show notes. So, if you're confused about which Mark Rogers you're looking for, just check the show notes, and the links will be there. Again, definitely, if you haven't already, subscribe to The Daily Carnage because it's awesome.  You Know What Comes Next... Kathleen: Well, that's all I have for this week. If you're listening, and you have gotten some value out of the podcast, you know what to do. Please leave a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform or your choice. And if you know someone else who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing work, please tweet me @WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Thanks, Mark. Mark: Thanks a lot, Kathleen. It was good to be here. Kathleen: Great to have you.  

In the fifth grade, Robert Rose’s teacher sent him home with a note that said Robert likes to tell stories. Well, as it turns out, she was right. Robert is the founder and Chief Strategy Officer of The Content Advisory, the consulting and advisory group of The Content Marketing Institute. Robert has been helping marketers tell their story more effectively through digital media for more than 20 years. Over the last five years, Robert has worked with more than 500 companies of all sizes, including 15 of the Fortune 100. Hes provided strategic marketing advice and counsel for global brands such as Capital One, Dell, Ernst & Young, Hewlett Packard, Microsoft, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and UPS. What you’ll learn about in this episode: The strategy Robert came up with to win when he was part of a startup competing against big companies like Microsoft What Robert did to become successful and build up Content Marketing Institute to where it is today, helping major companies get things done How Robert views work and marketing and how that sets him apart from others in his field Ways marketing has changed over the last 18 years because of consumers, and how Robert based his book, ”Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit” on this change Traditional marketing- how it is based on an efficiency model, and how it differs from a new marketing strategy that giants like Amazon, Netflix, and Apple are using An example explaining why it might be better to create your own audience than to find an audience through a platform like Facebook Why it’s so much more valuable to have direct access to your customers, and how Robert can help you do that How Red Bull is actually a media company that happens to sell energy drinks, and how this helps their sales What Terminus did to be a media company and give their brand value Practical steps you can take to build a media company within your overall company The biggest mistake Robert sees both small and large companies make and what you can do to avoid making that same mistake Why you need to focus on optimizing specific areas of your business, and why it doesn’t work to try to do everything at once One of the most important things you can do when finding your audience, and why it’s one of the hardest things to do, too Ways to contact Robert: Website: Robertrose.net

The MarTech Alliance chats to Robert Rose about his new book, Killing Marketing

Content marketing is growing up. It’s no longer about throwing out random social posts, random blog posts, or making an infographic once a quarter. Instead, we need to begin asking the questions (for our own agency and our clients): What are we building? What can we become as a brand that is of value to this audience of people we care about? Who can we be for our prospects, our customers, and our business partners? And I think an agency’s role in that can be both exciting and profitable. Why? Because one of the biggest frustrations for most agency owners is that it’s getting harder to have a seat at the client’s strategy table. Agencies are being commoditized and relegated to the status of order takers all too often. But when we have strategic conversations with a client around how they can truly leverage content in a way that is much bigger than a set of assets — you help them become a destination. You help them become a media company. That’s when the game changes and you’re back driving the client’s strategy and having significant impact on their goals. You become a must have partner. My guest today is Robert Rose. He was instrumental in the creation and growth of the Content Marketing Institute working alongside CMI founder Joe Pulizzi. Robert has written several books, including two with Joe. Their latest, “Killing Marketing” is about how innovative companies are using content as a strategy to turn marketing cost into a revenue stream rather than a cost. I promise you — Robert and I will get you thinking in completely different ways about content, the way your agency delivers content, charges for content, and talks to clients about content. Here’s the thing — most agencies will not have the courage to implement the future proofing strategies Robert and I discussed in this episode. Be one of the few that does. I encourage you to take action — do something with what you learn from this episode. If you do that — you will be sought after — and I want that for you. And if you found this episode helpful — you might also be interested in the 2-day “Content Marketing For Agencies” workshop Robert and I are teaching this January. Learn more here. What You Will Learn About in This Episode: How using content as a strategy can help solve a client’s business issues — and in the process — future proof your agency Why your audience — or your client’s audience — should be considered your “pre-client database Why agencies need to understand how to create content with a purpose and that it is no longer about creating more stuff How all the content marketing assets created for a client need to connect together to tell a single story How treating audience members like customers builds trust, then their walls come down, and they become much more open to sales messaging How to create an owned content experience for your clients and help them transform into media companies Why agencies need to have some sort of vertical specialization combined with a unique point-of-view of how they approach the world in order to be differentiated How an agency can go about uncovering its unique point-of-view Why midsized agencies looking to grow and become trusted business advisors to clients should focus on the strategic side because that is where the value is Why if you can’t control the media — then becoming the media is a viable content strategy for agencies and clients alike Ways to Contact Robert Rose: www.contentadvisory.net www.robertrose.net

There's been lots of talk lately about why brands should think like, and even become, media companies. But how do you actually build a media company? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Frank Gruber shares the story of how he created Tech Cocktail and eventually transformed it into TechCo, a startup-focused media company that was recently acquired. From how to develop and grow and events business to the best way to build a robust content engine and strategies for building an audience, Frank covers in detail the strategies and tactics he used to transform TechCo from a scrappy grass roots network of startup founders into a thriving media business. Listen to the podcast to learn more about Frank's journey with TechCo and what he advised the big brands that he consults with today on when it comes to thinking like a media company. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to The Inbound Success podcast. I'm your host, Kathleen Booth, and today my guest is Frank Gruber, the founder of Established as well as the founder of TechCo. Welcome Frank.  Frank Gruber (guest): Thank you, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.  Frank and Kathleen recording this episode Kathleen: Yeah. For those people who are listening, I have been chasing Frank down for weeks if not months to get him on this podcast- Frank: Sorry. Kathleen: -because, selfishly ... No, no, no. It's worth the wait. Selfishly, I have been wanting to pick your brain because you are somebody I met several years back in a networking group and in the time since, you grew TechCo quite a bit as a media platform, exited, and now you have a new company. But the reason I was excited to interview you is that I'm at IMPACT, and really, my main focus is transitioning us from an agency-first brand and business model, to a publisher or media company-first model. There's so much I want to learn from you and I'm super excited to dig in, but before I do that, tell our audience a little bit about yourself and your background and how you came to be where you are right now. Frank: Sure. Yeah, sure. I have kind of a product background to begin with. Years ago, I was doing product development for bigger brands like AOL and Tribune - a lot of it very content driven. I got into content and was one of the really early bloggers out there and had a site called Somewhat Frank and was a first contributor for Tech Crunch and then started a company called Tech Cocktail. The whole idea behind Tech Cocktail was to better connect and amplify the local communities that were out there. As you saw a rise of these different communities where there were startups happening and not a lot happening to kind of tell the story. So more or less, I started doing events, which turned into an online component, where we started TechCo and we grew that audience over the last decade from zero to millions of readers all around the world. Then, just recently, this last January, it was acquired by an international publisher. So, it's been quite a journey. A decade "instant success" or whatever you want to call it. Kathleen: Right. Frank: Along the way there was a lot of ups and downs and, obviously, we learned a ton because we were really pulled into the direction that we went, because it really started as very much a grassroots thing, and side hustle for me, because I was doing website development for AOL and Tribune, at the time. So yeah, here we are now, and I've kind of transitioned out of TechCo, and that's kind of running, and continuing to grow, and I've got a new company called Established, which is more or less helping brands with innovation slash startup programs. Helping them to better connect and create that innovation which is tough to do internally at big companies, and so we're helping kind of take some of the tools that we learned ... tools, and kind of lessons learned from building a media company, and taking those things, and now putting them onto a bigger stage with some of these larger brands, and helping them along the way, too. So, that's what we've been up to. Kathleen: That's great, and what I was particularly struck by, when you and I spoke about doing this interview, was that we're kind of navigating two different sides of the same coin. So in my case IMPACT has a long history as an agency, and we're trying to build this media company, and now you're really transitioning into an agency model. I think if we met in the middle, we would have the Wonder Twin powers. Frank: That's so true. And it's funny, I mean it's such a convergence right now, and that's what we started to see when we were at TechCo, we were actually behind the scenes, doing more or less agency type work, for brands. And some of those clients we were able to continue to work with, with Established, you know, the folks that acquired TechCo wanted to continue to grow that media component, not so much muddy the water with the different components of creating a, more or less a consultancy, plus running and growing a media company. It's interesting. We're seeing that across the board. You're seeing agencies acquire, or grow, media arms and vice versa. So I think it's really interesting to see, and now we're trying to help some of those bigger guys, now, with the different tactics we learned along the way. Kathleen: Yeah, in our case, we were very much inspired by the two Joe Pulizzi books, Content Inc. and Killing Marketing. Joe was the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, and he's written these books and Killing Marketing is about why you should actually start as a media brand, kind of like you did, and build an audience, and then you're audience will essentially tell you what your product should be through the feedback you're getting. Frank: Yeah. Kathleen: Yeah, and if you create products that come out of that feedback, you're almost guaranteed to succeed. As opposed to the other way around, which is the way most of us do it, where we build the products, and then we're like, "Well geez, now I need to build an audience," so I thought that was pretty interesting. Frank: No, it's so true, it's more or less ... that's how we believe, too. So we started by hosting events to showcase startups all around the country. And we, at one point, were doing 100 events. It's very much a grassroots movement, where we gathered hundreds of thousands of people together, over the course of a year, and more or less we were building this groundswell. And that was our Petri dish of people that we could just send and say, "Okay what is our next thing?" That's how it kind of turned into a media company, is we started producing content, and going that direction, and so I can totally see that. It's all about building that audience, and once you have an audience, you're able to do a lot. You can build a media company, or you could build a product, or you could offer other services, or whatever it is you're trying to do. That's the thing. Bottom line, we all had the opportunity to do that. Whether it be through this, or through a podcast, or through an online blog, or whatever. Kathleen: That's so true, and that's what we're telling all of our clients, is that you need to think like a media company to really be successful at marketing. It's kind of table stakes now. Frank: Right. From Tech Cocktail to TechCo Kathleen: What I would love to do is rewind the clock back to the very, very early days of Tech Cocktail, and I want to start just by asking how did you get people to these events? If you're starting with events, the holy grail is butts in seats, whether those are real seats, or virtual seats, or what have you. But, especially because you did events in different cities, how did you get that word out, and what was your grassroots engine? Frank: Right, yeah. So I think to begin with, it started very simply as a local thing. It was Chicago, and D.C., and then a couple other cities, and that was it, and it was really focused on getting that local word out. For that, we were leveraging our own networks. This is 2006, 2007 timeframe, so if you think about it, there wasn't the social movement. That was just the beginning, right? Of Web 2.0, and the social movement, so ... haven't heard Web 2.0 in a while. So more or less, we were leveraging that wave to be able to get the audience to come out, and so, yes it was a lot of little things, like blocking and tackling, or whatever, but also it was the opportunity now, that there were only a few people on Twitter, and there were only a few people using LinkedIn, and there were only a few people using YouTube, and some of those other technologies, and we leveraged those to grow an audience organically. And so I think that's how we started. Once we started getting into the situation where we were actually doing events all over the country, there weren't those advantages ... 'cause at that time, I think that was an advantage, to use those tools, and obviously time's moved, and things change, and so we had to continue to be flexible, and change as well, and so we started leveraging email as well. We started a big push towards notifying people via email newsletters and things like that in their local area. So, very hyper local about the next event that's coming to Detroit, or Denver, or whatever. I think that was a big part of our success as well, was we were able to get to people's inboxes, and I still feel like that's one of the number one places that you connect with people. Even with all the Snapchats and the Instagrams, or whatever, out there, I think that email's still pretty powerful. And so I think that's what we were able to leverage. And then also, just connecting with our networks, and being able to do the, "Hey, we're coming to town," every time we did it, and kind of connect with the right people.  I think where it got really difficult was when we started to do back to back to back. We were literally at one point doing events every single week, maybe sometimes in different cities. Kathleen: Wow. Frank: And that got to be tougher, because it's harder to duplicate the efforts, even if you create systems or whatever, you miss things, right? You can't do the same kind of VIP treatment that you would on every single event, and that's where it got really difficult. And we learned from that, so obviously scaled it back, and continued on our efforts on the online side. But, we also learned that as that was happening, everyone was creating spaces. Like there was now hubs in every market, like the 1871s in the world popping up, and accelerators in every single market, which didn't exist 10 years ago. And so all these different places were already converging people, and so the point of bringing the events together, and bringing people together was to create that convergence, and create the collisionable moments that happen and there's still a need for certain kind of events that connect people, but it was becoming table stakes, in that there was stuff happening everywhere, so we started to scale back the events, and really push towards the online component, when we saw that happening. And I think it was the right move for us, and ultimately, we were able to move all our offline events into an online program called Startup of the Year, which we're actually still running, to better showcase startups from all around the country. Kathleen: Now is that, that's an awards program? Frank: Yeah, it's a program that tries to find the most interesting companies all over. It's very inclusive. We look for really diverse startup founders, as well as teams, and geographically diverse as well. So yeah, it was basically our kind of community slash events program, that we were doing forever as Tech Cocktail, and we rebranded as Startup of the Year, and we're continuing to push ahead with that. It's about a ten month program. Kathleen: And how do you identify those startups? Do you have a network, or are they applying? Frank: Yeah, so they're applying. It's a little bit of everything again. So similar tactics, in that we were leveraging emails before, we're still now leveraging emails. We were able to continue the email focus from Startup of the Years past, as well as our personal networks, as well as reaching out to different local community leaders. We're part of something called the Startup Champions Network, which is basically ecosystem builders in every market, and we partnered with them, as well, and more or less, trying to find those local community leaders that can help spread the word is a big part of it, but also, we're still leveraging social. There's certain components of social that work really well. Some that we used in the past that worked great don't work as well anymore. It's interesting to see that trend. We even saw a trend in things like Facebook, which for a long time was driving a significant amount of interest, and whatnot, and engagement, and now it's gone to pay. You can't really get anything found unless you pay, and so that's totally different. Think about when we first started using Facebook. It wasn't that way. Things bubbled up and you were able to find things. Now the first thing they offer you is, "Oh, would you like to boost this?" You know? And you're like, "Well, no! I posted it, I thought that was all I needed to do!" So now you're seeing more people throw more money towards that effort, in a really strategic way, too, there's even companies that do it. I don't know if this is a thing you want to talk about or not, but there are literally companies that are paying for the demographics that they want, by leveraging companies that will get it for them via paid advertising on Facebook. So, you're a media company, and you wanna connect with the millennials of the world, you can literally pay your XYZ company, I'm not gonna name names, to get that exact traffic, and pay them thirty grand a month to do that. So, very eye opening. To me, I started to realize, there is just nothing pure in this world anymore. Literally. Kathleen: So true. Frank: Everything's pay, so it's funny to see that, and it was kind of a big lesson for us to learn, 'cause we were very organic in our growth and promotions and everything, and started to realize that, "Wow, there's a lot of people paying for this." Kathleen: No, we always say marketers ruin everything, and I think it's really true. So, going back one more time, you mentioned you had all these events in different cities, and you were leveraging your personal network. So did you actually have either team members, or brand ambassadors in these different locations? How did you handle covering all that territory? Frank: We didn't. We didn't have people in each market At first, we would literally go around the country, almost like touring, to each city, and as before we did, we'd reach out to anybody we knew in that local market, and connect with them ahead of it. And that worked for a while. Then once we started get the point where we were doing events in a ton of cities, that didn't scale anymore, so we basically created an ambassador network, right? We created a group of people, locally, that were our eyes and ears on the ground, carrying the, at the time, the Tech Cocktail, then TechCo flag, and continued to basically help create the events, get the excitement around them, and get people, obviously, to attend. And so we had some great brand champions in Albuquerque, and Boise, and all these different, Detroit, all these different cities along the way, and that really helped us a ton. At this point, to be able to scale to every market, and have people locally, I mean you need ... first off, you need a Groupon or LivingSocial sized sales force, when they were at their peak, right? When they were literally selling locally to be able to host these events to get them to be covered. And then you also need the other side of it, which is the marketing side, to get people to know about it. So, I think that wasn't, for us, scalable. We hadn't raised any funding to do that, and we didn't raise funding for quite some time, actually. We boot strapped for six years, and eventually took funding, and that's when we were able to scale it a little bit more, but we felt like that approach of having local people on the ground that were full time people, was just not a scalable thing for us. It's just too capital intensive. So we started with, okay, we've got a head of marketing slash events that then would manage of an army, more or less, of our ambassador network. And then that's kind of the approach we took. Some markets worked great, others didn't. I mentioned some of the high, like shining stars, and already some of the cities that did great work, and some, they did great for a while, then they got kind of pulled in, because of life, and work, and everything else, and so we had to continue to try to find their backups, right? And continue to refresh that network, which ultimately was a full time job, because you were constantly trying to find and refresh, people are changing roles, and having babies, and moving, and doing all these things all the time, and so it was difficult to keep a hold of, unless you had one person, or two people, working on that continuously. More or less community development, right? And continue to manage it. Kathleen: Right. And how did you structure that brand ambassador program? Because I would imagine that there has to be something in it for them, otherwise you can't really rely on them. Frank: Well. Kathleen: Any advice there? Frank: No, we tried everything. Every kind of setup you could. Because we didn't know. We were going into it blind, like, "How do we scale this? How do we get people on board, and continue to maintain the heart, right? And in it for the right reasons, right? So we struggled a little bit, to try to figure that out, and we tried a number of different attempts, and ultimately ones that worked the best were ones that just wanted to do it because of the good of the community or whatever. It's hard to find those people all the time. Especially in every market. And the ones that were doing that were now ... things started to be created, new things. So all of a sudden there was startup weeks, and there were startup weekends, and there were XYZ, whatever, meetups. So people that were those doers started to get consumed with all these things, and so we were, in some markets, we were really early, and others we weren't, so more or less we had to figure out, "Okay, what's the carrot that gets these people motivated and want to be a part of it?" And in many cases, the ones that were our best were just in it for the love of their local community and wanted to do the best thing they could. We actually started a pay model, where we literally were paying. "Okay, you go raise the money for it, and keep it. We don't care." We just wanted to do the event. So there was all these different challenges with that program, because we iterated and iterated and iterated, and interestingly, we ultimately, at the end of the day, said, "Okay, do you want to continue to do this kind of thing? We're not doing events anywhere all around the country, like we were, anymore, so if you want to continue to do it, do it, if you don't, that's okay." And it's funny, the ones that were in it for the love of the game, continued, and the rest were like, "We're done," kind of thing. And that was okay. We turned everything to an online competition, with a big culmination event at the end of the year, called Innovate Celebrate, which is coming up here in Boston in October. So things change, we had to continue being flexible. We did this for over a decade. So, if you think about what has happened- Kathleen: Yeah. Frank: There's no iPhone when we started. Like, think about that. Like ... it's nuts. And so, it wasn't that long ago- Kathleen: It's amazing. It's amazing how much it's changed. Frank: Right. Exactly. So- Kathleen: Yeah. Frank: This was like, at the beginning, a place of convening people, and then ultimately, that got created by a lot of different things, you know, with the different social networks, and different mobile apps, and everything else. So, we kind of continue to evolve, and we had to as we continue to grow. Kathleen: Now, let's just talk a little bit about the online media platform because you really built out a publisher site, or at least that's what it looked like from the outside, 'cause I spent some time on the site. There's a lot of great content on there. Can you talk me through ... You mentioned how you started. You started recognizing that people were creating spaces online all the way through to what it became. Frank: We had our own team to begin with, right? To begin with, we were writing all the content. At one point early on, 2010, up to ... we started in '06. So up to 2010, I was even writing up to five articles a day, which ... That was right when we first started doing it full-time. It took a while to be a full-time thing, and then we started ... remember hiring our first editor because I was like, "I need help managing all this." And then that turned into, "Okay, we need more writers." And at a certain point we had 10 or so writers and editors doing their thing and covering a lot of content and producing a ton. But then we realized like, in the media space, it's never enough. Even if you're a very niche publication, you still ... We got kind of pulled into from the offline events piece where it was very sponsorship driven, we got pulled into, "Okay. Now how do we generate revenue online?" Right? Because we're now doing most of our stuff online. And so, yes there's Google advertising, and there's all these different components out there that you can do to kind of generate revenue, affiliate is one of them. All that stuff is very driven by numbers. You need to have an audience - a huge audience to be able to make it work right. Or a very niche audience that is looking for exactly what you're offering. And so our content was so spread across startups, and innovation, and across cities, right? So it was very broad as far as that goes, but very much focused on innovation and tech. And there's a lot of that kind of content. And so, we were trying to really differentiate in the local space, and so, in the local space we were trying to continue to cover these things as the heartbeat in a lot of the local communities. Anyway, long story short, we got pulled into content and content marketing. And so we started to work with different larger brands that we were working on, on the offline stuff in the events, and they were like, "What else do you have? What else can you offer? And how could we reach a bigger audience?" And so we started working with them on some of our first content-marketing pieces, and didn't even know what it was at first ourselves. We were just like, "Well, we're going to just start writing the content, and it'll be brought to you by you, and it's gonna be similar content, but it'll be about this topic or whatever topic we decide, and we can do a whole series." And I still remember some of the first meetings with our team like, "What are we gonna do? How much are we charging?" But we figured it out, right? So we figured out what we should do, what's kind of the going rate, and ultimately, we were able to work with a number of bigger advertisers that we already worked with on events, and continue to extend that relationship online. And it turned into yearly contracts. In some cases it started as like, "Okay, here's a 10-article series for X amount." And now it's like, "Okay, now we're going to do a full year of content about this." We'll kind of space it out. And at one point, I think we had one that was like 54 articles. I'm like, "Wow. That's amazing. That's a really long deal." So, it was exciting and that's kind of the direction we ended up and ended up going, and we learned a lot about that along the way. But what we learned also is that, even with that, you're continually under this gun of how do we show metrics? So we had to find a metrics tools that showed not just like page views, engagement, and a lot more ... the answer if you're not CNN.com or something like that, right? Like we were trying to compete in so much space with them, as well as even some of the social networks are doing similar things than ... Basically, we were competing with everyone for attention, right? And so, but this was very niche kind of content. So more or less, it was a game where we always had to get bigger and grow and grow and grow, and we leveraged a lot of tools. Facebook was one of them. Twitter was one of them to begin with. I think one of the hidden gems out there is Flipboard. I don't know if you're familiar with it. If you're doing content, you should be on Flipboard because it can really engage a lot more users that don't even ... you may not even realize they're out there. Everyone's on their phone all the time and they offer really great interface to flip almost like an RSS reader, but a beautiful interface. Kathleen: Yeah. Frank: There's a lot of tools like that, that are out there that we kind of continue had to evolve and find because as you continue to grow, you always are trying to find more eyeballs, more or less, and as you try to compete with the larger folks out there. Kathleen: So you talked about how you were going to be able to demonstrate value to your sponsors and your advertisers. Frank: Yes. Kathleen: And kind of the different metrics that are out there to measure that, and I'm curious, when you would enter into conversations with prospective sponsor advertisers, what did those conversations revolve around in terms of, hey, this will be a successful partnership if what, for them? Is it if we get X number of leads, or was it engagement, or was it page views? What were those companies looking for from you? Frank: It was a mix, and that's we, we worked kind of backwards. So based on goals. So a brand may want to just have a great series of content out there about personal branding, right? And they wanted that because it was in line with the campaign that the were doing. Right? And so we worked backwards, like how do we create great content that fits our audience, that resonates well, is going to get great engagement? And we created a whole content calendar around how that would work. And then that's what we would present. Like, "Okay. This is what we're gonna do. This is what we think's gonna work. And it's gonna tie back to your campaign which is all about personal branding because that's your latest campaign or whatever." And that's just an example, but you get the idea. So then in the bottom of it, we would say, "Okay. This is brought to you by XYZ personal branding, blah, blah, blah, and link back if you want more information." So obviously those links were important to the brands, but at the end of the day in many ways, the minute that they're reading the content, and if there's some way that ... Sometimes we would incorporate the brand that were actually the sponsor of that content, and a lot of times you wouldn't, though. It just felt like we didn't need to, right, because they were already included in this brought-to-you-by kind of capacity. So, it just depended on what they were trying to do. We didn't love doing the content marketing that was to drive leads to a lead-gen form kind of thing like that as much. It was harder to do. Harder to measure. The audience that we were getting weren't sure if they were going to do that or not. It depended, you know. And we didn't want to be held to like, "Okay. We need to get XYZ brand to get this many signups," right? Or whatever. That made my heart race just even talking about it, like, I don't want to. Because ultimately, the minute we put that out there, we wrote that content for them about that specific thing or about that whatever it was, we already wrote the kind of the advertisement content for them in some ways. It wasn't. I mean, it was great content regardless, but we wrote almost like the advertisement piece if you were looking at it in line with like, "We're going to create a commercial," right? Well, the commercial is the content at this point. And we already created that for them which has value. So that's where, as a smaller, you know when I say smaller, we still had millions of readers, but smaller compared to the TechCrunches of the world or maybe CNN Money, or I don't know what their traffic is, but ... or Box. That's a good example, right? Verge. But they've also raised millions of dollars, like hundreds of millions of dollars. We did not. We raised two and a half. And so more or less, we were trying to compete in that same space, and the way to work in that space was more or less to add as much value. So we were trying to create the content, and then offer them the content to use. Like, if they wanted to use the content on their own site, they could feel free. We don't care. It's great. So we were almost like, in some ways, a content agency for them, and doing that allowed them to then use it in other ways. It tied in with the campaign that they had. They were getting online traffic and awareness from just being out there on Tech.co at the time, and then more or less, it was a better offering than a lot of the other folks were offering. Kathleen: Now that's really interesting. So, you had these partnerships, and it sounds like what you were selling is you creating the content for them and then publishing it, but also giving it to them to do what they wanted. Were there cases where you had sponsors or advertisers who came and said, "We want to do a five article series, but we want to create the content and give it to you for publication?" Frank: We have, and we worked with them on that. And we would actually have obviously final editorial approval on everything on what it would look like, but in that situation, that was even difficult to us, if they were good writers, and had great content. A lot of them did. Frank: So, the tough part of that was when they didn't have great content. And that- Kathleen: That's why I'm asking. Frank: Now we had an awkward conversation to have, because you're like, "Well, this isn't gonna necessarily fit for our audience because the ... you know." So you kind of have to be up front and say, "Okay. We're going to have to rework this." And we did, and that was the only way we could get it published on our site 'cause it wouldn't make sense ... Not to mention, we were really focused on making sure everything that was on Tech.co was very authentic in voice, and didn't rub our audience the wrong way, because our audience was our gold, right? That was what we had, and had to offer. And so, yes they were paying for the content, but they also were paying for this very engaged audience globally. So it was a mix, right? So they were getting a little bit of, almost like a value-add for being able to leverage the content in other ways as well. Kathleen: Now did you have, for the non-sponsored content portion of your site, did you have outside contributors who wrote for you, or was it all staff writers? Frank: Yeah. When we started with a paid staff, we realized that that was really hard to scale faster and grow. We got to the point where like, okay, now we've got to like ... How do we grow from here to here? How do we do that quickly? And so what we did, we started our contributor network which is similar to our ambassador network, but it was online, and it was writers. And so, we ... I don't know if you want to call it a mistake or whatever, we opened it up very quickly, and said, okay. We're going to put it out there, and got thousands of people to apply. We had so many writers, we didn't know what to do with them. And so then we had to reign it back in, and I think at the end of it, they don't have a contributor network anymore at TechCo because this is a lot to manage. Like now you've got a whole group of people that you're managing, and they're constantly asking about, "When is this going to get published," and "How is that going to go?" And you're going back and forth. So we had a whole team that managed that component of it. We had about a hundred and something writers at the end which were really solid and we could kind of depend on. And it would also go in spurts, kind of similar to what I was saying with the ambassador program. Some would write for a long time, and then all of a sudden, life happens. You know? And now they're like, "Well. I gotta take a break for a second." But these were all unpaid writers. They were doing it for the love of the game, to have bylines out there, and to be able to contribute. Some were local focused, some were national focused, some were focused on just the thing that they're really good at, and some were even about brand marketing and things like that. It just depended on what they were interested or excited about. And so, we accept a lot of contributors, but one of the things we had to watch out for is fake people, actually. We had a fake people problem, and I think the Internet does. It's still, in this day and age there are ... I don't know how many times you get these, but I get some random Facebook friends lately, and they're not real. You can go back and trace it. They're using someone else's picture. We've had people use other peoples' pictures. We've had people ... You know there was a lot of that kind of stuff happening, and we basically had to really hone that network into, "Okay. We're going to get on a Skype call with you, and find out if you're real." And we're going to have to pass that test, and then work with them to make sure that these are all real. And that was a lesson learned, and obviously we quickly removed any of the content that we found was not real. Kathleen: Yeah. It's interesting. We're in the early days of creating a contributor program, and definitely learning as we go. We have some contributors who are just rock stars. They're great writers. They're super reliable. And then we have others who are really smart but maybe take more handholding to get their articles to the point where they're ready for publication. And so, I've been working with my head of editorial content on how do we ... Let's look at the value we're getting vs. the time we're putting in, because in some cases it's just not worth it. Frank: Right. So the company that acquired TechCo, they did that analysis. The company's called MBF Global. Great company out in the UK. If you haven't heard of them, they're growing like crazy. And more or less, they were trying to build this media arm, and that's why they acquired TechCo. But they did that analysis, and they're like, well, it doesn't make sense. Right? We're going to be going in this direction, and we know what direction we're going to go in. It was a staff of people managing that from our side. We looked at it, as a funded company, and our goal is growth, right? Continued growth. And the best way to do that in the most capital-sensitive way, was to do it this way, right, and have these unpaid contributors that we're managing vs. having ... If we had to pay 100 contributors to write for us, that was just not the move to do. And so, it just made sense. And so I think, it just depends on your situation. If you have the time and effort, and you want to be able to do that, manage that group, then it makes sense. And if your goals are growth. But if it's a specific voice ... 'cause you're going to have now a lot of different voices, and a lot of different opinions about what should be going out and what shouldn't. And we even had some that we had to kind of pull back because they were too critical about certain companies we liked, or brands that we ... These are not all op eds. Now in this day and age, with political stuff, we're like, "Whoa. We can't, we're gonna have to keep an eye on that stuff as well." So it does open up just a Pandora's box of things you need to watch, watch out for, man. Kathleen: Yeah. Now you mentioned that your kind of North Star was growth, and as a media company, I know I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Obviously growth is synonymous with audience size, subscriber base, like especially owned audience. Can you talk a little bit about what some of the most effective levers were for subscriber growth for you guys? Frank: Yeah. To begin with events, right? We were able to get folks coming to something and they were super engaged in their local community. They were super engaged with our brand. They were an army of people locally that loved, at the time, Tech Cocktail, and then TechCo, and they would come out anytime we shined the Tech Cocktail symbol up there like the bat symbol, right, whatever, right? We started offering a number of different things that would grow us that subscriber base. Everything from reports ... We had some of the first ever reports about accelerators, we ranked the startup accelerators out there, and that was kind of first-to-market thing. Now you'll see like Forbes, and some of these others, already doing that. It's been almost six, seven years now, or maybe even longer since we first put our first one out there. And so you're seeing a lot more folks do that, so that doesn't necessarily make for a great report anymore. But as we started seeing folks do that, we started saying, "Okay, what other resources can we offer?" And so we started really trying to focus on online resources that offered value outside of just the regular articles that we were putting out. And then obviously, we traded the resource for their email address, and grew our audience. So we did a lot. That was kind of our growth strategy after the events, because the events became really capital intensive and time intensive, and not able to scale. There's only 365 days a year. We can only do 365 events and keep our sanity. Yes, you could do multiple events on multiple days. We did it. It was insane. But I wouldn't recommend that, especially if you only have a core team of ... a smaller core team. So I just think that, in this day and age, if you do the online kind of resource play and offer something of value, you can actually grow an audience that way. I would even, today, say with the platforms that are out there, things like Instagram are a great place to start. In some cases, you don't even need a website. It's crazy these days. You could literally start with an Instagram account with a "subscribe" link in your bio, or something like that, and grow that way. You may not get as much traction. It depends on how good you are at Instagram. But ultimately ... 'Cause it's not like you're off every photo. You're like, "Oh! That's resource." No, it's not. It's just a picture. So, it may be hard to get people to go back. So, that's where it's like at the end of the day, if we could create something that was valuable to someone, so the exchange is a one-to-one? You know, information for your email? That's the best way to do it, in my opinion. Some other things? Events. Obviously, if you can do them in a larger scale. We did some large things in DC with ... I don't know if you remember Digital Capital Week. We did that festival for three years with iStrategy Labs. And that grew ... You know, we had 10,000 attendees. So, that grew an audience locally of support, that knew about us, and what we were up to, and follow ... Some of them, you know, joined in the file, the content that we were putting out after that? So, that was another kind of strategy. And then, I think, just in general it was a ... We were focused on doing things that would create a sharable moment, or a way that we could engage somebody later with some kind of a resource. I mean, really, that's what we were focused on at the end. And that the strategy, obviously, I'm not with TechCo anymore. I should mention that early. I've transitioned out. So, their strategy now, I don't know what it is, but it's different. And that's totally fine. So, more or less, I'm speaking from when I was with TechCo up until we sold the company in December of 2017. So. From TechCo to Established Kathleen: Now, you mentioned earlier that these days you might not even need a website to be successful. So, you've sold TechCo. You've now started Established, where you're advising bigger brands on how to leverage this media, or publishing approach, in order to grow. If you were to try to start this all over again today, in the world we live in right now, which is really different- Frank: Critical. Kathleen: ... how would you do it? And like, what do you tell your clients? I'm curious. 'Cause it is, it's a completely different game these days. Frank: It is! I mean, it's a lot harder, in my opinion. It's harder and easier, if that makes sense. It's harder because there's ... Back when we started, there wasn't as much noise. Now, there's so much. Like, there is so much content. I mean, not just talking about our kind of content, I'm talking about like you have to choose between Netflix and Amazon, and all these different producers. HBO has ... I mean, there's so much content. And we only have the ... We have the same amount of time. So, it's just really ... That's, I think, the struggle that we have now is, from 10 to 12 years ago, there wasn't as much. You couldn't get things streamed to your phone. And so, you're competing with everything now. And so, I think, that's the challenge. The benefit is, from now, is that there are tools that can help. There's a lot more tools that can help you connect with people. Everything from ... Like I mentioned, Instagram's a big one. I mean, I just started a Podcast as well. It's called, Somewhat Frank. I brought back my old blog, which was called, Somewhat Frank, and repurposed it as now the Podcast, Somewhere Frank, because my name's Frank. And I thought it was clever. Kathleen: I like it. Frank: And I can be somewhat Frank on that, right? So, anyway, long story short, you know, without it, I didn't start a site right away. I just started Instagram, starting growing an Instagram account, leveraged that Instagram for a while. And then now, I've got a site. It's kind of that one-two punch after you've got a little bit of an audience. And then, the other thing is we're working with different groups. Like we're working with a group down in Tampa that has an innovation hub, and we helped them with a launch recently. And it's called, Embark Collective. And we're helping them with content strategy and growth, and whatnot. And kind of what we started talking about at the beginning is you need an audience. So, you need to build your own audience, because you can't rely on the local media, or the national media, or whatever, to tell your story for you. You have to tell it yourself. I mean, that's the whole thing. If you create an audience, you can talk, you don't worry about what The New York Time is covering, right? 'Cause you've got this really engaged audience that is already following along for the journey. And so, that's what ... You know, that's the approach we kind of take. That's the approach we're taking with Embark Collective, and we're doing it in a way that's the voice that they wanted to get out there, which is very founder led, versus talking about ourselves, right? So, it's a little bit- Kathleen: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Frank: ... a trickier thing with that kind of a lead. Especially with a new thing, right? When you have a new thing, you kind of need to tell people what it is. I mean, we're doing it in a way that's like through others can be more challenging. So, I think that is the challenge now. It's doing it in the right way, and kind of sharing that message. Frank: So, to tell ... You know, I guess the bottom line is there's still these great platforms that allow you to grow, and we're continuing to watch that. There are ... I mean, if you really wanted to jumpstart it ... And I've even heard some of the great marketers out there tell people to do this ... You can buy an audience. It's nothing that we did at TechCo, but you can. You can get a jumpstart with buying ... whether it be Twitter handles, or Instagrams, or Facebook, or even websites, right? 'Cause now you've got an audience that's already going to a website. So, those are other options. Like I said, TechCo was very organic. We just grew it from the ground up with events, and then online. So, that's where I'm more comfortable with, and understand better. Frank: Another example would be ... Here, I'm in Las Vegas. It looks like I'm in a locker room. I'm not. I have little lockers here with our secret things. No, we don't have anything over here. Kathleen: I know I'm dying to know what's in those lockers now. Frank: Yeah. So, basically, it's just where we put like things we used to do at events and stuff. But that's not really locker. Anyway, yeah. In Las Vegas, there ... we moved out here because of the Downtown Project. And so, one of the things that we start working on with them, Downtown Project, was this project by the CEO of Zappos Tony Hsieh. He started this 40-million-dollar project, Invest in Downtown. And, more or less, we started bringing people out every month. And it was more or less like a little summit. And we'd bring people out, and show them around, as the backdrop being downtown, but the ultimate payoff was that you were actually meeting great people. And so, as an opportunity to kind of connect, but that turned into, well, you also learned about the downtown. So, that is one kind of ... If you're doing things locally, and you're trying to get people excited about what's happening in your local area, that's one example of the way to do it. It's expensive and very timely, or time intensive. Kathleen: Consuming? Frank: Yeah, consuming. Consuming because you're now doing, you know, you're doing VIP kind of treatment for a lot of different folks that are coming in from all over, and you're the tie touch. So, I wouldn't recommend that to everyone, unless you ... Or they wanna do a lot of that. So, I think it just depends on what your goals are, and what you're trying to do. But I do think ... I guess you asked me would I start a media company today? I don't think so. There's just so much right now. I think there's so many other things you could do that would ultimately have to do similar things to a media company, and you'd still get that ... But you actually have a little bit different product, right? So, I love media. I've been doing it for a long time. I used to build the media sites at Tribune, so I've got a huge background in media, and as well at AOL, personalized news, and whatnot. So, I love media and news. I just think it's ... There's so much of it right now, I think that it's hard ... It's a lot harder to break in. Kathleen: Yeah. Well, so many interesting insights, and I feel like you've been in the media industry during a fascinating time, because it really has changed so much over these years. You know, here on this podcast, we talk a lot about inbound marketing, which at its heart is really just about using content to organically draw your audience in, which is kind of what you talked about in the beginning between events and some of the original content you were creating. Kathleen's Two Questions Kathleen: As somebody who's been in the space for a while, I'm curious ... Company or individual, I always like to ask this question: Who do you think is doing inbound marketing really well right now? Frank: Yeah. And I ... While you were saying that, I was thinking about other media brands that have done it really well recently. So, I'm gonna answer that question, and then I'm gonna answer your question. So, one of the brands that has done an amazing job, and has gotten a lot of traction through influencers, and is doing content marketing well, is Cheddar? So, if you're familiar with Cheddar. They went kind of a online component, but now they're on like Sling and other places. So they worked on distribution. And I think that's still really ... Any company, whether it be a start-up in the media space or any space, distribution is still like the most under-appreciated/thought of thing. Really. I mean, distribution is such a big deal. And so, the founder came from kind of a background of HuffPost and some others ... media sites, and had relationships. So, built great relationships, and leveraged them to build, what is now Cheddar. I think a lot of folks look at that and like, "Wow! That's just magic." It's not. It's relationships. At the end of the day, everything we do is relationship-based, and so I think a lot of that, he's done a really great job with platform, and then ultimately turned to relations. So, they're doing a great job, and they're on your television set, they're on your phone, they're on all the different social channels, and they're able to leverage media. So, if I was to start a media company, I'd wanna start something more like what he did, which is video-based, and then like growing it versus typing content and all that kind of thing. So, that's that whole answer to that question. But to your question about who's doing a good job? I may get a lot of newsletters. Obviously, Gary Vee is a leader in the space. I'm a big fan of his, for a long time. Brian Solis. I like his stuff as well. But, ultimately, I think I only ... I mean, everybody gets so many newsletters. One of the newsletters that I say and believe continuously is this Fortune Term Sheet? I just couldn't think of the name of it recently. I was like, "What's the name of that? The Fortune one." It's basically startup news and updates about investments, things that are ... I'm kind of looking towards, "Okay, how do I continue to invest in startups? How do I continue to grow our investor community to grow into our startup of the year stuff that we're doing to continue to invest in those great companies all over? 'Cause there are great companies all over the country and world, that aren't finding the funding that they need. So, because of that, I'm more focused on that kind of content lately. And so, I've been really focused on this Fortune Term Sheet email that goes around every day, actually. So it's a daily email which, I mean, we all get a lot of emails. That's the one that I continue to read continuously? Kathleen: And what makes it so great? What is it about that that you like? Frank: It takes time. It's got a great roundup. It used to be ... It's kind of a space that, like a TechCrunch, Crunchbase should be in, or I don't know if they do have a newsletter. I should probably look. But it's that, more or less, updates about things that have happened in the space. So like, "This company just got funded by this," or, "This just happened here," or that, you know, so it's kind of that quick rundown, and it's bulleted, so it's not like I have to read like a ton. And it saves me time about everything that's happened in the kind of venture space. And, in some ways, not just venture space, 'cause it is Fortune. They're looking at bigger companies as well. So, see. So, that's one that I read a lot. I'm trying to think if there's any others that do a really good job. Mine are so focused more on startup piece stuff. Oh, one of- Kathleen: Yeah, but that's great. I love hearing about examples outside of marketing. Frank: Well, here's one that's not. And it's kind of just my own ... Like I guess it would be called like just ... I don't consider myself an auto enthusiast. I just like looking at cool things. I used to love Jetsetter. So, I used to love the newsletter they sent out? 'Cause it was like a vacation. You'd like see this amazing resort, and the pictures. And it was in this beautiful place, and you could take a second, look at that. And I would save those. It's just changed to a different model, slightly. They don't have the same beautiful emails anymore. And they were, I think, acquired as well, right? So, they kind of changed a little bit. But they, for a long time, were like, "Wow! This is my daily vacation from whatever I'm doing. I'm gonna look at this Jetsetter email, and think about, "Wow! Wouldn't it be great if I went to this, you know, Bora Bora- Kathleen: Right. Frank: ... this beautiful place?"" Kathleen: If I was sitting on the beach with a piña colada right there, right now. Frank: Right, right. And they were offering affordable ways to do that, right? They were selling the dream. Frank: One that's similar to that, and I'm not a car enthusiast, but I get this new one called, Bring a Trailer. And it's basically an auction site for automobiles. Like I love looking at old like FJ Cruisers, which are like the Toyota big trucks and whatever. And like they have Porches. You know, like they have tons of stuff on there. It's my daily escape from everything that's like the chaos that's happening in my world. And I just take a look at those pretty daily to see what's going on. Frank: So, those are the ... I don't- Kathleen: Oh, I'm gonna have to tell my husband about that, because he loves looking for old Willys Jeep, and- Frank: There you go! Kathleen: ... old, like classic pick-up trucks. Frank: Right. Kathleen: So. Frank: Right, yeah. So, you could find that on that site. You can set a little alert, and they'll send you an email when that happens. So, it's a little bit more on the product side but, at the same time, it's kind of a guilty pleasure, if I have one. Kathleen: Yeah, yeah. Frank: So, you know, you're living in Las Vegas- Kathleen: No, that's great. Frank: You really can't have any vices if you live here, so that's mine. I look at, I guess they'd be auto porn. I don't know what that is, but I get right into it. Yeah. Yeah. Kathleen: That's awesome. Well, I'm definitely gonna check that out. Kathleen: Now, the second question is, you know, you're somebody who's in the world of marketing. With digital changing so much all the time, how do you stay up-to-date? How do you educate yourself? Frank: Yeah. Well, I read a ton. So, I mentioned Flipboard. I have that on my phone, and I'm on there a lot. And to the point of like ... I mean you're just ... Like I just flip, flip, flip, and try to keep up with everything. And I have different channels set up about different components of marketing or technology, or business, or whatever. And sports even, 'cause I'm the biggest sports fan. Go, Cubs. But the other thing I do is I've a friend that worked in ... to try to keep up to speed there as well. I used to attend a lot of events. Once I started hosting a ton of events, you started finding yourself not going to as many events. But then you become like, "Well, I'm disconnected from all the events. Why is that?" So, I started more recently going to more things. Like we were in our group together. Mindshare, right? So, that was me getting out and trying to do more event-related things to meet other folks in the industry, or we would never connect like this, if I hadn't been in that. So, I think that's my new approach for that. There's other events that are kind of more intimate that I've been trying to kind of get to. But again, I'm not doing as much of that, and so it's more or less, you know ... Daily, it's just like keeping up with the updates that are happening. And, obviously, the more high-test stuff is actually getting out and connecting with people. Kathleen: Yeah. It's definitely like drinking from a fire hose, right? Frank: It is, but like you know HubSpot does their big conference INBOUND every year. It just happened a little bit ago. That's a great opportunity for trying to connect with folks that are doing it, doing inbound marketing, and things like that. There's others, right? And there's niches too. So like, I just came back from Denver Startup Week. I gave a fireside chat with somebody out there, but also there was a summit for this group we're part of called, The Startup Champion Network, so SCN. And so, they kind of piggy-backed on each other, and that was an opportunity to connect with more people that were there, and vice versa. So, I try to make those kind of more strategic opportunities, right, that make sense. And you can continue to really refresh and re-up what your learnings are from those different opportunities. Kathleen: Great. Frank: Okay. Kathleen: Well, I have like a million more questions I could ask, but I know you have a life, and so I'll let you get back to it. But if somebody wants to learn more about what you're doing, or has a question about what you talked about here today, what's the best place for them to find you online? Frank: Yeah, sure. I'm just at Frank Gruber. So, Frank rhymes ... Or Gruber rhymes with Uber, dot me. And you can actually just ... I think it has my email on there, but frank@ ... Can I say that on this? Or is this gonna get- Kathleen: Sure, yeah. Go for it. Frank: All right. So, yeah, just ... My email address is pretty easy. It's frank@est.us so- Kathleen: E-S-T dot us? Frank: Yeah. US. Kathleen: Okay, great. I'll put- Frank: You're gonna get E-S-T dot us. Kathleen: ... all those things in the show notes. Frank: Yeah, that's great. So, yeah. I'm just gonna get a flood of emails now, right? Kathleen: Awesome. Well, you'll probably get a few from me, asking all the other questions- Frank: Okay. Kathleen: ... I didn't get a chanced to ask today. Frank: Good. Kathleen: But no, this was great, and really informative, and- Frank: Great. Kathleen: ... I think for any brand that's thinking of becoming a media company, there were so many good tidbits in there about, you know, good ways to grow, and maybe not such good ways to grow? Frank: Right. Kathleen: So, I really appreciate the time you spent. Frank: Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. Kathleen: Yeah. And if you're listening, and you found value in this interview, please, please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts or the platform of your choice. Kathleen: And if you know somebody who's doing kick-ass inbound marketing, tweet me at WorkMommyWork because I would love to interview them. Frank: Great. Thanks so much, Kathleen. Kathleen: That's it for this week. Thanks, Frank.

Subscribe on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/marketing-people/id1318483594?mt=2 This episode of Marketing People is a live recording of the 2018 Walker Sands Just a Book event. This year's installment featured Joe Pulizzi, co-author (with Robert Rose) of the book “Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit.” Joe is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, which hosts the uber-popular Content Marketing World in Cleveland each year. He recently sold CMI and is now focused on his family life and philanthropy. Joe sat down with Walker Sands VP of Marketing Courtney Beasley to talk about “Killing Marketing” and the opportunities that await marketers who can make meaningful connections with their audiences. Please enjoy Joe Pulizzi in conversation with Courtney Beasley at the American Writers Museum in Chicago!

Uccidi il marketing: killing marketing di Pulizzi e Rosehttp://www.giuseppefranco.itUccidi il marketing: killing marketing di Pulizzi e Rose. Chiariamo subito, l'intento degli autori Joe Pulizzi e Robert Rose non è quello di uccidere propriamente il marketing. E di uccidere il marketing tradizionale, quello che viene inteso come "pubblicità". Il marketing inteso solo e soltanto pubblicità (quindi costi). Invece gli autori costruiscono, ci raccontano, ci fanno vedere alcuni casi studio per capire quanto sia fondamentale avere un proprio centro media personale.Nel senso di creare dei contenuti nostri che appartengono a noi, avere la distribuzione. Noi distribuire i contenuti attraverso un podcast piuttosto che con dei video o con un blog. Avere e produrre continuamente contenuti, in modo da abbassare i costi del marketing classico ed avere così anche un aumento continuo di persone coinvolte, vicine al nostro marchio o brand personale. Ci sono un sacco di spunti interessanti, nel video te ne segnalo tre: 1) Riuscire a capire il nostro pubblico.2) Organizzare eventi e non percorsi finalizzati all'acquisto3) I numeri non sono sempre importantiIn sintesi: smettiamola di pensare al marketing come dei costi ma come un profitto (se fatto bene attraverso i contenuti).Infatti, ogni azienda dovrebbe avere un canale media di proprietà per diffondere i propri contenuti. Per rispondere alle domande dei clienti, creare un gruppo di persone interessate e farsi conoscere sempre di più (video)https://youtu.be/yPlUKMT86A4LINK E APPROFONDIMENTIIl Content Marketing Institute di Joe Pulizzihttps://contentmarketinginstitute.com/Il libro "Uccidi il marketing" su Amazonhttps://amzn.to/2zQ9md3L'edizione italiana è curata da Alessio Beltrami di Content Marketing Italia:https://contentmarketingitalia.com/uccidi-il-marketing/Come creare contenuti: atteggiamento mentale o routine? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryMWz3D_IkU-------------------------------------------------VIDEO GRATUITOIscriviti ai miei consigli quotidiani per comunicare in pubblico e ricevi subito il video corso introduttivo del METODO 4S.https://www.metodo4s.it/corso-gratuito-yt/ALTRI VIDEO SU FACEBOOKhttp://www.facebook.com/giuseppefrancopaginaCANALE PUBLIC SPEAKING PER IL BUSINESShttp://bit.ly/speaking4SSCRIVIMIinfo @ metodo4s.ithttp://telegram.me/giuseppefranco

Uccidi il marketing: killing marketing di Pulizzi e Rosehttp://www.giuseppefranco.itUccidi il marketing: killing marketing di Pulizzi e Rose. Chiariamo subito, l'intento degli autori Joe Pulizzi e Robert Rose non è quello di uccidere propriamente il marketing. E di uccidere il marketing tradizionale, quello che viene inteso come "pubblicità". Il marketing inteso solo e soltanto pubblicità (quindi costi). Invece gli autori costruiscono, ci raccontano, ci fanno vedere alcuni casi studio per capire quanto sia fondamentale avere un proprio centro media personale.Nel senso di creare dei contenuti nostri che appartengono a noi, avere la distribuzione. Noi distribuire i contenuti attraverso un podcast piuttosto che con dei video o con un blog. Avere e produrre continuamente contenuti, in modo da abbassare i costi del marketing classico ed avere così anche un aumento continuo di persone coinvolte, vicine al nostro marchio o brand personale. Ci sono un sacco di spunti interessanti, nel video te ne segnalo tre: 1) Riuscire a capire il nostro pubblico.2) Organizzare eventi e non percorsi finalizzati all'acquisto3) I numeri non sono sempre importantiIn sintesi: smettiamola di pensare al marketing come dei costi ma come un profitto (se fatto bene attraverso i contenuti).Infatti, ogni azienda dovrebbe avere un canale media di proprietà per diffondere i propri contenuti. Per rispondere alle domande dei clienti, creare un gruppo di persone interessate e farsi conoscere sempre di più (video)https://youtu.be/yPlUKMT86A4LINK E APPROFONDIMENTIIl Content Marketing Institute di Joe Pulizzihttps://contentmarketinginstitute.com/Il libro "Uccidi il marketing" su Amazonhttps://amzn.to/2zQ9md3L'edizione italiana è curata da Alessio Beltrami di Content Marketing Italia:https://contentmarketingitalia.com/uccidi-il-marketing/Come creare contenuti: atteggiamento mentale o routine? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryMWz3D_IkU-------------------------------------------------VIDEO GRATUITOIscriviti ai miei consigli quotidiani per comunicare in pubblico e ricevi subito il video corso introduttivo del METODO 4S.https://www.metodo4s.it/corso-gratuito-yt/ALTRI VIDEO SU FACEBOOKhttp://www.facebook.com/giuseppefrancopaginaCANALE PUBLIC SPEAKING PER IL BUSINESShttp://bit.ly/speaking4SSCRIVIMIinfo @ metodo4s.ithttp://telegram.me/giuseppefranco

In today’s episode, you’ll hear from Joe Pulizzi, an expert in content marketing. You’ll learn how content marketing can not only generate leads but become a source of revenue in its own right. Joe Pulizzi is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, a UBM company, the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. Joe is the author of five books including his latest, “Killing Marketing.” His third book, “Epic Content Marketing,” was named one of five must-read business books of 2013 by Fortune magazine. A full transcript of this episode is available here: http://destinationontheleft.com/joe-pulizzi/

Don't miss a beat of healthcare's newest craze! Get a glimpse of the future of healthcare marketing with veteran podcaster Jared Johnson and new co-host Peter Balistrieri, who extend an entertaining invitation to become change agents in your organizations. The two current hospital marketers challenge the thought that healthcare marketing is dead and discuss how best practices are changing as a result of advances in digital engagement.Is this "The End of Advertising As We Know It" as stated by Forrester Research? Should we be "Killing Marketing" like Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose encourage? Has the gap closed to make this "The End of Hospital Marketing" as Chris Bevolo claims in his newest book? The boys discuss these and other topics and then add a little freestyle love at the end. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The truth is that our world as agency owners is in constant flux. Think back to the Mad Men days when we didn’t charge clients anything for creative or strategy. We lived and died off media commissions. That wasn’t hundreds of years ago, that was just a few decades ago. So it’s no big shock that our industry is, yet again, undergoing a transformation. We’ve seen it coming for a while and for many of you, this may be something you’ve already been thinking about or experimenting with inside your shop. Most agencies have been playing footsie with content. Your shop may be the exception but for most agencies, they’re good at creating content in volume but we’ve been too focused on getting done and not the true strategy underneath. It’s time for us (for both ourselves and our clients) to get serious about what thought leadership means, owning a distinct point of view/position and leveraging that point of view to generate revenue. That’s why I was excited to have Robert Rose on the podcast. Robert’s most recent book that he published in September with colleague Joe Pulizzi from Content Marketing Institute is called "Killing Marketing” and it’s going to really stretch your mind in terms of what is possible and what’s coming next for us as agency folks. Robert Rose is the Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of the Content Advisory which is a consulting and advisory group of the Content Marketing Institute. As a strategist, Robert has worked with over 500 companies including global brands like Capital One, Dell, Ernst & Young, HP, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He's the author of three books including "Experiences: The Seventh Era of Marketing," a book about how marketing is shifting. It was called "a treatise and a call-to-arms for marketers to lead business innovation in the 21st Century."   What you’ll learn about in this episode: The rapid changes in the agency business and why those changes are coming more fast and furious than ever before Why agencies need to make a big investment if they want to survive (and why so often they just splash around in the water until it’s too late) Using content marketing to build an audience for your clients based on their specific needs How to use your engaged audience to find more people like them with Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube’s lookalike audiences Why you can’t expect clients to want to work with you if you don’t invest in your own marketing Why Robert believes that your agency blog isn’t usually the best place to host your content (and where you should write instead) Getting back on track when you find yourself falling into the trap of creating generalist content Building client trust by helping them transform into something new Why agencies have always been good at creating stuff for clients but why strategy and measurement need to be our new norm How to start working with a C-Suite level person when your current client contact is not as high up Why a media centric agency is the best kind of agency to build today (and how to retrofit your agency to become a media centric agency) Ways to contact Robert Rose: Website: contentadvisory.net Website: robertrose.net We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Joe Pulizzi is a legend in content marketing and brand storytelling. He's the founder of Content Marketing Institute - the leading education and training organization for content marketing - and the author of five books, including his latest, Killing Marketing. Joe and I last spoke a year or so back and it was great to catch up with him again. Over the course of our conversation, we discussed how content and customer interaction is driving the growing dominance of Amazon amongst the big four online brands, how a company's brand storytelling needs to be aligned with its purpose, and how content marketing is something 99% of businesses are doing wrong. So sit back and enjoy the content marketing wisdom of Joe Pulizzi.

It's been one whole year since this podcast launched on 03-JAN-3017. It would be dishonest of me to say I'm not pleasantly shocked we made it this far. A big THANK YOU to all my guests and supporters for helping me make it this far. During a given season I ask all my guests the same questions. And while that might sound boring, when you ask everyone the same questions it allows you to chart the answers and apply statistical analysis methodologies.  One of the more sensitive questions I ask it about #FakeNews and Facebook's response to this issue on its platform. The answers run the gamut, but on the whole professional marketers are largely unsympathetic. I have a bit more empathy as I argue that #DigitalDiscernment is a life skill with the 2016 U.S. Presidential election being a prime example of why that is.   You'll Learn:  Why I ask my guests the same set of questions. Why guest 53 Isiah Fowler feels we as individuls were responsible for #FakeNews Why guest 57 Joe Pulizzi feel Facebook is a media company and as such has a higher degree of responsibility for the #FakeNews issue.   3 Key Points:  You can't, or at least shouldn't begrudge people for not having a skill that they don't know is a skill. #DigitalDiscernment is a skill. You're not dumb; you were duped. #FakeNews is a complex issue and the layperson was taken advantage of.   Resources Mention:  TMDP 053: Why Success Starts with a Vision with Isiah Fowler TMDP 057: Killing Marketing with Joe Pulizzi   Get New Show Alters in Facebook Messenger! Go to http://bit.ly/mdshowbot to sign up. It's a chatbot and it's pretty cool!   Killer Resources: Ready to go pro but aren't sure if College is the right choice for you? Get my Ultimate Digital Marketing College Guide. Like the podcast? Then you'll love the book! Grab Beyond Buzzwords on Amazon. In the last three months of the 2016 Presidential election fake news outperformed real news on Facebook. DON'T be taken advantage of. Our Digital Discernment course teaches you how to call B.S. online.   Support this podcast: Like what you hear? Consider becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/MarketingDisenchanted. I'm a small, independent podcaster so your support goes a long way in making sure I have the funds to keep the podcast going. Go to Patreon.com and check out my awesome pledge levels. You're doing a good deed and will be rewarded handsomely for it! Thanks in advance.   Like what you hear? Book me to speak!  While podcasting is a personal joy of mine, nothing beats connecting with like-minded people in person. Go to ConsultTemi.com to book me for your next conference, meeting or event.   Let's Connect!  Follow me on Twitter Connect on LinkedIn Shoot me an email: Temi at ConsultTemi.com (Sorry, had to break the email link to stymie the bots… damned bots.)

Joe Pulizzi is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, a UBM company and the leading education and training organization for content marketing. CMI is responsible for producing Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing event in the world. He’s also the author of five books including his latest, Killing Marketing. His third book, Epic Content Marketing was named one of the “Five Must Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine. Quotes To Remember: “There’s a lot of different ways to market a product, but if I’m going to choose one I’d choose content marketing” “If you can build a loyal and trusting audience, you can create 10 different kinds of revenue” “This is a marathon and not a sprint” “It’s all about the subscriber” “There’s nothing like amazing research that’s gonna put you as the most credible resource in the industry” “The audience will absolutely fell you what they will give you money for” “Don’t fall in love with the product, fall in love with your audience” What You’ll Learn: The “Content Tilt”, how to embrace it and find your own. The essentials of marketing. How to build an audience, and what to focus on when monetizing the experience. How to integrate a crucial, yet rarely used marketing tactic beneficially How to grow your brand into a media company How to turn visitors into subscribers to grow your audience.   Key Links From The Show: Killing Marketing -- Joe’s Book Joe’s Site @joepulizzi - Joe’s Twitter Handle   Recommended Books: Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey See Joe’s book in the key links

This was such a fun interview, you won't want to miss it. Douglas interviews Robert Rose and Joe Pulizzi on their newest book, which documents how businesses can turn marketing from an expense into a profit center. Killing Marketing is a book every business should pick up and give some attention as their working on next year's strategies. Marketers are overloaded with platforms and technologies, are shy on resources, and are often underbudgeted. Taking an innovative approach to your marketing efforts can transform that. What if everything we currently know about marketing is what is holding us back? Over the last two decades, we've watched the entire world change the way it buys and stays loyal to brands. But, marketing departments are still operating in the same, campaign-centric, product-led operation that they have been following for 75 years. The most innovative companies around the world have achieved remarkable marketing results by fundamentally changing their approach. By creating value for customers through the use of owned media and the savvy use of content, these businesses have dramatically increased customer loyalty and revenue. Some of them have even taken it to the next step and developed a marketing function that actually pays for itself. Killing Marketing explores how these companies are ending marketing as we know it - in favor of this new, exciting model. Killing Marketing provides the insight, approaches, and examples you need to understand these disruptive forces in ways that turn your marketing from cost center to revenue creator. This book builds the case for, literally, transforming the purpose of marketing within your organization. Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute show how leading companies are able sell the very content that propels their marketing strategy. Special Guests: Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose.

Joe Pulizzi is the founder of Content Marketing Institute which is now a UBM company. It is the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. Joe’s fifth book “Killing Marketing” was just released. His third book, “Epic Content Marketing” was named one of “Five Must-Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine.   What you’ll learn about in this episode: The evolution of content marketing Focusing on your core verticals to help clients out with some part of the process that they’re terrible at How agencies can help clients build an audience of people that knows, likes, and trusts them and how that has a large impact over time Why elevating someone to the status of an expert with content marketing is a long-term process Focusing on clients that already value and have a budget for content marketing How delivering value to prospects on a long-term basis will all you to do business with them without going through an RFP How getting your audience to know, like, and trust you with content marketing will allow you to sell easily Some of the many different ways to monetize your customer list Changing the defined idea of marketing to match consumer behavior Why you can’t be everything to everybody and need to focus on a niche Why your sliver of opportunity to get started in on a niche is right now Ways to contact Joe Pulizzi: Twitter: @joepulizzi Website: www.joepulizzi.com We’re proud to announce that Hubspot is now the presenting sponsor of the Build A Better Agency podcast! Many thanks to them for their support!

Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, and podcaster. He's the founder of multiple startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014 and 2015. CMI is responsible for producing Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing event in the world (held every September in Cleveland, Ohio), as well as the leading content marketing magazine, Chief Content Officer. Joe has spoken at more than 400 locations in 16 countries advancing the practice of content marketing. He's delivered keynote speeches for events and organizations including SXSW, NAMM, Fortune Magazine's Leadership Summit, Nestle, General Motors, Oracle, DuPont, SAP, HP and Dell. You can hear Joe on his podcasts, “This Old Marketing” and “Content Inc.”. If you ever meet him in person, he'll be wearing orange. Follow Joe on Twitter @JoePulizzi. He can also be found on LinkedIn and www.joepulizzi.com.   You'll Learn: Joe's entrepreneurial path that led him to found Content Marketing Institute. Just how close Joe came to packing it in. How Content Marketing World became the largest conference of it's kind in the world. Why Joe thinks CMO's need to “kill” marketing as they know it. Joe's commitment to diversity in the Content Marketing World conference.   3 Key Points: Facebook is a media company Diversity matters. CMO's need to “kill” their existing marketing org structure and adopt a new model.   Resources Mention: Killing Marketing by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose   Get New Show Alters in Facebook Messenger! Go to http://bit.ly/mdshowbot to sign up. It's a chatbot and it's pretty cool!   Killer Resources: Ready to go pro but aren't sure if College is the right choice for you? Get my Ultimate Digital Marketing College Guide. Like the podcast? Then you'll love the book! Grab Beyond Buzzwords on Amazon. In the last three months of the 2016 Presidential election fake news outperformed real news on Facebook. DON'T be taken advantage of. Our Digital Discernment course teaches you how to call B.S. online.   Support this podcast: Like what you hear? Consider becoming a patron at https://www.patreon.com/MarketingDisenchanted. I'm a small, independent podcaster so your support goes a long way in making sure I have the funds to keep the podcast going. Go to Patreon.com and check out my awesome pledge levels. You're doing a good deed and will be rewarded handsomely for it! Thanks in advance.   Like what you hear? Book me to speak! While podcasting is a personal joy of mine, nothing beats connecting with like-minded people in person. Go to ConsultTemi.com to book me for your next conference, meeting or event.   Let's Connect! Follow me on Twitter Connect on LinkedIn Shoot me an email: Temi at ConsultTemi.com (Sorry, had to break the email link to stymie the bots… damned bots.)

Será que os departamentos de marketing podem se reinventar e começar a gerar um novo tipo de receita?O livro Killing Marketing foi lançado em setembro de 2017 e apresentou uma proposta diferente.Se você não ouviu o podcast anterior, de número 31, vale a pena pausar agora este podcast. Vai lá, ouve o 31 e volta aqui, que você vai entender melhor o contexto da entrevista de hoje.Voltando ao livro Killing Marketing, os autores Joe Pulizzi e Robert Rose sugerem que o marketing seja uma unidade geradora de receita.Pedi ao Joe que explicasse, com suas próprias palavras, do que trata o livro."Killing Marketing é meu quinto livro e foi escrito com o Robert Rose, estrategista do Content Marketing Institute.O ponto de partida é inédito para nós, pois trata de um tema sobre o qual nunca escrevemos antes.O livro apresenta um modelo de negócios.O foco é a seguinte questão: content marketing e a construção de públicos podem de fato ser um novo modelo de negócios?De fato, esse modelo proposto enxerga o marketing como uma área geradora de lucro.A maioria dos estrategistas e dos autores de marketing vai achar isso uma loucura.Eles vão responder algo como ‘marketing se destina a vender mais produtos e serviços’.Mas nós realmente vemos que os modelos de negócios de vanguarda tratam, sim, o marketing como uma área geradora de lucro.Por isso, acredito que estejamos vivendo hoje o melhor momento para se trabalhar como profissional de marketing."O meu takeaway de hoje é o seguinte:O marketing tem cumprido as mesmas funções há 60 anos.Algumas empresas, como RedBull, Lego e TAM, encontraram um jeito de fazer o marketing ser um gerador de receitas. Essa pode ser uma tendência de mercado e, por isso, nós devemos ficar atentos a ela.http://takeaways.com.br/032

Será que os departamentos de marketing podem se reinventar e começar a gerar um novo tipo de receita?O livro Killing Marketing foi lançado em setembro de 2017 e apresentou uma proposta diferente.Se você não ouviu o podcast anterior, de número 31, vale a pena pausar agora este podcast. Vai lá, ouve o 31 e volta aqui, que você vai entender melhor o contexto da entrevista de hoje.Voltando ao livro Killing Marketing, os autores Joe Pulizzi e Robert Rose sugerem que o marketing seja uma unidade geradora de receita.Pedi ao Joe que explicasse, com suas próprias palavras, do que trata o livro."Killing Marketing é meu quinto livro e foi escrito com o Robert Rose, estrategista do Content Marketing Institute.O ponto de partida é inédito para nós, pois trata de um tema sobre o qual nunca escrevemos antes.O livro apresenta um modelo de negócios.O foco é a seguinte questão: content marketing e a construção de públicos podem de fato ser um novo modelo de negócios?De fato, esse modelo proposto enxerga o marketing como uma área geradora de lucro.A maioria dos estrategistas e dos autores de marketing vai achar isso uma loucura.Eles vão responder algo como ‘marketing se destina a vender mais produtos e serviços’.Mas nós realmente vemos que os modelos de negócios de vanguarda tratam, sim, o marketing como uma área geradora de lucro.Por isso, acredito que estejamos vivendo hoje o melhor momento para se trabalhar como profissional de marketing."O meu takeaway de hoje é o seguinte:O marketing tem cumprido as mesmas funções há 60 anos.Algumas empresas, como RedBull, Lego e TAM, encontraram um jeito de fazer o marketing ser um gerador de receitas. Essa pode ser uma tendência de mercado e, por isso, nós devemos ficar atentos a ela.http://takeaways.com.br/032

O mundo mudou bastante nos últimos 60 anos, não é? Mas você já parou para pensar que a função do marketing dentro das empresas não mudou praticamente nada nas últimas 6 décadas?Os autores do livro Killing Marketing, Robert Rose e Joe Pulizzi, propõem uma mudança na função do marketing.Para eles, o marketing tem a oportunidade de deixar de ser um suporte para vendas para ser uma unidade geradora de receita.Só que, para isso, precisa ter uma mudança drástica na cultura de marketing.Mais ou menos como aconteceu no cinema.Eu me refiro a Star Wars. O diretor de cinema George Lucas ganhou notoriedade em 1973 com o sucesso do filme Loucuras de Verão.Logo em seguida, entrou de cabeça no projeto de Star Wars.Só que a direção da Fox não acreditava em Star Wars.Os diretores achavam que tinha muitos lançamentos de ficção científica naquele momento.Para reduzir os custos de produção, fizeram uma proposta ao George Lucas: em vez de pagar os US$ 500 mil de cachê, cederiam a ele os direitos de merchandising do filme.Porque merchandising não gerava muito dinheiro.Entre 1977, quando o filme foi lançado, e 2015, quando a Disney lançou a nova versão de Star Wars, merchandising deu muito mais dinheiro do que bilheteria.Para ser mais exato: * Em bilheteria, a fox faturou 5 bilhões de dólares nesses 18 anos de Star Wars.* Em merchandising, George Lucas embolsou 12 bilhões de dólares no mesmo período.O que isso quer dizer? Que o mercado da época só acreditava em receitas de bilheteria. Mas George Lucas encarou o negócio de uma forma totalmente diferente, o que mudou a indústria do cinema para sempre.Será que o marketing não precisa fazer o mesmo? Será que o marketing não pode mudar o mindset? Tem alguns bons exemplos no mercado.A Red Bull, por exemplo, tem uma revista chamada Red Bulletin. A tiragem é de 2 milhões de exemplares, incluindo os 550 mil pagantes. Ela gera receita para a Red BullE outras empresas começam a fazer o mesmo.O meu takeaway de hoje é o seguinte:O marketing hoje gera conteúdo. Se o conteúdo for valioso, ele pode fazer mais do que ajudar a empresa a vender seu produto. Ele pode ser um gerador de receita por si só.Quer ver um exemplo bem nacional? A TAM vende passagens aéreas certo? Pois bem, a revista da TAM vende publicidade. E não apenas se paga como gera receita para a TAM.Essa é a tendência apresentada no livro Killing Marketing.http://takeaways.com.br/031Esse endereço vai levar você para uma página que tem os links do Podcast de hoje e um material muito aprofundado sobre tendências de mercado.No podcast seguinte a este, de número 33, eu trago uma entrevista com o Joe Pulizzi falando sobre o livro.Até o próximo programa!Links:http://takeaways.com.br/

O mundo mudou bastante nos últimos 60 anos, não é? Mas você já parou para pensar que a função do marketing dentro das empresas não mudou praticamente nada nas últimas 6 décadas?Os autores do livro Killing Marketing, Robert Rose e Joe Pulizzi, propõem uma mudança na função do marketing.Para eles, o marketing tem a oportunidade de deixar de ser um suporte para vendas para ser uma unidade geradora de receita.Só que, para isso, precisa ter uma mudança drástica na cultura de marketing.Mais ou menos como aconteceu no cinema.Eu me refiro a Star Wars. O diretor de cinema George Lucas ganhou notoriedade em 1973 com o sucesso do filme Loucuras de Verão.Logo em seguida, entrou de cabeça no projeto de Star Wars.Só que a direção da Fox não acreditava em Star Wars.Os diretores achavam que tinha muitos lançamentos de ficção científica naquele momento.Para reduzir os custos de produção, fizeram uma proposta ao George Lucas: em vez de pagar os US$ 500 mil de cachê, cederiam a ele os direitos de merchandising do filme.Porque merchandising não gerava muito dinheiro.Entre 1977, quando o filme foi lançado, e 2015, quando a Disney lançou a nova versão de Star Wars, merchandising deu muito mais dinheiro do que bilheteria.Para ser mais exato: * Em bilheteria, a fox faturou 5 bilhões de dólares nesses 18 anos de Star Wars.* Em merchandising, George Lucas embolsou 12 bilhões de dólares no mesmo período.O que isso quer dizer? Que o mercado da época só acreditava em receitas de bilheteria. Mas George Lucas encarou o negócio de uma forma totalmente diferente, o que mudou a indústria do cinema para sempre.Será que o marketing não precisa fazer o mesmo? Será que o marketing não pode mudar o mindset? Tem alguns bons exemplos no mercado.A Red Bull, por exemplo, tem uma revista chamada Red Bulletin. A tiragem é de 2 milhões de exemplares, incluindo os 550 mil pagantes. Ela gera receita para a Red BullE outras empresas começam a fazer o mesmo.O meu takeaway de hoje é o seguinte:O marketing hoje gera conteúdo. Se o conteúdo for valioso, ele pode fazer mais do que ajudar a empresa a vender seu produto. Ele pode ser um gerador de receita por si só.Quer ver um exemplo bem nacional? A TAM vende passagens aéreas certo? Pois bem, a revista da TAM vende publicidade. E não apenas se paga como gera receita para a TAM.Essa é a tendência apresentada no livro Killing Marketing.http://takeaways.com.br/031Esse endereço vai levar você para uma página que tem os links do Podcast de hoje e um material muito aprofundado sobre tendências de mercado.No podcast seguinte a este, de número 33, eu trago uma entrevista com o Joe Pulizzi falando sobre o livro.Até o próximo programa!Links:http://takeaways.com.br/

Joe Pulizzi is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, and is known as the Godfather of Content Marketing. His book “Content Inc.” inspired the start of this podcast. Content Marketing Institute is the largest education and and training organization for content marketing, which also includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Pulizzi is the author of Epic Content Marketing, which was named as one of the must read business books of 2013 by Fortune. He’s also the author Content Inc., and co-author of the September 2017 release, Killing Marketing. He is the founder of Content Marketing Institute and Content Marketing World. In this conversation, we talk about what Content Marketing is, and how artists can use it to build their brands, and turn themselves into powerful media companies. Keep in touch:chris.goyzueta@gmail.com www.makingitwithchrisg.com https://www.instagram.com/chrisgoyzueta/ https://www.facebook.com/makingitwithchrisg  Credits: Host: Chris G. Producer: Jason TrosclairExecutive Producer: ONElive Creative Agency  Music: Emily Kopp

Welcome to episode #585 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast.  Here it is: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast - Episode #585 - Host: Mitch Joel. This conversation should have happened years ago. When I think about content marketing, I think about Robert Rose (and his co-author/business in crime buddy, Joe Pullizi, of course). To state what Robert Rose does is simple: he helps marketers become stellar storytellers. But that's really not even the half of it. For more than 25 years, Robert has been at the forefront of marketing and content marketing. He is currently the Chief Strategy Officer for The Content Advisory, the education and consulting group for The Content Marketing Institute, and is deeply involved in Content Marketing World. Robert also co-hosts the amazing podcast, PNR's This Old Marketing, with Joe. He is also an investor and advisor to startups like Akoonu, DivvyHQ and Tint. Most recently, he published his third book, Killing Marketing, with co-author Joe Pulizzi. His two other books were Experiences - The Seventh Era of Marketing and Managing Content Marketing. So, is it time to kill marketing? You be the judge. Enjoy the conversation... Running time: 1:02:32. Hello from beautiful Montreal. Subscribe over at iTunes. Please visit and leave comments on the blog - Six Pixels of Separation. Feel free to connect to me directly on Facebook here: Mitch Joel on Facebook. or you can connect on LinkedIn. ...or on twitter. Six Pixels of Separation the book is now available. CTRL ALT Delete is now available too! Here is my conversation with Robert Rose. Killing Marketing. Experiences - The Seventh Era of Marketing. Managing Content Marketing. The Content Advisory. The Content Marketing Institute. Content Marketing World. This Old Marketing. Follow Robert on Twitter. This week's music: David Usher 'St. Lawrence River'. Download the Podcast here: Six Pixels Of Separation - The Mirum Podcast - Episode #585 - Host: Mitch Joel. Tags: advertising advertising podcast akoonu audio blog blogging brand branding business blog business book business podcast business thinker chief strategy officer cmi content content marketing content marketing institute content marketing world cso david usher digital marketing digital marketing agency digital marketing blog divvyhq experiences facebook google itunes j walter thompson joe pullizi jwt killing marketing leadership podcast management podcast managing content marketing marketer marketing marketing blog marketing podcast mirum mirum agency mirum agency blog mirum blog mirum podcast pnr robert rose social media storyteller storytelling the content advisory the seventh era of marketing this old marketing this old marketing podcast tint twitter wpp

Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute and the veritable godfather of content marketing, is this week's guest. Joe and Robert Rose have just released their new book "Killing Marketing," and the concepts are a breath of fresh air for anyone who feels their content marketing efforts getting stale. Listen as Joe candidly explains, as only he can, how certain parts of your marketing strategy deserve to be killed and how you can build a thriving business — and career — as a strategic marketer. Tweet @youngheike or @marketingcloud with your thoughts on this episode or ideas for a future topic.

Robert Rose is one of the content marketing industry's best thinkers. He and Joe Pulizzi have teamed up to write a new book, Killing Marketing, which looks at how the world's most innovative businesses are turning content marketing from a cost into a profitable centre. Sarah Mitchell and Dan Hatch caught up with Robert at Content Marketing World. This is the last of our special podcasts from Cleveland, Ohio. James and Nic will be back next week, we promise. Here's a link to Killing Marketing.

"Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses Are Turning Marketing Cost Into Profit" by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose   Click here to view the show notes! https://www.salesartillery.com/marketing-book-podcast/Killing-Marketing-Joe-Pulizzi

I recently sat down with Joe Pulizzi, Founder and CEO of Content Marketing Institute. We discussed his new book Killing Marketing, which is essentially about making marketing a profit center. Don’t believe me? Read on or watch my video conversation with Joe below. View the show notes page: http://www.socialbusinessengine.com/podcasts/marketing-profit-center

Most business owners know the importance of curating, creating, and sharing standout content. And yet 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.   Joe Pulizzi is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, a UBM company, the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. Plus he’s a speaker, podcaster, and the author of five books, including his latest, Killing Marketing coming out in September. If it wasn’t clear at this point: Joe is a serious content expert.   Follow along as Joe contemplates the wild ride of building a business, explains what’s wrong with marketing today, and offers his one-of-a-kind advice for revamping how you communicate with your customers.   In This Episode A way to approach new business ideas that decrease your risk Why it’s time to kill marketing as it stands today How to create a direct line of communication with your customers What makes podcasting a near-perfect medium The importance of unplugging from technology   Quotes in This Episode “[An entrepreneur] is a special type of person. You have to get used to ups and downs, more downs than ups. And you kind of struggle through it, you're patient, and hopefully everything'll work out and things take care of itself.” —Joe Pulizzi   “[Most businesses] consider [content] a business asset, but they're not focusing on the core of what that asset is. It's not the content, it's the audience. Your asset is building an audience.” —Joe Pulizzi   “People want to know why their marketing is less efficient, why CMOs keep getting turned over, why the marketing profession isn't as respected as, let's say, accounting or another field like that. It's because we can't get out of our own way right now.” —Joe Pulizzi   “Content marketing is not new, it's old. It's been around for hundreds of years.” —Joe Pulizzi   “I'm a better person—I'm a better man—without technology.” —Joe Pulizzi   Resources Connect with Joe on Twitter Find Joe’s books on joepulizzi.com Content Marketing Institute Content Marketing World Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven Covey The 10X Rule by Grant Cardone

Joe Pulizzi is considered by many to be the "godfather" of content marketing. He's the founder of the Content Marketing Institute, a leading education and training organization for content marketing. CMI puts on Content Marketing World, the largest in-person content marketing event in the world. It’s the one event where you can learn and network with the best and the brightest in the content marketing industry. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council.  He is the author of five books, including his latest, Killing Marketing coming September 2017. His third book, Epic Content Marketing was named one of “Five Must Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine. More past and upcoming episodes of Mitch's podcast can be found at MitchJacksonPodcast.com

Joe and Robert cover why a number of publishers are cutting their own advertising and how Fender is taking a page from "Killing Marketing" and developing their own guitar lessons. Joe cuts in early for a rant about Gary V's latest post and why it's bad advice for marketers. Robert then rants about programmatic and raves about Deloitte. This week's TOM example: UBS. This week's story links: Online Publishers Try Reducing Ads to Boost Revenue https://www.wsj.com/articles/online-publishers-try-reducing-ads-to-boost-revenue-1499940061 Fender Strums Up Demand With Guitar Lessons http://brandchannel.com/2017/07/10/fender-play-071017/ The Hack: Having a Media Company Mentality https://medium.com/@garyvee/the-hack-having-a-media-company-mentality-53d66a2e8207 SHOW SPONSOR - CONTENT MARKETING WORLD - Summer rates end July 21st. http://contentmarketingworld.com RANTS AND RAVEShttps://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/304043/programmatic-buying-declines-12-in-q1.html? http://adage.com/article/agency-news/deloitte-s-heat-wins-john-hancock-manulife-global-creative/309746/ THIS OLD MARKETING - UBS https://www.unlimited.world/ https://www.marketingweek.com/2017/07/11/reaching-purpose-driven-millionaires/

“I'm the first one to say follow your passion, but sometimes you just can't monetize your passion. You got to realize that!” Joe Pulizzi Thank you for joining us once again listeners and are we excited today to let you know about our guest. Today, we have the man who is known as the Godfather of Content Marketing, Joe Pulizzi on our show!  Joe started Content Marketing Institute back in 2007 and later started Cheif Content Officer Magazine and Content Marketing World. These have become the leading education and training organizations for content marketing as well as the largest in-person content marketing event in the world. There are few people in the content marketing world that haven't heard about Joe and today we got to pick his mind for almost an hour. Joe will share with us what it is like after selling his business that he built for nine years. We talk about why it might be a bad idea to fall in love with your products and services. Joe shares about how he would build a community in today's world, and some practical tips about building a seven-figure location independent entrepreneur. 02:00: Joe's Taking His First Vacation Completely Offline 02:41: Joe On Balancing His Life Never Taking Time Offline for 10 Years 06:47: How Joe Became the Godfather of Content Marketing 15:56: Should You Fall in Love With Your Products/Services? 20:54: Building a Community in Today's World 23:58: The Future of Content Marketing 33:22: Changing From the Idea of an Office Space Business to a Location-Independent Business 35:53: 6-Figure Mentality vs. 7-Figure Mentality 38:06: Joe on Hitting Monetary Goals 41:40: Life After Selling a 9-Year Business “Media companies have been doing this for 200 years. They focus on building one property on one content platform they do it really well. They build an audience, and then they diversify.” Joe Pulizzi Honorable Mentions: Content Marketing Institute http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/ Cheif Content Officer Magazine http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/chief-content-officer/ Content Marketing World http://www.contentmarketingworld.com/ UBM Events Company in London http://www.ubm.com/ ‘Killing Marketing' by Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose https://www.amazon.com/Killing-Marketing-Joe-Pulizzi/dp/1260026426 ‘Content Inc.' by Joe Pulizzi https://www.amazon.es/Content-Inc-Entrepreneurs-Successful-Businesses/dp/125958965X Contact Info: http://www.joepulizzi.com/ Twitter: @joepulizzi https://twitter.com/JoePulizzi Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/entrepreneur-house-live-in/id1069958541?mt=2

Who said a discussion about Intelligent Content can't be as entertaining as it is educational? Definitely not our team at Enterprise Marketer! In our 50th episode of the podcast, Jeff Julian hosts and Pamela Muldoon deals a game of Texas Holdem with our special guest Joe Pulizzi, Andrea Ames, Carlos Abler, and Vishal Khanna. During the show we talk about the future, insights from a new author, define what a Content Engineer is, and have a great time.CONTENT OFFERS We hope you enjoy this content from the Intelligent Content Conference. If you would like access to the amazing session recordings from the event, check out this offer from the Content Marketing Institute: http://contentmarketing.go2cloud.org/SHEThis year, we will be back at Content Marketing World, recording more shows and teaching people about video marketing in our podcast booth. If you would like to join us and save $100 on your registration, visit this page to register: http://contentmarketing.go2cloud.org/SHGBIOGRAPHIESJoe Pulizzi - Joe Pulizzi is the founder of Content Marketing Institute, a UBM company, the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council. Joe’s the author of five books, including his latest, Killing Marketing coming September 2017. His third book, Epic Content Marketing was named one of “Five Must Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine. You can find Joe on Twitter @JoePulizzi. If you ever see Joe in person, he’ll be wearing orange.Vishal Khanna - For the majority of his 15+ year career in marketing, Vishal Khanna has been his organization’s only resource for marketing, communications and media relations. He received the 2015 Content Marketer of the Year award for his groundbreaking work in science content marketing. A former North Carolina Writers’ Fellow, he is currently the marketing and communications resource at HealthPrize Technologies, a digital patient engagement and brand loyalty platform for pharmaceutical brands.Andrea Ames - Andrea L. Ames, M.S., is a Senior Technical Staff Member and Enterprise Content Experience Strategist/Architect/Designer at IBM, where she enables strategic use of IBM's high-value content assets for the most client delight and success and highest business impact. She is a Fellow and past President (2004-05) of STC, a Distinguished Engineer of the ACM (the first technical communicator to achieve this distinction), a Senior Member of the IEEE, and a member of numerous other professional associations. She is the Program Chair for, and designed and teaches in, the UCSC in Silicon Valley certificate program in technical communication; has published two award-winning technical books and numerous papers and articles; and speaks regularly at conferences and professional organization meetings.Carlos Abler - Carlos Abler is Leader of Online Content Strategy for 3M Global eTransformation. Carlos leads a content marketing enablement framework called Content-2-Customer (c2c). C2C supports acceleration of content culture, focusing on champions and initiatives emerging from leadership, corporate CoEs, business service groups, divisions and vendors; activating roadmaps of content excellence cross-functionally and on a global basis. Carlos has a 30 year track record of directing and creating mixed media communications, in a wide variety of disciplines, for a diverse range of clients and purposes; including marketing, theater, entertainment, education, information design and civil society initiatives. Past clients include, Thomson Reuters, Microsoft, General Mills, AARP, Johnson&Johnson, History Channel, Smithsonian, Columbia University and Gyuto Tantric University. Awards include Webby Awards, WSIS World Summit Award, Bronze Anvil, W3 (Gold, Silver, Best in Show) and Communication Arts Interactive Annual for Information Design.Pamela Muldoon - Pamela Muldoon brings over three decades of marketing and media experience to her various roles in the content marketing industry. Her passion is helping brands and individuals get the right content in front of the right audience at the right time. As a content strategist she works with B2B companies to tell a better story while ensuring sales and marketing work together to reach their audience. She merges her background of radio, voice over and podcasting as a consultant and coach, believing that audio is still the most intimate form of content you can produce.

My guest today is an author, fan of the color orange, and an entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of Content Marketing Institute, and the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. He founded the company back in 2007 and spent nine years growing and scaling the business until it was acquired in June of 2016. During this time, my guest also published four massively successful books on marketing with content. His fifth book, Killing Marketing, set to launch September 2017. In this conversation, we discuss the true value of writing down your goals in the present tense, how CMI began monetizing its blog, and why now if the best time to start. Now, let’s hack… Joe Pulizzi.

Joe Pulizzi Show Notes Joe Pulizzi is founder of Content Marketing Institute, a UBM company, the leading education and training organization for content marketing, which includes the largest in-person content marketing event in the world, Content Marketing World. Joe is the winner of the 2014 John Caldwell Lifetime Achievement Award from the Content Council.   Joe’s the author of four books, including his latest Content Inc.  His third book, Epic Content Marketing was named one of “Five Must Read Business Books of 2013” by Fortune Magazine. You can find Joe on Twitter @JoePulizzi. If you ever see Joe in person, he’ll be wearing orange. Most passionate about today I have a lot of passions, probably my family is the number one. I got two boys, 13 and 15 years old, they occupy as much of my time as possible these days. I also co-founded a foundation called the Orange Effect Foundation that basically re-raise funds for children with speech therapy needs. Most of those children are on the autism spectrum. Starting on 2018 I’ll probably not do as much as I’m doing right now at Content Marketing Institute, the company I started on 2007 and had a successful exit on June 2016. Of course I’ll always stay involved with the Content Marketing World events and in the company, but I have a new book coming out on September 17 called Killing Marketing so I’ll be going and doing speeches all over the world and I’ll probably going to spend as much time with my kids before they go out to university. Killing Marketing will be my 5th book, I’m co-writing this book with Mr. Robert Rose My co-host on our podcast “This Old Marketing” and the Chief Strategy advisor for Content Marketing Institute. Right now we are going to the final editing stages and the book will be launched in early September 2017 at the Content Marketing World event in Cleveland Ohio. The idea behind Killing Marketing is the belief that we are doing marketing wrong and we should position marketing as a true profit center. You should set up marketing in such a way to build a loyal audience over time so you can monetize that audience. Your company I’m sort of the evangelist for content marketing. I‘ve been doing this for 20 years trying to talk to small and big companies about how they can build audiences through valuable content creation in order to see some profitable behavior changes. I started in the content business on 2000, started my own company on 2007 and we just had an exit on 2016. I still work in content marketing institute. We sold it to UBM the largest events media company in the world and It’s has been a pleasure working with UBM people. Your customers  For me personally I have a couple of different audiences that I enjoy working with, my last book Content Inc. was targeted to founders, startups and small-Medium business owners. For Content Marketing Institute our core audiences are marketing executives and directors at the largest companies in the world. For Content Marketing World we will get Microsoft, Cisco, Apple and Google and large B2B business companies. This is the 7th year of Content Marketing World event. We started in 2011 hoped for 100 people and we were blessed to have 600 delegates coming to Cleveland Ohio, and this year we are going to have 4000 delegates from more than 72 countries all over the world. Joe’s best advice about approaching the customer I see things a little bit differently than most of the books and sought leaders around the entrepreneurial space. Most business have a really good idea for product or service and they structure the entire company around that product or service, and the problem is that most of the companies has to pivot and change everything. My belief is that a better way to launch your company is around a particular audience. It’s fine to have the great idea for product or service in mind, but let’s focus on the audience, on the customer’s needs what are their pain...

Robert Rose, the Chief Strategy Officer for the Content Advisory, joined us on the podcast this week! Robert has worked with more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100 and has provided marketing advice for brands like Capital One, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and others. He is also a co-host of the podcast PNR's This Old Marketing - which is consistently ranked as a top marketing podcast with more than one million downloads a year. Robert has written two books, "Experiences: The 7th Era of Marketing" & "Managing Content Marketing", with a third due out later this year called "Killing Marketing." We have been big fans of Robert Rose for quite a while now and we were able to grab an hour of his time to talk a variety of marketing topics including: social media, live video, programmatic advertising, but mainly focusing on content marketing and storytelling for your business. Plus, we learn about his show that appeared on Showtime as well as a play that made a run on Broadway!

As digital marketers we are all obsessed with data, right? Prove this! ROI that! But is this killing our mojo and actually hurting our business growth?Also in Weekly Roundup:Facebook offers split testing on ad campaigns, Facebook now flags and down-rates fake news with the help from outside fact checkers and 9 Huge Digital Trends That Helped Shape 2016's Triumphs and Struggles.