#188: Joe Pulizzi (Tilt Publishing & Content Entrepreneur Expo) — Content Marketing, Community, and Cleveland

Joe Pulizzi [00:00:00]:
This is the greatest time you could ever be alive in the history of the world. We have so many benefits. We have so many opportunities. And with our topic here, being a content creator, you can positively affect or negatively, which is terrible, but you can positively affect somebody on the other side of the world on any topic that you have a passion for or some kind of knowledge for, and and I think that's just incredible today.

Jeffrey Stern [00:00:27]:
Let's discover what people are building in the Greater Cleveland community. We are telling the stories of Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs, builders, and those supporting them. Welcome to the Lay of the Land podcast, podcast, where we are exploring what people are building in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio. I am your host, Jeffrey Stern. And today, I had the real pleasure of speaking with Joe Pulizzi. Joe is a serial entrepreneur and deeply passionate about all things content marketing and content entrepreneurship. He is the best selling author of 7 books including Content Inc, selling over 500,000 copies worldwide with his work featured in the New York Times, Insider, Entrepreneur, and other notable publications. He hosts multiple podcasts and writes Orange Letter, a weekly newsletter with over 50,000 subscribers delivering actionable life, marketing, and business tips for content entrepreneurs.

Jeffrey Stern [00:01:23]:
And he's also the founder of multiple successful startups, including the Content Entrepreneur Expo, which is hosted here in Cleveland, where Joe and his family live. The Content Marketing Institute, which he successfully exited in 2016. Content Marketing World, and The Tilt, where he's crafting the future of publishing, providing authors with the tools, support, and platform to turn their stories into published successes. The thread that ties Joe's work together is content marketing. A term which he first used in 2001 and has championed since. In just a few minutes of talking with Joe, it is easy to grasp why he's amassed 100 of thousands of followers across social media platforms like LinkedIn, x, and others. So please enjoy this awesome and informative conversation with Joe Pulizzi after a brief message from our sponsor. Lay of the Land is brought to you by John Carroll University's Boulder College of Business, widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the region.

Jeffrey Stern [00:02:22]:
As we've heard time and time again from entrepreneurs here on Lay of the Land, many of whom are proud alumni of John Carroll University, success in this ever changing world of business requires a dynamic and innovative mindset, deep understanding of emerging technologies and systems, strong ethics, leadership prowess, acute business acumen, all qualities nurtured through the Bowler College of Business. With 4 different MBA programs of study spanning professional, online, hybrid, and 1 year flexible, the Bowler College of Business provides flexible timelines and various class structures for each MBA track, including online, in person, hybrid, and asynchronous. All to offer the most effective options for you, including the ability to participate in an elective international study tour providing unparalleled opportunities to expand your global business knowledge by networking with local companies overseas and experiencing a new culture. The career impact of a bowler MBA is formative and will help prepare you for this future of business and get more out of your career. To learn more about John Carroll University's Buller MBA programs, please go to business.jcu.edu. The Buller College of Business is fully accredited by AACSB International, the highest accreditation a college of business can have. For today's conversation, I was thinking if someone were to ask me what some of the core themes of the podcast have been, something I could extract from now hundreds of CEOs reflecting on their journeys. There is no way around calling out the the power and art of storytelling.

Jeffrey Stern [00:04:00]:
You know, you you really can't have entrepreneurship without it. And so when I have been thinking about your world and what you've evangelized and what we call today, you know, content marketing, which I am excited to unpack in a higher fidelity level of detail with you, the idea that companies, brands, founders can and should now own their own storytelling audience distribution. I'm very excited to hear, you know, your story, how your thoughts on storytelling have evolved, the, you know, kind of greater evolution of thinking that you've had through this journey of building companies centered around this theme of of content marketing and and storytelling.

Joe Pulizzi [00:04:42]:
It's funny we're even talking about content marketing as a thing because when I started in in media in the nineties, when somebody said or thought marketing, you immediately go to advertising. Immediately paid me. And, by the way, it's it's still much, much larger than corporate storytelling or content marketing. I mean, if you look at just the budget spent, advertising is the sun, and content marketing is Pluto. It's not even a planet. So let's put that in perspective. But now, as you know, every company out there has somebody on their team, if not tens or hundreds of people that are all gathered around. How do we create valuable relevant information on an ongoing basis to whoever their target is? And, of course, a company has multiple audiences or multiple customer bases, and they're trying to drive leads or they're trying to keep them loyal or they're trying to charge them more money or whatever the marketing goal is.

Joe Pulizzi [00:05:40]:
But, yeah, when I started back in publishing in the day, it wasn't a thing because it was a media thing. That's what media companies do. Right. Nobody realized that, oh, yeah, 20 years later, 20 25 years later, the marketing departments for these large enterprises, wherever they're situated around the world, the marketing departments look just like media companies. It's the same exact model. They're different depending on how they make money. New York Times and, let's say, Cisco Systems, they really have the same internal processes when it comes to storytelling. It's just that New York Times makes makes most of their money off of advertising and subscriptions, and Cisco make money off selling more routers or whatever they're doing.

Joe Pulizzi [00:06:20]:
So it's just interesting.

Jeffrey Stern [00:06:21]:
It is very interesting, and there's many more threads to pull on there, which we will in a moment. But I I wanna ground, you know, that conversation with, you know, your personal journey and understand a bit of what attracted you to this space in the first place and kind of the evolution of of your career through it.

Joe Pulizzi [00:06:38]:
Well, since this you know, you've got mostly Cleveland listeners here, you know, they'll appreciate. I I graduated, I went to Bowling Green State University, got my bachelor's degree, did a quick internship for the Cleveland Cavs because I wanted to get into sports marketing, Quickly realized that all the money goes to the athletes at a very core portion of the executive team, and I'm like, wow. The like, the job that I wanted to get when I was interning at the Cavs, the guy was working, like, 80 hours a week making nothing, you know, sharing an apartment, and I'm like, wow. That's really tough. I is there a better way? So I'm like, okay. Well, what do I do? And I luckily applied for a teaching assistantship at Penn State University for public speaking. And, basically, I had to teach 4 semesters of public speaking, and I could get my master's degree. And I thought, this is fantastic, and I majored in rhetoric.

Joe Pulizzi [00:07:29]:
So Aristotle and Plato and all that good stuff. So I was really interested in it, but I came out in 97 with a master's degree and no experience. And I came back to Cleveland because my fiancee at the time, now wife, she's a social worker. She got a job. We both met at Bowling Green. So basically met back in Cleveland, Ohio, and I'm like, I had a really difficult time finding a job. It's interesting to see my 2 kids now look for jobs. I remember sending out hundreds and hundreds of resumes in the mail just trying to find something.

Joe Pulizzi [00:08:00]:
I couldn't find anything because they're like, oh, you have a master's degree and no experience. You can't do sales. You can't do communications. You can't do PR. You can't do marketing. What what are you gonna do? So I started temping, and I temp for, like, 6 months. I got into different banks around Cleveland, and I started to do a lot of administrative work. And I was just happy to have a job, and I fell into this internal communications job at Medical Mutual of Ohio, which at that time, they were look I think that maybe they still are, but they're moving from the Rose Building downtown Cleveland to another location.

Joe Pulizzi [00:08:33]:
And I worked there for 3 years learning the inner workings of internal comms at a large insurance company and then fell into the biggest moment in my career. Got, some relationships over at Penton Media and started working at Penton Media in the beginning of 2000. And Pet Media at that time was the largest business to business media company in the United States. So they had about 45 or 50 verticals from HVAC to fire protection to machine design to all the food processing, the whole thing. Like, you'd never know unless you were in those industries, and they had the key magazine or event. And I slipped in there into this little department that nobody cared about called Penton Custom Media. And what Penton Custom Media did is they told they helped brands like Microsoft and Cisco Systems and associations like the American Heart Association or whatever create their own magazines, newsletters, then webinars, then podcasts, then social media, then all that stuff. And that's sort of where I learned, wow.

Joe Pulizzi [00:09:41]:
This is this is gonna be a thing is, oh my. There's Google. Well, people need to be found on Google. Oh, and there's social. People need to tell us what are they gonna put in all these pipes? And that's when I started to realize, wow, this is where I wanna spend the rest of my career. Right.

Jeffrey Stern [00:09:56]:
Well and and the vernacular, though, of content marketing didn't exist at that point. Is that right?

Joe Pulizzi [00:10:03]:
No. It was so, in the magazine and publishing industry, it was called custom media or custom publishing or custom content or brand journalism or branded content, all these horrible terms that marketers didn't care about. And the only reason so I was probably one of the first ones that got behind the term content marketing because I'm so let's see. Let's go to 0506. I'm running pet and custom media. We're a growing little department, and I'm going to sell these big corporate storytelling projects to these CMOs. And as soon as I opened my mouth and I said, custom content or custom media or custom publishing, they're already sleeping. Like, they're not even interested at all.

Joe Pulizzi [00:10:48]:
It's like, that's not for me. So I started to test it out. So I'd go in and I'd I'd say, so what kind of content marketing are you doing in in the organization? First of all, they'd never heard that term before. They'd but they said, oh, content marketing? Oh, yeah. We're doing a lot of content, but they'd had no idea. Right? But I'm throwing it by them because I finally realized, you know, I'm a marketer. We're not the smartest people in the world, but we do gravitate toward terms. And that's when you realize if you do your research on, you know, history of marketing, you realize, oh, direct marketing.

Joe Pulizzi [00:11:22]:
Right? Search engine marketing, social media marketing, event marketing. Everything is something marketing. And I'm like, well, if we're going to really break this thing open for marketers, we better call it marketing. So that's where I came up with with content marketing and and really pushing that forward. And then we decided when I decided to leave Penton and start my business in April of 2007, I led I think my first blog post was, what is content marketing? And then after that point, I just treated it like content marketing was the term for the industry, and that's always that's the way it was and always was, always will be, and it worked out fairly well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:12:02]:
Did you always have this entrepreneurial ember, you know, within you, or did you really, in your reflection of yourself at that point in time, think of yourself, you know, as a marketer? Like, where where did the entrepreneurial piece come from?

Joe Pulizzi [00:12:17]:
I always wanted to start a business. I had a little journal when I was younger of stupid ideas. And even when I was in high school and then into college, I would for some reason, they always ended up being newsletters or magazines, and I would write down. I mean, when I so as a little kid, I remember, oh, I wanted to be a farmer and grew up with my parents who both ran a restaurant for from when I was, like, you know, 3 to 8. So I'm like, oh, okay. Well, they went to work every day. They own their own restaurant. That was great.

Joe Pulizzi [00:12:49]:
I grew up in a funeral home atmosphere with my grandfather and then my uncle. They ran about 7 funeral homes in the Sandusky, Ohio area, and I watched them work. I mean, it was their business, and I thought that that was the way that you know, basically, you get an idea and you put a plan together and you create a business. And then when I, you know, got a little bit older and got into high school and college, I really, oh, wait. Well, that's not the way it works. Most people go out and get jobs. And I just like, I detested that idea, and I never wanted to do it. But I also I needed money, so I had to go out and get a job.

Joe Pulizzi [00:13:25]:
And I never felt like I I had the idea that was something that could actually work as a business model until 2007. So, I mean, I was 33 years old before I so all that time, I really felt unnatural in any position I was at and finally got the courage. And the kids were let's see. My 2 kids were 5 and 3 at the time. It's like, there's never any good as you know, there's never a good time to start a business. You can make all the excuses you want to in the world, and I had a lot. I'm like, oh, well, I can't do it. I got 2 small kids.

Joe Pulizzi [00:13:56]:
I'm just raising a family. I need benefits, all that kind of stuff. But my wife and I talked over, and, you know, I knew. Like, if I wasn't gonna do it now, it would never happen. I'd keep making excuses. And, you know, took took the plunge in it, and it worked out fairly well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:14:10]:
So there were a few terms that I came across in learning about the work that you've done that I thought would be fun to kind of interweave into the conversation as we explore the things that you've built as kind of proxies for those. One of them was this, the terminology of, you know, a content entrepreneur, you know, versus a content creator. And I love if you could just, you know, kind of explain the thinking behind that and, you know, as you came to found the the Content Marketing Institute, what are the kinds of questions that you're asking at that point? What is the the vision that you have for for the future?

Joe Pulizzi [00:14:45]:
Well, I mean, I'm a big believer in terms, and terms are really, really important, and they can be a business differentiator, especially when you're talking about creation of any kind of content or building an audience. So, I mean, content marketing was the same thing we hung our hat on. And then when it started to take off in 2010 and 11, I'd been writing, doing podcasts, doing webinars around content marketing for 3 or 4 or 5 years at that point. And so when people started to search for it, they would just, oh my god. There it is. I mean, we owned the content marketing or what is content marketing or content marketing events marketing events or anything you typed into Google. And so that's why we just shot our growth shot up incredibly from 2,010 to 2,015 because it was growing. And then we ended up, I know, moving a little bit forward, but when we ended up my wife and I sold Content Marketing Institute in 2016, and then I took it back up and started the a new organization called The Tilt and Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi [00:15:46]:
Content Entrepreneur Expo in 2021, I gravitated toward that term, content entrepreneur, because everyone was throwing around this idea of content creator. Right? And you know it. Everybody's a content creator. They're doing TikToks and Instagram. Yes. Yes. They're inside a company. They're outside a company.

Joe Pulizzi [00:16:01]:
Of course, we just had the Olympics, so content creators were everywhere. But then I'm like, okay. There's content creators are everywhere, but they're all struggling to build a business. Like, this is an issue. Well, what's a content creator that is successful at building their own business? That's a content entrepreneur. So, of course, when I start the whole thing over again, like we did with Content Marketing Institute, I just went totally into the fact that, oh, no. This is not you don't wanna be a content creator unless you wanna do it as a hobby. I said, oh, I was I would always go, oh, my mom's a content creator.

Joe Pulizzi [00:16:32]:
She's on Facebook, but she's not trying to build a business. You're trying to build a business. You have a newsletter. You're trying to build subscribers and then generate revenue from those subscribers. You're a you want to be. You wanna aspire to be a content entrepreneur. So I got behind that with the event, c e x, Content Entrepreneur Expo, and then The Tilt the tagline of The Tilt, which is our newsletter, was turning content creators into content entrepreneurs. So, again, I'm we're trying to not to spark controversy or anything, but we're trying to elevate the conversation, if you will, of just being bunched in.

Joe Pulizzi [00:17:05]:
You know, how do we differentiate our message? Don't be bunched in with all the other content creator events and all the other content creator newsletters. We say, no. We're different. We focus on the business aspects of content. And so, I mean, that's that's just the way I'm programmed because as I started in this whole thing with Penn Media in 2000 working with these companies, the first thing we would say is, okay. You're trying to target an audience. Here's your goal. Then it was like, well, how are you gonna differentiate your story so that you get attention? Because everybody I mean, go to anything.

Joe Pulizzi [00:17:37]:
Like, go to cloud computing. Go to today. AI is hot and say that you wanna build a newsletter or a TikTok following or whatever around AI. Well, that's almost impossible. How are you gonna differentiate within a 100000 people or some organizations with 1,000,000,000 of dollars that are trying to build an audience? What do you have to say that's different? So you really have to figure out, okay. Well, I have to use a different kind of platform. I have to think about my audience's needs a little bit differently. I have to present them and tell them in a different way or a point of view.

Joe Pulizzi [00:18:08]:
So that's really important. And I my number one go to thing for me and my businesses has always been, what's the term and how can we tilt the term a little bit in order to get a lion's share of the attention.

Jeffrey Stern [00:18:23]:
So if you were to, you know, title the the three chapters that kind of outline what the Content Marketing Institute, the Content Entrepreneur Expo, and the TILT are to you, you know, what are the terms you would assign to each of those respectively? And and just, you know, to set the stage a bit, what are the 3 of those businesses? And, you know, as we make our way chronologically to what you're doing today, how has your thinking and motivations evolved through them?

Joe Pulizzi [00:18:51]:
There's a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this. Content Marketing Institute was a pivot from the original business. So when I launched the business in 2007, it was it was called junta 42, which I thought was the greatest web 2.0 name. That was it. Everything was web 2.0. It's like, how can I have a cool we had all weird names out at that point? I'm like, oh, let's do junta 42. Junta is a a meeting between 2 people or a revolution. 42, you know, my the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, my favorite number.

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:20]:
Yes. Yes.

Joe Pulizzi [00:19:21]:
My it's just the universe, all that stuff. So I'm bringing that together. I thought it was great. But the business model was the eharmony for content marketing. That's what we were pushing. We're like, oh, well, you need to find somebody to help you with your content marketing. You're a big brand. You're a writer or a content creator.

Joe Pulizzi [00:19:39]:
You're trying to find business. We will match you up at junta 42. So that's what we did, which we got a lot of attention for, but the financial model was absolutely terrible. And in 2009, I was so 2 years after it started

Jeffrey Stern [00:19:54]:
Yep.

Joe Pulizzi [00:19:54]:
We were losing all kinds of money. I was dusting off the LinkedIn profile thinking I had to go find a job. It was horrible. And then after feeling sorry for myself for a while, I remember writing on a napkin, which I think was a cocktail napkin because I was I'd been drinking at the time. I wrote down, okay. Well, how do we really differentiate? Let's think about this differently. And I wrote down the business model for Content Marketing Institute. I said, we are going to have the leading destination online destination for content marketing for the how to and strategy for content marketing for marketers.

Joe Pulizzi [00:20:23]:
We're going to have the leading magazine, the premier magazine in the industry, which became chief content officer magazine, and then we're going to have the number one global event for marketers around the practice of content marketing, which became Content Marketing World. I wrote that on a napkin in 2009. Cmi.com was launched in May of 2010. It took off immediately, which was unbelievable. I've launched a member in Cleveland, Ohio. I had a little luncheon in September of 2010, announcing or launching the idea for Content Marketing World. We were gonna it was gonna be this big show. We were hoping to get a 100 or a 150 people to come to Cleveland, and it just so happened that 660 came to Cleveland in September 2011, and we knew we had something.

Joe Pulizzi [00:21:08]:
It was kind of the first time I remember that event. My wife and I were backstage. We were both in tears because there were 600 people out there. It was the first time I finally knew that I didn't go I have to go out and have to get get a job somewhere. Like, this was it. We were actually going to make it. We hit $1,000,000 in revenue that year. 3 years later, we'd hit 10,000,000.

Joe Pulizzi [00:21:28]:
So we were we we really were on to something, but content marketing world was the event. The goal was always to sell. From 2,008, when I wrote down really big on goal setting and writing down goals and religiously reading those goals, and I wrote down in 2008 that we would sell Content Marketing Institute for at least $15,000,000 by 2015. It didn't happen in 15. It happened in 2016. But so that was the whole thing there and then took a sabbatical in 2018, took some some much needed time off. I went to Sicily with my dad, did the whole thing, and then wrote a novel, which I'm working on now. So I'm I'm like an you know, I keep doing these little sidesteps, but I wrote my first thriller novel in 2018, 19 called The Will to Die.

Joe Pulizzi [00:22:14]:
Working on the next one now. But I COVID side I got sidestepped with COVID a little bit, Jeffrey, because I was I got a little bored. I thought there was a real opportunity because I had a lot of content creators who wanted to be content entrepreneurs in 2020 and 2021 come to me. And I'm like, oh, well, there's an opportunity there. I rewrote my book Content Inc, and that became the the spearhead for the Tilt and CEX, which I then sold again in 2023 to a wonderful company, self publishing company called Lulu. I'm still involved in the company. We've got a new product I'll call Tilt Publishing. So I don't know if you want all that detail, but I tend to start things.

Joe Pulizzi [00:22:53]:
So I've I've started and sold 3 different businesses in my day, and, I promised my wife I would not start any more businesses. But I would I can do lots of other

Jeffrey Stern [00:23:04]:
stuff. My god.

Joe Pulizzi [00:23:06]:
I can't tell you how. She was not very happy when the Tilt launched because I'm like, I went and got the domain name, the tilt.com. I was like, oh my god. This is the greatest thing ever. And she's like, you know, we were done. We you did the whole thing. You built out the organization. You sold it.

Joe Pulizzi [00:23:22]:
You had a great exit. What are you doing? I'm like, no. This is a real need. Whatever. And I I got a little sidetracked from wanting to be, you know, the next John Grisham or whatever and moved over to say, oh, I love this model. I know this model. And, and it worked out great. Don't get me wrong.

Joe Pulizzi [00:23:38]:
It was very successful, whatever, but I didn't wanna do the same business model, which is what it was. The Tilt and CEX is the exact duplication of the business model that we did at CMI. It's very easy to replicate where you build an audience around an email newsletter, and then you launch, you know, different media vehicles off of that, which the event is sort of the revenue and profit generator for everything that you do. I love that model. I've I've taught that model to a lot of different people, but I I wanted to do something new and different, which is why we sold in 23, and now I'm doing a bunch of things.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:11]:
Well, I'll I'll pull in 2 detours that I think you'll appreciate here that are also really in this whole spirit of of lay of the land and the community building work that that I'm trying to do here. So Mike Belsito came on lay of the land back on episode 52, and I remember him, you know, introducing you as kind of the mentor figure to him that kind of went through the exact journey you just described of, you know, this playbook, you would call it. And Lay of the Land itself only exists because of Jay Clouse. And

Joe Pulizzi [00:24:43]:
My god. I love Jay.

Jeffrey Stern [00:24:46]:
Him and him helping me through a similar journey.

Joe Pulizzi [00:24:48]:
I didn't know you knew Jay. Jay is fan oh, as you know, I mean, Jay's been one of our multiple time keynote at Content Entrepreneur Expo. So and good friend and great great person. Great con great great content entrepreneur. One of the best in the business.

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:04]:
Yes.

Joe Pulizzi [00:25:04]:
That's so strange. That's so crazy. And then, of course, Mike Balsito and the Product Collective and the Industry Conference and everything they're doing there. I'm so proud of what they've been able to to accomplish with that model. But

Jeffrey Stern [00:25:16]:
Right. It's incredible. These are, like, 2 world class, you know, people, aggregators in Cleveland, you know, from the land perspective is what I I love about it. But as they're, you know, businesses on their own, just incredible businesses.

Joe Pulizzi [00:25:30]:
Well, as you know, I mean, that's the one great thing. We Cleveland entrepreneurs, if we can all find each other and see what's going on, I mean, I'm pretty tapped into what's going on in media, but we're all very supportive of each other. I mean, Paul Raitzer is another one for Marketing AI Institute, lives right down the street from me, building Yes. The AI marketing event in the world here in Cleveland, Ohio. Absolutely. And it's just there's the stuff that's going on in marketing and media is just amazing. But if you're not plugged into to that specific industry, you might not know that that's going on, that there's gonna be, you know, 1300 marketing executives coming into town in in, September here for for their big event.

Jeffrey Stern [00:26:14]:
Lay of the Land is brought to you by Impact Architects and by 90. As we share the stories of entrepreneurs building incredible organizations in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio, Impact Architects has helped 100 of those leaders, many of whom we have heard from as guests on this very podcast, realize their own visions and build these great organizations. I believe in Impact Architects and the people behind it so much that I have actually joined them personally in their mission to help leaders gain focus, align together, and thrive by doing what they love. If you 2 are trying to build great, Impact Architects is offering to sit down with you for a free consultation or provide a free trial through 90, the software platform that helps teams build great companies. If you're interested in learning more about partnering with Impact Architects or by leveraging 90 to power your own business, please go to ia.layoftheland.fm. The link will also be in our show notes.

Joe Pulizzi [00:27:14]:
So a

Jeffrey Stern [00:27:14]:
bunch of different directions to take it from here. You know, across the the breadth of the businesses that you've had and, you know, maybe you're you're not gonna do another one after this, but, like, what what does success mean to you at this point? You've had some exits. You've had some success, I think, by, know, external measures of what people looking in might ascribe to it. What what is the impact that you are hoping to have looking back?

Joe Pulizzi [00:27:37]:
So initially, when I, launched the business in in o 7 and then, you know, read a a couple of books, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, 7 Habits, Stephen Covey, a few other ones. I would I put together my own, like, success journal, if you will, and I would write down, okay. Well, what are my career goals? What's my wealth goal? I would try to write that in sort of the present tense as I'm doing that physical goals, spiritual goals, family goals, charitable goals. And I'd write those, and I'd have 1 or 2 for each one of those, and I'd focus on that during that time. And when I would achieve 1, I would create a new one. So that's what I thought was success. I'm like, well rounded success. I didn't didn't wanna just be, oh, Joe's great.

Joe Pulizzi [00:28:21]:
He exited the business. It's wonderful. Got a lot of money. That's great. I'm like, okay. Well, I wanna make I wanna make some impact in the world, and how do I do that? That's why, like, charitable, we've got Orange Effect Foundation, which is our charity that we've been working on since 2007 to help kids who needs speech therapy and can't afford it find that. So we've got grants going out to over 400 kids around the United States with that. That's, like, just one of my small goals.

Joe Pulizzi [00:28:48]:
So that's 2007. I still follow the same type of thinking, Jeffrey, but, honestly, most of what I do is I mean, it's kinda corny, but more pay it forward. I've been given multiple gifts. I'm very blessed. We're super blessed as a family. How do we pay it forward and help some people? Like, how can I be supportive of Mike Balsito? How can I be supportive of you and Jay Clouse and what you're doing and seeing some Paul Ratzer is I I followed his journey since he was just a young kid working starting an agency? I've known him for 15 years now. And to see him grow this thing, that excites me now. Like, I will go to that event.

Joe Pulizzi [00:29:28]:
I will support that event. I'll do whatever I can. And so I'm I'm I've got a soft spot for for other entrepreneurs, but specifically for entrepreneurs in Cleveland. So I just try to help wherever I can and then and then use the gifts that I have. So that's why I continue to write. Probably the the thing that I am making the most impact, which sounds strange maybe, but it's with my personal newsletter. So I've got I've got about between LinkedIn and email, I've got about 40,000 plus people that that read my newsletter, and I just try to see how can I cover a topic with a little bit different bend and try to be helpful to people? Every 2 weeks, I write the orange letter and get that out there. I've got a podcast called Content Inc that I do every Monday morning.

Joe Pulizzi [00:30:15]:
It's a 5 minute podcast to help content entrepreneurs. And then This Old Marketing is our content marketing podcast that comes out every Friday with Robert Rose. And I've been doing like, we're up to 441 episode for this old marketing. I'm up to episode 458 or something for Content Inc. And, just kept keep putting out content. Not a formal business. I'm just trying to be helpful wherever I can and talk to people like you and say, well, where's the problems? And do I have any kind of value that I can give and and to help people on their journey? So that's what I'm trying to do. And then the ultimate success for me is just making sure my kids are successful.

Joe Pulizzi [00:30:55]:
Like, I really I I it's and it's an I gotta tell you. It's really interesting journey journey. They're 23 and 21. They were out of the house. Now they're back in the house. And I'm like, so my job is to get them back out of the house and be successful. And I'm hoping because they grew up in a household with 2 entrepreneurs, my wife and I. Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi [00:31:18]:
And I think that thinking is very helpful. Like, I don't know what it would be like to grow up in a household where you have 2 people that work a 9 to 5 job or whatever that is. Not that that's wrong. Not at all. That's great. I I have a lot of friends that do that, and they're very happy and successful, but I can't I don't understand that. I want them to believe that they can get up in the morning, and they're excited about a project or making impact on people, and they just go at it. And they don't feel like they have any barriers in their way that they or anybody tell them they can't do it.

Joe Pulizzi [00:31:51]:
And there's a little privilege there, of course. This is the greatest time you could ever be alive in the history of the world. We have so many benefits. We have so many opportunities. And with what our topic here, being a content creator, you can positively affect or negatively, which is terrible, but you can positively affect somebody on the other side of the world on any topic that you have a passion for or some kind of knowledge for. And and I think that's that's just incredible today. It's like when I started in 2000, didn't have that opportunity. It's very hard, very costly to build an audience.

Joe Pulizzi [00:32:24]:
Like, we we when I was at Penn, it's like, oh, it's $3 per subscriber or $5 per subscriber, and we've gotta do we gotta send direct mail, and we gotta make phone calls and all that stuff.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:32]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi [00:32:33]:
Now you can build an audience on a platform by delivering consistently over time, and they come to know, like, and trust you. And then they start to sign up for your other stuff, and then they buy what you have to offer, and you can build a business out of it without with basically a cell phone, which is just amazing to me.

Jeffrey Stern [00:32:51]:
It it is amazing how the the Internet has kind of, I mean, removed the geographic, you know, constraint that that we've had and allowed for the any any interest or niche that that you have, you can find your people on the Internet now.

Joe Pulizzi [00:33:07]:
And, well, you are you're much younger, obviously. But when I was launching the business, the first thing I thought of is, oh, I have to go find a office.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:15]:
Right.

Joe Pulizzi [00:33:15]:
It's like nobody that was like and when I didn't have an office, you were shunned. You're like, oh, you work from home? Oh, well, that doesn't happen today. Right? Especially if you're doing this kind of if you're doing anything in media, you're like, of course. Yeah. Keep your overhead low. You don't wanna start hiring people. Use contractors. You know? That but that model at the time and we we we built CMI up to we had 28, contractors for that business.

Joe Pulizzi [00:33:40]:
We had 2 employees, just my wife and I. It was a very rare thing in media at that time, and I would go to conferences. They're like, you can't run a business like that. But we did. And now today, that's exactly what how you'd start a business. You wanna you don't wanna say, oh, we're gonna we're gonna hire 20 people before you get revenue. You you don't take it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:33:57]:
How do you grapple with these two ideas at the same time that maybe geography is increasingly less important because of the Internet? But at the same time, and this one feels I have less like it's more anecdotal than anything I can quantify, but place based stuff feels also more important at the same time, like being in Cleveland and and what Cleveland has meant to you in in your journey.

Joe Pulizzi [00:34:20]:
So there is a physical component that's really important wherever you are. Like, for exam let's just take about if you're networking at market you're a marketer today. You might think, oh, well, I don't have to go to all the events, and, well, it depends on what you're trying to do. But the most probably the thing that gave me a leg up over other entrepreneurs in the space was going to these events and having access to some of the leading thinkers in marketing and publishing that I wouldn't have access to if I didn't go to them. I would go to, you know, all the marketing pros events or all the published Folio events in New York. I was in New York a lot, taking the subway wherever I could, having no money in my pocket, just trying to hit these events and meeting the right people. I remember I I went to some crazy event in I don't know where it was off the coast of Florida having no money, but I knew that I really had to be there. So I spent the money and spent the 3, 4 days because I'm like, I need to get in front of these people.

Joe Pulizzi [00:35:18]:
It's really, really and and it worked out fairly well. I think that the same thing goes if you're an entrepreneur in Cleveland or you're a media in Cleveland or whatever. You get out and talk to others who are dealing with the same issues you are, and you never re you never know what kind of help you're gonna need or what kind of help you can give if you don't. And I I try to talk to my kids about this, and they're like, oh, no. No. I've got all everything I need in front of me online. I'm like, yeah. But, of course, I'm old school, and I'm like, there's nothing like shaking somebody's hand or seeing them in person that solidifies our relationship.

Joe Pulizzi [00:35:54]:
So if you build these relationships online or start these relationships online, that's great. But you will then become friends for life or colleagues for life or whatever it is if you meet them somewhere in person and have a real conversation with them. So I'm a big believer, and and that's, of course, that's the business model as always. The thing that has been growing, all the disruption that's happened in media over the last 20 or 30 years. What's the thing of all of that that hasn't changed that's as strong as ever? In person events.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:26]:
Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi [00:36:27]:
Strong as ever. Come especially, I mean, obviously, COVID was a blip, but you still see people. It's like, they've got all these connections on social, online. I really wanna take that the next step and build my business or whatever whatever your goal is. It's so critical and and important.

Jeffrey Stern [00:36:45]:
So, you know, I was talking about the kind of terminologies that I came across in your work, that I I wanted to try and weave in. There there was one amongst the many that I I wanted to call it because it spoke to me, you know, most saliently, which was this idea that you don't wanna build your content house on rented land. And so and and I'm curious, you know, where that idea comes from as it relates to the work you're doing with Tilt, you know, and how you're, you know, helping authors through their journey. You know, just your your thoughts on that.

Joe Pulizzi [00:37:17]:
So when social media came out, we thought it was the greatest gift to marketing ever. It was free, and we were able to build audiences. And, of course, I I benefited from that. I was I think, by 2008 or 9 or 10, I had 100 of thousands of followers on Twitter. It was really working well for me. And then as we saw some of these platforms make not only algorithm changes, but decisions to keep people off the platform or whatever, that you were like, well, where did that come from? Or how did I get banned off of Facebook? Or how am I not on you know, what's going on with Twitter? Yep. You had a lot of businesses that part of their marketing business model was building their audiences on those channels. And those benefits are fleeting at best because you can't control them.

Joe Pulizzi [00:38:05]:
So if you let's say that you had really good organic reach on Facebook in, you know, 2,009 or 10, you had terrible organic reach by 2016 because Facebook took all that away because they want people to buy ads, and that's their prerogative. I'm not nothing gets meta or Facebook, nothing against Twitter, x, whatever, nothing against any of these platforms. They're in the business to make money, and they're not gonna just give you free organic reach. But since that happened, you'd have so many marketers that would get themselves into trouble because they would put all their eggs in that basket without saying, well, we need to control those channels and build, like, little media companies where we we have an addressable audience, where we can communicate with them on a regular basis. And that's where email came in. It was so critical. I remember when I really started doing content marketing presentations in 2009, 1011, and social media was taking off. I mean, this is when you had, like, o seven.

Joe Pulizzi [00:39:01]:
Twitter was a south by southwest, and then it just boomed. And they're like, oh, great. We don't need these other channels anymore. And I was out there saying, look. Email newsletters have never been more important. Go build your followings on these social channels, but you you want to direct them to something you can control just in case something happens, and it absolutely did. So for the last 10, 15 years, we've been saying, like, build print subscribers, build email newsletter subscribers, things where you get opt in permission to communicate with your audience, and you don't have somebody else coming in saying you can't or they're changing the rules on you. And I I will still go out today, Jeffrey.

Joe Pulizzi [00:39:40]:
I've got speeches coming up all this year, and I will still go out and say, what's your subscriber hierarchy strategy? How are you moving your fans and followers from Instagram and TikTok and x and meta and whatever else, Pinterest, wherever else you're on, and how do you move them up the chain into some kind of a direct connection with an audience? So take that into your second question. What we noticed, especially as we, sold the Tilt to Lulu, the self publishing company, what I realized as an author and because I published 9 books

Jeffrey Stern [00:40:15]:
Yeah. Yeah.

Joe Pulizzi [00:40:16]:
All that data and all my connections when I would sell books would go to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Kobo and all the other distributors. So I'll give you a really good example. So Content Inc, it's been a very successful book. I've written 2 versions of it. I've sold in audio, print, and ebook over a a 100000 copies of Content Inc, and that's and I'm so blessed by that and humbled by that. But I don't have one piece of data from any of those people that ever bought that book. I you might have said, oh, Joe, I bought your book, but I don't know that because I don't have the data that supports that. And I'm like, there's got to be a better way, especially if you already have a fan base.

Joe Pulizzi [00:40:58]:
So let's take Jay Klaus. So Jay Klaus, really good creator in about the creator economy. He's got, let's say, 200,000 email subscribers. I don't know what he's got, but he's got a lot.

Jeffrey Stern [00:41:10]:
Yes.

Joe Pulizzi [00:41:10]:
So Jay is gonna write a book. And, normally, what happens is Jay writes a book. There's some publisher or or that that publishes that book or publishes directly, and the first thing you do is you put that on Amazon. And you say, everyone comes. You have the 200,000 direct connections, and then you're gonna send them off to Amazon. And Amazon's gonna collect all that data, and Amazon's gonna get the lion's share of that revenue, not you. Like, that makes no sense. Shouldn't somebody like Jay have them on their website, keep them there, sell them directly on the website now that we have the technology to do that, get the data on that, and get the lion's share of the revenue? Isn't that something that that entrepreneurs would do? The answer is yes, but we don't think about that.

Joe Pulizzi [00:41:57]:
So we've been giving all this to Amazon and Barnes and Noble and god knows who else. So we created the idea of TILT Publishing, which is a hybrid publisher, which will publish your business book. We'll get it as look beautiful. It's got the cover. We'll do print and distribute and and ebook and the whole thing. But the difference is we want you to sell directly from your website. So the content entrepreneur, which is the group book we launched in April, we set that up so you can't go get it on Amazon. You can't go get it somewhere else.

Joe Pulizzi [00:42:26]:
You have to go to Joe Pulizzi dot com, buy the book. And when you do, I see that order come in, and it goes through our processes. And I get the data, and they can sign up for the newsletter, and I get the majority of that revenue. Not that you can't it's fine. If you wanna sell and distribute and have discovery on Amazon or whatever, that's great. You can absolutely do that. But we are trying to sort of prove a point that you can sell directly. And so we're trying to teach the Jay Clauses of the world or any executives out there who are launching books.

Joe Pulizzi [00:42:52]:
It's like, hey. It's fine. You can distribute all the other ways, but please send your fans and followers and subscribers to your own site and take control of that business model.

Jeffrey Stern [00:43:03]:
Yeah. No. It makes it makes too much sense.

Joe Pulizzi [00:43:05]:
But nobody's doing it. I I sent a note to Gary Vaynerchuk. I know Gary a little bit. He I don't know if he knows me. But, anyways, I've been to his conference and I've been connected with Gary at different conferences or whatever. And he Gary just did a great book, I think, called day trading attention or something like that. And it's a great book. It's in very much Gary style.

Joe Pulizzi [00:43:23]:
And I just sent him a note. I said, Gary, it's great. I'm glad you're number 1 on Amazon. Wonderful. Could you not have sold to your just your fans and followers for this period of time on your website? I mean, especially with Gary, which most of his connections are social media. It would be great if he could get those direct connections. Right. Maybe he doesn't thinking about it or whatever.

Joe Pulizzi [00:43:44]:
Maybe he did a deal with a publisher probably who wouldn't allow that. But we've got to start fighting. We need more entrepreneurs out there that are saying, look. There's a different way. There's a better way, and we're just at the start of this. I really believe that in 5 years, 7 years, you're gonna have more and more business books out there where the first inclination will be to sell directly and not through other outlets and just give all that data and revenue up. That's my hope.

Jeffrey Stern [00:44:11]:
Yeah. I I see it. I see I see it very clearly. So I have, 2 more questions for you, and and the first is kind of a grandiose open field one and the other is our traditional closing question. But as you, you know, reflect on your journey, think about the future of content marketing or whatever it may be coined, you know, going forward, what what do you feel is left unsaid? You know, what what what would be your kind of parting words in in all of this? And then, then we'll turn to our traditional closing question.

Joe Pulizzi [00:44:40]:
So now with content marketing being everywhere, it seems like every company, no matter what size, has some kind of strategy. The biggest problem I see, and this has been the problem from the beginning, is there's there's no they don't do 2 things. 1st, they don't deliver consistently on whatever channel they're on. Whether it's a newsletter, whether it's TikTok, you always have to you have to be like Norm Peterson in Cheers if you ever remember watching that show on NBC. It's like Norm showed up every day at the bar on time and always had something interesting to say. And that's what I say with your content marketing. That's what you have to do. You have to show up every day, whatever you whatever your promise is to your customers.

Joe Pulizzi [00:45:19]:
So show up, have something interesting, relevant, and helpful to say, and, you know, don't pitch your products all the time. And most companies that I talk to just don't do that. They have these big plans and strategies. And when you look on whatever they're doing, Instagram or their newsletter or their webinars, it's mostly just horrible, unneeded information, and a lot of it's got a sales sales y. So it's it's like, don't do it if you're going to do that. If you're not gonna take the time and figure out, okay. This is targeting this person or this persona, whatever you wanna say, and these are their informational needs or pain points, and how can we be one of the informational helpers to them so they know, like, and trust us? And it can help our business. So that's how it comes back to you.

Joe Pulizzi [00:46:08]:
Most companies just aren't strategic enough, and they're just putting out a lot of horrible content. I think that hurts in the long term. And so when I go and I go and tell these companies, I'm like, look. You're you're on 14, 15 different platforms, and you're creating mediocre stuff. Let's kill, like, 7 or 8 of these things. You don't have to be everywhere, especially when you're putting out crap like this. So let's focus on 1 or 2 areas where you can deliver consistently. You have the resources to be the best informational expert for that particular topic to that particular audience.

Joe Pulizzi [00:46:39]:
So that's kinda my whole thing, and that's gonna continue to go on because as people think it's free and they could just put it out there on social, you're seeing more and more bad content. And you're not gonna make you're gonna get run over by these creators, these content entrepreneurs that are trying to build a business because they know that they have to do that. In order to build an audience, they have to be valuable, relevant, and compelling to that audience. So that's the that's kinda what I would say about the anybody who's looking to get into content marketing, think about what's your differentiation. We call that the content tilt, and how are you delivering consistently over a long period of time. And if you do those two things, you'll probably build an audience and be successful.

Jeffrey Stern [00:47:16]:
Well said. So with that, I'll I'll ask you our our closing question, which is for a hidden gem in Cleveland, something that other folks may not know about, but perhaps they they should.

Joe Pulizzi [00:47:28]:
So I've got a hidden gem for you, but I have to mention, Hilarity Hilarity is at East 4th. Nick Costas over there. I'm sure people have mentioned Nick. So Nick owns Pickwick and Frolic and then also the Hilarities Comedy Theater. It is one of the greatest institutions in Cleveland, Ohio. If you haven't been out there to see a show, you're doing a disservice. And Nick Costas is almost always there on the weekends, and you will find him. And he he is the reason why there is an East 4th Street.

Joe Pulizzi [00:47:58]:
Pickwick and Frolic and Hilarities was the 1st eatery and location to go on that wonderful street that we have for our downtown areas. And it's not, like, hidden, but it's so important. I always like to call that out there, and I go my wife and I go to a show there every every other week. The kind of the hidden thing that I love that if you if you're into bands and you love the outdoors, I would go to, the Whiskey Island Bar. What's it called? The Whiskey Island Saloon. It's right off right it's on Wendy Park there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:28]:
Totally. Yep.

Joe Pulizzi [00:48:29]:
You know the area, if you've been there. So I would just say, boy, if you want a great atmosphere, they got picnic tables out there, they got good food and drink, and see a band out there. They're playing almost every night. They've got a band there. In the summertime, it is one of the great places, to be on the on the west side. So I love that place if you haven't had a chance to go out there.

Jeffrey Stern [00:48:49]:
Excellent hidden gems.

Joe Pulizzi [00:48:52]:
That's a tough one. There's a lot of wonderful so I like the I like the patty I like the patio at Collision Bend. I like the patio at at West Park Station in Cam's Corners. There's a lot of great places.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:03]:
Well, the the beauty of this question to me is, you know, a 100 almost 200 episodes in, no one has mentioned either of those.

Joe Pulizzi [00:49:09]:
Oh, that's awesome.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:11]:
Yeah. You know, so there's

Joe Pulizzi [00:49:11]:
like isn't that? You should put together a list. Maybe you have. A list of all of them and say, this is the ultimate guide to Cleveland.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:19]:
Yeah. I I do need to put together that list. I've been waiting for AI's capabilities to get good enough where I can feed it all my transcripts, and then it can pull that list together.

Joe Pulizzi [00:49:27]:
I think you I think it's absolutely there. If you do have a little chat g p d four o and you feed them in, I bet you it would absolutely spit those out for you.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:34]:
It it's almost time for, just a specific hidden gems, you know, map and episode.

Joe Pulizzi [00:49:39]:
That's great. I love it.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:41]:
But no, Joe. I just wanna thank you. This was amazing. I really appreciate your time and and sharing your story and insights. So thank you.

Joe Pulizzi [00:49:48]:
No. Thank you, Jeffrey. Thanks for doing the work on this. I mean, I think this is really important what you're doing, so please keep it going and happy to help with anything you're doing.

Jeffrey Stern [00:49:56]:
Thank you. If folks had anything they wanted to follow-up with you about, you know, you're you're a 1000000 places on the Internet, where where would you point them to?

Joe Pulizzi [00:50:04]:
Well, I I from our past conversation, I was sending them my website. So go to The land

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:09]:
the land that

Joe Pulizzi [00:50:09]:
you own. Go to joe palizzi.com. That's pulizzi.com, and you can subscribe to my newsletter. You can ping me. You got I got a contact form there. Please send me a note. I love I do still do a lot of speaking. I do a lot of local speaking and international speaking on marketing, but, and I've got my newsletter orange letter that I love people to get and cover and do cover every once in a while some some local activities as well.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:33]:
Awesome. Well, thank you again.

Joe Pulizzi [00:50:35]:
Thanks, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey Stern [00:50:37]:
That's all for this week. Thank you for listening. We'd love to hear your thoughts on today's show. So if you have any feedback, please send over an email to Jeffrey at lay of the land dot f m, or find us on Twitter at podlayoftheland or at @sternjefe, j e f e. If you or someone you know would make a good guess for our show, please reach out as well and let us know. And if you enjoy the podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or on your preferred podcast player. Your support goes a long way to help us spread the word and continue to bring the Cleveland founders and builders we love having on the show. We'll be back here next week at the same time to map more of the land.