439: Developing a Content Strategy to Stand Out From The Crowd with Joe Pulizzi

This episode is sponsored by Clarity. You spend a lot of time on your blog content, from planning to recipe.

Testing to writing to promoting.

But do you know if each of your posts are bringing you the most traffic they possibly can? With Clarity, you can see information about each and every post, which is automatically synced from WordPress, Google Analytics and Google Search Console so that you can make well educated decisions about where your existing content may need a little attention.

Think broken links or broken images. No internal links or missing alt text.

You can also use information that Clarity pulls about sessions, page views and users to fuel the creation of new content because you'll be able to see which types of posts are performing best for you. Get access to keyword ranking. Click through rate impressions and optimization data for all of your posts today With Clarity, listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first.

Month of clarity after signing up.

To sign up, simply go to clarity.com food that's C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food thanks again to Clarity for sponsoring this episode. Foreign.

Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast this week. On the podcast, Bjork is interviewing Joe Polizzi. Joe has been an expert in content marketing for many years, and you may know him from his book Content Inc. Or his newsletter the Tilt. In addition to his podcasts and the events he organizes, he knows content marketing forwards and backwards. In this episode, Bjork and Jo will be chatting about what content marketing even means in 2023 and how you can think about it different from advertising. Joe also discusses the importance of differentiating yourself and delivering consistent content in this market, and why you need to find your niche. Joe also shares more about what content Tilt is and why you should apply it to your content strategy, and why exit planning is so important for every entrepreneur and might give you a new way to think about the goals you have for your One quick note before we jump into the episode. If you listen to our podcast on Apple podcasts, a recent iOS update might mean that you are no longer subscribed to our podcast feed. If you head over to our show page@foodbloggerpro.com Apple and make sure that you're still following the podcast. So just click that little follow button that will ensure that the episodes you want to listen to are still downloading to your phone. Thanks so much for listening and without further ado, I'll just let Bjork take it away.

Joe, welcome to the Podcast.

Thanks for having me. It's about time.

Yeah, this is old hat for you because you have the setup. This is first time with the new camera. People can watch on video if they want to do that later. But you are a podcaster, among many other things. So talk about a couple of podcasts that you do and then maybe just a quick background on your story because it's really cool to hear how deep you've gone in the content world.

Yeah, boy. I'll try to keep it brief because I'm old now and I've been creating content for 25 years. But yeah, I have two podcasts, a Monday morning podcast called Content Inc. It's five to seven minutes long. It's for content creators kind of trying to become full time content entrepreneurs. So hopefully something inspirational or informational on that. And then Robert Rose and I have been doing this old marketing since 2013 and it's a news show covering content marketing and media news. So we've been working on that over 400 episodes on both of those. And I got into this whole business by starting in business to business publishing. I just kind of fell into it. I started account managing projects with a company called Penton and Penton Media was the largest independent business to business media company at the time. And I was in this little division called custom media and custom media did stuff that pet media didn't do anything. So pet media, the trade shows and magazines and then big websites and really.

Traditional marketing type stuff.

Really traditional B2B stuff. And then I found out about this custom media thing and I'm like, oh. We started to help big brands like Microsoft and Agilent and HP and Autodesk tell their stories and they did that at that time through quarterly magazines. So then we went from print and then we got into blogging and then we got into webinars and then social media. And I was like, this is amazing. I thought it was going to be the future. And in some ways it was where I said, well, these brands are going to have to start learning how to tell their own stories because we've got all these pipes available and they're going to want to build audiences and then try to maintain or change behavior of those audiences. And that's when I left in 2007. My wife and I created what was what became Content Marketing Institute and our event Content Marketing World. And then I've been sort of the content marketing guy for shoot a long time, 15 plus years into that area. So.

And what's so great about your story is you, you're able to see the evolution of it. And so you can see, like, echoes of probably some of the traditional things that existed 20 years ago that still live within the world of, you know, media and content marketing in 2023. But you've also seen the things that don't work, that used to work, or maybe some of the things that people are still holding onto and trying to make those things work, and they don't really work, but for whatever reason, just because people have always been doing them, they still exist. And so they're still around, you know, in 2023 today. When you say content marketing, that's a really. That's a really big umbrella. How do you view that?

Like what.

What's underneath that umbrella?

Yeah, I mean, if I'm just saying content marketing, I'm talking about the philosophy or the strategy that a company would employ to say, oh, I'm gonna take create valuable, relevant, compelling information on an ongoing basis to a target audience in order to maintain or change behavior. And you do that many different ways. You can do that through a podcast, you do it through a blog, a webinar series, a custom magazine event, all sorts of things. And it's funny, you talk about, you know, I've seen things. I've been around long enough to see things.

I've seen things. Yeah.

And it's funn. So over the past 20 years, it's the same mistakes over and over again. And on the one side, it. Most companies don't differentiate themselves in any way. Basically, they're creating content just like everyone else in their space is creating content. It's the same stuff. It doesn't differentiate. We call that a content tilt. They don't have anything that breaks through all the clutter and gets any kind of attention. They don't build an audience, and they're wasting their time. And the second thing is, they don't deliver consistently. So we see this over and over again how companies of all sizes, they start and stop. And that's why when you see these successful content creators out there, brands, it's because they continue on when everybody else stops. They've been doing it for two years, three years, four years, five years. Red Bull is a really good example. How did Red Bull become Red Bull Media House and one of the largest media companies in the world? Well, they started in 2004. I mean, they've been doing this for 20 years now. It started as a magazine. So, you know, those are the two things. So it's easy to go in when I go into some of These companies and they say, joe, we're doing all the things. Yeah, what's wrong? I'm like, yeah, you're doing all the things a little bit into each one. You're jack of all trades, master of none. You're not targeted. There's no niche here. You're not building an audience. You might as well just advertise.

Yeah, interesting. And the difference between content marketing and advertising is like advertising being you're putting something out there, it's getting in front of people, it's maybe kind of getting top of mind, but it's not building an audience or telling a story. Do you feel like that's the difference or how do you differentiate those?

Well, that's one of them. And you could look at it that way. But basically with content marketing, you're trying to build and control your own channels. You're basically trying to become your own little media company. If you're advertising, you're sending out your message in somebody else's channel. That's it. It's like it's. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean we, everybody advertises, it's no problem. But if you don't want to spend the 18 to 24 to 32 months and really do the one thing really well, like I've got an amazing blog or an incredible podcast or an awesome YouTube channel, that's where it starts. And where a lot of companies start is they say, oh, I have to do all the things. I have to be in seven to 13 different channels.

I'm like, yeah, yeah, no.

And the ones that are, have been doing it a long, long time and diversified their way there. Yeah, you start on doing one thing really, really well.

It's one of the things we often talk about is, especially when people are, they have a family and they have a part time or full time job and they're trying to build a content, you know, business in our world, it's food based and they're trying to publish to Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp channels comes out, oh, I gotta add that in. And suddenly you're doing all of it kind of well, but not really well. You're following best practices, but best practices only help if your content is excellent. And I, I feel like that's what I hear you saying a little bit is focus in, get a narrow focus on maybe one specific channel, get really good at that. And this combination, novel, unique, consistent. Does that feel accurate? Like it has to stand out, it has to differentiate and you have to do it consistently for a long period of time.

That's very, very accurate. The biggest recommendation that I make when I talk to content entrepreneurs is I never say, go do more of this. It's always, do less of something. Get off of X. You're wasting your time on Instagram. Maybe you're doing. Maybe TikTok's your thing, maybe it's YouTube, maybe it's the podcast, whatever. Something has to start as home. And if you look at media business models one on one, whether you start with the New York Times or Huffington Post or whatever, they've all done it the same way. They start by being really good and figure out all the intricacies of that one channel and they focus on one specific audience and how they can solve the pain points and the informational needs of that audience. So if you do those things and then you ask yourself, well, if. If we do the work like you say, if we overdo it over a long period of time, can you become the leading informational expert over that thing? If you do the work, and if you're laughing about that and say, no, that's crazy, we can't do it, then you're not niche enough. You got to go down and figure out, okay, there's a content area that's got. You've got to exploit more. You got to go deeper there. Or maybe there's an audience. Maybe you're not just targeting people that enjoy Hostess foods. Maybe it's something even lower than that. Who knows? I don't know. But you've got to go down to something that's really, really underserved today, which is really easy to do, actually, because we've got all these great tools to help us find that. But it's hard to make that decision because we inherently, as human beings feel that in order to have the most opportunity, we have to go wide. We want to target consumers. We have target 18 to 54 demographic or whatever you're doing. I'm like, that is not going to work. You start small and then you can broaden, but you've got to build that audience first. From a very, very small standpoint.

Yeah. I think a good example of that is the person who introduced us, Kate all, who has Pinterest as her focus. She knows Pinterest inside and out. She really understands it. She's built an audience there. She's built a business around that. And that building a business piece is one that I want to touch on because I think that that's the question that comes out of what is content marketing? In service of. And for some of us, you're building content and that content is the product. And what you're doing is kind of back to that advertising versus marketing conversation. You're using your platform to then bring advertisers in and then advertise against that content that you're creating. So you're taking those like, I think of AG1 or athletic greens. In the world of podcasts, they're not building a big brand, they're advertising. But they're using people who have built big brands and partnering with them to kind of draft off of their audience. So, you know, there's this idea of you start out, you have the focus, it's niche, you have your channel, you're going to become best in class in that niche, on that channel. Build a following in service of what, what does that lead up to? And how do you need to know what that is at the outset of your, your, you know, content business building pursuit?

So you can do it either way. There's no one right way to do it. But if I'm, let's say that I'm a solo content creator and I want to become big, it's actually better if you don't have a product that you just say, okay, here's the audience that I want to target. Here's the thing that I'm passionate about and love. I love this, this certain aspect of photography. I would like to show it, I want to talk about it, I want to instruct it. And you go and create this amazing Instagram channel around that, whatever, and you start to an audience. Once you get close enough that that audience, that audience begins to know like and trust you, they will absolutely tell you what things that they want to buy from you. I'll give you an example. This happened with Content Marketing Institute. Like I was doing a blog four or five times a week talking about the how of content marketing and all the things that we could do and the strategies and how you should, you could structure it. And I was trying to sell basically a matching tool to match up content creators with brands that needed content. And no, nobody wanted to buy that. That was the product. That's what it was in service of to, to use your terms. But nobody wanted that. They wanted, they let me know loud and clear. Hey, Joe, do you have any training available for my team that to understand content marketing? Joe, are there any events around content marketing that I could send my people to? Joe, do you do consulting around content marketing? I didn't do any of those things, but they told me Loud and clear. Once we built this audience that they were going to do that. So it would have been easier if I wasn't pushing this other product. Now that said, that's what I would do right now. If you just a joke, you want to get into the space, I would say don't have a product, Launch your product secondarily. Build an audience first. But if you're Autodesk and you want to sell 3D software or CAD software or whatever the case is, you would then say, okay, well, we're going to solve these engineer mechanical engineers challenges in this visual space and teach them all these things and hopefully when they come to know like and trust us, because we're solving their informational needs, they will buy more of our stuff, they'll be more loyal to our brand, they'll come to our events, they'll do those sorts of things. So basically sell more product or stay longer as customers. So that's generally loyalty. You know, content marketing started as a loyalty driven activity through custom magazines, if you will. So you can do, you can do it either way. So big brands that are already out there, they're doing it because ultimately they want to sell more stuff, which is fine. And content creators out there are doing it because they don't really know what they're going to sell yet. But they could do like a Mr. Beast did. Mr. Beast had no idea in 2012 when he started his YouTube channel that he was going to launch Feastables.

Yeah. Which is a chocolate that he sells. Which is like you would ask him 10 years ago and be like, no.

Yeah, now it's a probably. Now you tell me you know more about. It's probably almost a billion dollar brand.

Yeah. I would assume getting to that point. Right.

But he launched that because he saw that opportunity because of the one, you know, 100 plus million followers he had on YouTube at the time, which is probably 200 million now. So Mr. Beast launched it where I don't have a product yet. Then I'm going to launch all this other stuff that he launched, the burger place as well. So what is it?

Beast Burgers or Mystery Beast Burgers?

I think Beast Burgers, whatever. So he's launching all sorts of things because he built a large audience to do that. So that's one way to do it. And the other way to do it is, hey, I already have a customer database. How do I get these people to rely on me more without selling directly to them? So that's why we'd never call our content advertising. We would call Our we're doing content just like any other media company does, because if it's salesy information, nobody's going to want to engage with it. So it has to be really, really good to today.

Yeah, so it's. I interviewed Nathan Barry who has ConvertKit email platform, and one of the things he's doing right now is they have a podcast that. It's like a podcast too, where they're calling it Billion Dollar Creator. But the idea behind it is kind of that idea of what in service of what. And what he's talking about is like the importance of building a business that's content based in service of then selling a product. And it's echoes a lot of what I hear you saying, which is like, be really strategic at being best in class in something. And you do that by being consistent, being novel, unique, and figuring out, I think this is kind of the third piece with it. Like, what is it that your audience needs? Like, what are you great at? And what does your audience need? And find that overlap and continually create within that. Eventually what will come from that when you have an audience is the ability to ask or see the need that exists for them and to create some type of product around that, whether it's a service, whether it's an actual physical product, whether it's a company that you know does almost well. In your case, it was like doing conferences. Like, you build this audience and then one of the products that you have is you can do conferences or training. So all of these different options come from it. It gets a lot easier once you have an audience, and we've seen that too with the products that we've created? Having an audience makes it so much easier. Do you have any advice around figuring out what that is like when you have that audience, how do you formulate what it is? And when do you know when you're ready to actually do that, like sell something?

So that's a great question. My answer is you want to drive revenue as soon as possible. Most of the content entrepreneurs I talk to or content creators getting into the space don't have a lot of disposable income where they can wait nine to 12 to 18 months for, you know, somebody to give me money. So, you know, I talk about this in my book Content Inc. There's 10 different ways to drive revenue. And most of the content creators I talk to drive revenue in five, six, seven different ways. So where it's almost the opposite of what we talked about before, where we want to focus on one channel and serve one Audience really well with revenue. We want to do all the things to figure out what's going to stick. So the lowest hanging fruit is you're probably going to sell some kind of sponsorship or advertising. It's like, hey, I got a newsletter, I've got a podcast. Somebody wants to reach my audience, great, I'm going to insert that ad. Boom, you're doing that right now. And they say, oh, okay. Well, I've learned that we could actually do a side event or a webinar or something. So you're in the event space now. Or you could do affiliate marketing and affiliate links, which a lot of creators do. You could sell books and ebooks and white papers and those types of things. And you could even do a Kickstarter program and get donations. So you could do all these different things, just like a media. By the way, those are all products that a media company would launch. They're all, if you look at your local newspaper, website, in any industry, they're all making money all those different ways and they're doing as much of it as they can. And then you're on the outside. You might say, okay, now I'm what Nathan talked about. Nathan did his thing and launched ConvertKit. Great. It's an email, wonderful email service. So he wants to sell more subscriptions, product subscriptions to that, that product. Or maybe you're a consulting person. It's like, hey, I want to do coaching or consulting. Well, you could sell all kinds of time for dollars that you want to from a coaching standpoint. Or maybe you're a big company like a Red Bull or like an Autodesk or Microsoft where you want to keep your customers more loyal or sell or have them buy more high ticket items if you will, and create yield. So you know, there's, there's 10 right there that you can go through and look at. But so that's the difference is we want to be singularly focused on the content side and build that audience. And once you build that audience, you have, you're basically staying up all night every night figuring out how can I drive revenue and keep the lights on. And then you'll figure out, you'll say affiliate marketing, that doesn't work really well for my audience. And but you'll say, wow, this event really took off when we launched content marketing world 2011. I started talking about at the end of 2010. I was hoping 100 to 150 people would come to Cleveland for a big content marketing event. I had no idea that that first year, 660 would show up and four years later we would hit 4,000.

That's crazy.

I was just like, oh, let's try it like a good content entrepreneur should do. So that's where you get in. And you don't necessarily have to choose, but you need to try a lot of those revenue components on that side and then you'll know which is, which are the winners and which ones you can move on from.

Yeah, that's great. And, and similarly to the different platforms, you probably will come out of that experimental phase with a leader like, hey, this may. This is the main thing. You're. You're doing services, you're selling a product, you're doing conferences, you're doing training, you're doing consulting. That becomes the main thing. But then you also have those additional revenue sources potentially that are kind of supporting that, that are also there but aren't the main driver. But your point is, when you are creating, create singularly, like focused in on one specific platform, one specific area, the thing that is that you are most natural at that's going to be the easiest for you to create on that platform. When it comes to the monetization side, think strategically about kind of trying all of them, seeing what works, and then maybe out of that double down. Is that.

Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, if you're. I think a lot of people mistakenly believe, oh, I need the focus on the content and audience side and I need the focus on the revenue side. I don't agree with that because you don't know. You have no idea. Things are changing so fast with the audience. I don't know that. I didn't know that an awards program would take off in content marketing, but it did so great. That was a product that we could launch. I didn't know that we weren't going to be able to sell anything at all for digital advertising, but we had a waiting list for people to be in our email newsletter. Yeah, who knows? It's all different. It's different in the food industry is different, in marketing is different and whatever. So, yeah, you definitely want to try that and test it out and then, you know, learn, fail fast. If you want to put it that way, say, oh, that works. That one doesn't. That one. All I knew is that I was three years into this whole project and I'm losing money and I'm like, if I don't figure this thing out fast, I'm not going to be able to pay for the kids going to school and my wife is going to Hate me.

Motivation.

She quit her job to watch the kids and I was the sole breadwinner. This is going to be bad quickly, so figure it out.

What turned in that point for you? Like, what was the thing that was the breakthrough?

I fell in love with this product, this matching tool that I thought was going to be great because I'm like, oh, my God, all these brands need content. They don't know where to find it. Google wasn't the Google that it is now. At the time, it's like, oh, okay, well, we can be that matching. We can be the eharmony for content marketing.

Yeah.

And I wouldn't let go of it. And I kept pushing it and pushing it and pushing it. And then basically what happened? This was September of 2009, our best, my best case study, if you will, that was paying for the service. I called to re up the annual service, an annual fee that somebody had to subscribe into, and talked to the CEO on the phone and she basically said that they weren't going to re up. And we had delivered them millions of dollars in revenue. And they're like, oh, they could find our better roi, ROI somewhere else. And I'm like, I don't know what to do now. This is the best. I can't do any better than this. And this person's not going to sign up and buy. And so I was ready to, yeah, I was dusting off the LinkedIn. I'm ready to, I'm ready to go find a job. And then that's when I just sat down after feeling sorry for myself and wrote it on a cocktail napkin, believe it or not. And I wrote the model and I said, okay, we are going to focus on, you know, I got all this, started realizing going through my email and, and started to listen to what my future customers actually wanted to pay for and then put the model together that became Content Marketing Institute, Content Marketing World, Chief Content Officer magazine. And we were, we became the, the goal was to be the leading destination for content marketing education. And then we were able to do that in a couple years from them once we pivoted away from that product that nobody wanted to buy.

And so it almost sounds like in you talking through some of these suggestions, it's like you then looking back, that's what you did. You built an audience. You said, here's what we're going to build an audience from that audience. Then listening and saying, what do people need? Creating that product and launching to that audience that you built.

That's it.

Does that feel accurate? Yeah.

That's absolutely accurate. And then I was, I was basically the same model. Everything we talked about, we were doing it really well. Our platform was the blog and then the blog was paired with the newsletter. So that was working really, really well. And we were, we were, kept hitting them over the head with, hey, sign up for this service.

Yeah.

And nobody was doing it.

Yeah.

And then once we flipped that and said, oh, okay, well, let's just stop. It's not working.

It's almost like saying, what do you want to sign up for? And then people say that, and then that's what you create.

It's so weird how you become blind. I mean, they're telling me, I'm going through these emails, I'm going through the blog comments saying, is there an event for content marketing? And I'm like, no, there's really not.

So I'm like, oh my God, I do if I want to go to an event for content marketing.

So yeah, so there were, I mean, there were events, don't get me wrong, but they were really small events, 75 people, 100 people. They're more workshop type things. And I said, but nobody, nobody has built the event for the industry. And by the way, when my wife and I sold in 2016, the valuation of Content Marketing Institute came from the event. Yeah, I mean that's, that's why we were purchased. Because UBM now in forma wanted to buy Content Marketing World. Even though we had six or seven or eight different ways that we drove revenue and profit, the big money maker.

Was the event the thing for them that was most valuable was that event.

Yeah, was that. It was, was absolutely that event. And that's where it's funny. I was just talking to somebody in a, in a different call. We were talking about the importance of building a moat. And then Warren Buffett talks about this is like he invests in businesses that have some kind of moat around that protects that business. When you build an event business or a membership business or a subscription business, you are building a moat that's different from every other newsletter out there, every other YouTube channel. So as you build your audience and you look at the products you launch and say, hey, is this something that we are uniquely qualified to launch that we can do that other people can't? So you can sort of build that moat in.

Yeah, it's in the moat. In that case, is community. Like, is that what you're getting at or how would you describe it? Like if you have a membership, if you have subscription, if you have this conference, those Being moats is the like level underneath that community.

I would say launching an a large scale event is something that most people weren't willing to do or risk or had enough knowledge to do. But it's because of the way we had a, we had built a community that we were able to do it. So mo, we knew all the speakers because they were already on our newsletter list. They were already participating and guest blogging on our platform. They were in our LinkedIn group. Like we already knew all these people really, really well. So if somebody else was going to come in and say, hey, they wanted to do a content market, large scale content marketing event, it'd be very difficult for them without that knowledge and wisdom and participation from these wonderful people that wanted to work with us and see us succeed because we were helping them.

That's great.

This episode is sponsored by Cultivate wp. Specifically a new offering they have called Cultivate WP Go. So Cultivate wp, the agency or the company, focuses on designing and developing food blogs. And it was founded by Bill Erickson, who's this incredible WordPress developer.

We know because as I'll share, we've.

Worked with him and Dwayne Smith, who's this incredible designer. And Bill developed a version of Pinch of Yum before we had our own internal team. And it was one of the fastest growing versions of the site that we've had. So as you know, in this industry.

Word spreads quickly about people who do good work.

And Bill and Duane have really filled their calendar over the past few years with doing these custom websites for some of the biggest food sites on the web. You can see the list on their website and they would create these fully custom designs, but they would cost literally multiple tens of thousands of dollars. And that makes a lot of sense if you're a site that gets multiple millions of page views. But what they realized is there's a lot of really successful sites who need the best technology in the world to power them, but can't justify spending more multiple tens of thousands of dollars. So that's why they launched Cultivate Go. It's a semi custom theme design and white glove site setup. So you choose one of the core themes, they have multiple options, and then their team customizes the logo, the brand colors, the topography so it matches your brand exactly. And then they set it up on a staging environment where you can test it out, get a feel for it, and can launch your site within just one week. And the cost is only $5,000. And here's the thing, you have the exact same features, functionality and support as the themes that cost up to 10 times as much as a Cultivate Go theme. So that means your Cultivate Go site can compete on an even technological playing field with the biggest food sites in the world. If you're interested in checking it out, go to foodbloggerpro.com go or you could just search Cultivate Go in Google. Thanks so much to Cultivate WP for sponsoring this episode.

One of the things when you you talked about Content Inc. The book and you have this kind of flywheel or I don't know what you'd want to how you how you'd describe it, but two, two kind of parts of that that I would be interested in talking about. We can include it in the link to the show notes so people can see it. But you talk about selling kind of this exit and one of the the last step is sell or go big. So I'd be interested in talking about that. And then also one of the the steps is the Content Tilt and the Tilt is the name of the newsletter where you talk about content entrepreneurship. So there's we don't have to talk about each one of those People can read the book. They can check that out. But can you talk about those two specifically the second step of the process, the content tilt and then this idea of seller or go big. And then if there's other kind of pieces to fill in would be interested to hear that.

I'm more than happy to. Yeah. I've been working on this model for a long, long time interview on my own experience but interviewing a lot of content entrepreneurs and what they found to be successful. And we broke it down to seven distinct steps that pretty much work in that order. But the second step is Content Tilt and it's important to talk about because it's, it's where we talked a little bit about this where most content creators, whether you work for a brand or not, they they completely miss the point if when they look at the content they're creating, it's just like their competitors content. There's no differentiation. So basically your Content Tilt is how do we find a way to cut through all that clutter, break through and get the attention of an audience in some way. So it's your ba. It's basically how do you differentiate? What's your hook? Why do why should people pay attention to you? So all those questions are you have to figure you have to have it and most companies don't. I in some of the presentations that I do, I'll do A thing on cloud computing. And I'll say, look at all the content on cloud computing. And I would go to Amazon's page and IBM's page and Oracle's page and I would take their content on cloud computing and I would put it side by side and it's exactly the same.

Yeah.

I said, luckily these companies are already billion dollar companies and they don't have to worry about having the exact same content. If you have no budget, you can't think this way. And plus, let's just say that you were going to do content on cloud computing. You've already got companies that are putting millions of dollars behind this. How are you going to break through? So we'll brainstorm and say, oh, it's cloud computing for operational managers in the food industry space that live in the Pacific Northwest. I don't know.

Sure, yeah.

So that could be a niche, that you could be the leading informational expert. So basically I always challenge, when I used to do consulting, I always used to challenge the marketing team. I'm saying, if we do the work, can you be the leading informational expert on that? And when they stopped laughing and actually got to a point where they said, I think we could, it's like, good, let's do the work. Let's go down to it.

Yeah.

The sell and go big.

Sell or go big?

Sell or, I'm sorry, sell or go big. I'm a big proponent of exit planning and I believe exit planning happens before you start anything that you do. So for example, 2007, I left corporate America. I had a VP position in publishing, as we talked about, left and started a business. And I wrote down in my journal that by 2015 that I would sell the company that I was currently working on for $15 million. So that was my. The 15 million was an exact number because I talked to my accountant, said I, I wanted forever money, money that I wouldn't screw up everything. I wanted to make sure I could take care of my kids and my family. And I went and I talked to my accountant and I said, what do I need to have like $10 million at the end of this thing? He said, well, you need, you need 15 after tax.

I'm after taxes, after taxes and the.

Whole thing to pay for all the stuff and to do the bonuses and everything. I need 15. So I said, okay, just 2008, I said in seven years that we would sell for that. Every decision that I made with the business, I looked at that goal. I'm like, okay, well will this help that happen? Not help that, you know. So I've. I mean, I've worked with a lot of content entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs in general, that have no idea. I did a workshop for about 50 entrepreneurs in all sorts of service industries and, and whatnot. And I said, how many of you have some kind of exit scenario? And like, one person raised their hands like, yeah, I plan on my kids getting this. And I said, does your kids know that they're going to inherit your business? I know we haven't talked about it yet, so I'm like, okay, everybody stop. Why are we doing this? Why are you in the business that you're at? So I would compel everybody listening to this is why are you in your business? Like, is this something that you're doing as a hobby for the rest of your life? And that's going to be great. And that's fine if, you know that's the case.

Yeah.

I know a lot of people that don't like exit planning because they like, say, I just want to live my life the way fine. I don't. Like, I wanted to. I wanted to travel more. I wanted to be around more for my kids than. Than doing all the stuff that I was doing, not being a part of their lives. So I had specific exit planning goals. And so that as a content entrepreneur, you get to a point. I knew where I wanted to go, that I wanted to sell and exit that business for a specific amount of money. And when we got to the point where I was able bring in people to look at the business, I knew that we were going to be valued at that because I'd done all the research on it, but people want to.

Did you sell it for. Yeah. Oh, yeah, that was the number.

So 2015 came along. 2014 would have been. Been the year to sell by 2015 to get them. We didn't have the valuation then. We had to wait one year because I looked at it, I'm like, we had to make some other decisions in the middle. So June of 2015, I knew that we were going to be at a point where we could get that valuation and we started to get people involved. I started that process at the end of 2015. We did the memorandum, I did in person meetings. I got the Lois in, and we ended up going through the process specifically with UBM and by June, so it was June of 2016, we sold for more than that $15 million number. So everything, everything, everything worked out. Yeah, it was.

That's.

It doesn't work often work that way. But a lot of people probably don't realize that I reviewed that goal every day.

Sure.

And I think when you're that focused on something, and I'm not saying everyone has to do this, but I believe that everyone should have their goals written down, that you should review them first thing. You get up in the morning and before you go to sleep at night, it starts to work while you're sleeping and you figure out, okay, what am I going to do? What impact am I going to make on the world? And that could be financial, it could be spiritual, it could be mental, physical, could be whatever, family, whatever it is, focus on that. And the same thing holds true to building a content business. Knowing why you're doing what you're doing, that's incredible.

What a story. That's awesome. I think specifically the idea of writing that down and then achieving that within it was, you know, I said it was like a little bit outside of time frame, but essentially like when you said you were going to do it is really, really inspiring. And I think a huge part of that is the mindset like you talked about going into it to say here's specifically what I want to get out of it. Everybody doesn't have to get the same thing out of it. The point is like define what it is that you're after. The reason that you're starting. It's kind of that classic like seven habits, like start with the end in mind, apply that to your life, but also apply it to your business. So in your case that was sell. You knew you wanted to have this life changing exit where you would sacrifice for this defined period of time that would allow you to live differently after that. How about in the case of go big, what does that mean?

So when you get to a point, and like you mentioned Nathan Barry, really good example, he's definitely going big, but he's figuring out a way that he can still do all the things that he wants to do with his new billion dollar thing and whatever. When you get to the 25, 30, 35 employee contractor level, you get into a whole lot of issues of scaling. So you have to make sure that you know that the organization has to change. That's when you're hiring new operational people to come in, new salespeople. It's a whole different set of headaches. So I'm not, it's, it's definitely not impossible. Every major media company that you know of has gone through that. They've gone through the, we're a really small media company, we get to that 15, 20, 25, 30 employee level. Or whether that's, let's say, seven and a half to $10 million in revenue. And you're like, okay, now we're in for a whole new headset of headaches. Because the. I don't want to say it's easy growth, but it's easier growth. Once you get what we call a minimum viable audience in the book of an audience that's willing to buy from you in enough and then enough of that audience that you can pay for the lifestyle you want, then you gotta start. Okay, we got this hockey stick growth. It happens in almost every content entrepreneur business. So the first two, three years, you're sort of, you're sparring, you're figuring it out. And then you get to years three and five and you see this amazing hockey stick growth where they go from 100,000 in revenue to 2 million, 3 million, 4 million in revenue. And then they start to stall. You have to figure out, okay, well, we've got the easy growth. You figured out the one product category and now you've really got to take it to the next level and figure out how you're going to operationalize this thing. And it has to be without you, the founder. Like, you can't have your hands into all these things. Like you, that's where it really gets into hiring and firing and figuring out. And so it's. And honestly, they're tough decisions I never wanted to make. I absolutely didn't want to go there and so already knew. Okay, good. I was at that point where scale or sell, I already knew I wanted to sell. And thankfully, you know, it all worked.

Out and you knew that number. So the interesting thing about that is like, then you got back into it. Like you, you started new things and pursuits and talk about what that was like, like post exit, were you able to do what you wanted to do and how is it different than you thought it would be?

So, yeah, real quickly, 2000. So two. I stayed on with the company till 2017. Part of my earn out, everything went well. Great. 2018, I took the entire year off. I did 30 day Sabatic. 30 day, no social media, no email in January of 18. And the rest of the year I worked on it. We have a nonprofit called Orange Effect foundation and I did more with that. I started working on my novel and the novel, I finished the novel in 2019, the Will to Die. So I started to use all different parts of my brain that I never worked before. I stopped the podcast, I stopped this little marketing and stopped content incident and everything was great. Was spending time with the kids. And then Covid. Covid came along. And to be honest, I. I started dabbling in a lot of different things because of sheer boredom. Like, I don't want to say I was bored, but I was like, I was home a lot. I wasn't doing 20. 20 was supposed to be a full year travel for my wife and I.

Yeah, change of plans.

That didn't happen.

The most drastic change of plans.

Yeah, it didn't. So. So basically. And so here's where your plans go awry. Right. I was like, okay, what am I going to do now? And I started to learn about the creator economy and I started to talk to a lot of my friends who were trying to do this thing. And then I re. Released Content Inc. Which was originally done in 2015, and said, okay, this can be very helpful.

Yeah.

I said, oh, I might as well. I should do a newsletter. I should launch an event. I basically did the whole thing over again.

Yeah.

And hindsight, I would absolutely do it again. But I wasn't planning on doing the same model twice, which is basically what happened, which is why I then course corrected after Covid was done. And we ended up selling the Tilt and Content Entrepreneur Expo CEX to a wonderful company called Lulu. And now they shepherd it and I help them continue this thing growing.

So, point being, you would. You would do it again, but you wouldn't use the same model. Do it again, meaning, like you'd get back into something, like creatively building something, but maybe not necessarily replicating the model that you had done before.

I was so I was very excited for the first year and a half of doing the Tilt. I thought we were doing something really different. We were testing out tokenization and content creators getting into that, and I was learning about things that I'd never heard of, never done, nobody did. And then that the whole tokenization thing went down the tubes.

Yeah.

Like web currency and all that didn't work very well. And then we had to shift the model and that model became exactly what we did before. And that's when. And again, I love being involved with the tilt. I love being involved cex. I will continue to. But I didn't want to do the same thing again once I realized that's what we were doing. So now I'm. Now I ended up. We ended up selling, which worked out really well. And as I told you before we talked, I'm working on my second novel. A. Yeah, A secondary. Secondary novel to the Will to Die, which was the first one. And it just Now I'm back traveling again and speaking and doing a lot of things that I love. So a weird 18 month period, which I guess was probably for a lot of people during COVID Yeah. Kind of figuring out what you're going to do. But now I feel really good about what's going on.

That's cool. So we did episode four 15. We did an interview with Matt Briel. Do you work with Matt?

I just talked with Matt. Absolutely.

So encourage people to check that out. You know, one of the things that you talked about is wanting to encourage people to figure out as a creator, how do you sell outside of the ecosystem of Amazon? We talk a ton about that in that podcast. So it'd be. Encourage people to check that out, knowing that it's now part of this kind of Lulu ecosystem. Encourage people to check out the Tilt, which is. Can you describe like Elevator Pitch, what the Tilt is all about?

Yeah. The Tilt is a free newsletter for content people who are doing any kind of content creation, who want to build full time businesses and what we call content entrepreneurs to get. Get it every Tuesday and Friday. And we're, we're trying to teach you and then cover the news that's important to you as a content creator or a professional content creator. And then the, the event that goes with that is CEX Content Entrepreneur Expo, which will be May 5th 7th in Cleveland, Ohio. We'll have 500 content creators coming together, learning on the spot, networking with each other, trying to support each other and build our businesses. So that'll be in May. And then to your point about figuring out the ecosystem of books, our initiative with Lulu, which is really exciting for me, I get to work on something I haven't done before. We're trying to figure out how content creators can be successful who launch books. So these are, you launch a nonfiction or a fiction book. How they can be successful without having to rely on Amazon. And I'm a big rented land, own your own land proponent, where whether that's on X or on Instagram or YouTube or someone like Amazon, a content creator putting all their eggs in that basket and basically that they can make any changes. They're not your followers, they're their followers. You're renting that land and then what do you do with that land to make it your own and build your own business. So I see that happening with authors on the Amazon side where Amazon's making the decision on what's going to work and what's not. And I just don't think it's fair. And I would like to see more authors sell directly. So that's what we're trying to figure out with Tilt Publishing, where we can take your manuscript, help you get that new manuscript to publishing, and then set it up so that you can sell directly from your own website to your own fans instead of having to send them off to Amazon and having Amazon keep the profit and Amazon keep the data.

Yep. How do you reconcile. Because that might be something that people would say is like, wait, wasn't that something we were talking about before? Where you should focus in on one platform, build your audience on one platform. So how do you reconcile the non, you know, don't build your crop on rented land with the focusing in on one platform.

So when you make your decision to pick your channel, I don't have any problem of which you, what decision you make. You might say, I'm going to go on YouTube because my customers or my audience are already there. That's what's great about those platforms. They already have the audience. That's why they're so seductive. You could say it's LinkedIn. You could do, you could do Twitter X, you could do Facebook. Whatever it is you TikTok, you choose those. At some point you have to say, okay, how do I move all that power that I have or lack of power with the followers that I built on that platform to something that I can control more than not, that becomes some kind of an email newsletter or a subscription program or a membership where somebody is giving you their personal information, their email and giving you permission to contact them. And then you don't have to go through an outside entity and an outside algorithm or algorithm. Exactly. And you have your own business. And by the way, this is Again, Media Business 101. If you look at New York Times or you look at Huffington Post, or you look at any of the great media companies that have been built, they, at one time or another, they say, okay, we can't rely on all that social. We'll still use it. It's fine. I'm not saying don't use it. I'm saying don't rely on it. It's the same thing with Amazon. And we're finding us with all these authors that are saying, okay, well everything that I have, Amazon, you don't, they don't even get, let it be possible for one of your own fans, your own subscribers to purchase from your site and give you that information directly. And I think we just have to change some of that thinking. And my concern is a lot of new content creators aren't even thinking about the algorithm, that they're. That they don't have any connection with those people directly and they can get booted off the platform at any time. And that's what scares me about what's going on right now.

Yeah. And as an example, let's say your book is super successful on Amazon. You sell 100,000 copies. There's no way for you to connect with any of those people who purchase your book. Like, you just won't know. You don't know who they are. You can't connect with them. You can't. You have an event coming up. You can't market to them.

I had. This is my example. Is this so Content Inc. A book I'm very proud of. Two editions that sold more than 100,000 digital, print and audio copies. I don't have one piece of information from those hundred thousand. I would give a lot to get 5,000 of those names versus the hundred thousand that I sold. And that's just the thinking that the changes, like, I don't care about the sales, I don't care about bestseller. I want the connection with my audience. So that's kind of the different way to think about it. And that's why now, in the future, all my books that I'm going to be writing will be sold directly from my own website.

That's awesome, Joe. There's a lot of places we could send people for projects that you have been or are currently involved with. But what would your preference be if, you know, we did a shout out, a few different places where people can connect with you, follow along with what you're up to, because we want to make sure that we do that.

Oh, thank you. So jopolizzi.comp U U L I Z Z I is the best because you can get everything there. But I have my own personal newsletter there. So if you were going to sign up and you wanted insights and from Joe, if you got anything out of this conversation, sign up to the newsletter there and you'll get that. And then if you would like to meet me in person, I would like to meet you in person. You can go to CEX, which is May 5th to 7th in Cleveland, Ohio. You can sign up at CEX events and all the other stuff.

You'll.

You'll find me in the social media sphere if you will, but I'd rather talk to you directly. How about that?

That's awesome, Joe. Thanks so much for coming on.

Thanks for the opportunity.

Hey there, Alexa here from the Food Blogger Pro team. Hope you enjoyed this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast, I wanted to take a quick second to make sure you are aware of the Food Blogger Pro membership. So the Food Blogger Pro membership, Food Blogger Pro in general, was started when Bjork and Lindsay Ostrom. Lindsay is the content creator over at Pinch of Yum. When they started getting a ton of questions about starting and growing and monetizing food blogs so people would come to them and say, hey, I see what you're doing, I love what you're doing. How can I do the same thing? So they decided Food Blogger Pro to be the place where food bloggers, food content creators, can go to learn how to start, grow and monetize their own food blogs. So we have different courses, we have different events, we have different tools and deals for our community. We have a community forum where members can connect, collaborate and troubleshoot with with industry experts and their fellow Food Blogger Pro members. And it's just a really active place. I always like to say that your Food Blogger Pro membership won't look the same the next week after you join because we're constantly adding new content, new value to your membership. I wanted to read this testimonial from Food Blogger Pro member Alistair from the Pesky Vegan, and he says starting a food blog can feel pretty daunting. More often than not, it's probably something you're trying to do on your own without much prior experience. Signing up to FoodBlogger Pro was one of the single best things I could have done, as it removed a lot of the worries I had and provided me with a supportive community and a wealth of invaluable information. When I think about the journey I've been on, I simply can't imagine getting to where I am without this membership. Thank you. So cool to see so many different experiences with Food Blogger Pro. We have tons of testimonials on our site. If you're interested in learning more, if you're interested in learning more about the membership, what that looks like, what you get when you sign up as a member, you can go to foodbuggerpro.com join. You get access to everything we have the moment you sign up. So no content is dripped. You can kind of just create your own journey through our content and access what is most meaningful and beneficial for you. So again, that URL is foodbloggerpro.com join if you're interested in learning more. Otherwise, we'll see you here on the podcast next week. And until then, make it a great week.

It.