This is a transcript excerpt of Chad Pollitt’s INBOUND 2015 presentation on content promotion strategy. In this opening segment he introduces himself (veteran, adjunct professor), frames the talk as a story-driven discussion about content promotion, and highlights the problem of a rapidly expanding, noisy content landscape that makes visibility and promotion harder.
Chapters
I'm not your typical speaker. It's not that I'm not a good speaker or bad speaker or anything like that. I don't religiously study my slides. Each slide represents a thought. And I'm going to share a story throughout this presentation. And I hope that each and every one of you gets something out of this story. And it's a powerful story. It's a story of content promotion, and it's an often overlooked story in our business. Now, I've been in this business a long time in some form or fashion since late 2001, early 2002. And I've seen things change and evolve over those years. And this is a culmination of my thoughts around that evolution and how we as a company relevance has attacked the problems and the challenges that we face as marketers every day. That's what we're going to talk about today. But before I do that, I have a few housekeeping things. First off, please everyone tweet to HubSpot with the hashtag inbound15 to put me in a bigger room next year. Please do that. But before I jump in here, I want to let you guys know a little bit about me. If you don't know already. I served over ten and a half years in the army, the US Army. I was a commander. I had my own company of soldiers that I commanded. That's where I got this. Every week, sometimes twice a week, I do a mastermind session with some of the top executives in our industry. And we sit down on Google, on hangouts, and we just talk about their challenges, their wins. And it's interactive. And I do this every week. And it's my way of keeping my finger on the pulse of our industry and what's happening in real time. I'm going to pass this out now. I'm going to pull five business cards out of here for my next mastermind session. So if any of you want to be a part of that mastermind session, please put your card in here and we will get a hold of you probably in the next week. So I'm going to go ahead and start here, sir. By the way, that's heavy. Imagine putting that thing on your head. Sucks. Anyways, so quick announcement. This is so funny to me. Two weeks ago, I was asked by the Indiana University Kelley School of Business to be a professor for them. I'm just an old soldier, right? I don't have a master's degree. I'm just passionate about this business and I'm passionate about sharing what I've learned in this business. So technically, I guess I'm a college professor now. Anyways, I encourage and challenge each and every one of you. If you ever have the opportunity to shape the future of our industry and teach college kids digital marketing, do it. They need it. The professors I talk to are traditional old school marketers and they don't get inbound at all. Those students need people like us. And that's why I stepped up to the plate. By the way, being a professor, an adjunct professor doesn't pay shit. But the truth is I would have done it for free because I want to have a hand in the future of our industry. And I feel like giving back in that way is a good way to do that. So I encourage and challenge each and every one of you to do that in the future if you have that opportunity. So this is what I'm going to talk about. I don't like bullets. I will not read bullets. I'm just going to share thoughts. I'm going to tell stories, okay? But this is what I'm going to talk about. On its surface, it doesn't really make sense, does it? What's a content explosion? That's a content explosion. Unless you've been hiding under a rock the last five years, each and every one of you have seen the amount of content double, triple, quadruple on the Internet. It's crazy how much content is on the Internet and it's only growing. Part of that's HubSpot's fault. It is. Guess what, folks, the secret's been let out of the bag. It's no secret anymore that inbound marketing works, right? So maybe you were an early adopter. Maybe you were the first in your vertical, in your industry to. To do inbound marketing, and you blew up. It helped shape the growth of your company. Maybe. Is Marcus Sheridan in here? You know his story. Look what it did to his company. Fast forward to today. Those competitors are doing content too. Because the secret's been let out of the bag. What happens when you're in an industry where you have 500 other competitors all creating the same type of content you create? What happens to your visibility? It becomes crowded. It becomes noisy. This is how much content is produced every second. Excuse me? Information. Every second on the Internet. That's a ridiculous amount. Content and information. That's what you're competing against with inbound marketing, with content marketing. Look at how many blog posts you're competing against. That's how many blog posts are published and written every single day. And it's only growing. How many of you have slaved over some article for hours? Hit publish and nobody read it. I've done it. I've written over 800.
