[A conversation with] Joe Pulizzi - about content entrepreneurs
Questions asked:
Tell us more the “audience-first” way to start a business
After Eric Ries’s MVP, here comes Joe Pulizzi’s MVA (Minimum Viable Audience)?
To help content entrepreneurs go the distance they need to focus and stay away from negativity. Can you tell us more about your “secret formula” for this?
How one can manage both a job to pay the bills while the content business is growing?
A 5 million dollar business in 5 years right?
Is the Content Inc. business model also made for women?
Successful content business is teamwork?
What are the 7 steps to building a content business?
Let’s focus on the 3rd step: 1 content type, 1 platform, 1 channel
How do we articulate the 1-1-1 rule with the increasing ability we have to repurpose content?
Where does email/newsletter fit into the process?
About the audience: in B2B, how do you distinguish the “entrepreneur” and the “marketer” audience?
Talking about a minimum viable audience, how do you come up with a number as a business goal?
Should you forget about the 1,000 true fans?
Should we build a content business on Clubhouse?
Do you like Clubhouse?
How should one proceed if we want to acquire a media company?
Can you give us an example of brands having recently acquired media?
Giving back: Pam & Joe’s Orange Foundation
Karine Abbou: My first question is all related to, I would say, the mindset, the posture of a content entrepreneur that is behind both the book and the podcast because you relaunched most of them during Corona. And in this sort of mindset and posture, the underlying concept is really “start by the audience. Forget about the products”. Too many entrepreneurs start by “I have a super product. I'm going to launch it and then I'm going to think about marketing”. You know, that’s what the VC calls the go-to-market strategy. Please talk to us a little bit more about this disruptive idea - audience first.
Joe Pulizzi: As I started preparing to write “Content Inc” for the 2015 version, I started to do a lot of research. As you say, a VC company. The way most businesses are launched is ninety 99.9% of businesses out there launched with some kind of product. And at the same time, if you look at all the research on the success rate of those businesses, it's very low. And most of those companies fail within three years, five years for the most part. Way more than fifty percent of those businesses fail. So I'm thinking, OK, great, we've got this idea of how to launch a business, we launch with a product first, but yet most of these businesses fail. It doesn't make any sense to me - is there a better way? And then as we sort of started to research more companies like what we were doing, at Content Marketing Institute, which came out and said :
look, what if you built an audience first?
Build a loyal audience around a particular niche that the audience was involved in, that, you know, they were passionate about or they needed more knowledge or whatever the case is, and said, what if you built that audience? And then once you build a loyal audience, listen. You'll find your audience will tell you what ultimately you need to sell, kind of like they did for Content Marketing Institute. I never had planned on doing an event. There was nothing on the landscape to do any kind of an event, but enough of our subscribers said, “Joe is there any event out there that we could go to for enterprise marketers?”. This is exactly how it happened. I was not planning it and we looked at enough feedback and that's when we got the feedback on, “hey, is there an event? And “we need corporate training”. That's when we launched the Chief Content Officer magazine. That was particularly for CMOs, to target them so that they would start to get training in their organization. And then Content Marketing World was launched at the same time. We thought this was the thing.
We went out and interviewed all these “audience-first” companies that were launching. That took two, three years to really get started, but in five to seven years became multimillion-dollar organizations. I said this is the model now. It takes time. No doubt about it. It takes time and patience. And I'm sure we'll talk a lot about that. But there is actually a lot less money you have to put up. And there's actually, I think, less risk overall, because once you build a loyal audience through a wonderful email, through an amazing YouTube channel, through an Instagram feed, through a podcast series, through an event, series or magazine, whatever it might be in which you build that loyal audience, you can monetize that audience in eight, nine, 10 different ways. And that's what we do with Content Marketing Institute. That's what Brian Clark did, Copyblogger. That's what Marcus Sheridan did with River pools and spas. As we talk about in the new book, “Continent Inc.”, there are one hundred case studies. And I really do believe that this is the best model out there for anyone, especially an individual who doesn't have a lot of resources, that doesn't get VC backing, that can't go out and get five hundred thousand dollars to start their business. I could say there is a different way to do it. And then you see all these content creators today that are dabbling around and we're like, no, there's an actual business model for this thing.
Karine Abbou: So basically, if I want to summarize for people who are listening to us, Eric Ries at the time created the MVP and you created the MVA, the minimum viable audience that enables you to start something, build an audience and make money, right?
Joe Pulizzi: That's right, and I have to say kudos to Brian Clark from Coppyblogger for that one because we actually discussed that. I think he's the first one that came out with that term MVA, minimum viable audience. I love it because basically the idea is let's create like Kevin Kelly's thousand true fans - let's create a small audience and then once we do that, the audience will help shape where the business needs to go and where we get money from its fans. And that's where you're going to create the business. Michael Stelzner did this with Social Media Examiner. He said, my minimum viable audience target is 10,000 email subscribers. And he says all I'm going to do is get 10,000 subscribers. I'm not going to create any kind of revenue nor any products, and if I can do that, then that's enough for me to know that I think there are legs here. And that's what he did, and of course, now social media examiner's, the multimillion-dollar organization is super successful. Yeah, it's really interesting.
Karine Abbou: I love the idea. That being said, I have questions before we go deeper into the concept, the business model, those seven steps to build money through your audience. One of the things that are really tricky in this business model is that, and you say in the new book many times, it doesn't come in one day and you need persistence. Of course, you're going to be confronted with a lack of funds, so at some point, you need to figure out how you're going to make a living. So necessarily we’re gonna be facing doubts, stress, negativity, bad comments on our venture from outsides, etc. You have one solution for that! Something I loved in the book: the three “R’s”, I thought it was honestly great. Can you tell us more about this, please?
Joe Pulizzi: Yes! The first one is Record, the next one is Review, and the next one is Remove.
Karine Abbou: First of all, if you can explain a little bit more of those things because I think that's the key. You say that one of the key successes to building your audience is getting to monetize which is really about focus and focus every step of the way. So we're going to go deeper into the different steps. But the problem I have with that is persistence. It’s not that much that people don't want to be persistent, they're just busy. A day has 24 hours, and you're most of the time working six or eight hours per day, depending on the situation. So what are your tips for this? How do you start with the very first steps on being persistent and also acquiring money? Can you give us some numbers on that?
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I mean, we can go through it. Obviously, you want to get to revenue as quickly as possible because you have to put food on the table. I totally get that. We talk about that a lot in the book. The challenge is you have to build that minimum viable audience first before you really get into the revenue side. For me personally, I did consulting. I consulted on the side. I sold some collectibles that I had. You do it. Twenty-two months of moving and shaking and just enough to feed the kids. We really cut our lifestyle down, we went to one car. I mean, not that we were roughing it, but I mean there were some, what I call, ramen noodles and baloney dinners where we didn't have a lot. So we were cutting it down and that's what I would recommend.
But when we talk about the Record, Review, Remove process:
First of all, you have to write down what you want to do. Like what are your overall goals? These are personal goals as well as business. What do you want to do then when you figure it - this is what I want to do, this is what I want to build, this is who I want to be.
Then you review those every day, and we talk about it in the book, you review it in the morning, you review it before you go to bed. This is so that all you're thinking about is this stuff all the time.
And then remove all those things that are getting in your way, in the way you think, but also some of the things that you're doing so that you can actually accomplish these goals. And the one thing that we found, that you talk about, is that people say they say I don't have any time - “I'm working a full-time job”, “I can't do this stuff”, “I can't get this thing started or whatever”. But when you really look at how people are spending their time, we're spending three, five, six, seven hours in front of a screen on social media, not for business purposes. Just watching mini-series, watching the new Disney plus show, whatever they're watching. So you have to make some decisions and say, look, I'm not going to watch a movie a day like I was or I'm not going to spend two hours on Facebook like I was. I'm going to spend that time and put it in your calendar doing something different, creating a blog post. Creating my YouTube, my email newsletter, whatever it is. Right. Doing those things. So, yes, you have to. The period that you're worried that you're not going to make it last a long time, it lasts longer than you think it lasted. I mean, I started the content model that we did for Content Marketing Institute in 2007, April 2007. And I did not think that I was going to actually make it until September of 2011.
Karine Abbou: Wow! Oh, that's why you started running, by the way?
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, because I was stressed out. I mean, literally, you know, of course, this is any entrepreneur. My wife was staying home with the kids, which was a great benefit for us to have. And I'm freaking out trying to figure it out. You got to remember, there's a lot of doubt there. But by September 2012, we had a multimillion-dollar organization that had offered to buy it. So you have to realize that’s how quickly it happens. OK. And that's when things really speed up. So it takes you between, let's say, twelve and twenty-four months to really get to a point where you're driving some amount of revenue and you have a minimum viable audience. Once you get to the later parts of the model, things speed up incredibly because you've hit on something, you're building audiences, building faster. You're looking, you're seeing new revenue opportunities. Your audience is very open about what they want to purchase from you or how they want to support you. Things really start to move. That's why I talk about it in the book and you mentioned before, I believe that if you can get to five or so years of doing this, you can get to a five million dollar valuation. I love this business and I believe that it’s the best way to launch a business today.
Karine Abbou: So we meet every year and in five years, the jackpot. Five million dollars in five years if we follow your method, yes?
Joe Pulizzi: Right. That's what we seem to be found. I mean, when I did the research for the book, it's generally between two and 10 million. So could be two on the low end or could be 10 on the high end for us. You know, we were probably at about that seven to eight million dollar valuation, mark. And then let's see, that was five and then three years later we were at a thirty million dollar valuation. So, OK, things really start to move well and then you're really getting into some interesting.
Karine Abbou: That's really the traction you've seen. OK, one last question I have on all this before we're going deep into the seven steps, is your business model content made also for women? Just expanding my point just for a minute. The point is related to what you just said about those two years or sometimes more, to create the content base. How many hours per day would you dedicate to creating content? Let’s take the example of women who would be mostly in charge of “running a family” or sometimes who would be the only revenue source, etc. So, if we do the math quickly, let’s approximately say that she could get something like around three and four hours per day on a daily basis, to produce content really well. Do you think it's sustainable?
Joe Pulizzi: You're really talking about traditional male and female roles of that's kind of what you're mentioning. And the thing is, in case studies, it found that everybody has their own situation. I mean, you know, it's funny that you're talking about this. I mean, I know some stay-at-home dads that they're in the other position. They're the ones that get the kids up, get up, get the kids in school, make the lunches, do what they need to do, run all the errands and get groceries. So what I've found and this is why I love the model, I don't think it matters. Obviously, every family has priorities and things they have to take care of. Every couple will split up responsibilities. However, that is. But when I look at the case studies that we have in the new edition of the book, Kristen Bor, a woman from Barefoot Theory, is an amazing case study. You talk about Anne Rearden, baking queen of Sydney, Australia, a fantastic case study - a stay-at-home mom, and she was able to figure out the time. Now, she's amazing. She's been doing it for well over ten years now. Quinn Tempest has done a great job on Instagram and Anne Hadley has done an amazing job with her newsletter, Total Anarchy and Running, Marketing, Profs and all the things I'd like to think. I know we don't live in a perfect world, but I'd like to think it doesn't matter who you are or where you come from. You can do this thing. Now, do you have to make some changes to your life, as we talked about? Yes, absolutely. But I think that goes with, you know. Male or female, any ethnicity, whatever the case is, I'd like to think it is a fair business model, it's the fairest of the business models.
Karine Abbou: I don't think this thing can work if you don't really have a very, very sustainable base at home, right?
Joe Pulizzi: So it's a little bit different depending on who you are. So my son, who's almost 18 years old, is on YouTube. Let's say he's a YouTube creator. He doesn't have any responsibility. He can live on almost nothing right now. He can do these things, make the decisions. No big deal. But when you have a family, when you have a significant other, you have a spouse, you have kids, you have to have the support of that significant other. So you have to have the talk at some point, like, I had to have the talk and go to my wife and say, because I left, as you know, from reading the book, I left a six-figure executive position and publishing with really good benefits. And I just say, look, if I'm going to do this, the next two or three years are going to be rough and we can't do all the things we've been doing, we might not be able to go on the holiday we've been going on, you know, all the things that we might be able to we can't go out as much as we were before. So you have to make those kinds of decisions. So absolutely anyone that says, I want to build this content first audience, first model, you have to get buy-in from your support group, somebody. And by the way, when we talk about goal setting, it's always good to set your goals and have at least one person help you be accountable for those goals, even if it's I run three times a week. Do you have somebody that says, hey, did you run today, work out today? Did you read it today? Those things always help. So I would absolutely have to have the talk.
Karine Abbou: Awesome answers. OK, let's go deep into the seven steps. Can you tell us about them, please?
Joe Pulizzi: Sure. So it's actually funny because the original book “Continent Inc” had six steps. The new “Content Inc” version has seven. The seventh step is very important, near and dear to my heart. I'll talk about it.
The first two steps are the sweet spot and the content tilt. The sweet spot is the intersection of your expertise. What are you good at? What do you have some kind of insight into and match with whoever that audience is and what their desire is. So what's that audience's pain point and the intersection of that is what you would come to as a sweet spot.
Our sweet spot for Content Marketing Institute was this idea of content marketing. Do marketers understand it? What do they need to know about it? Those types of things we had understood that and we had expertise in publishing, so we could bring that together and create this new thing. But that's where everybody starts. It's like that's where you come up with the niche, topic, and here's my audience.
Then you move on to the content tilt. Sometimes you can't figure it out right away. So for the new business, I'm betting a lot on the fact that our differentiation is this term called “Content Entrepreneur”. Nobody uses that term right now. So we're going full forward with this idea of a content entrepreneur that we think can resonate and differentiate us enough so that we can separate ourselves from the pack, and that content entrepreneurs, our target, will actually want to engage in our email newsletter, those types of things.
Wallie Koval who created Accidentally Wes Anderson is a great case study. While he was doing an Instagram post every day that, you know, was an image, a great photo that looked like it came out of a Wes Anderson movie. That's why he called his Instagram feed Accidentally Wes Anderson. Well, what he found was, is that all these photos didn't have any detail behind them. So he's like, OK, people want to visit here, but there's no detail at all. So he could create the detail behind it. Nobody was doing that, went through the whole thing and created 1.5 million followers now, and just had a New York Times best-selling book, which is an excellent book. I highly recommend you getting it. If you love photobooks, it's like a coffee table. But this is the content filter where you find your differentiation. So that's the first thing.
And then you come to step three, which is the base and the base is very simple. Instead of doing seven things at one time and being mediocre at all of them, pick one platform and one content type. So that's basically when people say I'm a blogger or I'm a YouTuber or I'm on Instagram. What is your core thing? And that's where you build your audience. So like for the tilt, we're just focusing on email. So we're building our content type as textual plus image and our platform is email. Walis is imagery through Instagram. So that's his platform. OK, those are what we want to focus on and what we found, and by the way, this is how every media company since the dawn of time has created itself. New York Times started with a print newspaper, Ted Talks is an event series. Huffington Post started with a blog post. Everybody starts with one thing, and that's where most marketers go wrong, is they say, oh, I got a great idea. I want to create all this content. And they throw it up everywhere and they become Jack of all trades, master of none, and they can't build a significant audience.
Karine Abbou: OK, let's stop on this third one. When you say you need to focus on one content type one platform, one channel. First of all, please explain just very quickly the difference between the three of them, because some of the terms might be pretty confusing. And we're going to talk more about the email specifically. That can be sometimes either a content type, a platform or a channel. It's sort of a mix.
And also just to give you some idea of what I have in mind is that today, it's very difficult to say maybe OK, I will blog, of I will make a YouTube video. Technically, you have a video, for example, a half an hour video. You can then extract the sounds and make a podcast. You can have a written transcript of what you're doing in the video. You can translate this transcript to have it in another language. You can make some short and long videos and stuff that you're going to share on all platforms of social networks. Post some funny ones on Instagram and some more serious ones on LinkedIn. So how do we deal with that? Because one content can lead to ten. Gary V. even launched a content model around this idea of starting with a video and repurposing it into at least 20 other pieces of content. So how do I focus on doing this?
Joe Pulizzi: Let's talk about the platform and then findability platform. Where's your home? What's the main thing that you do? So in your case, it's YouTube. So let's say Gary V. says I'm creating a YouTube channel every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I do a 30 minute YouTube video targeting this audience. That's what I do. Everything that you just talked about is findability. How do I get people to go back to that? And that's basically part of building the base and then going and creating the audience. Findability is all about creating that audience. So I'm not saying you can't be on all those channels, I'm just saying you got to make sure that you use those wisely.
Now, where I disagree with what a lot of what Gary V. says is, he'll basically say you've got to be where your customers are and you should be doing a little bit of Tik-Tok or you're doing Snapchat. I don't agree with that. What I think makes the most sense is to do something like Joe Rogan did with his podcast. He says, OK, I have a podcast, that's my platform, that's my home. And then I use YouTube. And what's this other one? Instagram, let's say YouTube and Instagram to get people to go back to that podcast. But I don't do Tik-Tok and I don't do email and I don't do some of these other things. So you get your focus on that. I think where people get lost is they're like, oh, I've got to dabble in all these other channels. No, you don't. What really goes wrong is where you see somebody saying, oh, I want to create a series of shows and I'm going to do a podcast here and I'm going to do a video series here and I'm going to do this on Tik-Tok, all different things. So you're basically saying instead of building one home, I'm building little huts here and here and here and here and here, and it doesn't work. It doesn't work because you have to create a good, solid foundation. That's your base. And then you can go ahead and throw out the fishing rod every once in a while in different social channels to get them to come back to the platform.
Karine Abbou: Ok another question related to that. What do we do with email? Because in the book this is very obvious, you write very explicitly: “You need to have an email offering”. I one hundred percent agree with that. On top of my YouTube channel or on top of my Instagram group, how do I manage to do both because at some point it doubles the work?
Joe Pulizzi: OK, so let's say that you don't start with email as your home, which most people don't. What we're doing with the tilt right now and starting with email as our home, most people don't do that, although there are still a lot of people today who do that. The scam has done that and the media glossier. I think a lot of new media companies have done that. But a YouTuber doesn't do that, a podcaster doesn't do that. That's where I want to see when you get into diversification. That's the first thing that you do. And the reason why is, and we will talk about it for the people that don't necessarily know, is if I build my home on YouTube, if I'm that Gary example and I've built a million subscribers on YouTube, how many subscribers do I have now? And I say, you have zero. YouTube has a million and you're borrowing them. So what do we do? I get scared because YouTube could cut off our exposure to those million. They could change the rule at any time. Somebody could subscribe to my YouTube page. YouTube could decide not to show it, and they're perfectly within their right to do that. So we've got to protect ourselves. So what we want to do, as we move forward with the model, we said great, I had to start on YouTube because my audience was there and that made the most sense with what I was doing. I don't have a problem with that. You built your base on YouTube, then as you get to the model where, hey, how do I have more control over this business model and communicate directly with them, at some point you say, oh, we're releasing an exclusive email every Friday. And so you get your YouTube subscribers to start subscribing to your email. And Smash did this really well years ago. So Smash at a time was one of the most popular YouTube channels out there. They saw this coming and then they started to direct people back to their website during the YouTube shows to get them to sign up for exclusive offerings. So that's what I would get to. So at some point, you need some unique email offering and that could take a couple of years. You don't have to do it right away. That's what you got to remember.
Karine Abbou: You don't start both at the same time, you don't build your home on YouTube and start at the same time a newsletter.
Joe Pulizzi: That's right. If you start with YouTube, commit to YouTube, build your YouTube subscribers. And then when you get to a point where we talk about diversification later, where you want to diversify as we did with Content Marketing Institute, we said, oh, we're going to start with a blog. A blog was our home. Then we added the email component. That was our first diversification. Then we added a print magazine chief content officer. Then we added a content marketing world event. So we had all these diversifications. But those things happen generally nine to 12 months apart. OK, generally how we did so.
Karine Abbou: OK, that was super clear. And thank you so much for distinguishing both. I have one question also about the audience. For some, it's pretty easy to determine your target audience. I was reading that yesterday. The Hustle sent an email about the vegan industry, I'd say, the fake meat industry that grew to be so big in the US. Yes, five or six years ago, it was a super small niche. It was very, very tight, so at the time it was not that complicated to find your niche. What about when somebody, and there is a lot of B2B business that are having these questions, want to address both marketers and entrepreneurs for content marketing? You targeted very high level, skilled marketers, in very big companies, but you have tons of SMBs and the entrepreneur is often the marketer. And I tend to think that any good entrepreneur needs to be a very good marketer, but all marketers are not automatically good entrepreneurs. So how do you answer, because I know lots of people in the audience have this question, how to distinguish both?
Joe Pulizzi: Well, if I'm targeting an audience, I want to go as small as possible. So for “Content Inc” we said that the book is for entrepreneurs and marketers because I was sort of in the middle with the audience and I think I made the wrong choice. I should have just said it's either for entrepreneurs, service, or marketers and we would’ve had two different books. I think I did a disservice because I was trying to make it too broad. Now, the new book, I really went and said, this is for entrepreneurs. And I even said at the beginning of the first chapter I said, look, if you're this of this, you can get something out of this book. But I'll tell you who I'm talking to in this book, the entrepreneur, the individual content creator who is trying to build a sustainable business. So that's basically how I'm looking at entrepreneurs. So a marketer, you know, totally, totally different audience. That's basically somebody who sells something through communication. That's what I'm looking at from a marketing standpoint. But if I'm coming at this model specifically, I'm looking at the smallest niche possible, and I don't think you can get too small because if you do this right, it'll grow. Like you said, like with your fake meat industry, it started so small you were targeting very few people. You're like “can you even make something out of this?” and lo and behold, five years later, you got millions of people interested in it. That's how it starts. Same thing with content marketing. There was nobody when we started. In 2007, who were the marketers in large organizations that created content that didn't involve sales material? Hardly any of them. They were working on custom magazines and newsletters at the time, custom publishing. So fast forward 13 years later, and there are millions all over the world, so that's what you're going to, that's what this model does.
Karine Abbou: I know you're obsessed with numbers :). When you're talking about a minimum viable audience, how do you come up with a number that you need to target and say, OK, until I reach this number of audience, I won’t do anything else; I'm just focusing like hell to reach this number.
How do you determine it? At the time when I launched a Content Inc model on the legal industry, it was a B2B intermediation business, and to determine this number I used the following reasoning. In France at the time, there were 50,000 lawyers. Usually, when you talk about an industry, you always notice that there is one main piece of information about this industry. In my case it was the following: 80 percent of the lawyers were generating 20 percent of the global revenue of the industry, which means that for me since I was targeting the lawyers who were struggling to have leads online, my minimal viable audience was somewhere in that 80%. So then I segmented it, micro-fragmented it until I came up to a number of hundred lawyers. I am just giving us an example to come up with a realistic number for an MVA. Do you have another way to do it?
Joe Pulizzi: I don't know. First of all, I like your formula. I should add that for the next book. General, generally four, for me to be a minimum viable audience is anywhere between 20 and 10,000.
Karine Abbou: OK, so we forget about the 1000 true fans?
Joe Pulizzi: No, not necessarily, because that's where you want to start, but that's not if I get a thousand true fans, that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to monetize yet. Start with your thousand true fans. Start with your five hundred. I mean, I worked on a project for Agilent Technologies back in 2003 where we targeted one hundred executives. Well, why one hundred and how do you monetize? Well, each one of those hundreds had multi-millions of dollars in buying power. So that's why you and I are talking about this differently. I could literally target one hundred executives at one hundred companies. And if what I sell they could buy for millions of dollars, that's fine. Right. It's no problem. OK, so depending on what you might sell and what you might offer, which is completely fine. You don't have to not think about it just because you don't want to, you absolutely want to think about it. So that takes a lot into account. So if I know ultimately going to sell a product for one hundred to two hundred dollars, you're probably looking at the ten thousand number range. If you're going to sell your products for a thousand to two thousand dollars, a thousand or two thousand people might be your minimum viable audience. Consumer groups are generally higher. If you talk to Matthew Patrick, who launched a great YouTube channel called Game Theory, his was about fifty thousand. He had to get to about fifty thousand subscribers on YouTube before he could do anything. Which makes a lot of sense. Right. You have to get a lot of subscribers to let it go. And then once he got to five hundred thousand, he took off. So I would say a couple of thousand consumers, you're probably in the 30, 50 thousand range, but again, I can make a case to go either way, depending on which direction, if you do a really good job of solving the informational needs of a small group of people that have a large buying power. Yeah, you're good to go.
Karine Abbou: I need to ask you other questions because I know the audience is curious. I wish I could go deeper into the seven steps, but anyway, everyone will buy the book so I'm not worried about this part ;). One question. Should we build a Content Inc model on Clubhouse?
Joe Pulizzi: Should is not the right question. Could - you could. I would always like to be on email or blog because you have more control over it. But technically, I could. My friend Gary Henderson is doing it right now. He's launching two, I think, two or three shows a week on his channel. He created a club on Clubhouse and he's targeting content creators, he's doing shows and he is building an audience on that. And now he’s reached his biggest audience on Clubhouse. And he's driving those people back to his website to sign up for his email. It's a very, very simple model. You could absolutely do it there [Clubhouse]. So if the people are online, you could do a clubhouse, especially now that it's hot. A lot of people are into it, so I can absolutely see that being a thing.
Karine Abbou: Do you like clubhouse?
Joe Pulizzi: I'm moderately bullish on social audio. So of course, Clubhouse is first out of the gate. You've got Twitter spaces, you've got Facebook, which I think just today or yesterday announced that they've got their whole social audio thing yesterday. I mean, Clubhouse right now is the leader. Somebody is probably going to buy them that. I like it. But again, you have to follow the format. You can't just pop in every once in a while. You have to say, OK, I'm going to do a show. It's going to be Monday or Wednesday or Friday or Sunday at this time. And this is who we're targeting. And we're going to have information that nobody else has. And this is the format. You have to be predictable. I think a lot of people think with social, you just have to spread your content, but it's just like if you were on network television, you have to be at a certain time, on a certain day
Karine Abbou: One of your favorite topics is acquiring media assets, so I need to ask the question. An entrepreneur, not a content entrepreneur, but someone who has the product to sell. If he wants to be smart and move to a Content Inc model, he could get a media. How should he proceed?
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. So basically every company has either the buy or build scenario, do you go ahead? Let's say you're starting from zero. Do I go out and buy somebody else's subscribers, their media platform, their base, or do I go ahead and build it? If you have the time, the patience, the wherewithal from a grit standpoint, persistence standpoint, you can go ahead, take your two years, three years, build your platform and then monetize that platform as we did. A content marketing institute can absolutely do that. But if you have some funds and you can go ahead, purchase. I have never seen what's going on right now because everything is for sale. There are so many podcasts out there and I've been sort of testing it because, you know, I've been talking about this for ten years, a lot of media companies that are for sale right now. Media assets are for sale, small podcasts, small blogs, websites are for sale. So you might say, “I like your idea, but I don't want to wait two years”. Well go out and buy something. Where is your audience at? Is there something already created? Is there a podcast? Is there a blog? Go out and buy that brand, buy those assets, and then you could bolt your product onto the product that launched it and you've got a done deal. And I talked to three podcasters over the last week that all said that they have a number in mind and they would gladly sell. And these are not big deals. These are five-figure deals. So, anyone, anyone could go out and approach them and say, I would like to buy your podcast.
Karine Abbou: So in the book, you go into details explaining how you should target which media, which prize. In France, I didn’t notice any specific trend around this idea of getting a media company whereas in America for the past one or two years it has been crazy. So many brands. Can you please give us few examples that really were astounding to you?
Joe Pulizzi: HubSpot is a good one. HubSpot bought Agency Post blog years ago. They just bought the Hustle. I mean, we can go back to when L'Oreal bought makeup dotcom in 2010, for a very small [amount]. I think they paid a million dollars for that. And it was basically nothing at the time. It built that thing out into makeup.com and what it is today. So, yeah, those things are happening right now. And my recommendation is, and what I talk about in the book, is to have a list, if there are five or seven or ten things that we could buy and this is for any market or entrepreneur, you should have that list and start making contact with those people and become friends with them or whatever, so they know who you are. And then when you're ready, you can go ahead and reach out to them and say, hey, I'd like to do a partnership. Or is your blog for sale or is your website for sale? Or can we talk about these types of things? And this stuff is happening all over the place. So you say in France, if this isn't happening, I can guarantee you there are a lot of people thinking about it, so there's a huge opportunity. These things are happening and there's a huge opportunity.
Karine Abbou: I'm not saying in France it's not happening. If I say that, I'm sorry, just maybe we don't communicate enough on that and we don't relate it strictly to marketing.
Joe Pulizzi: But anyway, yeah, by the way, still in marketing, most chief marketing officers don't think about this. And what I've been saying, and I've been saying this for a couple of years, like if I'm a content marketer, if I'm a content marketing person, then enterprise may be the number one skill you should have is acquisition knowledge.
Karine Abbou: Oh, wow. Really?
Joe Pulizzi: I absolutely believe that. Because the thing is, if I'm a content marketer and I go into a company, they're going to say, OK, build the content program, go. Well, if I need to build the content program, I should be looking at both buying and building, and content marketers don't know anything about acquisition. So I'm saying, well, if you're a content marketer, you come and you understand not only the basic tenets of content marketing, but you understand mergers and acquisition, you're on the top two percent of content marketers out there. You have such an advantage. I can go into an organization, build a content program in a quarter of the time that anyone else can, because I will do it organically and through acquisition, where everyone else is doing it organically. And they have to spend all kinds of time on promotion and whatever. It's a different business case. You have to make that business case to a chief marketing officer.
Karine Abbou: OK, I get it :). Joe, one last thing to summarize it all. I'm very sensitive, about the Orange Foundation. And I was, you know, I noticed that good entrepreneurs or marketers at some point they're having a real consistency in what they're doing in their life, personal life and what they're doing in business. And definitely one of the keywords that you're saying, and it was in your definition of marketing, is communication. And I sort of say it makes sense. It makes a lot of sense because, in your business life, you help marketers communicate better on what they have to sell. In your personal life, you try to help children just learn to communicate. Can you just tell us for a few minutes what the Orange Foundation is doing?
Joe Pulizzi: Yes, thank you very much. So the back story is my oldest son had trouble speaking at a speech disorder and he wasn't able to speak any words at all. He was three years old, And we put him into aggressive speech and play therapy. He had a tutor until he was eight years old and now he's in university. He's doing fantastic. But it was that aggressive speech therapy that really made a difference. And through this process, what I found out is that a lot of families can't afford speech therapy and they go without it when kids really need it. And of course, we just want kids to be whatever they want to be. And a lot of times they have the ability to communicate, but they need help. They need assistance. So we created the Orange Effect Foundation to be a fundraising organization for families and children who need speech therapy and simply can't afford it. So we've started that. And officially in 2014, we now have two hundred and thirty-five kids with grants that we fund. They're consistent. It's always guided by consistent speech therapy. So at least once or twice a week that they can get speech therapy that can help them do whatever they want to do. And so that's what we've been working on for the last many, many years. And theorangeeffect.org, if anyone wants more information about it. But yeah, I was just working on it this morning. We work on it all the time. And our job is to make sure that the family doesn't have to choose between putting food on the table and getting speech therapy for their child. Of course, they're going to put food on the table. That's the priority. That's their survival. But we don't think they should need to choose. So that's what we're there for.
To reach out to Joe
After his exit from CMI in 2016, Joe is back in the “content” business with the Tilt. You can find him @:
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Mark your calendar
🗓️ March, 27th: Rand Fishkin
🗓️ May, 13th: Mark Schaefer
🗓️ May, 20th: Robert Rose
🗓️ May, 27th: Marcus Collins
🗓️ June 10th: Marcus Sheridan