[Who is] Joe Pulizzi?
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Joe Pulizzi
“My name is Joe Pulizzi.
I started in business to business publishing in 2000, and I was lucky enough to get into our department called Custom Media. Basically, what we know today as content marketing. I fell in love with the practice, fell in love with the idea that you could send communications to customers that, you know, don't pitch your product that is actually helpful to them. And if you do a good job of that, build an audience, and then you could sell them things later. I thought that was a great thing.
I always had an itch to start my own company. So launched what became Content Marketing Institute 2007. Then we launched an event called Content Marketing World in 2011, hoping that we could get one hundred people to Cleveland, Ohio, and six hundred and sixty showed up and it became a four thousand delegate event a few years later. Still going strong there. Of course, last year they had to go online only because of the pandemic, but it now looks like this September in Cleveland, they're going to try a hybrid approach. Hopefully, that will go ahead and work.
But my wife and I sold content marketing in 2016. I took a sabbatical year in 2018. I wrote a novel called “The Will to Die” in 2019.
And just starting a new business now called The Tilt, and the Tilt focused on content creators, individuals who want to build sustainable businesses.
And then along the way I've written seven books; started with “Get Content, Get Customers” in 2008 “Epic Content Marketing” in ‘13, “Content Inc.” in 2015. I’m writing the new addition to “Content Inc.” right now, it'll launch in May. And a couple of others - “Book Killing Marketing” with Robert Rose.
So yeah, I've been involved in this content marketing thing for a long, long time now. Over twenty years”.
Joe and content marketing
The question everybody is asking: Did Joe actually create the word “content marketing”?
“Now you're giving me too much credit. I did not coin the word. The word was first coined I believe in 1994. If you want to give me credit for something, you probably give us credit for popularizing the term, because we came out in 2007.
Our first post was “why content marketing?”, and nobody was using that term. It's funny, when we launched the business, we said we are going to pretend that content marketing is the phrase for this industry, and we really treated it like everyone should just know what content marketing is. And four years later, it really took off. So who knew?”.
What does his partner in crime (aka Robert Rose) think about it?
In Epic Content marketing, Joe mentioned that he used it for the first time but I was not really if it was his own creation. So when I was writing my book “Content marketing: the American methodology”, I asked Robert the same question.
“I would credit Joe with the creation of it. It was around, and there were a few mentions of it prior to him, but he brought it into the main stream for sure. He had written a book called Get Content Get Customers in 2009, and that really was the first time I’d seen it anywhere. From there, it really took off after we created the Content Marketing Institute and began using the term more widely”.
Some vintage content pieces from Joe:
Why content marketing - the very first post dated April 26th, 2007…
Why marketers are reluctant to move away from traditional marketing strategies? - Still soooo true in some countries :/
Why brand fails at content marketing - not quite niche enough via Gary Vee - Already obsessed by “finding your niche” 😉 back in 2010…
Stop building your brand on building land - I think this one is displayed in every single office at CMI… since 2014!!
Why brands need to acquire a media company - Dec. 2nd, 2015.
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 @:
Follow him on Twitter.
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