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What does it take to stand out in a noisy world of content and build a legacy that lasts? In this episode, I’m joined by Joe Pulizzi, bestselling author and one of the pioneers of content marketing, as he shares his insights on using books as a cornerstone of your marketing strategy, finding your unique “content tilt,” and creating meaningful impact through storytelling and service.
Leverage Your Book as a Marketing Tool Summary
So you want to write a business book? Before you retreat to that cabin in the woods, let me share a smarter approach that aligns with your existing content marketing strategy.
Start with Your Content Tilt
The biggest mistake most aspiring authors make? They jump into writing without establishing their unique angle. Your content tilt—your differentiated message—is what will help you break through the noise.
Ask yourself: If you do the work, can you become one of the leading experts in the world on this topic? If the answer isn’t an immediate “yes,” you need to refine your focus. Don’t worry about being too niche; you can always expand your territory later.
Build Your Foundation First
Before diving into your book, establish a consistent content platform:
- Choose your primary content type (podcast, blog, video series)
- Deliver valuable content consistently for 6-12 months
- Build and engage an audience
- Test and refine your message
This foundation serves two purposes: it helps you validate your ideas and creates a content well you can draw from later.
Write Your Book Without Starting From Scratch
Here’s the secret successful business authors know: integrate your book writing into your existing content creation process. Are you already blogging twice a week? Creating regular videos? Hosting a podcast? Each piece of content can become a potential book chapter.
Think of it this way: if you’re already creating valuable content, you’re essentially writing your book in public. After six months of strategic content creation, you could have 75% of your book already written.
Your Book Marketing Strategy: The Three-Legged Stool
Your book isn’t the end goal—it’s the centerpiece of a larger content marketing strategy. Think of it as a three-legged stool:
- The Book: Your clear point of view and differentiation
- Speaking Opportunities: Use your book to land speaking gigs, podcast interviews, and webinars
- Content Destination: Drive all traffic to your website with one goal—growing your email newsletter list
Launch Strategy: Think Like Hollywood
Don’t just drop your book into the world. Take a page from movie marketing:
- Start talking about your book 3-6 months before launch
- Integrate book content into your existing marketing channels
- Use webinars and interviews to build anticipation
- Create a 6-9 month promotional cycle post-launch
The Bottom Line
Writing a business book doesn’t require isolating yourself or starting from scratch. By aligning it with your content marketing strategy and building on your existing platform, you can create something that not only shares your expertise but drives real business results.
Remember: your book isn’t just a book—it’s a powerful marketing tool that can open doors to speaking opportunities, grow your audience, and establish your authority in your field. The key is starting with a strong content tilt and building your marketing strategy before you write your first word.
Want to take this further? Start by identifying your unique angle. What’s the truth you can share that others aren’t talking about? That’s your first step toward writing a book that matters.
Leverage Your Book as a Marketing Tool Episode Transcript
Rich: My next guest is the founder of multiple startups, including content creator education site, The Tilt, Content Entrepreneur Expo (CEX), and is the bestselling author of seven books, including Content Inc. and Epic Content Marketing, which was named a must-read business book by Fortune Magazine.
He’s best known for his work in content marketing, first using the term in 2001, then launching Content Marketing Institute and the Content Marketing World event. In 2014, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Content Council.
He successfully exited CMI in 2016 and consequently wrote an award-winning mystery novel, The Will to Die. He’s got two weekly podcasts, the motivational Content, Inc. Podcast, and the award-winning content news and analysis show, This Old Marketing, with Robert Rose.
His foundation, The Orange Effect, delivers speech therapy and technology services to over 400 children. And today we’re going to be talking about how you can leverage a book to drive your business forward with Joe Pulizzi. Joe, welcome back to the podcast.
Joe: Rich, it’s so nice to be back with you and to talk to you. It’s like coming home when I get to be on your show.
Rich: That’s very sweet to hear.
Joe: It’s funny, you were reading that, and I always reminisce. So I’m like, man all the places we’ve been in content marketing and the people we meet. And I also feel old.
Rich: I’m looking at the video now and we both have a lot of salt in our beards. So there’s that.
Joe: Oh, man. Yeah. It’s just, it’s done. Yeah. It’s just nothing. There’s nothing you could do. There’s nothing you could do. It’s good to see you. It’s good to talk new stuff. There’s a lot of going on in, in content and marketing. So there is,
Rich: And it’s always great to see you because even though we don’t see each other all that often, although thankfully lately we’ve seen each other at least once a year at MAICON, so that’s been great. But every time I reconnect with you, it feels like it hasn’t been that long. So it’s always nice to catch up and I appreciate it.
Hey, so one thing I didn’t know about you before I read your bio, Joe, is this Orange Effect that you’ve been doing. What was the impetus behind that and how did you get it started?
Joe: The short story is our oldest was born on the autism spectrum, and about three years old, Joshua didn’t have any words, just mostly grunts, and we’re trying to figure out how do we help our child? And believe it or not, it was very difficult to figure this thing out. Do we do speech therapy? Do we do play therapy? And my wife mostly figured out the program of aggressive speech and play therapy. And we were blessed because we had the funds to pay for this. And now Joshua’s great, just graduated college, got a first job. Everything is fantastic because of that speech and play therapy.
And what we found out along the way were that a lot of families were in similar positions to us with kids that have apraxia or autism or a number of other disorders, and don’t have insurance to cover these things, and they don’t have the funds to cover it. So we created the Orange Effect Foundation specifically as a last resort to make sure kids who really need speech therapy to take their next step and be whatever normal they want to be, can have that speech therapy.
So we started that in 2007, officially as a 501c3 in 2014. And we are a fundraising organization. We do all sorts of activities to raise funds so that kids all over the United States can get that speech therapy or speech technology device that they normally wouldn’t get, because families are making a decision. Hey, do I put dinner on the table, or do I get my kids speech therapy? It’s an easy decision. They got to eat, they got to pay their rent. So hopefully, they’re filling a need that needs to be.
Rich: So I love that. And early intervention in those situations makes a lifetime of difference. And I’ve seen that firsthand
Joe: It makes all of the difference, thank you.
Rich: We’ll have a link to that in the show notes for anybody who wants to learn more.
Joe: Thank you.
Rich: Shifting gears, talking about using a book to better market your business, to grow your business. You’ve spoken about making it the centerpiece of a marketing strategy. Can you explain why do you think a book is such a powerful tool for content creators and businesses alike?
Joe: There’s a lot of different reasons, Rich, but I think the biggest reason is it gives you a point of view. It gives you something to build around. And you and I have been talking about content marketing forever, but the reasons why a content marketing strategy fails for the most part is, one, it’s not consistent.
It doesn’t deliver consistently over time, but more often you see doesn’t have what we call a content tilt. Doesn’t have a clear differentiation and message. Doesn’t have a point of view. Doesn’t have something that’s compelling or interesting. And that’s what I love about building around a book. You can actually say, why was this book made? What is the reason for it? What story am I trying to tell? What truth am I trying to tell that people may not know about?
And if you do that really well, and you found something that you can stand on a pedestal now and you write a book, you can build your speaking career around that book. You can then launch and leverage your podcast or your YouTube series or your email newsletter, whatever, but the book can be the centerpiece.
And I think we’re starting to see that more and more from influencers and content creators who’ve created lots of other stuff. But they maybe never put their foot down and say, “No, this is what I stand for. This is what I’m trying to educate the world on. This is what I want to be the leading expert in the world on.”
And I just love the idea of a book. Because as you write a book, as I write a book, I know you’re at least diligent enough, competent enough to put a book together. It’s not easy. You got 60,000, 70,000, 80,000 words. It probably took you longer than nine months or 12 months to put together. You had to figure out who’s going to publish it. Are you going to self-publish it, hybrid publish it?
So I really believe that it says a lot about the individual. But it can say even more about building our entire content marketing strategy around this very important idea.
Rich: I love that. I love the idea of it almost being a tent pole for the rest of your content.
Now you mentioned the Content Tilt, The Tilt is the name of the website I mentioned in your bio. Talk to me a little bit more about how you talk to content creators about developing their own tilt.
Joe: So I’m blessed and cursed to be able to talk to content creators and content marketers and content entrepreneurs almost every day. And I got to tell you, Rich, I get sad a lot because they’re very excited about this thing that they’re talking about, this thing they believe in. And we’ve seen it most recently in AI, where you’ve literally seen a thousand people in our area that were doing something else, and they jump on AI. Nothing wrong with that, but a lot of them are saying the same thing.
So whatever it is, I just want to make sure, if you do the work on this idea, on what we want to be Content Tilt, is we want to have some kind of different message to break through all the clutter out there. If you do the work, can you be one of the leading experts in the world?
And I always ask somebody that. Because I want to make sure that they level set against what they’re doing, that it’s worth their time. Okay, you’re going to do this thing in AI. You’re going to do this thing in content creation. You’re going to do this thing in woodworking. Whatever the idea is, you do the work. If you do the podcast, if you do the email, if you do the YouTube series, if you do the event series and you deliver consistently over a long period of time, which is what we need to do to build a loyal audience, do you think you can be the leading expert? And if they immediately say, “Oh no, I don’t think so.” I say, “Then something’s wrong.”
Like we were talking about, you mentioned MAICON before and Paul Roetzer. Paul started his journey into AI over 10 years ago. He really set a different idea about the importance of AI, specifically in marketing. At that time, not a lot of people were talking about it. He said if I do the event, if I do a podcast, if I do something, could I be the leading expert? We had that conversation. “” was the answer. And he’s become one of the leading experts in AI and marketing because of that.
But if Paul comes out with that idea today in 2024, 2025, is he going to be successful? I’d have to say, I don’t know. I don’t know. It might have to go in a different area in order to get the attention because it’s so saturated with content. So that’s where I’m like, hey, that’s the big issue where you really have to think, is there a differentiation for you?
And then also you have to think, is there money? Is there enough revenue? Is this just a hobby for you? Which it could be. And there’s no problem with doing a podcast as a hobby or YouTube as a hobby. But is there going to be money? Are there sponsors out there? Are your subscribers willing to pay money for something that you can offer. So those are some of the key issues that are going on with content creators.
Rich: That is very interesting. And so I wonder if the next Paul had to come out today, how they would have to maybe niche down or change something along there. And I wasn’t planning on spending too much time on The Tilt, but I am curious. Because I’ve talked about the Remarkability Formula in the past, four lenses that you can use to differentiate yourself for your business. Do you help people identify what their tilt could be? Or if it’s not niche enough, if it’s not refined enough, if there’s too much competition, are there steps that content creators can go through that might be worthwhile before they actually start writing a book to figure out what their tilt should be?
Joe: Yeah, absolutely. So I wrote a book called, Content Inc, where we talk about this in The Tilt newsletter all the time, but I talk about it in Content Inc. and mentioned The Tilt for the first time, I think in 2014 or 15. I rewrote the book in 2020 talking about The Tilt and levers that you can pull depending on how you can make sure you stand out. You become someone’s favorite content creator.
So the first thing you look at is your expertise. What do you have as an individual and organization that is over and above others in your area, in your industry, in the world. So you have to look at your subject matter. And then if you have a larger company or a midsize company, you can look at your engineers and your knowledge workers in your own organization. What do you have? What are the assets that you have? You can talk about a content area, and then you look at your audience area and you say, okay who’s the specific audience, what’s their pain points, what keeps them up at night there?
There ou can go in and say if we really want to differentiate, we can’t just focus on that broad of an audience. We really have to niche down with our audience to make sure that we can solve those informational needs as specifically as possible. So that’s the start. We call that the sweet spot. That’s where everyone starts. It’s, what do I have to say that’s different? And then, what does my audience need to hear that’s different and valuable and compelling?
And I always start, Rich, with the audience. It’s almost always too broad. You can’t niche down enough from an audience standpoint. I always say go as small as you can. Become the leading expert as quickly as you can. And then you can always broaden out.
Again, I want to use Paul as an example. Paul just started with marketers. He’s like okay, AI for marketing. Now he’s going into finances, and he’s going into operations, and he’s going into defense, and all these other areas of AI. He can do that now because he built on a very small base of just AI for marketers 10 years ago. So that’s where I want everyone to start, as small as possible.
And people get worried and say, “What if it’s too small?” You can’t get too small. You can’t get too niche. Work out the problems there because it’s going to take you three, four, five, six months to really figure out what the right approach is and how you go forward. So that’s where I would start.
There’s a lot of other ways you can look at. You can look at the spending, you can look at the addressable market for certain things. You can really take a tool like a Google trends that can help you. What are people searching for? I remember when I got started in content marketing. I use Google Trends a lot because I was like, is content marketing the term? So as you mentioned in my bio, I started flinging around that term in 2001. It wasn’t a thing. Like nobody used that. At the time we were using custom media and custom publishing and branded content and member communications and all sorts of stuff.
And I’m like, okay, for a marketer what’s going to resonate with them? None of those other terms did. And what I realized using Google trends and some other tools, I realized okay, if you’re a marketer and you want to be attracted to a certain field, you have to call it something- marketing, direct marketing, social media marketing, search marketing, event marketing. Everything is blank marketing. The world was talking about custom publishing and custom media. So you knew there was a disconnect and we just got lucky, right? We saw an opportunity there. It’s like, oh my God, “content marketing”, it’s a no brainer.
I was with the official Association for Custom Publishers and I’m trying to make this pitch saying we have to stop talking about custom publishing because it doesn’t resonate with marketers. And we want to get marketers on board to use this but we’re using the wrong term. So again, just an example of how you can do that.
And Google trends was great. Because Google trends said almost no one was using that term and they were using all the other terms. I’m like, Oh my God, content gap. Opportunity. If we do the work, we did the work two and a half, three years it took. It does take time, but after that time, then it really took off once we hit a minimum viable audience. So it was something to see. And we got really lucky when we did it.
Rich: Nice. Now if somebody is listening and they feel that they have a decent enough content, something that they can focus on and really be the world leader in, what’s the process look like to move into writing a book?
If you’ve never written one before, there was a time when people said, oh, you just blog your book. And then all of a sudden you have 52 blogs, and you call that a book and you publish it. I’m sure things have evolved. What are you telling people now who haven’t yet written a book, how they should get started in this process?
Joe: So getting started is the hardest thing. But I want people to simplify their process. What are you doing? So are you doing a podcast? Are you doing a YouTube series? Do you do an email newsletter? Do you do a blog? Everybody’s coming from somewhere. So take what you’re already doing and integrate the book into that.
So 2012 I wanted to write Epic Content Marketing. And I’m like, oh my God I’m already blogging two times a week and we’re just starting this podcast. Like I’m already creating all this content. It’s too much. So how do you integrate that into the schedule?
So I’m like, okay I start and figure out, okay, what does epic content marketing look like? What’s the mission for that? How are we trying to educate marketers around this practice of content marketing? And what do the chapters look like? What are the ‘how to’ chapters that I would need to build that book around? So I’d write those down.
You got, whatever, they don’t all make it, right? But you got 20, then you got 50 different ideas that need to go in the book. Each one of those become, what’s your thing? Rich, are you a blogger? That’s a blog. One chapter is a blog. Is it a podcast? Oh, there’s a podcast episode. You can have a guest, not have a guest, whatever. It depends on what you want to do. Oh, it needs to be a YouTube show. And I’m going to do my TikToks around this. Whatever, your home base is, build a book around that.
And if you do that really well, in six months, you got 75 percent of a book. That’s it. Don’t feel you have to go off, even though you and I might like to go off into a cabin somewhere and spend some time writing, which there’s a lot of value to that. A lot of people I talk to, most creators can’t do that. They have to integrate it into their schedule. Easy enough. We did that in 2012, and in six months I had 75 percent of a book, started putting it together, took another three months, brought it down, had 95 percent of a book. So basically six to nine months, I’ve got a book done and I did nothing different.
And it’s okay. You can put those chapters out ahead of time. Nothing says that you can’t because you’d be amazed how when you put the book together people think it’s new anyways. It’s “Oh, I never read that before, I think that “, or whatever. You can go ahead and repurpose and reimagine all these things into different parts. And I think the best way to do that is into a book.
Rich: Yeah. And even if they have heard some of that content before, part of what they’re paying for when they buy your book is the ease, the fact that you’ve combined it all together into a well curated thought process from beginning to end. And that in itself has value.
Joe: You’d be amazed that the people, I don’t want to say people are lazy, but if it’s in another form and the works already done for them, that’s the idea of why does a business do content marketing? Basically, you give away all your secrets, because 99 percent of the people don’t want to do that work for themselves. They want you to do it as a consultant or a business, whatever. The 1 percent that takes all that knowledge and does it themselves, great, let them do it. You don’t want that business anyways. Everybody else is going to say, “Oh, Rich is the expert. I want to go with him. He’s shared all this with me. I want to have him help me from a consulting standpoint.” We can do the same with our content in a book.
Rich: I don’t want to skip over how much work it is to write a book. You definitely teased it a little bit. When I wrote my books, I just carved out an hour every single morning until I hit 60,000, which was a magic number for me.
But once we have this book written, what are some of the first steps you’d recommend to making this the centerpiece of all of our marketing efforts?
Joe: The first thing that you need to do is build it in as early as possible into your marketing. What a lot of creators and marketers will do is they’ll just say, “boom, it’s a book and it’s available for sale”. I’m like, oh my God, no.
Take a lesson from Wicked. Everybody’s talking about Wicked lately. Wicked had a Super Bowl ad in February of ’24, they didn’t release that movie until November. I want you to think about that for your book, or whatever it is, right? We’re just talking about a book, but you want to make sure that you tease out this stuff now. That helps when you’re releasing chapters and podcasts and talking about it in a little bit. You’re not giving away the book yet, but you’re talking about it. You’re marketing, you’re building it in.
So you might, if you have an interview in your book that’s great, put a webinar on a couple months before and you could say you’re going to be in that book. The book’s coming out, make sure people know. So that when you do launch, everybody is aware of it and now they just need to hit the ‘buy’.
So I would also say that it can be, I don’t want to use the term ‘campaign’, but you can take that book and you can leverage it for a lot of different things, depending on what you’re trying to do. So what is the goal of the book? If you’re just a content creator and you want to make money off it, that’s one thing. And we could talk about that. But if you’re trying to say, no, I want this to get me more clients, more consulting business, sell more products and services. You want to make sure that you’re talking about it on your webinars, in your email newsletters, every piece of inventory that you have, you need to have a piece of the book and it’s easy to do.
You don’t even need to sell the book. You just reimagine some of that content as part of all the things that you do. And I think there’s probably a six-to-nine-month life cycle. You start talking at three to six months ahead of time to tease out some of that content, you launch the book and then you’re talking about that book for six to nine months. And then hopefully you already have somebody, maybe it’s you who wrote the book, or maybe it’s somebody in your organization who loves to speak, having that book companion will also help you get speaking gigs as well.
A lot of organizations, they won’t even accept the speaker as a keynote or a major breakout workout, workshop speaker, unless you have a book. And I hate to say that, but it’s true. So it gets you into places that you haven’t been able to get to before.
Rich: 100 percent agree with that. I’ve seen that in my own life. You’ve talked about leveraging a book to build a community or an audience over time. You’ve also talked about connecting it to an email newsletter. Are those things related? And what does that process look like in your mind?
Joe: So for those people listening, I’m going to talk specifically about just you’re a content creator, you want to be an influencer. It could be part of your business or not. There’s really three legs of the stool with this.
One is that book that we’re talking about. What’s that POV? What’s the thing that you stand for, your differentiation area? That’s your book that will then lead to what we just talked about, lots of speaking opportunities. When I say speaking opportunities, that could be a guest on podcasts like we’re talking here. It could be webinars. It could be workshops online, and it could be in-person events where you’re doing keynotes or break out.
So you’ve got this book thing that you’re standing, that everything’s wrapped around with your content strategy. You’ve got opportunities to spread that message with your speaking, and then you want to direct them to some content destination. What is your home base? We all get a choice, and most of us are doing all sorts of things. You’re doing six, seven, you’re doing Twitter/X, you’re on LinkedIn, you’re doing webinars, you do an email newsletter, blog, whatever. I want to know what your home base is.
For most of us in this racket that we’re trying to do, you have a website, you have a web destination that you want to send people to. And the goal for me, it’s JoePulizzi.com. And the goal of JoePulizzi.com is one thing, to get people to sign up for your email newsletter. Because it takes time to build a loyal audience, and you’ve got these wonderful feeders. So you’ve got the book that feeds into the speaking that leads them to wanting to know more about you, where are they going to buy the book and where are they going to find out more information about you, about your website, on your website.
And there, lo and behold, on your website, you have some incredible consistent communication experience called an email newsletter. That is also hopefully differentiated that they’re going to sign up to. And that’s where the magic happens as they sign up and you have an opportunity to then become their trusted expert in whatever it is. And then they will buy your book, come to your show, come to your event if you decide to launch one, everything can come from that.
So you’ve got book, you’ve got speaking and you’ve got some content destination. And the best thing about that would be an email newsletter. And that’s the three legs of the stool. And I’ve seen thousands of influencers and content creators use that model. It’s been working. I’ve been in this industry for almost 25 years. It’s been working every bit of that 25 years, even with all the changing and social media and AI and all the tools. And so I continue to believe that’s just a wonderful model for anybody to take.
Rich: Joe, a lot of this might feel like if you want to be an influencer, if your business is content creation for those people who run a business, or they’re in charge of marketing for a small to medium sized business where content creation is an ends to a mean rather than the end itself, does this change any of your recommended strategy or does this basically still work for a business that’s just looking to an owner who’s looking to write a book that basically acts as a business card that proves that they are the expert in the space? And should they change any of the recommendations you’ve made up till now?
Joe: It absolutely works. The change is you have more resources to get your employees involved. I believe employees are your best marketers or can be your best marketers. They obviously believe in your company. They depend on the company for their livelihood. Leverage them, get them involved in content projects.
So for example, let’s just say the CEO is not the best expert or spokesperson as part of your organization, which happens all the time. Maybe it’s the VP of engineering. Maybe it’s a product manager somewhere in your organization. Great. If you can see that, have that lift that person up. Don’t be afraid. There are a CEO or a Chief Marketing Officer of VP of Marketing will say we don’t want to give that employee too much, they might go look for another job. Okay, that’s fine. You know what? You know who also has that same formula? Every professional sports team that’s out there. You absolutely want to put your eggs in that basket because you want your customers and your prospects to be fans of your employees.
Think about you want them to go into the sports store, pick off a jersey that is, “Oh, that’s my director of engineering. That’s my project”, like you want that. And you can have that today and leverage that as part of your model. So maybe your VP of engineering writes that book, but that leads into speaking opportunities for multiple people in engineering because they can leverage that book. Maybe it’s three authors. Maybe it’s four authors. You could do a lot of things like that.
And that leads into the organization’s email newsletter that’s targeting that specific prospect or customer. So absolutely you can do the same model, but see, it’s not just you. It can be multiple other people. It can be just you if you decide if you’re the CEO and you want to be the thought leader in the organization, you can have all the resources wrap up. You can have editorial help. You can have podcast production help. All those things can help lift you up, but it doesn’t have to be that way. You can lift up the other members of your organization to be many different experts, and you can do the same model to different personas.
If you’re a B2B, you could say, “Oh, I have six personas.” Okay, try one persona, do the book, the speaking and the content destination model. And then when that works out well and you worked out the bugs and you say, “Oh, I got another persona over here, another topic area”, then you can go in that direction.
Rich: Joe, what’s one action that a listener could take today to start their journey forward with their book, or if they already have a book, to position their book as a marketing centerpiece for their business?
Joe: It’s an important question. I guess the first thing that comes to mind, Rich, is there something in your industry that’s not being talked about that should be, that maybe makes you a little bit uneasy? Because those are the important things that need to be talked about. And these are the things that you can talk about maybe and have a better idea on than maybe the media companies in your industry or some of the other creators, because you’re working with customers on this all the time.
So that’s where I would really say, what could our point of view be? Because the point of view and the content topic to that specific audience, then that’s where you build out the book from. That’s when you say, okay I’m going to build out the newsletter or the podcast.
What I would probably start though, if you don’t do anything, if you’re not creating any content at all, I wouldn’t start with the book. I probably would start with some regular content initiative to start building momentum and start building an audience in some way.
And this is where you can put on your Harry Potter sorting hat, if you will. And you have a say in that, maybe you have some really good people in your organization that’d be great on a podcast. You’ve got a couple, three people, you can put them on, they’re really good on air. It’s a video podcast, you can leverage it on YouTube and send it out on Spotify and Apple. Great.
But if you don’t, maybe you’ve got some really good writers in your organization that would lead for an email newsletter model or a blog model. So maybe you’ve got some people that are really good on camera, maybe that’s a regular TikTok series or YouTube series or something like that.
So the webinar as well, you could do that kind of thing. So I would think, what is your consistent content experience that you’re going to deliver to your audience that you can get them to subscribe, follow your thing. And I think you need to do that for six to nine to twelve months and build that audience. Work out all the bugs with, are we saying the right message? Do we have the right frequency? That’s what it takes, time.
Sometimes it takes 12 months to figure out that maybe our frequency is not right. Maybe we should deliver it over here. Maybe it’s not a podcast. Maybe it is a blog, regular blog posts whatever it is, you figure those things out. And then from that, when you’ve got it and you have something and you’re starting to build an audience, from there comes that book. And that’s where you integrate that process. Now we’re going to go to work and integrate the chapters into our regular content from that machine we’ve just built.
Rich: Awesome. Joe, this is fantastic. I already know the answer, but if people want to learn more about you and follow you online, where can we send them?
Joe: So yeah, JoePulizzi.com. If you go to there, you’ll see I’ve got this newsletter that I send out called, The Orange Letter. It goes out every two weeks. So that’s for me, personally.
I do the This Old Marketing podcast, if you like podcasting on marketing. And then the Content Inc. on Monday, which is a five-minute podcast every Monday.
And then for The Tilt and all this stuff, we’ve got a hybrid publishing model that we have called, Tilt Publishing. So we do work with new authors that are looking to get started. You can go to thetilt.com and find out more about that.
And our big event, Content Entrepreneur Expo, which will be August 24th to 26th in 2025 in Cleveland, Ohio, it’ll be our fourth year.
Rich: Lovely Cleveland, Ohio. No irony in my voice. I’ve been to Cleveland a few times. It is a great little city, bigger than my city. I shouldn’t call it a little city, but still a great city. Worth checking out. Joe, always a pleasure, my friend. Thank you so much.
Joe: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been a good time.
Show Notes:
Joe Pulizzi is a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, and one of the pioneers of content marketing. He founded the Content Marketing Institute, launched Content Marketing World, and has authored multiple books, including Epic Content Marketing and Content Inc. Joe is also the founder of The Orange Effect Foundation, which helps children with speech disorders, and hosts both the This Old Marketing podcast and Content Inc. podcast.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.