Content for Business: How to Build Your Business on a Solid Content Foundation

Do you have a great idea for a business?

Wondering if content marketing will help move the needle?

To discover what it takes to build a content-driven business, I interview Joe Pulizzi.
More About This Show
The Social Media Marketing podcast is an on-demand talk radio show from Social Media Examiner. It's designed to help busy marketers and business owners discover what works with social media marketing.

In this episode I interview Joe Pulizzi, founder of the Content Marketing Institute, author of the book Epic Content Marketing and the founder of Content Marketing World, the leading conference for content marketers. Joe's latest book is Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs Use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses.

Joe will explore how you can build a sustainable small business with smart content marketing.

You'll discover the six steps to take to create a content business in any niche.

Share your feedback, read the show notes and get the links mentioned in this episode below.
Listen Now
You can also subscribe via iTunes, RSS, or Stitcher. How to subscribe on iPhone.

Here are some of the things you'll discover in this show:
Content for Business
When and why Joe started the Content Marketing Institute

Joe shares how he got into the content marketing industry. He was vice president of custom media (also known as content marketing) at business publishing company Penton Media until 2007. At Penton, Joe and his team helped advertisers who wanted to do something unique tell their stories. For example, if a company like Microsoft wanted to tell a story to an executive audience, Joe and his team would help them create an ongoing newsletter, a magazine, blog series or webinar series. Joe did that for seven years.

Joe left Penton at the end of March 2007 and wrote his first blog post titled "Why Content Marketing?" on April 26, 2007. That led up to Joe launching Junta42, which he says was basically the eHarmony for content marketing. The idea was to match brand sites that wanted to outsource some portion of the content process (creation or distribution) with agencies that would pay for the service to get the leads.

Joe explains how in 2008, with no money, no paid distribution and about 2,000 subscribers, he decided it was time to build relationships with influencers. He started a research project called The Top 100 Content Marketing Blogs. (I was on the list first for White Papers and then Social Media Examiner.) He notified everybody who was on the list, and it just took off.

Fast-forward to 2009, Joe shares, the model was working and they matched up about 1,000 projects. However, they were still having trouble getting companies to pay for a subscription to the service, even though they were driving leads to them. After his best case study (they sent a $1 million+ customer to an agency, and the agency decided not to renew their subscription), it finally hit Joe that this business was not going to work.

Although Joe was "in love with his product," he finally figured out the key was to fall in love with your audience and focus on their needs and pain points. His audience was asking for training, education, consulting and speaking. They weren't even ready for a matching service, because they didn't even know how to create a content marketing strategy.

Joe pivoted to the education and training concept and launched Content Marketing Institute six months later. That was May 2010.

"At that moment we said we were going to create the leading online destination for content marketing, the leading magazine and the leading event," Joe recalls. "And within two years we were able to do that."

Listen to the show to hear how Joe and I first connected, as well as the similarities between our projects.

Why now is the time to get into a content-driven business

Content Inc. is Joe's fourth book. The other three are content marketing–related and f...