The Content Entrepreneur, with Joe Pulizzi

Joe Pulizzi

Episode 201

While our guest wasn’t the one who invented content marketing, by founding the Content Marketing Institute, Joe Pulizzi became its standard-bearer. For decades now he has shown marketers how to make their marketing better by building a media presence that directly connects them to their audience.

These days, Joe is saying this model applies to a much wider populace. He’s showing how individuals can make a go of having businesses that are 100% content-based. He’s urging these people, formerly known as the audience, to go make their own audience. He calls this type of person a content entrepreneur.

This business model’s definition has two criteria. First is that content is the vehicle used to market the product. We all know this as Content Marketing. It lets buyers take samplings of a business model where they present the skills they’ve acquired and

The next criteria – content must also be the product. Unlike experts who work full-time as a teacher, writer or consultant who sell their expertise based on their own time – be it in increments of hours or years.

Content entrepreneurs get to craft and sell multiple products without committing their time. Instead, they sell newsletters, courses, books, community-access and other products to the point their audience consumes so actively, it generates high-enough earnings to support Their livelihood. It’s possible today to form an entrepreneurial venture based completely on content.

This isn’t exactly a typical Funnel Reboot topic, but we have just surpassed 200 shows and now that we’re starting on a new bicentenary. Let’s use this chance to go in a different direction, try something new.

So listen in as we go to Cleveland Ohio to speak a second time with our guest, and founder of Tilt Publishing, Joe Pulizzi.

Timestamps/Chapters:
0:00:00 Intro
00:04:41 Origins of the Content Entrepreneur idea
00:11:21 Content mktg’s more than a wrapper
00:20:27 Audience vs community
00:23:11 PSA
00:23:52 Thinking of offers for your audience
00:31:13 Having media calendars
00:36:11 Business model may incorporate web3
00:45:34 About CEX & Joe’s book

People/Products mentioned in the show:

The Content Entrepreneur book

Content Entrepreneur Expo

Joe’s LinkedIn profile

Glenn and Joe at the CEX 2024 expo



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Guest Insights

Guest Insights

Episode 200

Podcasts are tiny time capsules, preserving moments of wisdom and insight. Every time I revisit past episodes, I am reminded of how insightful our guests have been. Certain themes consistently emerge, echoed by guests from the very beginning of the podcast to just yesterday. The cost of ignoring these insights is so high that they bear repeating.

Tune in to our latest episode where I share six aspects of marketing that I didn’t know when I first started this podcast. Please listen in on these valuable pieces of wisdom.

Timestamps/Chapters

0:00:00 Intro
00:00:51 Dan White on mutual understanding
00:02:09 Nick Kelly on tackling human adoption
00:02:45 Debbie Qaqish on marketing ops
00:06:35 Johan van de werken on sharing knowledge
00:07:28 Jim Gianoglio on conferences
00:09:04 Tim Wilson on mixing tactics with strategy
00:12:39 Giannini Fumagalli on change
00:13:07 Gil Gildner on change
00:13:54 Amanda Farley on mindset towards change
00:20:05 Brett Serjeantson on SaaS’s shortcomings
00:21:11 Mark Edmondson on building your own system on top of analytics data
00:22:38 Bob Moore on the rise of APIs
00:23:09 In conclusion

Past Guest Episodes

Smart Branding, with Dan White

Delivering Data Analytics with Nicholas Kelly

From backroom to boardroom with Debbie Qaqish

Boosting GA4 with BigQuery, with Johan van de Werken

Marketing Mix Modelling, with Jim Gianoglio

The Analyst’s Role in Marketing, with Tim Wilson

In search marketing, change = opportunity. With Giannina Fumagalli

Becoming a Digital Marketer with Gil Gildner

Built to Change: How to Future-proof your Marketing Team, with Amanda Farley

Data Science Wizardry with Richard Fergie & Brett Serjeantson

What Google Analytics 4 Makes Possible, with Mark Edmondson

Ecosystem-Led Growth, with Robert Moore



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The AI Playbook, with Eric Siegel

The AI Playbook

Episode 199

Today’s topic is AI and ML, and though you may think this doesn’t concern marketing, we need to acknowledge how it’ll shift things.

Up to now, marketing was done on the premise that for a given audience shown a message, some  average percentage, would act on it. With AI, we’re now able to look at individual audience members and predict how each of them would act upon a message, and at the opportune moment we could have the message show up to each one of them. Goodbye analyzing what happened with crude audience averages, Hello to using detailed data to predict what’s likely to happen. 

With AI holding such promise, why don’t more companies hand things over to AI? I had thought it’s held up by a lack of technical people who know how to do this, but our guest says we’ve had enough technical expertise – He himself was previously one of those data people, and his expertise wasn’t enough to do the job.  He says AI initiatives are held back by those running business functions like marketing who haven’t made the business case and collaborated with the data people to implement this. 

My guest is a leading consultant and former Columbia University and UVA Darden professor. He is the founder of the long-running Machine Learning Week conference series, a frequent keynote speaker, and author of the bestselling Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. In 2023 he authored “The AI playbook”

Let’s talk to Eric Siegel.

Timestamps/Chapters:

0:00:00 Intro
00:01:37 Welcome Eric Siegel
00:01:56 Barrier we face isn’t technical know-how
00:06:05 Despite a strong start – AI’s been slow to spread
00:11:17 Process a business needs to implement ML
00:27:41 building a custom algorithm
00:29:45 PSA
00:52:32 The human-side of the switchover
00:54:03 Contacting Eric

People, products or concepts mentioned in the show:

Eric speaks at: Generative AI Applications Summit and at Machine Learning Week

Reviews of The AI Playbook and book’s site

Eric works at Gooder.ai

Geek Professor Drops Rap Video, Tries to Dance

The AI Playbook | Eric Siegel, author | bizML

Clayton Christiansen

Malcolm Gladwell

 

 



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AI playbook diagram

Ecosystem-Led Growth, with Robert Moore

Bob Moore ecosystem-led growth

Episode 198

A pretty widely held view in the world of B2B products is that sales has gotten harder, not easier. It’s not that buyers aren’t buying. By definition, buying is something they do. But in the example of software, some sales reps won’t even know they were being evaluated, let alone passed up for a rival’s product. Only the winning vendor knows that that account uses them for that specific function in their technology stack. All other companies are in the dark.  

 

But are they really? Another way to look at this is that every vendor has information that could be valuable to others. You can find many buyers stacks with products having some overlap but that largely complement each other. As proof, note that lots of these products even integrate with each other because of buyer demand. 

 

Should vendors consider collaborating with vendors they compete against? Aren’t we supposed to hate the competition?

 

We don’t have to. A famous example of that was Apple’s announcement in 1997 of the deal it struck with Microsoft. Steve Jobs defended the deal saying  “If we want to move forward…we have to let go of this notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.”

 

Zooming to today’s reality, It makes a lot of sense for vendors to collaborate as part of an Ecosystem. By pooling their data together with their indirect competitors, they can see internal buying patterns. Those vendors who hitch their data wagons together get around the ‘nobody talks to our sales rep’ problem, because one of their partners already has the info that rep needs. Using this intel helps them come first in the race for their product to be selected to go in the buyer’s stack. 

 

Our guest today got a Science & Engineering degree from Princeton University and after a stint in the investment world, he dove into co-founding startups. The first was business intelligence platform RJMetrics and the other was cloud data pipeline company Stitch, both of which he saw through to successful exits. 

 

His latest role is as Co-Founder of a platform that safely shares data among companies for this kind of partner-based selling.

 

Outside of work, He is a Trustee for one of America’s top centers of science education and development And an improv comedy performer, in a  team that has performed over 100 shows together.

 

This husband, father of two, is very proud to call Philadelphia home. Let’s head there now to meet Bob Moore.

 

Timestamps / Chapters

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:46 Bob’s thesis on how sales is broken

00:11:21 Ecosystems are cause for hope

00:26:13 PSA

00:26:53 Revamping corporate partner practices

00:31:38 Pooling together data

00:55:06 Contacting Bob

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Ecosystem-Led Growth book

Bob on X

Bob on LinkedIn 

Bob is formerly Co-founder of Stitch Data

Bob is currently CEO at Crossbeam

Metcalfe’s Law

 

 

 



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Partnering on Customer Acquisition, with John Wright

John Wright Partnering on Customer Acquisition

Episode 197

Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else’s channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.

Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.

Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.

As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.

There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies’ shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.

Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.

Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.

 

 

Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:35 Welcome John Wright

00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking

00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods

00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables

00:23:14 PSA

00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars

00:42:13 Contacting John

People, Products and Concepts mentioned in Show:

statsdrone.com

John@statsdrone.com

StatsDrone on Instagram

 



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