Content inc joe pulizzi pdf download

There are so many channels available out there to disseminate your knowledge that choosing the right one may seem like a daunting task.

But, choosing the channel is only part of it! You build your base not merely by attracting the right people, but also by keeping them hooked. With a publishing schedule, of course. Reaching your target audience is one thing; turning them into loyal listeners, visitors, or subscribers — is a completely different thing!

There are many ways to do this too. Facebook and Twitter were probably the first things that crossed your mind, right? Well, it seems that email subscribers and search engine optimization are more important! And yield better results! Here are some tips and tricks as far as the latter is concerned. And there are few ways to do this!

The first one is the simplest one: add more channels! You have become a YouTube sensation — create a podcast. If you want to be a bit bolder, you can start writing books and magazine articles, or even begin offering speeches.

Finally, if you have the money, you can even go as far as buying a content asset! It can be an influencer or a magazine with an already built base of subscribers. He realized that the stories and content assets of the organization were in his 20 or so employees. Yes, the initial problem is solved, but that information was gold. What if OpenView could harness that one-on-one content, making the story available on the web for anyone to access?

In September , OpenView launched its own blog, and since then the business has never been the same. The results are simply amazing. Figure 6. For multiple weeks, River Pools overdrew its checking account. Not only was it becoming difficult to pay employees, but the company was looking at possibly closing up shop for good.

Marcus Sheridan, CEO of River Pools and Spas, believed that the only way to survive was to steal market share from the competition, and that meant thinking differently about how the company went to market.

There were four competitors in the Virginia area that had greater market share than River. Two years later in , River Pools and Spas sold more fiberglass pools than any other fiberglass pools installer in North America yes, you read that right. Needless to say, River Pools and Spas stayed open for business. Its recipe for success was content marketing, so successful for Marcus that he now travels the world talking to business owners about his story and the power of content marketing.

How did he do it? Actually, it was a simple process. Marcus wrote down every conceivable customer question and answered it on his blog. Until then, I had the opportunity to interview Marcus one on one about his marketing strategy and his process.

Rather than make all sorts of complicated plans, they should just get started and figure it out as they go. Where does that kind of no-nonsense attitude come from? JP: You talk about respect and courtesy on your blog. Do you see examples of disrespect in business publishing or blogging? What kind of advice do you give to bloggers about that issue? The majority of businesses, especially B2Bs, live in this world of gray.

I write like I talk. Second, my blog is opinionated. I live in black and white. We have a dearth of thought leadership because everyone is afraid to take a stand.

Now, you have to be respectful. Not today. The CSI in every industry is growing daily by leaps and bounds. It comes down to quality. Quality initi- ates the social side of things. JP: You discuss the pros and cons of different tech platforms on your blog, like Alexa rankings and Livefyre.

Which apps and plat- forms do you think bloggers need to know about—if not use—to be successful? Marcus: The one that I talk a ton about is HubSpot. HubSpot was the first company that was a true all-in-one for example, blogging, analytics, e-mail marketing, lead nurturing, social me- dia. You need to do better than just Google Analytics. And Jeff viewed these five pages of my web- site. I really, really want to know what Jeff did.

You can say this is a keyword phrase the person typed, this is the article that they landed on, these are the pages they visited, and this is the form they filled out to become a lead.

When John eventually turns into a customer, we close him out in our analytics and track it back to that initial keyword and that initial article.

JP: You share a lot about yourself, your family, your faith—a lot more than the average business owner. Tell me why. Marcus: I want you to start to develop a relationship with me early on. I want you to know, first of all, what I look like. The number one need we have in life, in my opinion, is to feel understood.

This is deep. As marketers we talk about social media but yet we want to be antisocial; well, screw that. All chips in the middle of the table. The remain- der of this book will focus on how you can find your story, how you can better understand the process of developing epic content, and how you can transform your organization into a content marketing factory that attracts and retains more of the right kind of customers.

Are you ready? The fact that it is tak- ing content marketing so seriously is important for all of us in mar- keting and business generation. Look for more of this trend in the future. You can too. Growing up, and on into the present, my mother is meticu- lous about how she chooses and buys gifts for members of our family. So it is fitting that I cannot write a book on epic content marketing without my own version of the Disclaimer. But this book is no silver-bullet strategy.

None exists. Each one has worked in different ways for different reasons. Your content plan cannot be duplicated by any other company, but you can learn from other companies and take on the best of others into your own plan. You can stop searching for this. The purpose is to help businesses identify where they are with content marketing and where they need to be. He was kind enough to outline this model as follows. Depending on what business you have, you may have varying needs for content develop- ment and sophistication.

Understanding where you currently are in your content marketing jour- ney content aware, thought leader, or storyteller is critical to getting started on the right path see Figure 7. The classic example of this is inbound marketing companies that use content to Figure 7. The strategy consists of generating lots of trustworthy and helpful content in order to be found, generate awareness, and engender trust with your target audiences.

Example: Tenon Tours. Tenon Tours uses HubSpot to generate lots of content on its blog about Irish culture, local events, and travel tips. It spends its time optimizing the posts for search ranking. As a result, it increased its site visitors by 54 percent.

Key to success is focusing on which posts generate the best search engine rankings, which have the most social shares, and which ones drive the most visitors. The business claims and earns leadership in the industry category by creating and facilitating content that not only meets demand but also creates trust in the brand beyond just how to use the product or service. At this stage, the business moves beyond creating content for its core buyer personas and moves into creating content for influenc- ers.

On the business-to-business side, this is creating a more efficient buying funnel in essence, helping your buyers buy , because it is dif- ferentiating the business against its competitors by claiming and earn- ing expertise. The business may create content that talks about the use of other products that complement its own.

It may offer research or extended content that reaches or is sourced by industry influencers. Example: OpenView Venture Partners. OpenView takes a holistic approach to its content marketing strategy. The company has a com- plete blog, virtual events, physical events, videos, infographics, and social media channels that serve its core mission to communicate its belief that new forms of marketing can positively affect start-up com- panies.

OpenView uses industry influencers as well as its own employ- ees to tell its story. The company not only hosts influencers to help OpenView generate content, it has active outreach to influencers to generate content to them as well. The organization has truly established itself as a thought leader of entrepreneurial growth in the venture capi- tal industry—one that cares deeply about its portfolio companies.

That subsequently elevates OpenView to be pitched by more creative and innovative entrepreneurs than it might otherwise be, given its size.

At this stage, the brand inte- grates content into a larger brand narrative and aligns its content strat- egy completely around a customer engagement strategy. The business goes beyond becoming a thought leader in the industry by drawing prospects, customers, and influencers into an emotional relationship with the brand.

The storyteller strategy educates, entertains, engages, and has impact on audiences because the content goes well beyond the scope of the product or service into why the organization exists at all. It actually creates demand for products and services the audiences may not know exist yet or may never exist at all. The goal of the storytelling strategy is to create better customers.

It creates a global efficiency in marketing and sales because it enables the brand to differentiate to the point of being able to command a premium for its products and services or to have to discount them less. Example: Coca-Cola. There are many of the storytelling strategy at work. GE does this by talking about innovation and creating brand stories that engage consumers to care about the GE brand; that influences businesses that may buy GE products. Sometimes becoming content aware is suf- ficient to be able to meet demand, which is done through the creation of epic content.

But the real revenue opportunities and growth are in the storyteller stage. Regardless, this is a decision that you need to make as you mature in your practice of content marketing. You need to know where you are currently before making a decision about where you want to be. The first problem for us all, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn. We often forget that point when we describe how wonderful our widget is that no one cares about. The more you talk about yourself and your products, the less that content is spread and engaged in.

You are afraid to fail. Taking chances with your content and experimenting a bit reveals the possibilities for your content market- ing and uncovers new and valuable customer stories. You are setting the bar too low. How can you be the trusted expert in your industry if it is not? You are communicating in silos. Are you telling different stories in PR, corporate communications, social media, e-mail marketing, and other media?

Do all departments follow a consistent corporate storyline? Epic content marketing means that your company is telling a consistent story. Do something completely unexpected with your content from time to time. There is no call to action. Every piece of content should have a call to action. You are too focused on one particular channel. Stop thinking in terms of just e-mail newsletters or Facebook.

Think about the problem you are solving for your customers. Then tell that story in different ways everywhere your customers seek out authoritative information. You create a backup plan. There is only try and reiterate. Forget a backup plan. A backup plan for example, pay-per-click or sponsorship is admitting to failure before you begin. There is no content owner. Someone in your organization possibly you must take ownership of the content marketing plan.

There is no C-level buy-in. Organizations without C-Level buy-in are percent more likely to fail at content marketing than are companies with executive buy-in according to CMI research. You are not immersed in your industry.

Everywhere your customers are, you need to be whether it be online, in print, or in person. You are not serving a defined niche enough. You need to be the leading expert in the world in your niche.

Pick a content area that is both meaningful to your business and attainable. Distribution of content is inconsistent. Distribute content consistently and on time. Develop your content marketing editorial calendar see Chapter There is not enough thinking with search in mind. Most likely, the largest portion of your website traffic comes from search engines. If you create pieces of your content with search in mind, you stay focused on the problem and how customers communicate that problem.

You also get found! The problem is that customers only need sales-related content at a very particular moment in the sales pro- cess. If you are honest about the content you have, your organization has plenty of feature- and benefit-related content. What you need are stories that engage your customers. We marketers need to positively affect them, engage them, and do whatever we must to help stay involved in their lives and their conver- sations.

The following are the six principles of epic content marketing: follow them closely. Fill a need. You content should answer some unmet need of or question for your customer.

It needs to be useful in some way to the customer, over and above what you can offer as a product or service. Be consistent. The great hallmark of a successful publisher is consis- tency. Whether you subscribe to a monthly magazine or daily e-mail newsletter, the content needs to be delivered always on time and as ex- pected.

This is where so many companies fall down. Whatever you com- mit to in your content marketing, you must consistently deliver. Find what your voice is, and share it. Have a point of view. This is not encyclopedia content. You are not giving a history report. The more you talk about yourself, the less people will value your content.

Figure 8. What makes them so special? Are they consistently delivered around the same day and time? Is there a particular point of view that you appreciate?

Do they help you live a better life or grow at your career? Frequency: monthly. Tracy an author. Frequency: annually. Frequency: daily. Frequency: quarterly. As a business, your goal is to become part of the content fabric for your customers. If you do, selling to them becomes relatively easy.

For example, I will usually try any software product that Copyblogger Media releases. I trust the organization that much. Does your content take advantage of current trends and news stories? The image was retweeted more than 10, times and received free press from nearly every media company on the planet. Fact-driven content. Regardless of your point of view, the content you develop must be based on fact.

Just as in high school, when all of us used to cite our sources, leveraging credible statistics and information has never been more important. Almost every media company on the planet employs a fact checker: someone whose sole responsibility is to make sure what the company is saying is percent correct. If just one piece of content you release is incorrect, the social web will be relentless on your brand.

Your job is to set processes in place so that this never happens. Visual content. It found that blog posts and articles with images performed 91 percent better than those without them. Why does this happen? In a separate study sponsored by 3M, 90 percent of information transmitted through the brain is visual in nature, and visual content is processed 60, times faster than the written word.

So even with textual content, visual design is critical and should be a part of every piece of your content marketing. Efficient content. When we at CMI first started our daily blog posts, it was just two people doing it: Michele Linn and myself. We did the best we could with the resources we had. Now almost four years later, Michele leads the strategy, Jodi Harris manages the daily content, Lisa Higgs proofs and checks the content, Tracy Gold reviews all our titles, and Mike Murray edits our meta tags for search engine optimization.

Curated content. Since you are a publisher too, you need these steps as well. So many small and large companies start to develop content without a clear plan in place. If not, why should your customers care? Why do you engage in them? What makes them special?

Can you be on that list for your customers? Hit the ball. And that is why I succeed. The one thing that most people take from this commercial is that you have to try in order to succeed. But I think the meaning is so much deeper than that when applied to marketing and content goals. There is usually a very distinct goal that an athlete is shooting for: a championship, a gold medal, a specific time goal, or simply a game win.

Michael Jordan always stated that his goal was to be the best basketball player to ever play the game. It takes passion, determination, and some soul searching to truly determine what kind of content you need to create that will have an immediate impact on your customer. But is there a goal for us marketers and business owners that we can identify that is the Moneyball of content marketing? The goal may be that you are just trying to find a more effective way than advertising to create awareness for your product or service.

This is the long-tail strategy. Why stop communicating with prospects once they become customers? Instead, communicate with them more frequently certainly not in a creepy way , and engage them with additional value. Customer upsell and customer retention goals can work hand in hand. Content—and especially content generated by satisfied customers—can be one of the most powerful ways to reach any business goal.

This is when content marketing starts to work for you exponentially. CMI has over 40, active e-mail subscribers to our daily or weekly content. So which of these goals makes sense for your content marketing? Maybe you are working to improve your customer reten- tion rate. Take a moment now to get your mental juices flowing. Write down your content marketing goal, and put it up somewhere so that you see it every day.

Two individuals known as Smosh started developing and distribut- ing videos on YouTube back in Eight years later, Smosh runs the most popular YouTube channel with eight million subscribers.

Copyblogger sells software to bloggers. Kraft is one of the largest food companies in the world. OpenView is a venture capital company. Smosh is a comedy network. The answer is no—almost across the board. Marketers view spend- ing on content marketing as an expense. This has to change. First, a question: what is an asset? Traditionally, marketing spend has been viewed as an expense. Hopefully, that expense has transferred into some brand value or direct sales exchange, but the event itself is over.

Content marketing is different; it needs to be viewed and treated differently. For that reason alone, you need to think differently about acquiring content assets. You are not acquiring content expenses. You are acquiring an asset! When you invest in a video, a podcast, or a white paper, those pieces of content create value in a couple of significant ways. One, the finished content is used over a long period of time; it has shelf life.

The content you create has value long after the investment is paid off fitting the definition of an asset; see Figure 9. An example is content created for search engine optimization. One blog post can deliver returns for years after production.

Two, content can be and should be reimagined and repurposed. You may start by investing in a video, but at the end of the year, that one video may result in 10 videos, 5 blog posts, 2 podcasts, and 30 sales tools fit for different levels of the buying cycle.

When you think like a publisher, everything you develop for publish- ing purposes is an asset. Having that mentality means that you need to think about all the resources that create and distribute that content dif- ferently. Thinking in these terms will help you in a couple of ways. Live it. That effort will start to rub off, and content will gain importance in the company. By thinking this way, you will more actively market the asset. Would you plan to sell your house but not tell anyone about it?

We need to elevate the practice of content marketing. We had around 3, subscribers to our weekly e-newsletter, which was sent out each friday. We at CMi had the goals of brand awareness, lead generation, and thought leadership, just as your organization most likely does. We found that by developing epic content marketing on a consis- tent basis, we were creating better customers for our business as well as accomplishing a number of marketing goals. Our understanding of the value of our subscribers turned our little business from something that was just surviving into a brand that was thriving and growing.

Dan spoke about the chang- ing mentality of his media company and how it had expanded its defini- tion of subscription. Subscription, for most media companies, is better known as circula- tion. The circulation of a magazine or newsletter is what you can sell against. If we only had an audience of 10,, we would have to charge much less for a full page of advertising. You are your own media company.

This means offering a valued e-book, research report, or white paper in exchange for subscribing to your e-mail list. As much as I loathe pop-ups or pop-overs as a reader, I love them as a content marketer. Over 50 percent of our daily sign-ups come from Pippity. Pippity also integrates nicely with WordPress, our content management system.

So many companies want to throw offers in front of their readers. If your goal is subscription, that should be your main and only call to action.

Once you focus on subscription as your goal, make it a priority to find out what makes a subscriber different to your business than a non- subscriber. Once you find that thing that makes a subscriber truly unique, everything will start coming together for your content market- ing program. Focusing on your objec- tives is key. Invest in assets that will continually grow the business over the long term.

If you look at marketing more like renewable energy, it makes all the difference in your planning. Business owners and marketers tend to bend their content to their thinking. Most of the time, marketers think that their content audiences are the same as their buying audiences. But, for your situation, your direct buy- ing audience may not be the same as the audience for your content. The first, most likely audience, are the students.

But there are also parents, who help support and fund the students. And there are alumni. What about local, state, and federal government? So before you start any content program, you need to have a clear understanding of who the audience is and ultimately what you want them to do.

An audience persona is a helpful tool to use as part of your content mar- keting plan. When content is developed for your content marketing program, it is the persona that gives context.

At any one time, you may have employ- ees, freelance writers, agencies, and even outside bloggers creating con- tent for you. The persona keeps everyone on the same page with who is being talked to and why the communication matters for the business. In other words, if one person goes through a different buying process than another, you need a different persona for each one.

Is that process different for a man than a woman? That depends: if you are sell- ing jewelry, the answer is yes; if you are selling marketing automation software, the answer is no. If you are just getting started with con- tent marketing, you may start with just one or two personas. For exam- ple, if you are selling air-conditioning servicing and equipment, you may start with one main audience persona: the woman of the household who makes most of the decisions about heating, ventilating, and air- conditioning.

Once you are comfortable with that person and with cre- ating content for her, you can move on to the next audience. The easiest way to find out is by asking the following questions. Who is he or she? How does this person live the average day? Why does this person care about us? Eddie, now an executive vice president with a large international firm, has amassed quite a nest egg.

Eddie travels the world as part of his job accruing , travel miles last year , and he also enjoys as much as possible traveling to the islands off Croatia on holidays. Over the past few weeks, Eddie has been working to consolidate his finances with one provider; he has made steps in that direction by recently developing a trust for his family. Eddie is consistently con- cerned that he makes the right decision so that over the long term his family is taken care of. Sales reps will readily admit that buyers mislead or even lie about how they compare and choose one solution over another.

Moreover, even product experts are unlikely to be buyer experts, since they interact mostly with current customers as well as a select few big prospects. And mining online data leads to personas that are little more than job descriptions with high-level pain points.

If content marketing is going to benefit from persona development, it needs to uncover specific insights unknown to your competitors or any- one inside your company. This information is so valuable that you would never post it on your website. However, it will tell you, with surprising accuracy, exactly what you need to do to deliver content that persuades buyers to choose you.

How to fix this mistake. The only way to gather clear, unexpected insights about how your buyers make decisions is to have a conversation with them. Make it a goal to spend a few hours a month interviewing recent buyers, including those who chose you and those who did not. Ask buyers to walk you through their decision, starting with the moment they decided to solve this problem.

Each in-depth conversation should take 20 or 30 minutes, but the time it will save you in planning, writing, and revising content will be immeasurable. If your marketing team is debating whether your buyer persona is a man or a woman, or if you are bogged down finding just the right stock image of your persona, then you are focusing on the wrong things. Priority initiatives. What are the three to five problems to which your buyer persona dedicates time, budget, and political capital?

Success factors. Perceived barriers. What factors can prompt the buyer to question whether your company and its solution can help with achieving his or her success factors? This is when you begin to uncover unseen fac- tors, such as competing interests, politics, or prior experiences with your company or a similar company.

Buying process. What process does this persona follow in exploring and selecting a solution that can overcome the perceived barriers and achieve his or her success factors? Decision criteria. What aspects of each product will the buyer assess in evaluating the alternative solutions available? To be useful, the decision criteria should include insights from both a buyer who chose a competitor and one who decided not to buy a solution at all.

Many people think they should create a new buyer persona for each of the relevant job titles in each of these seg- ments. Not so. One company I worked with initially planned to build 24 different buyer personas. When they started interviewing their buyers, they were able to pare that list down to Because their marketers are continually conducting new buyer inter- views and gaining new insights, they expect to consolidate that list even further. When you have captured the five rings of insight about buyers, you will see that differences in job titles, company size, and industry do not necessarily relate to differences in your insights.

For content marketing and most other marketing decisions, you only need a separate persona when there is a significant difference on several of those findings. For example, you may find that buyers of your RFID radio-frequency identification technology in both the hospitality and consumer products industries have nearly identical priority initiatives a mandate to be more competitive and perceived barriers an incremental approach is needed.

If you have a strong story to communicate on each of these points, one persona may be the best way to ensure effective messaging and content marketing. The structure imposed by surveys and scripts leads to nice charts, but it fails to reveal the new insights that you need. For example, if buyers tell you they chose you because your solution is easy to use, you might ask follow-up questions to understand why the solution needed to be so.

Setting up listening posts is critical for all editors, journalists, report- ers, and storytellers to make sure they truly know what is going on in the industry. The following are all means of getting feedback from customers—in effect, functioning as listening posts.

One-on-one conversations. Search of keywords. Using tools such as Google Trends and Google Alerts to track what customers are searching for and where they are hanging out on the web. Web analytics. Whether you use Google Analytics or another provider such as Omniture, diving into your web analytics is key.

Social media listening. Whether through LinkedIn groups or Twitter hashtags and keywords, you can easily find out what your customers are sharing, talking about, and struggling with in their lives and jobs. Customer surveys. I have included the sum- maries here for helpful reference. A pioneer of content marketing, Pulizzi has cracked the code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work.

In Content Inc. These steps are: The "Sweet Spot": Identify the intersection of your unique competency and your personal passion Content Tilting: Determine how you can "tilt" your sweet spot to find a place where little or no competition exists Building the Base: Establish your number-one channel for disseminating content blog, podcast, YouTube, etc. Connect these six pieces like a puzzle, and before you know it, you'll be running your own profitable, scalable business.

Whether you're seeking to start a brand-new business or drive innovation in an existing one, Content Inc. He is the founder of several startups, including the Content Marketing Institute CMI , recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. Magazine in CMI produces Content Marketing World, the world's largest content marketing event, and publishes the leading content marketing magazine, Chief Content Officer.

Discover the new marketing model for entrepreneurial success! By Douglas N. First off, this book is very different from Joe's last book, "Epic Content Marketing," which is one of the very best "soup-to-nuts, how-to" books about content marketing.

The book includes many examples of companies who have very successfully followed this approach. The book walks you through the six-part Content Inc. If you're familiar with the Copyblogger brand, the Content Inc.

This book is ideal for startups, a startup inside a large organization and a stalled business. Build your audience first. Then create your product. This is the new, proven entrepreneurial model explained in "Content Inc. And works. And, to listen to an interview with Joe Pulizzi about "Content Inc. To an old journalist who trained on manual typewriters and had no Internet access, content is, well, just what we used to call copy.

Different copy for different purposes, audiences and goals. Littering the book with examples such as Huffington Post and KraftRecipes is one thing, yet it can also be setting up unrealistic expectations. Small can be beautiful and a firm of architects can still utilise great content for a very small audience. Bigger is not always better, despite the inferences and hoopla from this book. The author is a content marketing expert and the advice is generally quite good, embracing and actionable; yet the book just did not grab this reviewer.

It should have. Even an old dog can learn a few new tricks from another wise old dog. It just felt as if you could not warm to this book and thus it was too easy to become disengaged and put it down. That is a shame. Both the author and the publisher knows their business, so what went wrong here? Is it more than good content in average or poor packaging?