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Discover how the best media brands and solo operators are winning at newsletter growth & monetization.
Hosted by SparkLoop's cofounder Louis Nicholls and SparkLoop's newsletter nerd, Dylan Redekop—we take you behind the scenes and share the strategies, trends, and tactics you need to know to build your email audience and revenue.
Featuring exclusive interviews with the smartest media experts and operators out there today. Including from the Hustle, Morning Brew, Workweek, The Pour Over, and more.
EP 18: Joe Pulizzi
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Dylan Redekop: [00:00:00] Welcome to the Send and Grow podcast. My name is Dylan Redekop, and I'm your host for today's episode at Spark Loop. We help the best newsletter operators and media brands in the world grow their audiences. We get to see firsthand what growth tactics, strategies, and channels actually work, which ones you should copy, and what mistakes you should avoid.
And now with this podcast, you get that access to. Every week we sit down with a different guest from industry expert. To successful operators and we go deep on the stuff that you need to know so you can become really effective at growing and monetizing your email audience Today I'm joined on the podcast by Joe Pulizzi.
Joe is an author and entrepreneur. He founded the Content Marketing Institute back in 2007, which he then sold in 2017. Since then, he's founded the Tilt Media, a newsletter and education platform for content entrepreneurs, and it also includes CEX, the Creator Economy Expo, which just grabbed its second annual in-person event.[00:01:00]
Joe Pulizzi, thank you for joining me today. I'm really excited to chat with you. I've been a fan of you and your work. Going back to. Not quite as far back as you've been doing it, but up to the recent past of about 2020 when you launched the Tilt and the Tilt coin. So I know a bit about you and your background, but why don't you share with our listeners who you are and your experience in the marketing and newsletter industry?
Joe Pulizzi: Sure. Yeah. You, yeah, you were a little baby when I started. That's, that's, I can start out that way. So why would you know? Yeah. Basically, uh, I've been doing this thing for 25. Or so years. I got started on the publishing side at a company called Penn Media, so B2B Publishing, and I learned the art of what we now call content marketing.
At the time wasn't called content marketing. I got the itch to start my own business. In 2007, launched what became Content Marketing Institute. A lot of people know me for Launch the Event Content Marketing World, which became the the largest physical event, still is, I believe, the largest physical event in the content marketing space.
I did a sabbatical in 2018. I, [00:02:00] I wrote a novel called The Will to Die, which is a small town murder mystery in addition to the other, you know, I don't know, seven, eight business books. And then in 2020, you know, when everybody was trying to figure out if they're gonna do something different. And I was re-imagining what I wanted to do.
I saw a lot of my friends, a lot of content creators out there. Who are trying to be, what I would call content entrepreneurs trying to build a full-time business out of this thing and didn't know how to do it, and they saw what a lot of the influencers were doing. A lot of just the. YouTubers that were out there that didn't have a really good strong business model, there was too reliant on what I would call rented land social media platforms.
And I'm like saying, well, maybe there's an opportunity that I should be helping some of these people out there. So I redid the A version of Content Inc. So Content Inc. Was my book from 2015 about doing this thing, how a content creator can launch a full-time financially successful business, relaunch it in 21, launch the tilt.com as a.
Two time a week newsletter around these same topics where we talk [00:03:00] about how to issues for content creators building their business or building their audience. And we included news every week and then just had our second annual Creator Economy expo, which is specifically focused for professional content creators.
So my whole thing right now is just to teach and talk about how content creators can become content Entrepreneurs can have a full-time job. It doesn't have to be just a side hustle. You can live on amazing business. If you think about it a little bit, amazing life with this business, if you think about it more strategically instead of just thinking about the content and building assets on somebody else's channel, so, That's what, that's what I've been doing for the past, uh, shoot, almost three years now, so.
Awesome.
Dylan Redekop: And that's, that's a good lead way into talking about, you know, like you said, how you're helping content entrepreneurs build these businesses. And so you're doing that with, you know, the Tilt and The Tilt newsletter. So could you give us a, just a kind of a quick history of the Tilt Newsletter? So like you said, you saw an [00:04:00] opportunity, was the Tilt newsletter the first thing you started to.
Joe Pulizzi: No, it actually was Then you brought up, yeah, you brought up Tilt coin. I got heavy in, in 2020. I got heavy into Web3 and understanding, didn't we all And the reason why. Yeah. Well it, I still think there's an opportunity, even though we're in crypto winter or whatever you want to call it.
Mm-hmm. There. As I'd hear more and more stories about people getting shut off of platforms like Twitter and YouTube and TikTok and changing the algorithms and Instagram, and you'd be this amazing creator and think you'd have a business and all of a sudden you don't. Yeah, because the rules change and whatever, and I'm like, I saw the potential in web three, the idea that.
I don't have to be beholden to somebody else's network. I can take my assets and then slice off little pieces of ownership to share with my community and may maybe take it to the next step where Kevin Kelly calls it a thousand True fans, Lee Yin on the web three side call it a hundred super fans.
Mm-hmm. Which I still believe. So could you as a [00:05:00] content creator, build an audience and monetize that audience with just a very small group of people? So I'm like, oh, let's, so if I, I believe that with the token, so I believe the token could do that on the blockchain. And launched, as you know, it's called Tilt Coin on the rally network.
At one time it was the most popular, most successful token by any measure. Mm-hmm. Uh, we had about 2300 token holders that were very passionate about what we were trying to do and learn. And we were learning community as, as you were a part of trying to understand what this thing meant. Yeah. It worked really, really well.
We built that community, those people. We launched Tilt Coin first and then launched the newsletter, and a lot of those people became newsletter subscribers. We launched trading programs from it. We launched N F T and off the back of that, which is our never ending ticket, a part of our event Creator Economy expo.
So all those things work. Tilt Coin is not around today because. Rally closed up shop. Hmm. Which is, and this is the ni, I [00:06:00] have a whole mea culpa. I have a podcast on it. I have an article on it that says, look, I, Todd was the one guy that talked about stay off of rented land and be careful. And what we did was we built our token, what we thought.
Was this idea about ownership and within, outside of, of Web two, if you will. Mm-hmm. And it was right in the heart of Web two because we built on somebody else's network and they decided not to support it anymore. And so the question is, would you do it over again? And I would do it over again. And it's hard to say, Dylan, if I would've launched it, cuz we could have launched the token on a blockchain, whether that was Ethereum or Polygon or something like that.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, but the reason why I decided to go with Rally, because the onboarding was as sim as simple as an email. A lot of people in our audience, they didn't know anything about Web three. They didn't have any kind of a digital wallet, and I didn't want that kind of learning curve. So I said, it's okay.
You have time. Yeah. Sign up with your email and we'll get you there. And we were learning, we were doing all those things and a lot of people [00:07:00] through us got their first digital wallet for the first time and started doing some things and there you go. Yeah. And we, we all learned a lot together and we learned that if you're gonna do this thing, Around tokenization.
You don't have another company like a Twitter, like a TikTok that's That's in in control of the tokens. Yeah. You wanna do it yourself. So when we launched the N F T program, which was a part of Creator Economy expo that we launched ourselves. Mm-hmm. Launched on the Ethereum now. Yeah. We launched on Ethereum blockchain.
That we own those ourselves, we control those. All those are fine. So we learned from that standpoint, but, but Tilt coin is no more. Yeah. So, So you go
Dylan Redekop: and that, that, and that's a, a good lesson for, for everybody, for yourselves and everybody listening to, and I want to take it back to just my personal experience.
The first time I. I had thought of, or first time I had actually really seen anybody using some, something like a coin of a token, if you will, to incentivize people to join a [00:08:00] newsletter. I mean, newsletters are not in 2020 what they are now, where it's, it's it know, it's everywhere. It's been, it's ev everywhere's proliferated, which is, which is great.
But at the same time, I'd seen different, you know, incentives to join, whether it's a lead magnet or, or a referral program. But I'd never seen one with a, you know, that unique angle. So, I guess my question is how well did that work? And often people say maybe you should use a financial incentive to get people in, but I feel like there was something different though with the, with the Til coin.
So if you could just explain how that kind of referral program sort of worked and how it grew. The Til
Joe Pulizzi: newsletter. Absolutely. It was the best thing that we did. It was, it worked so incredibly well. So basically you had received the Tilt newsletter. You could go either way, but let's just say you started and you found the Tilt newsletter.
You would go ahead and sign up through, you know, we had our referral program set up with Spark Loop and everything was working amazingly well. And when you signed up to the referral program, if the more that you referred other people to join the tilt, you received [00:09:00] a, a number of tilt coin. Mm-hmm. We started it at certain numbers.
We basically ended up, ended up with $5 worth of U s d worth of tilt coin you'd get every time that you. Sent out for a referral and we were getting people that were doing 7, 8, 10, 15 referrals a week. Some of these days were crazy. And it was wonderful because that was our marketing engine. And by the way, the whole referral thing still works really well.
You can still do other things. We just happened to have our basis be tilt coin. We really tried to stay off the whole financial thing. Maybe we shouldn't, we shouldn't have set it up and said $5 u s d. Maybe we, we set the wrong expectations of it, but we wanted to say, Hey look, you can collect this token and do things with it.
We wanted it to be a utility and it was because you could buy, get a number of items from our, the merchandise. Mm-hmm. You get a hat, you could get a hoodie and you could get stickers and do whatever you could get. And we had a lot of people that had completely free training because they traded in their [00:10:00] tokens.
We had different levels, as you know, in our discord that depending on how much til point you had, you got into different levels of discord. And one of 'em was like a V I P level. Mm-hmm. That you could get access to me and ask me any questions and whatnot. So we have a different thing set up, but it was the greatest thing we've done.
Now we still have a referral system, but nothing that worked to that. Point when everything was going and people wanted to have access and they were learning about tokens and it was. Wonderful. Yeah, I, I think that was awesome. It was, we got a lot and we got a lot of, so, so today, I can't say it was all bad because we got a lot of great newsletter subscribers and members of our community because of the, to coin.
Yeah,
Dylan Redekop: for sure. I mean, it helped me, it helped me just that experience learn more about, you know, tokens and, and the whole cryptocurrency realm. It helped me get into Web three a lot more than, than I had it before. So, It was a really good learning experience for me. And also, you know, as you mentioned, people who are incentivized to share.
It was an easy share from somebody who was referring because you basically, I shared in my [00:11:00] newsletter and I didn't have a huge newsletter at that time, but there were weeks where I'd say, Hey, if you join the Tilt, it's a great newsletter, so you should join it regardless, but. If you join it, you also get, I believe it was a, a $5 US, like you said, that's true in worth of tilt coin, which is, you know, not a significant amount of money, but it's enough to kind of p people's curiosity.
And there were weeks where, like you said, you know, you, you're getting 10, 15, 20 referrals just by sharing that. So, so it was, it was a really good referral system in that regard. And it was a little bit different because it was, Cryptocurrency versus just like a $5 credit or gift card or, you know what I mean?
Mm-hmm. Like there's, there's something a little bit different that you could collect. So we, we,
Joe Pulizzi: but we benefited from the time as much as it hurts us now, it helped us then. Yeah. Because it was as bowl bull market as you could have. Yeah. If we wanna call it a bubble or whatever, the, and everybody wanted to learn about it no matter what.
Mm-hmm. And, and there was a network effect where you had Anne Hanley as part of her newsletter, Brian Fanzo, you had a number of other people that were doing the [00:12:00] same thing, and they were all in the Rally network and Mark Shaffer was there. There's a lot of, was Brian Clark there too, I believe. Yes, absolutely.
Yeah. And Brian Clark. Yeah, we were all working together. Mm-hmm. Trying to help each other referring. So if you owned Tilt Coin, you probably owned another 10 creators on there. And Rally was really good at the start. Mm-hmm. Of promoting their creators, specifically content creators. And that's why I loved the platform.
I mean, I, Jeremiah Ang, good friend of mine, he was a creator and he is like, you know, you gotta come on the platform. And I wanted to go on the platform. And so all that was working really, really well. And then, And then crypto winter came and, but really, but learned a lot. Wouldn't, wouldn't regret a thing.
And it, yeah. So from the referral standpoint, if you can come up with a very enticing reward from a referral program works really well. Yeah.
Dylan Redekop: Oh absolutely. And that's the Tilt newsletters proof. So let's go back to the newsletter in terms of where, where's it at now? Where is the Tilt newsletter at now in terms of like, you know, size?
How sure your publishing frequency? The content has shifted a little bit. Cause I believe it [00:13:00] was. A little bit more web three focused, you know, in those earlier days. So give us a rundown of, of where it's at now and, and how, how it's Yeah. We
Joe Pulizzi: started in Sure, started in April of 21 from zero, and now two years later we have 25,000 subscribers.
Nice. It's a very healthy newsletter. We're getting 40%. Almost 40% open rate, get a good solid clickthrough rate. We've got a wonderful, loyal audience. We've got a great group still in Discord, and then a lot of those people obviously come to our in-person event creator economy expo. So the model's working really, really well.
Uh, advertising economy is not where I would like to see it. I mean, we were selling out all our inventory when we started in 21 and early 22, and then a lot of that stuff has dried up. For us, and we're looking, we're rethinking how we wanna monetize that, but it seems like some of that advertising's starting to come back.
So we're excited about those things that are happening. But, but yeah, so it's, it's, it's going really well. It's the, it is the magnet of everything else that we do, and I always believe, if any content. Entrepreneurs going to start something. [00:14:00] They need to start with one thing. Mm-hmm. That's a podcast. It's a YouTube channel.
It's a newsletter. In our case, it's an email newsletter. And I, even though it's harder in my opinion, to grow an email newsletter from scratch, it's the best place to start. Because you don't have to then port it over from your YouTube channel and you don't have to port it over from your podcast. You have e everything that where you have, and then basically decisions are made based on newsletter subscription.
Once somebody subscribed to something and they know, like, and trust you for that newsletter that we're sending out one, how to, you know, it's every goes out every Tuesday and every Friday. It has one how-to section, here's what you should do, five things, whatever. And then we go through the news of the week.
Here's the stuff that's happened. Here's what's happening on TikTok. How does the banning of TikTok thing happen? What's Instagram doing? How are YouTube's royalty payments going for creators? So we talk about all those things in the hopes that we're sort of like a morning brew for content creators and content entrepreneurs.
So they can go to one source and sort of get all the bits and pieces [00:15:00] so they can make educated decisions about their business. Yeah,
Dylan Redekop: and it's, it's a really well put together newsletter and it's you doing it All right, Joe, it's you and typing it all out yourself. No. Geez,
Joe Pulizzi: no. That's the funniest thing you've ever said to me, Dylan.
No, I've got an amazing group. We're a small group of four. I'm in charge of the strategy, the selling I sell with, with Mark Maxheimer, who's in charge of partnerships. Laura Kak is amazing, does all our operations and. Is an amazing editor. So she comes up with the editorial plan and Dave Anthony runs all of our IT stuff and tech stuff.
So we got a nice little group of of people. We've been like that from the start. Yeah. And we're all, we, we're all remote and we've all worked with each other before, so it's, it's great. It's a fun little passion project and. We're in it because we hear from people who sell their first product somewhere, or make their first a hundred thousand dollars or make their first million dollars, and we want to hear about those situations.
And that's why we decided to do Creator Economy Expo, [00:16:00] because there was no in-person event that we thought were really getting these professional content creators together and meet. Mm-hmm. And I know firsthand that if you are a content creator and you wanna do that full time, you have to. Interact with other people on a regular basis to keep you accountable so that you can learn and you can do partnerships.
Yeah, so I want, you know, You, you helped us out. Like when we were launching the Tilt, you had your newsletter that you're, I mean, there's, there's, there are 50 or 75 or a hundred of those people that help the tilt and we want to help those people as well and, and whatever the niche is and whatever the size of the community is.
So, and that's what I love about this group of people. I mean, they're all trying to help each other. Yeah. We're all, and we're all on the same team, right? Nobody really competes with each other. We're just like, Hey, we're, we're trying to make this thing, we're trying to work from home. We wanna spend more time with our families.
Yeah. We wanna be better people. We wanna add something to the world. Everybody's trying to do the same thing. Yeah. And um, that's what we found in our, in our research, we just delivered it, was [00:17:00] why do people become content entrepreneurs? It's not necessarily, I mean, yes, they have a passion for the content.
Mm-hmm. And they're really good writers or audio people, or really good on YouTube or whatever the case is. But those are always all secondary. It's always about, I wanna live my best life. And I wanna be independent and financially free. And that's why I love the whole idea of content entrepreneurship.
Dylan Redekop: It's a, a noble aspiration to live kind of that life and, and to kind of be able to run your day the way you want to and have more volumes, the lifestyle business to some degree, if you can. You mentioned something, and it made me think of earlier when you're talking about the newsletter kind of being the centerpiece of the content.
There's a, a few online creators who talk about kind of the hub and spoke model where you've got. As long as you've got the newsletter, as kind of the hub, then you can kind of spoke out to all these different platforms that are not necessarily owned. Right? And so some people just wanna start on Instagram or they wanna start on YouTube.
And by [00:18:00] all means, they can, you know, you can post there and create content there. But to me, It seemed obvious to me when I was beginning that, you know, the whole point of creating that content is eventually to communicate with these people. And whether you're selling them, you know, a course or products or whatever that might be, services you need to email them and, and getting contact with them as emails, the most effective, you know, sales marketing channel that really, that there is in terms of digital.
And so my whole thought was like, well, Why not just start with the newsletter, get people subscribed to that first, and then you can always push out to these other different channels. And I had a funny conversation with Mark Shaffer where I said, don't, um, and you being from the, you know, the Content Marketing Institute, the content marketing background, I, I had a, a spiky point of view that was Don't start a blog.
Start a newsletter instead. And I think I, I shared that Mark Shaffer, uh, he poked some fun at me because he basically did a full rebuttal on why you should not do that and only have you know your mom and your. And your brother reading your [00:19:00] newsletter, whereas, you know, the whole world can read your blog via SEO and stuff, so Sure, sure.
How do you see the role of a newsletter shifting now with the, like I said, the kind of proliferation of the different platforms and, and everything like that versus, you know, what the, the blog was to content, say 10, 15 years ago?
Joe Pulizzi: Sure. The so lot, lot of, lot packed in that, so let's get, sorry. No, that's okay.
So first of all, It's sort of like Harry Potter and the sorting hat. You do have a choice. Like you, you, you can choose to go on Instagram if it makes sense. If you're really good at doing that kind of stuff and your audience is there, Instagram might be the place for you. Mm-hmm. It might be TikTok like Tequila.
J Bear, good friend of of the Tilts, good friend of mine. He decided, Hey, if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna start sort of Instagram as the hub and then does things to send people to sign up to his email. That's absolutely fine. That's the best. Because his audience was there and that's the biggest [00:20:00] opportunity.
And he saw a content gap. If he starts out with just a newsletter, it would take a very long time. He's got 200 built, 200,000 followers in a very short period of time, would never be able to do that three email, because you don't have that built in network already there. Right. But you have to remember, so the reason why we're always.
Flight, the flight to quality, the flight to email. If you look at the subscriber hierarchy, and I've been talking about subscriber hierarchy for dozens of years, I think, but in my 21 book Content Inc. I have the subscriber hierarchy, and at the top is membership and email. These are the things that we have some kind of control that we can communicate to our audience on a regular basis.
So we don't need somebody else's permission. Mm-hmm. And they can't take it away from us. We, I mean, we need their permission, but once we get it, we have it. If you look at everything else, like maybe you can make a case for podcasting. But let's go right below that. Go to Twitter and Instagram and YouTube and Facebook and all the way down, right?
Yeah, it's, that's all rented land. All those fans, [00:21:00] followers, and whatever, they're great and they may work for you, but you gotta go up the subscriber hierarchy in order to make the business work for you. At some point, you need email. Like if you look at the greatest YouTubers of our time, you even look at somebody like Mr.
Beast or you look at what Joe Rogan's doing at the end of the day, you know what they have, they've got a newsletter. They've got reasons for people to go to their site to sign up for something so that at the end of the day you have an asset. Look at the New York Times. Somebody, some might say, Hey, New York Times, you know, they have all this great.
Great content. They have more content, they have more blog content. No, than than you could shake a stick at, but you don't value the company by the amount of content they have. You value it by the subscribers, the email subscribers they have. Yeah. That's the value that provides the value of the media asset.
So I'm all for starting a blog, if you will, and getting found. And why would you start a blog over a newsletter? Because you think inherently that you'll be able to get found in search engines like Google [00:22:00] because of that. That's up for debate with the way that Google's changing the things. But that's the, I mean, I started a blog too back in 2007.
Mm-hmm. Totally believed it worked out for us. I still have blog posts from 15 years ago that are getting thousands of people a day to 'em. Right. It totally works from that standpoint, but today you can actually make a case to start newsletter first if it makes sense for the business. Mm-hmm. So if you say, I don't know if I believe in hub and spoke.
Unless you're only looking at two or three spokes necessarily, because I don't want, I don't want you as a creator on all the social networks you shouldn't be. You should pick one or two that you can be great. Mm-hmm. Jay Clouse says it best. He says, is it easier to get all A's and five classes or an a plus and one?
Mm-hmm. An a plus and one. Mm-hmm. So do your one thing. Great. So is that your email newsletter? Be amazing. You have the most amazing newsletter in your niche. Create that what we call a content tilt. Find that area of differentiation where you can break through all the clutter and [00:23:00] be different, be you. So that's the email newsletter.
And then say, I can focus on LinkedIn. Or Twitter or TikTok, I don't care what it is, but maybe one, I can make a case for two, like for me personally or for our business at the Tilt. Okay. We've got the tilt in the middle. That's the, that's the thing that brings everything together and then we say, well, we can, we can be great on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Really, probably LinkedIn more than anything else for me personally. Mm-hmm. Right. I can't, I can't be great on YouTube and TikTok and Instagram and Facebook. I can't be great on all those, but I can be great on one. Yep. And that's where most content creators feel. They have to be on all the channels, and that is fake news.
Mm-hmm. You do not have to be, you really just need one thing that you're wonderful, podcast newsletter, YouTube, and then one social channel to really share and get that message out, to bring those people back to the
Dylan Redekop: newsletter. Yeah, I mean, you spread yourself so thin that unless you have a whole, you know, team of producers and editors and [00:24:00] everything behind you, it's just not gonna, it's not gonna
Joe Pulizzi: work the way even then, Dylan, even, I mean, I've done, I've been like, what I used to do for a living, I used to do consulting and I used to go on these multi-billion dollar companies and I used to look at, do a content audit for them.
So a de cursory content audit. And they'd say, oh, we're bringing in the content guy, content marketing guy, Joe and Joe's gonna have some great story idea that we can launch and we can do a YouTube and we can do a webinar series or an event or a researcher report or whatever. Every time, a hundred percent of the time, I would make recommendations for them to kill things.
Hmm. Because they were basically creating a bunch of mediocre content that wasn't making any kind of impact on your customers. I'd always ask 'em the question. You're like, what if you stopped all your content production? Would your customers even notice? And the answer is almost always, they wouldn't.
Yeah. Yeah, because you're just wasting, you're just creating all this stuff and wasting a lot of people's time. Mm-hmm. So instead of doing the eight little YouTube shows you got going on in the four podcasts and all the things that you got a little audience that are not making any [00:25:00] impact in the world.
What if you created the greatest podcast for this audience ever? If you don't have those aspirations, why are you doing this at all? Yeah. Like you have to have those types of aspirations or it's not worth doing that.
Dylan Redekop: That's a really good point. It leads me to kind of a different, a different role, but of course we, when we're talking all about newsletters and everything like that, and um, you know, content entrepreneur, the entrepreneur part, the actual money part, we need to discuss it because a, a lot of our, our audience, they are either right on the cusp of making some, some money with their newsletter.
They already are making money with their newsletter, and I'm, I'm wondering from your perspective, how the Tilt Newsletter has. Helps generate revenue with your business?
Joe Pulizzi: Abso absolutely. The, I'm partial to physical events as part of the business model because there's so few people that do it right, and it is a bit of a risk.
People think it's a risk because there's some finances that need to happen in order to make, you know, [00:26:00] you're, you're line at six figures. Plus, depending on the size of event, a lot of people aren't willing to make those decisions. So my belief is for a good in-person event to work, you need to build your email.
Subscription audience. So you need that data. And then once you get, they become the know, like, and trust you, you can start putting in things to sell in front of them. One of those things is an in-person event. That's the way that our model works. So we, we, we get revenue from advertising or sponsorship in the tilt itself.
We sell little training programs that we sell as well. Like we've got our digital pass out now where you can get. All the, all the presentations from Creator Economy Expo for a price if you didn't go and whatever. And then we also have the event itself where we get registration revenue from the delegates that wanna come, and then sponsorship revenue.
So I like that model a lot. I also like the fact that if you do that really well, you can generally sell it or flip it. If that's a goal. And, and I always believe that if you start any business, it's always for sale. Mm-hmm. Depending on the price. I've sold three, I've sold three [00:27:00] businesses in my day, so I always look at those opportunities as well.
The same thing happened with, with Content Marketing Institute. We had 200-225 thousand email subscribers at that time. We had a really solid, good, good audience of marketers and that, that build up a, an event content marketing world, which is a 6 million event. Wow. Annually, and we were able to sell this thing and we sold, of course, you could do webinars and do sponsored webinars that way you could have paid membership.
You could absolutely do that. You could do affiliate marketing. So anybody who's new listening to this, besides the business model that I talk about, the great thing is once you build that audience in the middle, we're talking specifically through some kind of an email. Then you can. Basically generate revenue in 10 different ways.
He's like, oh, okay. Well, I can sell advertising and sponsorship. I can do events like Salesforce does Dreamforce, or HubSpot does Inbound, or the Tilt does Creator Economy Expo. You could sell premium content, you could sell books. You could sell eBooks. You could sell audiobooks. So all those things are on the table for that.
You could do affiliate marketing [00:28:00] where you're promoting somebody else's product or service, and you're getting a little cutoff of it. You could do it through donations. There's a lot of sites out there that just take donations kind of, well, like Wikipedia does. It's like, hey, right, that's how we support ourselves.
Will you support us? So there's lots of ways to make direct revenue, and then you could just launch products or the number one way that content creators make money. A lot of people don't realize this, but it's through consulting and coaching. Number one way by far, not even close. Number one is consulting and coaching, and number two is books.
Wow. So if you look at those types of things, then that you can look at all of that. And what we wanna do is if we create very few areas where we're an we're creating an amazing content product, and you're building this audience, then you want to actually do the opposite with your monetization strategy.
You wanna make money in as many ways as you can, because when something happens, like we're in this sort of economic. We don't know what's going on time right now where people pull back their advertising. If your entire business model is focused on advertising and sponsorship, you're in trouble, [00:29:00] right? So you've gotta make sure you have different levers that you can pull depending on what happens.
And this, by the way, It is not rocket science, it's just media 1 0 1. This is a media business model, so anybody out there, whether you're a marketer or whether you're a small business trying to be a content entrepreneur, you have the same business model as the New York Times as Red Bull Media House, as Cisco Systems, as is Nvidia, as Google, as Apple.
They all do the same thing. You have an audience in the middle that you're trying to get to know, like, and trust you, and you have all these ways on the out outside where you can pull money out of. That's it. So it just depends on what you wanna do and, and how you go forward with it.
Dylan Redekop: So in terms of the overall monetization revenue generation from the Tilt newsletter, it's mostly not all, but what I, what I understood there was the key, uh, uh, way you guys are driving revenue is through your, the in-person events as well as some, some sponsorship dollars and education core sales.
Yep.
Joe Pulizzi: Sponsorship education. Books. [00:30:00] We get sponsors on the podcast, which is really good. We do a number of affiliate marketing deals. Mm-hmm. So we're probably doing six or seven different revenue components every month that we're trying to drive through that way. The biggest is our event creator economy expo.
Right. But, and then the second is sponsorship and advertising. And then we fill in the gaps with all these other things that we're, we've got moving on and, we'll, we're, we're continuing to look at opportunities as they go.
Dylan Redekop: What, what I'm hearing is, Diversified income streams is generally
Joe Pulizzi: Yes. Ab It's kinda ab.
Absolutely. Yeah. You can't put your eggs on on a all one basket and just say it's, it's like, it's like, oh, okay, I'm gonna put all my money away for retirement and I'm going to put everything in into toys.com as as a stock, right. Or pets.com or some, mm-hmm. Something that did the globe.com. Something that didn't make it.
Absolutely wanna diversify. You want to have, you wanna have stocks and you wanna have stocks in different size companies and in different industries. And then you wanna have bonds, and you have bond corporate bonds [00:31:00] and debt and government bond and all that stuff. So the same type of mentality has to happen with your business.
So you want different ways that you make money, all looking for different ways to make money. There's gaps all over your business that you can add in. So if you only have one or two ways that you're making money, you really need to. Start looking at, oh, well maybe there's an opportunity for a virtual event.
We'll do something around there. And that could be sponsors. Maybe there's another one where it's a membership program and that membership program that we're gonna charge directly from that so that you get money from different places. So you should also have a list of all the companies that wanna reach your audience.
Mm-hmm. So those companies that you have listed here, okay, well what are they willing, what are they spending money on? You should know what your, what their, are they spending money on sponsorship advertising? Are they. Creating their own content product, could they possibly buy you one of these days?
That's, this is the biggest thing that's happening right now where you have a lot of content entrepreneurs that are selling their businesses because it's very difficult to build an audience in a particular niche. Mm-hmm. And a lot of companies are terrible at it, so they're like, well, instead of waiting three years to build a minimum [00:32:00] viable audience, that company might go out and buy you, as in HubSpot, bought the hustle.
Exactly. Uh, for 6% of their annual sales and marketing budget, it was a big amount of money to Sam Par and the hustle. And it was nothing for HubSpot. Right. We're gonna see more and more of that happen as we go, and I think a lot of content creators need to be prepared. And if they are prepared to know right now who could buy you.
Mm-hmm. And you should start building relationships with them right now, those companies. Yes.
Dylan Redekop: And great point too, bringing up the hustle because they had a very similar model to, to you, right? Like I believe Sam started the hustle as an event. Uh, I shouldn't say he started the hustle as only an event.
There was a, a newsletter or an email that he was sending out with it. But that was kind of his first sort of proof of concept that he could make it work. So, so it's, it is a good model. Obviously tried testing true by a number of people. So I wanna wrap up our chat here with just one or two more questions quickly.
I'm curious where you see the role of newsletters going in the next couple
Joe Pulizzi: years. Well, yeah, I mean it's gone from, I mean, when, when we were. So basically [00:33:00] email is different than newsletters. Yeah. As you know, and a lot of people don't understand, it's like when I, when I'll do speech, I'm always an email proponent and I'd say, how many of you are doing email newsletters to your audience?
And most of the hands go up And then, then I say, well, how many of you are getting more than 5% open rate? And you only get a couple that stay up? And I said, all you people that just put your hand down, that's not a newsletter. You are spamming them. Yeah. That's what we have to deal with right now. And that's why a lot of people, when I'm promoting email newsletters, they're like, Joe, email, come on.
This is, we're in web three, social media, AI content, all this stuff. Why, why you keep talking about newsletters? And I'm like, I, it's the same thing for the last 20 years, I haven't changed. I I, if you found an interview for me from 2007, I'd be saying the same thing. Mm-hmm. About the, about there, there's.
There's too much clut. Somebody will say, Hey, there's too much clutter. I don't even look at my email, but I always say, Hey, there's always the one or two emails that you get every day or every week that you absolutely have to [00:34:00] open, right? That change your life in some way, that help you get a live a better life, get a better job.
It's like, oh yeah, well, you need to be one of those. So I basically say you have to strive that in every newsletter you are absolutely inter interesting, and you absolutely have to show up at the same time, on time, on a regular basis in order to build a relationship with your audience and newsletters, right?
There's not a better mousetrap right now than having that newsletter do it. I don't know. I can make a case for a print magazine to do those, and that's a big opportunity there. But a lot of people don't want the expense. It's very expensive to do something like that. So it comes back to on the subscriber hierarchy, membership email, newsletter, print.
There's no better three right now to do. You can, you can make you have a, you have a hunch about which you like the best and which you don't, whatever. A lot of people don't like certain things, but those are the three fail safes, if you will, if you wanna build a long-term content entrepreneur business.
To answer your question, I don't see it changing. I don't see it going away. There's still [00:35:00] so many bad newsletters out there. There's so many that aren't differentiated. Take our industry, for example, and this is where we have to, we have to work harder as well. How many creator economy newsletters are there right now?
A thousand. 2000. There's a lot, I don't know. Once you get past 50, you're, it's a very competitive area. Yeah. So how are you going to differentiate that? You have to find a, a, a smaller niche, always go smaller on that niche where you have to change your audience in some way. Mm-hmm. So it's, I'm, I'm still bullish on newsletters.
I don't change that a bit, especially how these big networks are still trying to take all that data and not give any of that power left over for content creators.
Dylan Redekop: That's a great point. Okay, so last question here before I I let you go. Is there, is there any question that I haven't asked you that you think I should have asked you about newsletters or, you know, create content entrepreneurs in general?
Joe Pulizzi: No, I mean, I think we got, I mean, I've been rambling on about so much about things. My [00:36:00] whole thing is I, it's the greatest time to be alive because I can be an entrepreneur from my house, work when I want, and I feel. When I get into conver, so, so I've been doing this for a long time, but I get into conversations with people that aren't even aware that this is a bus that, that you can live a life like this.
Like they don't even think I work. Yeah, they don't even know like, what is this thing? Like what do you do? Like how do you make money? Like all this stuff, most of the people out there, 95%, let's just look at the United States. They know of the nine to five job and the only difference that they know from the nine to five job is sometimes now I can work from home.
Mm-hmm. That's it. It's always reliant on somebody else. I'm getting a job with somebody else and I'm always like, that is the riskiest thing. That anyone, any individual could do, why do I wanna risk my fortune of my family to somebody else's saying, Hey, you have a job today, but tomorrow you might not.
Mm-hmm. Today you have benefits. Tomorrow you might not. [00:37:00] I don't want that, want you to do. Why don't you go do it yourself? So I, I'd be feel if you be believe that this model is for you, that you want all your dreams to come, come true. They're there for the taking. Yeah. Now it takes time, and maybe that's the question we should have.
It takes, our research says it takes about 18 months mm-hmm. To build a minimum of viable audience where you can somewhat support yourself. I think that's a little bit low. I would go from 18 months to three years to, to really say, Hey, I, I can put in the time, the effort to do, because the reason why most content creators fail, and this is in any size company, is because they stop.
Point 46% of all podcasts have one episode. So if somebody had a really good idea, it started something and said, wow, that was a lot of work. So yeah. The, yeah, the, the one, the winners, you don't have to be the smartest person. Mm-hmm. You have to be the one that shows up on a regular basis in this industry to win.
And a lot of [00:38:00] people don't realize that. So if you set yourself up, you get, get your expenses down to a point where you can support your family. Mm-hmm. You're not, maybe, you know, you have to. Not go on that extra vacation. Maybe you'd have to go down to one car, I don't know, whatever it is for you so that you can set yourself up.
So you give yourself three years of runway. You can build this audience and then do whatever you need to do after that. That's
Dylan Redekop: right. Yeah. Don't build your professional house on somebody's else else's land. Right. You don't want that job. Don't
Joe Pulizzi: build your content house on rented land. Yeah, you absolutely true.
Don't
Dylan Redekop: just like, just like having a boss decide whether or not you're gonna be coming to work tomorrow or not. So that's a great point. I think we should end it off on. So I wanna thank you, Joe, for joining us here on Sending Grow Podcast, and give us a, a quick rundown of where people can find you online and, and anything else you'd like
Joe Pulizzi: to share.
Yep. At at Joe Pulizzi, J O E P U L I Z Z I. On all the socials, I've got two podcasts, content Inc. Motivational, one every, every Monday for content entrepreneurs, content creators. We have a content news show every Friday with Robert Rose [00:39:00] called This Old Marketing. Both these shows have been on for almost 10 years.
Nice. So I've been doing this for a long time. And then the tilt.com, that's the newsletter. So if you're at all interested in what we're talking about, please subscribe. And if you like it, great, stay subscribed if you don't unsubscribe. But we, but we feel that it's necessary in the industry right now, and we're just trying to help.
Dylan Redekop: So there, and I can, I can vouch for that. We'll obviously share all those links in our show notes. Thanks Joe for coming on. We'll talk to you again soon.
Joe Pulizzi: Awesome, Dylan. We'll see you soon. Okay.
Dylan Redekop: Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Send and Grow podcast. If you liked what you heard, here are three quick ways that you can show your support.
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