How Content Marketing Can Fuel Your Entrepreneurial Success

Can content marketing work? Is content marketing a buzzword or solid business plan?

What’s the surest way to startup failure? Follow old, outdated rules. If the same old, same old isn’t working and your ideas are going nowhere, you need something new.

What you need is a NEW rulebook for entrepreneurial success. Enter Content Inc.

In Content Inc.: How Entrepreneurs use Content to Build Massive Audiences and Create Radically Successful Businesses, one of today’s most sought-after content-marketing strategists reveals a new model for entrepreneurial success. Simply put, it’s about developing valuable content, building an audience around that content, and then creating a product for that audience.

Notice a shift?

Author Joe Pulizzi flips the traditional entrepreneurial approach of first creating a product and then trying to find customers. It’s a brilliant reverse-engineering of a model that rarely succeeds.

The radical six-step business-building process revealed in this book is smart, simple, practical, and cost-effective. And best of all, it works. It’s a strategy Pulizzi used to build his own successful company, Content Marketing Institute, which has landed on Inc. magazine’s list of fastest-growing private companies for three years straight.  It’s also a strategy countless other entrepreneurs use to build their own multi-million dollar companies. Build an audience and you’ll be able to sell pretty much anything you want.
 
In Content Inc, Joe lays out the success that he’s build with Content Marketing Institute and growing to Content Marketing World with case studies and examples. Joe has carved a solid niche with content marketing and share how you can use this method to fuel your entrepreneurial success. He breaks down the business startup success model into six steps:

• The sweet spot – learn to find the intersection of your passion and your competencies. Hone your niche.
• Content tilting – Find a place where little or no competition exists and tilt your content to fill it.
• Building the base – Find your number base for your content.
• Harvesting audience – Use social media to convert readers to subscribers and ultimately clients.
• Diversification – Grow your business with a multiple channel content marketing strategy.
• Monetization – Now that you’ve established your expertise and built your audience, you can begin charging money for your services or products.

Some great quotes from the book Content Inc. to get you thinking about your content marketing:

1. For each article, Upworthy writes a minimum of 25 different headlines. Then the company does various A/B tests with its subscription lists to see which headline led to the most e-mail opens and the most shares.

2.

Today’s availability of technology means that any business in any industry can develop an audience through consistent storytelling.Click To Tweet

3. Let’s say someone rounded up all your content and placed it in a box, like it never existed. Would anyone miss it? Would you leave a gap in the marketplace?

4.

Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.Click To Tweet

5. More and more, I find that the best Content Inc. programs revolve around aspirations, not needs.

6. A blog post is like a miniskirt … it needs to be long enough to cover the essentials but short enough to keep it interesting.

7. What I now know is that it’s next to impossible to truly be a thought leader in your industry without a killer blog, a thoughtful book, and a speech that rocks.

8.

The way we communicate with our prospects and customers is the one remaining way we can actually be different.Click To Tweet

9. The Content Inc. model only works if you can build a loyal audience of subscribers over time. Period.

10. Michael Stelzner, founder of Social Media Examiner, says it best: It’s hard work. I’m not going to lie. Anyone who tells you that it’s really easy to build a content business is not telling you the truth. You have to accept the fact that this is going to be grueling, difficult, time consuming, and laborious work. But if you’re willing to roll up your sleeves and get dirty, and are willing to constantly analyze what you’re doing and scrap what doesn’t work and continue what does work, and keep at it, you can be very, very successful.

I’m really looking forward to interviewing Joe for My Book Club this month to dive into his success with content marketing. I know his ideas will help thousands of entrepreneurs grow their ideas into successful businesses.

There’s a good chance you already know my next guest for my book club, Joe Pulizzi, but here’s a brief intro just in case you need a refresher.

Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, podcaster, father and lover of all things orange. He’s the founder of multiple startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), the leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014. CMI is responsible for producing Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing event in the world (held every September in Cleveland, Ohio), as well as the leading content marketing magazine, Chief Content Officer. He began using the term “content marketing” back in 2001. CMI also offers advisory services for innovative organizations such as HP, AT&T, Petco, LinkedIn, SAP, the Gates Foundation and many others.

Subscribe to the Content Inc. Blab with Joe Pulizzi so you can catch the interview live or the replay at your convenience. It will be November 30th at 9 am ET and I’ll post the transcript here on this post.

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