Last updated on July 19th, 2015 at 09:38 pm
On this week’s edition of Podcast Recappers we look at an episode of the Social Pros podcast hosted by Jay Baer and Adam Brown, featuring Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute and author of the books Epic Content Marketing and Content Inc.
CMI produces Content Marketing World, the world’s largest content marketing conference, annually in Cleveland, and also publishes the leading content marketing magazine Chief Content Officer. Pulizzi hosts several podcasts himself, writes regularly for CMI and Entrepreneur, and is a popular keynote speaker.
This week’s guest host, Jeff Rohrs, introduced Joe, who talked about how to give away content, the six steps to reach multi-million dollar status, and the importance of creating channel strategies for each social media channel.
In a nutshell, the six steps are:
- Identify your sweet spot
- Content tilt
- Building the base
- Harvesting the audience
- Diversification
- Monetize
Joe used his own business as a great example of how this works. Content Marketing World (CMW) happens every year in Cleveland. “If you’re looking for your content marketing people, they’re here,” Joe said. That was their sweet spot, finding content marketers. So they built a successful blog at contentmarketinginstitute.com, publishing helpful, valuable, and insightful posts on content marketing. That’s Steps 1 through 3 done.
Step 4 was relatively easy for Joe and his team because many of the CMI blog readers subscribed via email, so he was growing his list with each published post. When it came time to launch CMW, they simply started by sending out a note to this email list. For Joe, the email subscriber metric is the most important thing for any business builder.
For Step 5 they branched out into other marketing channels, including social media. Joe knew it was important to build communities through each channel. Sure, there’s overlap between them, yet it was a great way to expand CMI’s reach and capture new readers.
Here’s a peek into how they did it:
- CMI produced a documentary that’s gotten over 5,000 views on Facebook alone.
- The #CMWorld Twitter chat was launched in 2012 to help promote the first event, yet it’s still going strong today.
- The Twitter chat was so popular that the regular participants wanted to meet up in person at CMW
- The CMI blog attracts content marketers from all over the world, who share the posts via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, and more.
The final step, monetize, was achieved through the signups to CMW. They had enough of a following on each marketing channel that if even a fraction signed up, they would make a profit.
(Author’s note: I attended CMW in 2013 and it was inspiring. It features lots of great speakers, marketers, and keynoters. In particular, William Shatner gave the closing keynote, and who’d have thought the man knew so much about marketing?)
To find out what else Joe had to say about social media channel strategies, listen to the podcast here.
