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I mean, you covered, most of it I've been in, I started in publishing over 20 years ago, fell into this thing called content marketing, which all my business books are around that, which is basically instead of interrupting people, uh, with, let's say advertising, we're going to create valuable, relevant, compelling information, build an audience.
[00:01:12] And then if they know like, and trust us, they're more willing to buy stuff from us. So that's the whole idea behind content marketing. Uh, my wife and I, uh, own ran content marketing Institute up to 2016. We had a very successful exit then. And, uh, I stayed with the company until 2018. Took that whole year off in 18.
[00:01:32] One of the best years of my life spent a lot of time with my kids. My two kids. In college. And, uh, and now really because of this whole pandemic thing, I spent a lot, of course, like a lot of people were spending a lot of time at home and I decided to really focus my energy on like individual content creators who are trying to be financially independent.
[00:01:55] And when I say content creators, I'll be talking about bloggers or podcasters or YouTube or Twitch streamers, anybody. That's actually trying to create a business out of this. And there's just a lot of questions it's very hard to do. And I said, well, I can probably be more effective at helping those people than let's say writing a second novel, which is the novel did great as no.
[00:02:16] I mean, I always wanted to write a novel, but I figured, you know, I could be more helpful. So we launched another business called The Tilt and we are a hundred percent dedicated to training and education for content creators and helping them understand what it takes to build.
[00:02:31] Greg Mills: Okay. Now, are you kind of the outlier in your family or did you come from an entrepreneurial background?
[00:02:37] Joe Pulizzi: No, I absolutely did come from an entrepreneurial background. My, uh, my parents owned a restaurant called Pulizzi's Restaurant in Sandusky, Ohio. So I grew up in that until I was age six or seven, and they ended up selling that business. And at the same time, my grandfather and my uncle owned a funeral home. So I, I grew up in the funeral business.
[00:03:01] I worked at the funeral, their funeral home from, you know, 18 to 22 all during my college years. So basically every little piece of my family had some sort of entrepreneurial spirit and I was itching to start a business forever. I mean, I was in corporate environment until I was 33, 34.
[00:03:19] And finally, you know, I took the leap and started what ultimately became Content Marketing Institute. But yeah, I always had that itch and it's much easier when you see people around you that are doing this and are living a completely different sort of life, not a nine to five life in any way.
[00:03:36] And that's what I was doing. I also thought I wanted to spend time with my family on my terms. So made that decision finally, and it took the leap and it worked out really well.
[00:03:46] Greg Mills: Now you were using the term 'content marketing' as early as you know, back in 2001. How do you define it?
[00:03:55] Joe Pulizzi: First of all, the idea with content marketing used to be called custom publishing or custom media. And it came from the magazine industry where a lot of, uh, companies, instead of doing advertising would create their own magazines like Walmart and Sam's club has their own magazine. Mazda has their own magazine, airline magazines.
[00:04:13] That's where it came from. Was in charge of at the time, this is in 2000, 2001. I had to go sell these projects to big, mostly business, uh, business marketers, chief marketing officers. And when I'd go in and I talked to them about custom publishing, they'd already be sleeping.
[00:04:29] They don't know any of the publishing. We don't do publishing I'm a marketer. So that's when I started using the term content marketing because, uh, you know, just use logic, right? Search marketing, social media, marketing, direct marketing. If you want to get a marketers attention, you have to call it marketing. So I started using content marketing.
[00:04:47] It started to get some traction. And then the whole idea behind it is instead of this interruption thing. So instead of borrowing somebody else's channel: the newspaper, the magazine, the blog, the YouTube channel, you know, your podcasts, let's say I wanted to, I wanted to, uh, advertise on your channel.
