My guest today is Joe Pulizzi. Joe is an author, podcaster, marketing speaker, and entrepreneur. He's the best selling author of seven books, including Content, Inc. And Epic Content Marketing. He has two weekly podcasts, the Motivational Content Inc. Podcast, which is about turning content creators into entrepreneurs, and he has the content news and analysis show this old marketing with Robert Rose. Joe founded The Tilt, which is a newsletter for professional content creators, and CEX, which is the Creator Economy Expo. And that's a content entrepreneur event happening in May of 2024. In this episode, Joe and I talk about his approach to social media, how to deal with rising competition in content creation, and simple ways to stand out and make connections. I really enjoyed my conversation with Joe, and I'm sure you'll take a lot from it. Please enjoy my conversation with Joe Pulizzi. This is the Show for Digital Creators by Digital Creators, hosted by me, Dylan Schmidt, a Los Angeles based content creator who loves to blend marketing, creativity, and business. Join in as we explore online entrepreneurship, creator best practices, and more. Each week, I'll bring you interviews with successful creators, tips and tricks for growing your online presence, and simple insights into the latest trends and strategies I'm seeing and using in the space. Welcome to Digital Podcaster, Joe. Thank you so much for joining me on Digital Podcaster today, Dylan. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. I'm honored to be speaking with you. I just shared before I pressed record, that I've been reading your books for years. It has cemented the way I view content. I'm over the moon to be talking with you. To say I'm a little nervous would be an understatement, but you got to say that, right? You can't just act like you're not nervous. There's not too many people who are nervous around me. So now you have anything to worry. I think we're in the clear. Nobody's intimidated by a short Italian. Well, I guess it depends. We won't go there. This is super fun. No, I love what you're doing. Obviously, we're talking about a lot of the same things. Content entrepreneurs are near and dear to my heart, and I've basically dedicated the last 20 years of my life just trying to help creators reach more people and build businesses and live whatever life they want to live without being encumbered by a corporate environment or other things that are not helping them live their best life. And that's why I love, I mean, the business of being a content entrepreneur. The content business, I think it's the greatest business on the planet. It is not easy to do, as we may talk about, but if you can make it through the first year or two, which my wife and I called the Bologna and Ramen noodle years, then you've got something. I love that. And I've been serving my audience just to kind of touch base with them. Where are you at what's in the way. And one of the things that's come up across the board, which I was not expecting, was time. Everyone is just mentioned over and over again how oppressed they are for time. And I was wondering if you could speak to that. Being efficient with your time, for one. How are you with your time and what are some of the things you see around time efficiency with creating content? Well, it's tough. I mean, I really look at it. Everyone has the time to do the jobs in this business that they need to do, but I think that we are not allocating that time properly, let's put it that way. So I'll give you a couple of examples. So when I do the one on one consulting sessions or I'm speaking to a bunch of entrepreneurs, what we find out is that early stage content entrepreneurs are doing way too many. Oh, and we do got to do the podcast and the newsletter. We're doing the blog and got to be on TikTok and YouTube and whatever. And I get it, they feel like they have to and I'm like, no, you should not be doing that. You cannot be jack of all trades, master of none, and be successful at this business. You actually have to choose. And that's when we get into strategy. If you're strategic. Strategy is about saying no to many things and saying an emphatic yes to one or two so early in this business, you have to say, okay, well, maybe the center of my content business is a podcast, maybe it's a blog, maybe it's a newsletter, maybe it's YouTube. Doesn't mean you can't use some of those other things to market whatever that centerpiece is, but you really at least have to focus on that as a choice. The other thing is social media. Do you have to be on all the platforms? So for me personally, this is very difficult. I spent ten plus years building up a pretty substantial audience on Twitter, which I've just gone away from, and said I can't dedicate the time and energy to be successful on that platform anymore. So where am I going to put my I don't, I don't do anything business related on Instagram, nothing on TikTok. I'm not even on TikTok and nothing on X. Where do I spend all my social time? I chose LinkedIn right now, LinkedIn for me and my audience and to distribute my newsletter and to post on a regular basis. I only can make the time if I want to live a regular life and have family. Time is on that channel there. So I'm hoping that's a relief for a lot of people listening. It doesn't mean it makes it easier, but I don't see another option to being successful. That doesn't mean that when you're three, five, seven years down the pike, you can't diversify. You absolutely can and you should. But if this is a media model. That's what we're all doing. We're a media 101. And what do they do? They start with one platform. You build a minimum viable audience on that platform. You diversify revenue, but you have a core content channel that you focus on a platform. And then once you build that audience, then you diversify into all the other things because you're probably got some help, and you have an audience that is profitable for you to move into other channels. Because we do this because we believe if we have somebody listening to our podcast, let's say, and then they subscribe to our newsletter or our YouTube channel, that they become more profitable for you. They spend more money, they stay more loyal, they talk more about you, they share your content with other people that you want as your audience. So that's why we do those things. We just don't do it because we want more. We do it because it makes sense for the business model. So I went all over the place with that question. I was with you, but I think you just have to make the right choices. And generally when I go into a content entrepreneur and we do an audit, they always expect me to recommend doing more. And I always say, you're doing too much stuff. What are you doing out here? What if you took that content energy and moved it over here? How good would that podcast be if you stopped doing TikTok, X, Instagram, YouTube, whatever? So that's what I would want to focus on, at least at the start. Now, I would say within the first. Three years, and within LinkedIn, for example. I mean, it used to be so simple with these platforms. With Instagram, I guess to switch for a second it was like Photos. And then they keep adding in the features and get you to stay. And whatnot next thing you know, within one app, there's all these different types of posts. With LinkedIn, do you try to stick to a format? So I publish between four and five times a week. I should do five. I know that sounds terrible, but sometimes I miss a day. I guess when you get that far down the path I've been doing this for 25 years. You could miss a day here. I think you deserve that. But I don't on my podcast and I don't on my newsletter. Never missed and never will. But on LinkedIn it's between four and five. Generally, Monday might be a newsletter day. So that's a post that's attached to a longer newsletter. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Those days are thoughtful posts, maybe an image, some kind of question. I did one recently where I was talking about why I'm talking to a lot of creators about this concern over big tech and having big tech control a lot of the business model. And are we moving more to email? Are we moving more to selling directly? And what does that mean? And I showed a chart on how creators are getting very little traffic from social anymore. It's a good discussion. People start to share that and repost that. And that happens hopefully on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and then on Friday, we live stream on my podcast, this Old Marketing with Robert Rose. And we've been doing that for the last six months, and that seems to be working really well. Gets a lot of you know, that's five times. I got one video, I got three regular posts, and I got one newsletter post. If you can add an image, that makes sense. But I found out that sometimes even very short, hey, I'm struggling with this today. What does everybody else think is really important? The most important thing to making it work, out of all of it is making sure you're posting on other people's pages, and that will make it work. Basically, this might be LinkedIn 101, but where's your audience hanging out on LinkedIn? What are those creators doing? Make a list of ten to 20 of those creators. And you should be making some schedule that every other day that you're commenting on their stuff. That not only makes your stuff more visible, because when you post on their platforms again, you hit the stream for anybody who's following you. You come right to the top, even though you're posting on somebody else's. So it's regular engagement there. But the more that you post on those other platforms, more visibility you get for your stuff. People that follow, like I'll post on Jay Klaus's board, jay might respond, somebody say, oh, okay. Who's Joe? What's Joe doing? Joe's got a book. Joe's got a podcast. And that works really well. And that's Influencer 101 from 20 years ago, but it still works really well on the LinkedIn platform. There's a lot of J names. Like J, Klaus, Joe. I think it's a J Kunzo. I think actually it's funny. So for our event creator CEX Creator Academy Expo, we had that in May. It's in May of next year. We had Jay bear. We had Jay Klaus and Jay Acunzo. And after I think Jay Acunzo was the last one, I said, I'm sorry, I couldn't find any more J's. I really tried hard. J's are standing strong in the creator side, for sure. My middle name is Jay, so if you need me to change it to. There you go first, go by it. If you came and speak, I would introduce you as Jay because it's mandatory. It's mandatory. That's amazing. I have to shout your praises for just a SEC, because one, like you said, LinkedIn 101, people that have listened to this podcast, people that I've spoken with, know that I am just kind of a deer in the headlights when it comes to LinkedIn because it just is overwhelming and confusing. And I've said, I need the fundamentals, the basics of LinkedIn. Where should I be looking. And I think that's one of the things you do so well in your books and in your podcast and in all the content you share is you deliver information in a way that I can wrap my head around versus, like, oh, this is where I look, because I log on there, and it's like, there's trending topics. There's all these shiny candy, and I'm like, Should I go to this? Should I go to that? And so just the simple, oh, yeah, just comment on people, make a list of people, look there, start there, is helpful even having an understanding of other platforms. Well, thank you for that. I think that maybe the reason I look at the space a little bit differently is because I came out of publishing and media. I started in B to B Publishing, and I really am like, wow, this is not a rocket science model. This is just you deliver consistently a very valuable message to a very targeted group of people, and you do so over a long period of time. You listen to them, figure out what their pain points are, and if you do that really well, that should resonate in all the content that you're creating. And so, basically, the Norm Peterson rule for content creation show up on time every day, and when you do, say something interesting and don't overcomplicate it. And I think that's what we do. As I said before, we got to be at all the places I'm like, nobody said that. I cannot stand some of these influences out there saying, you got to do all the things. You got to be on TikTok. If you're not on TikTok, you're losing the big opportunity. What? Why? What if I take that energy and I put that into my podcast? Well, you're just making choices. And so if you're 100% on TikTok, great. Then you're all in on TikTok, then that's your thing. I mean, that's a concern for me because there's no control on that channel, and TikTok could get banned at some point, and TikTok could change the rules at any point and change their algorithm and do all sorts of things that we've seen forever. That's my concern, is having control and ownership over your business model. But if you do that really well and you can move those people over to, like, an email platform or a membership platform or something like that, that's okay. That's great. You go where the audience is at and move them over to something where you can have a one on one conversation with them. But yeah, so that's my whole thing. When I write an article, I look at it and I edit it to say, okay, what can I take out of this? Because I know I've overcomplicated it. Every conversation I have with my wife, I said three things I shouldn't have said. First of all, I should have just listened. Okay, I'm going to listen to the payment. And then I'm going to come up with just a very simple concept and make it relevant to the people that I'm talking to so that's it being everywhere, too. It is draining. And it reminds me of, like, it seems like if I had to say it stems from this lack of knowing who you're talking to as well. If you're trying to reach people that would fit on LinkedIn is TikTok. The place is pinterest. The place seems like it just makes everything more complicated when you add in more stuff. Well, I think it's maybe you know this because we were talking about my book before, but I wrote Content Inc. In 2015 and then new version in 21. And the first step is the sweet spot. It's like, okay, well, how do I find my sweet spot? Your sweet spot is the intersection, one between what your expertise is. So what's the thing that you're a little bit better at than most of the world? So that's your expertise area. And then the other one is what are the pain points of your audience? So if you don't know your audience and their pain points, this doesn't matter. The expertise does not matter. Great. You're an expert. So what? There's 1000 experts to nobody. So we don't want to boil the ocean here. We want to focus on who is that audience and what keeps them up at night. And I've been using pain points and what keeps my audience up at night for 25 years because I think it resonates with people to say, don't just listen to them. What are we listening for? They have problems. They have things that they are dealing with. And you have to cut through all that clutter and figure out how you're going to be the leading informational expert on the planet to them, because you're competing with Netflix and Google and everybody else out there. So how are you going to do that? You really have to focus on where are they hurting? And your information needs to be the solution to that. I did a conference last week, and I asked everybody, how many people create and distribute email newsletters? And almost everyone raised their hand. And I said, how many of you believe that you have remarkable newsletters? And everybody put their hand down, and I'm like, I feel like, what are we doing here? What are we doing here? We better be doing this for a purpose. We're trying to change the world one audience member at a time, right? And you can do that. That's why I love this industry, because if you have five or ten people in your audience, you're probably making a difference. You don't need to be Mr. Beast. You can have a small audience and make a living with this if what you're delivering is truly, truly valuable. So don't overcomplicate it, but know who they are. That's why we talk about these things. Again, basics but we call setting up listening posts. What does that mean? That means everywhere you can, you want to be getting data about your audience. We can do that through analytics. We can do that through surveys. We can do that through talking to them, like, in real life, through zoom or in person. That's why I love going to events. I go to events. Number one reason is to go talk to all the people and figure out what they're struggling with, because I can do that easier in person. It's funny when you get in an in person setting, it's like therapy for everyone. They just talk about all the things they're challenged with. So that's where I and set up as many of those as you can. If you do that really well, you'll have the answers to, what should I write about today? What should my podcast be about today? Because they just told you, yeah, that. Doesn'T seem to happen as easily. Virtually. I've noticed people don't share that, and I guess probably not in the space to share it, really. It's not like you have those moments of in between things happening. It's really just everything's so purpose fast. I guess you just can't get it. And by the way, I love virtual events. There's nothing as a business model. There's a lot of really good cases out there. But if you're talking about there's nothing, right? Who knows? With AI and everything, I don't know how things are going to go, but right now, into the foreseeable future, there's nothing that's going to replace in person events. And that's why it's funny. So I started one career I had in content marketing and still dabble in content marketing, and now I'm in this content entrepreneur space. Well, as you know, there's thousands it's not tens of thousands of people that are targeting the same audience. Well, okay, well, we have to be different. How do we be different? How can we be different and break through all that clutter? One of the ways we decided to do that was to actually create a physical event CEX, because that's like a moat. Like, if you're a follower of Warren. Buffett, I haven't followed his biggest. But if you if you follow Warren Buffett's investment strategy, he only invests into companies that have a significant moat around them. So it's hard to compete with them, like a Coca Cola or a Pfizer or something like big infrastructure distribution, like something that can't be matched. Well. Today you're competing with people that just need a smartphone. So what do we do? What do we do? So one way is to, okay, well, we had the funds and the wherewithal, and I've known the investment business forever. Let's do an event and differentiate that way. And it worked out really well for us to do that. Now, instead of competing against, let's say, 50,000 people talking about the same things to the same audience, now we're competing with ten. Okay, ten. I can wrap my arms around ten. Can we be the leading event for content entrepreneurs among those ten for our audience? Yeah, I think we can. Okay, what do we need to do to get there? We need to change this. Whatever you need to do from that standpoint. So that's why I'm a believer in. That side in the barrier to entry. Yeah, you could do like a short little live event. I've done a lot of live events and it's not like something you just hop right into without any knowledge. Right. It's of course more expensive than doing it virtually. And if you add in both components, that adds a layer of complexity. That makes a lot of sense. Do you think this popped in my head while you're talking? I was like, Please remember this. With the rise of artificial intelligence, there has come artificial confidence. Artificial confidence, like people are so quick. To get answers now that the content creation side of things almost seems easier because I could just ask Chat GPT how to fill a live event, for example. Now that's going to be what it gives you is not going to be tailored with someone who's run live events. But there seems to be, like you said, more people in the content creation game to separate yourself. It's like whereas before you might maybe had to move, like, inch this way, now you got to move maybe further because of so many people's access. Now you have 16 year olds popping up and they're like these promises. I don't know if they're telling the truth. Doesn't seem like it, but there's more popping up. So, first of all, it's a great question. I could have 17 different answers to it. The first thing is that everyone can create basic to above average content to your audience today fairly easily. All right, so what does that mean for still? You have to do some extra things to be the best of the best and break through. Is that a temporary thing? I think it is. So let me expand on that. So, first of all, I believe in using AI tools just like everyone else, but to enhance the content that I already create. So that if we can set up and let's say that we're using a chat GPT or whatever, and you're using A Plus, so it's all yours. And you can start to train that AI as an AI assistant, as a tool to really help you. Whether that's for ideation or whether that's improving the content, that the ideas you already have. I think that's the thing. I mean, I've used it a little bit. I've seen some definite performance increases by that from just creating visuals where it used to take me a half hour and now it takes me four minutes. That's a big difference. If we can have an AI that continually learns, and there is an AI that can do there are AIS that can do that and learn from that. I think there's an opportunity where I'm struggling. Dylan is this is a temporary year, as Paul Raitzer says, and he's quoting somebody else, but I'm going to quote Paul, who's the founder of the Marketing AI Institute. He says, The AI that you're using right now is the dumbest AI you'll ever use. Which means in six months, can you imagine? In twelve months, can you imagine? I fully believe that the movie her will happen where people will have relationships with their AI. You're already seeing AI comfort tools for elderly people for relationship building. You're seeing that there's a couple of big dating apps that are using AI that it's like chilling how they're using it, where you can talk to 50 other AI bots at the same time because that AI bot is built on your needs and wants. I'm like, oh my God, this is crazy. My wife's going to get jealous of an AI bot now. Hey, it's coming. It's absolutely coming. And I think it's hard for us to get outside of AI and just using it as how we use other tech tools. I think this is completely different than anything else we've ever seen. But I can't tell you exactly what it's going to be except from what I've seen in movies and what we can dream up. I'm a part time novelist. I wrote a book called The Will to Die. I thought it was pretty good. I want to write another one, but are you telling me that I can write something better than AI will in a year? I don't believe that's possible. I think AI will be able to out content me, if you will. So what do we do? I think it's humanity that wins out. So it's conversations like this that can't be duplicated, right? Mean, it could be fake post, but this conversation can't be duplicated. Me going to an event can't be duplicated. So how do you create a moat around your content business and survive in AI? It's bringing in physical components that can't be duplicated. So if I'm a content entrepreneur, I'm looking at events that I need to go to to be a part of that audience, to build my audience directly. I think that speaking is critical. I believe that adding a physical book component, even though you've got an AI book generator, but if it's a book that's really based on what you stand for and your purpose and stands for your audience's needs, that's part of it. So there's this real human model that you could still use AI, but this real human business model that's there for the taking. And maybe there's an opportunity because so many people are using AI. On the other hand, we're like, if we can get out of our shells a little bit and lean into this humanity, maybe there's an opportunity. So that's kind of where I'm at. I think for the next three years, people who can speak in front of other people, lead discussions, do live events, be on podcasts like this. They're going to have an advantage over those that are just creating textual content or video content, and they're doing it through AI because, what, two years? I don't know what the percentage of content right now that touches some AI tool, but I'm under the assumption that in two to three years, 95% of all content will run through some sort of AI or maybe be completely AI generated. So you have to ask me that question in two and two and a half years, what I'm doing. But if you're asking, okay, how do we future proof our business model now? It's to lean into the in person component. I hadn't even thought of this until you said that. Like I mentioned to you, I was behind the scenes for years. And then a couple of years ago, June 2021, I was like, I'm going to create my own personal brand and start creating content and just see it as an experiment and just go for it and create content around podcasting and content marketing. And I had recorded some video, and people are like, how are you so confident? And I'm like, I am not confident. I'd never done any camera stuff. But I said that because everyone wants to use quote cards and text bases. Before Chat GBT, I was like, I'm going to record myself because I'll stand out. People are afraid to put themselves on camera, and so this will be a differentiator and now that still seems to be true because a lot of people hesitate to record themselves even talking on video. And I've seen I'm not sure if you've seen, like, Frank Kern, the Marketer, he's posted these AI videos lately on his Instagram where he's not trying to pass it off as it's not really him, but it's like a video of him. It looks like he's talking and the mouth is kind of moving. It's a little off, but like, you and the quote, it's the dumbest it will ever be. It's the worst it will ever be. It's only getting better from here. What was it like for you when you first used Chat GBT? As someone who has just been so familiar in the space, initially, the first. Time I felt like my career was over, to be honest with you. I was like, okay, now, granted, we know the horror stories. Sometimes Chat GPT is wrong and whatever, sometimes misinformation or whatever. But these are, again, temporary things. Yeah, I mean, I'm like, well, this is pretty good. And what's crazy is that there's enough content on me out there that I could say, can you write a short story about starting a funeral home business in the tone and feel of Joe Pulizzi? And you know what? I'm like, yeah, I probably would write like that. If you follow Professor. Scott Galloway. He just came out with his own AI. He's getting all these questions from his audience and so he came out with his AI that sounds like him and talks like that. I don't know if I would have done that, but I see he's trying to push the envelope a little bit with what's possible. Are you familiar with John Loomer Facebook ads? Yes, absolutely. Yeah. What's John doing? Well, John had created a chat bot that he was training on his content because he's been blogging for years and he has a lot of written content out there that lends itself. And so the chat GBT has opened AI. They've crawled for sure, his website, because there's just a lot, but it's not always accurate. But he's trying to fine tune his chatbot to be more accurate for his audience to use. Wow. But yeah, it reminds me of the people that the even you could kind of capitalize on it in a way of making a chat bot, but at the same time it's kind of like scary. Well, it's interesting for audiobooks is a really good last. Brian Piper and I wrote Epic Content Marketing earlier this year and we both did, whatever, seven or 8 hours of our audio sections, which were much longer because they were edited down. You know the drill. And it takes a lot of passion, a lot of heart, a lot of persistence to do an audiobook. And I've done seven or eight of them now. I can talk a particular couple of paragraphs and it's recorded, and then somebody can take my entire manuscript and make it sound 97% like me, where I can catch a couple of things, but most people wouldn't. And it just output that and I'm like, wow, this is nuts. Now, I don't know how I feel about that because they're my words. Something else is. I mean, I pay for the will to die. I paid Cal Tate to do a great job reading The Will to Die because I didn't want to read my own fiction novel. So it's just interesting to see how this goes and then to look at to our last point, this is the dumbest. It's going to like, what are we going to do with this? So I think as content creators, we need to lean in and experiment with a lot of this stuff just so we can see what's coming. That's literally for anything else. I don't care if you use it as part of your content and you find the efficiencies. Andrew Davis was talking about a great keynote speaker. He was talking about this. He was saying, if I can teach my chat bot or my Chat GPT version how to write like me, how to do scripts like me, whatever, then I have saved 10 hours a week and I'm going to use that 10 hours a week to spend with my family. If you put it that way, I'm like, okay, I can see that. I can make a case for that. Like a tool paintbrush, if you will. If you've trained it and it's not coming from scratch and you're curating the words and you're editing them and it's providing value, I don't see how it could be a negative thing. I've read so many landing pages lately that it's, like, just obviously just written by Chachi BT, and they didn't tweak anything. And that my brain doesn't even read the words. It just reads like, this is AI. And I don't even connect with the words because they're the well, you might. As well just yeah, in that case, you're just scraping and stealing, in my opinion. There's nothing of you in there. I like the whole thing of, like, yeah, if you're using it as a brainstorm tool, I think that's great. If you're using as an editor, I think that's totally fine. And if you're using it based on, like, if you're using a chat bot that's based on all your thinking, I think I'm okay with that, too. But then we go past that and I don't know, because then we get into somebody I know is having a relationship with an OS. Exactly. I'm into Joaquin Phoenix movie at that point. We're not that far away. I literally this morning, read the article about there's this group of elderly people who are very lonely, and it is a huge problem in the United States where their family's not around anymore. They're in nursing facilities or assisted living. They don't get visitation, and they're creating these little customized chat bots to talk with them, and they just communicate back and forth. And I'm like, here we go. I'm not even saying that you could see the videos. They're better. They're feeling better about themselves after talking with a computer. Yeah. Where is this going to go? I don't know. I'll be honest. I've had some conversations with some family members, and I'm like, they're, like, single or something. I'm like, they could definitely benefit. There's a level of processing that you have with a partner that you don't realize until you're alone. And then you're like, I have nobody to share this with, and if it's doing with AI bot, cool. That's how it starts. This might be the last conversation you and I have as human beings. We don't even know that. People are already signing off. They're like, this has gone off the rail. Where to take this? Like, especially not long after Chad GPT really popped up, I was, like, a little bit of an existential crisis. There were probably a few episodes there where it was just like, what is anything but that's true. Shifting gears. So you have The Tilt, which is a newsletter for content entrepreneurs, would be apt to say, right, I was just speaking with somebody, and I'm curious. Like, you're the perfect person to ask about this. They were like, hey, I'd like to do a curated newsletter. And it was kind of the idea around content moderation. They were just like, we would have people submit it and then we'd blast it out and it'd be all good. And I'm not working with them on this project. They're not moving forward with the project. But you have The Tilt, which makes me curious. One thing I had brought up to her was, how will you be sure that all the content that is being submitted from these creators is not just like, some rough, low quality chat GBT output? And I've read the tilt and the quality is high. And what do you have in place just to like, how do you deal with that? Because it feels like text is one of those things currently, at this moment, where you have to be like, the quality is a little bit more discernible, I guess. Or maybe that's just me. I don't know. Sure. We launched The Tilt newsletter in April of 21, sort of as a model after Morning Brew. I fell in love with Morning Brew, that whole model where the belief was I wanted somebody to open the newsletter and not have to click through anything if they didn't want to and get complete value because most of the newsletters we see out there are abstract. Click click on this. You have to click here for more. And I was like, no, I don't want to do that. So Anne Gin is the editor and sole writer on The Tilt newsletter. Mark Maxheimer assists with the case studies that are in there on our Content Entrepreneur Spotlights. And that's it. Anne has a wonderful database. She gets so many email newsletters and so many notices in her email inbox, and she keeps it all fresh and what we should be covering. So basically, people don't know. There's one educational article to start. It's always original that starts The Tilt, and then it goes into the news that you should know. So we'll cover news and then our take on it. Like what's our tilt take? You should feel this about it, or you should don't build your house on rented land or whatever. We'll go through it. And so we've been doing that for two and a half years now, and Anne has been doing a great job. And Anne is the editor of that because she has expertise in this industry. I've worked with Anne for 20 years. She knows this industry better than anyone else does, right up there, and I want to have her fingerprint on this as well. Now, that's not to say that somebody that's just throwing I don't know how if you get contributions from other people, that's fine, and we do all the time, but they have to be vetted. And it's a very difficult model because 90% of the stuff you get contributed is terrible. It's like, you're right. It's just somebody threw this together or they pulled it off their website or they chat GPT it or whatever they did, and you just get somebody that wants the link in the bio in. The newsletter, or it's a sales letter, and you're like, this isn't even. This. Is not a sales. It's like, yeah. Or they didn't even know who our audience was, or, Why are you wasting time? Or whatever. I mean, when we launched Content Marketing Insitute, this is back in 2007, we started it as a contributed blog. So I would write an article, anne might write an article, a couple of other people, but we would have people from the community write. And that's the way it was for five, six, seven years until we were inundated with crap. And then now, if you look at Content Marketing Institute, even though I'm not involved in the blog anymore, you will see that it's almost all done from staff. So it's not to say that it can't work, but it may be more work than just finding an expert or being the expert in it and writing it instead of going on, oh, I'm just going to get content from everywhere else in the community. It's like, okay, we'll add five more hours of time on to go through and make sure it's good. Yeah, unless there's that trust there. I guess part of the reason I'm asking, like, ten years ago, I used to run a newsletter that had a lot of readers, and we would feature three contributors a day. And this was well before AI writing tools were a thing. And even then it was like the quality was so hard to maintain that level of standard. And even if you give directions on this many words, they'll be too short, too long, not the right direction. And then with text based things, I'm just so, like, how does that work in 2023? 2024, by the way, and just thinking about that question. So let's go to 25. Yeah, maybe there's a case for that. Maybe there's a case for AI doing that. But I'm under the assumption if everyone that's the great thing. And the horrible thing about it is everyone has access to this tool, so everything can be duplicated. And I mean, we've already seen the cases of I saw this in the sports industry where there were headlines, like local sports headlines that were duplicated from all over the country because an AI tool was used, and they tended to use the same type of words in certain situations. And you're like, oh, my God. And you see it and you're like, of course. Well, there's some days, well, that won't happen. But I don't know how is that going to change? Will there be a point where you train an AI bot to be the best version of the expert editor for your industry? Probably. There probably will be. I'm under the assumption that as fast as it's moving, we are going to be blown away. I'm already blown away by the video stuff and the deep fake stuff, it's getting nuts. If you look at the improvements in mid journey just from 2022 to now, and you look at the visualization, I'm like, oh my God, the last image that I see already looks human. Okay, I'm going to close up shot and I'm going to take a nap now. Right? And that's what I wanted because I guess the human innovation of we're always looking how to survive, really, survival is such a crucial thing. And in content, like surviving in content, the access to information, it's like, okay, we all have this equal access. But there's something that can't be faked is like time in the like, you've been doing it for years. No one can just pop up in that expertise. And the time you've been doing it, there's a lot of gifts that come from it, and it feels like there's not a lot of applied knowledge with people that are just getting output. It's like if you just Googled something versus you've actually lived it and, you know, alternative pitfalls and a full picture of it and sometimes it's reducing its thing down to the essence also not something giving you back like 800 options and then you have to figure out which one to choose. Versus you saying at the beginning of this episode, pick a platform and go there. Versus spread yourself thin. It might be, but I'm thinking of wisdom when you're talking about, yeah, I've been around. I mean, I'm 50 years old now. I've been in the industry for 25 years. But when you were talking what I was thinking about as my differentiator is relationships. Because if you're thinking about, okay, let's get back to people want to talk about the content entrepreneur business model, the Tilt is great. Creator Economy Expo is great. Can somebody else do it? Yes, absolutely. But what made those things happen was my relationships with other people to help me get that off the ground and to financially support it. Now, there's no AI tool for that as far as I can tell right now. That's going to call up so and so that has a marketing budget that will help just I don't know how much you know about it, but the Tilt and CEX were just sold to Lulu. So it's my third exit of a content business and very happy with that relationship. And I'm going to stick around and help Lulu really make this a success. But that can't be duplicated. That relationships with Matt and Kathy and the team at Lulu that happened through things that I was doing as a human being. So I think that's where I keep pushing the in person event. I keep pushing the send thank you notes. Send real thank you notes in print. If you're trying to get on the good side of somebody, send them things that are going to help them so they think of you. And when you need something. But those types of things, that's what can't be duplicated and that's what we need to lean in on. So again, yeah, I've made a lot of mistakes, so I know, oh, I don't want to do those things again. And maybe somebody might not know that, but I'm under the assumption that that knowledge will be put into a computer and somebody can warn. Like the chatbot version of me will be able to warn for that. But the chat bot version of me can't call up or go visit or talk to somebody in the industry that's going to take your business forward. I've noticed there's this kind of like, pulse of content and marketing in general. It feels, as a generalization, like, less personal scaling, something that's not a one to one. It's like one to many. And what I'm hearing you say is how much of it is just relationships? And how you said at one point, speaking to people, whether not everyone has to be a Mr. Beast. If you have an audience of five, cool. And just focusing on those five and focusing on those relationships that you're building one by one, well, that's a great. I mean, that's just Business 101 for anybody listening. Let's say you have 1000 email subscribers. Like, you got a really good start. You probably don't have enough to get a sponsor, but you're like, how do I financially support this thing? I'm under the assumption within those 1000, you have 25 to 50 superfans, and those superfans will be willing to pay whatever they're willing to pay to get extra access to you or to be a part of a cohort or whatever. I've seen it done a million times. And then the creator, with only 1000 in their audience, whatever that audience is, is making $100,000 because they're offering something to a group of people that really need something, and they really need a lot of FaceTime or a little consulting or therapy or whatever it is. I just got back from Content Marketing World in DC. And I'm watching all the comments on LinkedIn and whatever, and over and over again I said I go to CMW because of the people, because of the it's all related. So when you go to an event first and you don't know anybody, you're going because, oh, the networking and I don't know any. I want to meet people, and the training and the sessions or the concert or whatever it is. But you go back the second year to meet the people that you met the first year, then you go back the third year and the fourth year, and it's all about the people. And that's why you got to focus on that core. It's so important. Events that have been around for 1020 years, they have a core of people that have gone to all these events. It's really important. So anybody can do that. So that would be my recommendation based on what you're saying is that find out who those superfans are in your audience base and create something for them. If you want it revenue generating, that's great. That'll help you and your family. But if you just want to get them together on a regular basis for something. Monthly calls Matt Hines created during COVID there was know chief marketing officers didn't know how they were going to get together anymore and what's going to happen. And as all this change is happening, he created Coffee for CMOS as like an invite only thing. He gets like 500 of the most influential CMOS on a call every Friday. And these people really needed to talk with other people even though that they're the richest and most influential marketers on the planet. Just saw the opportunity that was in his community. Hey, let's do this. And now it's become a thing and it's like going crazy. It's amazing how successful that's been. Everyone listening to this has that opportunity with your audience. It's just somehow we think we've got to have a bigger audience, we've got to have more, we got to be on more channels. No, you don't. Sometimes it's the simplest thing is maybe these five people just need to talk with each other and you're going to facilitate that and then that starts everything going. It's such a great note to wrap up on. I'm like, I don't want to say anything else other than what are you excited about that you would like to share with people to send them to? Well, I mean, you were very nice. The tilt. And CEX is May 5 through 7th in Cleveland. We're looking to get 500 content entrepreneurs there. Very excited to be our third year this year. So we're really getting to a point where I'm feeling excited about the event. A lot of great people there. The thing that I'm working on that's new with Lulu is called Tilt Publishing. It's in beta right now. We're going to launch it in the first quarter. It's basically a book publishing imprint specifically for content entrepreneurs. So the whole idea is how do we get content entrepreneurs who want to make more money but also want to control their own data, own their data and sell directly? So we're creating a whole thing, maybe a little marketing if you need it. So we'll take your final manuscript, we'll edit it, we'll design it, we'll lay it out, we'll get you set up for success and directly selling it. And I'm the whole like, don't build your house on rented land. So this really resonates with me because I see so many authors out there that just say, oh, I'm just going to publish on Amazon. They can have all my data. And there's nothing wrong with Amazon, but don't send your current customers to Amazon. You want your current customers to buy directly from you. So that's what we're trying to get. It's like a paradigm shift with a lot of people say you don't have to sell all your books and products on other properties you can sell directly. There's a better way to do it. Keep your relationships with your customers. So that's the thing I'm excited about now. And if there's anyone who should listen to you about that, anyone who hasn't published a book and is interested in doing that is listen to someone who's published a book. Not some chat GBT output that's know, sure, just publish it on Amazon or something. It's just like, take advice from someone. It successfully over and over again. Thank you so much for joining me today, Joe. It's been an honor and a pleasure. Dylan. This is great, and I'm looking forward to the next time.