80. Converting an Audience into a Community: Joe Pulizzi's Expert Tips

00:00:00
Last week's episode, I did a musing about what it is that we as expert entrepreneurs need to be focusing on building in order to scale, at least from a marketing perspective. And I realized that I have ruffled a few feathers, maybe because you'ren't here listening to this podcast to work out how to grow your podcast, right? And here I am telling you that the one audience you need to focus on is your email list and not your podcast list. Let me know. How do you feel about that?

00:00:32
I never actually asked you, and I'd really like to know. Email me or leave me a voice note or comment through the link in the show notes, because I do want to make it clear that it's not mutually exclusive. Growing your podcast and knowing that your end game is to build your email list, exactly what it is that I'm doing. And knowing this gives focus, that's exactly what I want to create YouTube and the even better thing. Your podcast is such rich content that it is the nucleus, the anger content, all your other channels, channels you need to be using that one thing, your email audience.

00:01:11
And so in this episode, I wanted to speak to someone who has built and sold three different businesses about how he did this, how he grew his email audience, why he grew that audience, and the different ways he's been able to monetize it to the point where he has and was able to successfully exit three of his businesses. Sound good? So if building value in your business is something that you're to do, so that at the end of the day you're truly building an asset, then this is the episode for you. My name is Deirdre Tshien, CEO and co founder of Capsho, the fastest way to repurpose and market your expert content. And this is the Growmap Podcast show.

00:01:51
Hi, I'm Joe Pulizzi. I am a serial entrepreneur, but I'm done with that life now. And I've been in the content creation content marketing industry for the last 20 plus years and eight books and just continue to try to be helpful wherever I can. I first met Joe at his event earlier this year called the Creative Economy Expert, or CEX for short. And I was blown away by the community he had created, a community centered on a very specific type of person trying to do a very specific thing.

00:02:24
And just last month, he announced that he has sold that business, the business that creates and runs the CEX events and a newsletter called The Tilt. But the thing is, it wasn't even his first business that he had sold. His previous business that was acquired back in 2017 was the Content Marketing Institute, which held the content marketing world events. And the one he had exited prior to that in 2012 was Social Tract, a social media and blogging service. So Joe knows a thing or two about creating value in his businesses.

00:02:54
Now how does he do it? How does he use marketing to create valuable businesses? I have a very defined model that I've been working on the past quite a few years. I call it the content inc model. I wrote a couple books about it, but basically it's okay.

00:03:12
What is my content tilt? What's my differentiation area where I can break through all the content clutter that's out there and actually get some? It's very, very difficult to do. It's actually the most difficult thing of anything else. We can create content all over the place, but do we have actually anything that people want to connect with on a regular basis that's differentiated in some way?

00:03:35
So it's really finding that so what is my expertise area? And at the same time, what are my audience's pain points? What keeps them up at night? And you sort of put all that together and figure out, okay, I have this differentiation. So for me in 2007, it was all about content marketing, which at the time wasn't really a phrase.

00:03:54
It was custom publishing and custom media. And there were all these companies that were starting to build little media companies inside themselves, but nobody was really covering. And I said this could be a thing, let's differentiate it by calling it something different and let's start to educate marketers on how they can create content and become now everybody calls it content marketers, but at the time wasn't a thing. So that's what I focused on. And then my hub to doing that would be, okay, I've got the differentiation area and I'm going to say, okay, well where am I going to try to build this audience?

00:04:27
For me, it was on the blog at that time, which was the best place to be from 2006 to 2010, let's say, and then an associated newsletter. So today that could be a YouTube channel, could be TikTok, could be a podcast, whatever the case is. And then you do the heavy lifting. You consistently deliver valuable content over a long period of time. Generally anywhere between 18 months and three years is when you get to what we call a minimum viable audience, enough that you can monetize.

00:04:58
And then once you do that, then you could really get into the community side. So I'm all about build the little media company first. Figure out what you're going to deliver on a regular basis, figure out what really is keeping your audience up at night and become the leading expert in that thing, no matter how niche it is. And you can't go too niche in my opinion. And then once you do that, then you can really say, okay, how am I going to monetize this thing?

00:05:23
How am I going to build community? So they're more loyal, so they become more valuable customers. And then if everything works out, that final step is I call it go seller go. You know, sell or go big, which is do you want to have an exit as an entrepreneur or do you want to create a mini enterprise out of this thing? So when we launched Content Market, what became Content Marketing Institute in 2007, I never wanted to create have 5100 employees, 150.

00:05:53
We got to about 28 that worked with us. And I said, okay, that's enough. We had planned an exit the whole time anyway, so it really worked out well. And then the same thing with my most recent exit with the tilt and Creator Economy Expo. The plan was always, I'm going to build this thing up, and when I get to a point that it makes sense to sell it, we'll go ahead and start that process.

00:06:15
Okay, so did you pick up on the nuggets? He dropped things like it takes between 18 months to three years to build a minimum viable audience, one that you can monetize and that gosh that's equal parts of relief to know that it does actually take that long, and equal parts disappointing to know that it really does take that long. Did you also have that thought, okay, so then once we start to monetize, then we think about building that community, build an audience monetize, then communatize. That is how you build value in your business to sell. To me that makes a ton of sense.

00:06:52
Okay, so you may be wondering what actually is a minimum viable audience, which is really the first part of this process. I would love to tell you that it is a number because that would be great. And actually okay, I will give you a number actually if you're in business to business side. So you're targeting business people of some kind. I always feel that if you have an eNEWSLETTER of 10,000, that is enough that you can really start to scale a business.

00:07:22
So basically it's going beyond just a hobby into something that you can actually monetize and grow a long term sustainable business from it. If you're on the consumer side, that's going to be a much higher number because your audience members aren't as valuable from a monetary standpoint as a business customer. It is a really good example because I've just done both of these things because if you slow content Marketing Institute Targeted Enterprise Marketers so having an audience of 10,000, we grew that audience to about 200,000 email subscribers. So we scaled that over five or six years pretty quickly. But I could sell six figure deals to people that wanted to reach a smaller portion of our audience because they would end up buying 50,000, 100,000, $200,000 in product from our sponsors.

00:08:12
So it worked really, really well. Vice versa. If you look at the tilt, you could say it was business to business, but we were targeting an individual content entrepreneur and the buying power of an individual content entrepreneur. Basically, like a lot of the people listening to this podcast. We don't have a lot of money.

00:08:30
We don't have thousands of dollars that we can throw on software or email or a new studio or anything. We've got to be a little bit smarter. We've got to cut our expenses down so that we can actually make profit. At some point, their buying power is different. So I would need many more audience members to make that go.

00:08:49
Now, you can make the case today that with a lot of the content creators out there that have membership groups that maybe or cohorts that people are spending three or five or $10,000 a year on, that, you can absolutely make it with a small group of people. Hard to scale that, hard to sell that. So it really depends on what your goal. If you're happy and you've got 50 people that are spending $3,000 a year with you and you're making a great living, wonderful. Congratulations.

00:09:20
That's awesome. I always look for I wanted to try to make money while I slept. I didn't want to spend so much time during the day with individual. There's a lot of people who are much better at that than I am, individual teaching. So I was like, well, how do we scale?

00:09:35
So that's where we created Creator Economy Expo, our event, where you could get that to a point where it would be an asset for another company to buy. So I'm not even answering your question, but minimum viable audience is a feeling where you can get to scaling, where you can really start to get to the point where, all right, I have the product, I have the audience, I'm feeling really good about it, and I have a real good start. So you're past testing and you're ready to go. So with Content Marketing Institute, that was about 10,000 email subscribers that I went to. I talked to a number of other people in that B to B media side, and 10,000 seems to be a really good number.

00:10:19
I've talked to a few people on the YouTube side. 50,000 subscribers is sort of a really good number on the consumer side. But honestly, depending on what you're selling, you could throw it all out the window. You feel like you've hit the nail on the head with your content tilt and your audience, you might have a minimum viable audience ready to go where you can take the next steps. I really hope you're listening closely to Joe as he talks because this stuff, this is literally all you need to scale your business for an exit.

00:10:48
I'm a big fan of keeping things simple and having focus. And having been through my own entrepreneurship journey, I 100% stand behind this being the focus from a business and marketing perspective. Now, where Joe and I went, this conversation was really breaking this down into its component parts and start to dive into that. So we're going to take a really quick break and when we're back, we're going to go into how we build our audience monetize and then Communitize, you might be able to tell that scaling a business has been on my mind lately. In fact, the last couple of episodes was me starting to think through this and articulate my thoughts and specific strategies that I am so excited to be sharing with everyone coming to our first ever event, Capshovians Live.

00:11:30
And so I was stoked to have Joe Pulizzi, who has done this himself three times, share the very simple strategy of what he focused on to scale a business and build an asset that he could sell. The first part of that building an audience. And what I wanted to know from him is where it is that we should be focusing on building an audience and why. So when you're a content entrepreneur and you're looking to build this thing from a content business, you ultimately want to build an asset. And if you're going to build an asset, you need the data.

00:12:04
So you need customer data, audience data, and you also need the control over distribution. So let's just put that out there right now. If you believe that's a content asset, data and control over distribution, that's a big deal. So if you're starting out as a content creator, there's a couple of different ways to do it. If you started out as an email newsletter, it's great because you have the data from your customers, you're getting opt in permission to communicate with them, and you have their email.

00:12:31
And you also can, as long as they don't unsubscribe from you, you have control over distribution. You can send the email whenever you're ready. And if you don't like your email provider, you could switch email providers and port that over. You have that control. That's great.

00:12:46
The problem is your audience is not there. You have to build that and do a lot of work to build that email list into a real asset. So that's why the majority of content creators start with, where's my audience at? Are they on YouTube? Are they on TikTok?

00:13:02
Are they listening to, in some cases listening to podcasts that might be a better place to start. They already have the player, they have a phone, they have an app that they like to use. So they're already there. And then you just have to do all the things involved in content creation and discovery to get found and now you're ready to go. So if somebody says, I want to start a YouTube channel, YouTube series or a video series on something, the control way to do it, the asset way to do it, would be go launch it on your website.

00:13:31
The problem is nobody's there. So you actually have to start with, where are my people going to be? I'm going to go on YouTube, I'm going to go on TikTok, I'm going to do Instagram, whatever. If that's the case, which is great. You start your thing on somebody else's land.

00:13:45
Basically if you start on YouTube, Google has all the control, they have all the data, they can kick you off the platform at any time. And that's why it's called rented land. You are leasing, you are renting. You have to play by their rules. You could make all the wonderful changes you can to your YouTube channel and it's amazing, you got it just the way you want to and just when you do, they're going to kick you out and find somebody just so that's why we call it renting land.

00:14:09
I want people to think of you're actually renting an apartment and you could do all those wonderful changes, but at the end of the day it's not yours. And any changes you make are probably going to help YouTube or TikTok or Instagram and they're not going to help you necessarily. So what do we do if we build on rented land? We've got to figure out a way to deport that over to create a different asset. So at the end of the day, you're protected.

00:14:35
The best way to do that and the best way for the last 20 years has been through some kind of email newsletter offering and you see the best of the best and you see like Mr. Beast, maybe the most popular YouTuber out there. He's done that with contests, get them over to his website. He's collected millions and millions of people's names starting with rented land on YouTube. But now if YouTube kicked him off the platform, he would be okay because he spent a long time building a database with all sorts of products and offerings and whatnot.

00:15:08
So if you're just a not Jimmy Donaldson person, if you're not a Mr. Beast, what do you do? Well, what you end up doing is create an offering that you could say, hey, my best fans, you can get this over on the website or this on the email newsletter or create some special offer or maybe that's a paid offering or whatever it is. So with our three exits, my first exit was a blogging service that we ended up selling in 2010. 2nd exit was Content Marketing Institute in 2016.

00:15:38
And my most recent exit was the Tilt and Creator Economy Expo in 23. The reason why we were able to sell and had some value is because we had a customer audience database that somebody could look at and go, hey yeah, I mean look at really a good example is New York Times. Is New York Times worth X number of billions of dollars? Because they have lots of content that they've created. No, I mean they've got content all over the place.

00:16:10
Is the content of value? No. What's of value? It's the content that's actually creating an audience member. It is the database, it is their asset of customer information.

00:16:21
That is the reason why the New York Times can do all the things that they're doing. So if you're a content entrepreneur out there, you've got to remember that you can build your audience on any platform that is not yours, not your website, not your email newsletter. But at the end of the day, you've got to remember that you build on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, the Clubhouse Discord, whatever. You play by their rules and you could get kicked off at any time. So we have to be smart about it and create something of value.

00:16:55
And my favorite way to do that is through a regular, consistent, valuable email newsletter. And so far it's worked really well for the last 20 years. And right now, as far as I can tell, email is still being used and still an important part of most people's lives. Even social media chat. I love when I talk to I call them the kids.

00:17:14
I talk to the younger folks out there and they say, people don't use email anymore. I'm like, well, you don't necessarily use email because you're 20, you're not out of college yet, or whatever the case is. But if you look at all the social media platforms, what's their primary keys for database people? What is the thing that holds their database together? You had to give them an email address at some point.

00:17:37
Now, will that stay the same in the next six months, a year? I think so. Right now it's one of the best things we have. I was very bullish on Web three for a long time, but until we get any kind of clarification from government bodies about how that's going to work, I'm sort of staying back and seeing. And when we get clarification, then I think that email and then some kind of web Three blockchain component in the future might be another way that we can control the data, control the distribution, and not be always at the whim of what these other big tech companies are doing.

00:18:13
I'm sure we don't need any more convincing that email is the audience we need to be building. Right? And if you missed my own views on that in last week's episode, then you definitely have to go and press play on that episode straight after this one. Now, if you don't know, Joe has quite a large following on LinkedIn, and so I had to ask him about what the impact was on the value of his business, the impact of his email list versus his social media audience. Was this taken into consideration when his business was being valued and he had something really interesting to say about that.

00:18:46
So if you want to get the goods on this and grab the bonus clip in the show notes, because I wanted to get straight into the second part of the scale strategy. Monetization. Does Joe have a view on what it is that content creators need to. Be monetized yes, and I'll explain what that means when you're trying to develop an audience. You want one home base.

00:19:11
You don't want to diversify right away. You want to do what media companies have been doing for a couple of hundred years. They basically create one thing that's really, really good. They can promote it lots of different ways, but create one thing as your center of gravity for your audience and then you diversify out later. Once you build that minimum viable audience.

00:19:31
It's the opposite with monetization. You want as many different ways to monetize as possible to see what actually works. And there's ten plus different ways to do it's. Like I can do it through sponsorship or advertising. I can create multiple types of in person or online events.

00:19:45
I can do it through affiliate marketing, I can take donations, I can do premium products, I can do courses and classes, I can sell products, I can do consulting. So great, you can do all those things. If you're asking specifically for our audience of content entrepreneurs, the number one way that our audience makes money is through consulting some kind of in person ongoing advisement and teaching. 51% and that is actually you see that as a transitional way to go from corporate world to independent content creator is in a lot of cases they're keeping business with their old employer or old context that they have to say, hey, can you help me? On an ongoing basis, I need freelance help, whatever that is you're doing.

00:20:31
Consulting freelancing to help you as part of your transition. Long term, again, you probably don't want to do that, but short term I remember when I left corporate world in 2007, the only way that I could feed the kids, keep the lights on, were multiple consulting gigs. Even though that's not what I had envisioned long term. I wanted to build this media company, this events company. I had multiple product ideas in mind, but in the meantime, consulting second is books.

00:21:03
And there's a caveat with that because that's changing. If you would have said, hey, my only option is to just go with Amazon, you might, or other big players like that. You don't necessarily make a lot of money off books. You create a book in order to create other opportunities. Let's say public speaking or interviews out of podcast or whatever the case is.

00:21:22
That's why you've historically created a book. But there's other opportunities now. Obviously we were just purchased by a self publishing company and I'm learning all the ways where I can sell direct, I can make more money and keep the data that I didn't have before. And so books are rising to the top. When I say books, I could mean print books, ebooks, audiobooks, smaller books.

00:21:46
You could do the whole thing. You could do a little bit of it. You could do a lot of different ways that you can create premium offers through that. So that's the second way. And then you've got things like, I want to do courses and training is right up there.

00:21:58
Affiliate marketing is huge with some models that are out there. I remember when Brian Clark started copy blogger back in the day. His number one way that he was generating revenue was through affiliate marketing. I know john Lee Dumas at Entrepreneur on Fire is really big into affiliate marketing. So those types of things now, that all said, my favorite is in person events.

00:22:20
Because more than anything else, because it's a differentiator there is some risk to it because you have to actually rent a venue and you have lots of costs associated with it. You don't get the people to the event. You don't get the sponsors to the event. You might not offset the cost, but there's a huge upside. So if you're into huge upside when we launched Content Marketing Institute, 2007 started to get some traction.

00:22:45
In 2011, we launched the first content marketing world. We were just hoping for 100 or 150 people to come to Cleveland, Ohio for a marketing event. We ended up getting 600. That event the first year almost hit a million dollars in revenue. And by the time we sold in 2016, that event was doing five $6 million a year and throwing 50% to the bottom line.

00:23:07
That's why companies will spend millions of dollars for those types of entities. We were able to do that because there were a thousand other blogs and a thousand other podcasts on that same topic, but there were only a couple of events available because creators aren't willing to take that next step. That's why I love that opportunity with in person events. And then maybe the lowest hanging fruit of all is sponsorship and advertising. And we were talking a lot about numbers, about like, how many do I need to sell advertising?

00:23:40
You don't need anything to sell advertising. What you need is you need to go talk to a partner that believes in what you're doing and say, I'm trying to do this to this audience, educate this audience in this way, or whatever you're doing, whatever your passion is, whatever your content tilt is, and go ahead and sell it. Because when we launched Content Marketing Institute, we had no audience. I had no track record or no credibility. But I did know some people in the industry, and I went out to them and I said, here's what we're trying to do.

00:24:05
We're trying to create the leading educational organization around the practice of content marketing, and I need support to get that done. And I believe this is going to be successful. And if it is, you will be coming along for the ride. And so that's why I sold some of those companies up front into the benefactors, and we're able to convince them without any audience at all. So that's a great way for you to start.

00:24:28
And that's when you learn that the number one skill for a content creator is sales. You are all in sales. You have to learn how to sell. Every opportunity for you to talk to somebody is a sales opportunity because that person probably knows somebody that is willing to support you in some way. So that would be my recommend.

00:24:47
Do all the things, test them all out. Your lowest hanging fruit is probably sponsorship, advertising, and then as you get down the road, you can figure out what's the real thing that's going to be the driver behind your business. I always say that too. And it's definitely been my own experience that being an entrepreneur actually means being a marketer and salesperson. I'm glad I'm not alone in experiencing this too.

00:25:11
Okay, so we've spoken about building an audience, we've spoken about Monetizing, and now it only makes sense to talk about his third component, community. How did Joe build his community? There's no one way to build a community. It really depends on where you see the opportunities for your own business. So there's free opportunities.

00:25:29
When we started Content Marketing Institute, one of the ways we built community was to have the audience members create content for us. So we would reach out to them on a regular basis and say, would you write an article, be part of this, be part of the comments. We would support you in social and do all those things. And they would start to get more involved because of that. And we knew early on was the more we can get our audience involved in what we're doing, the more that likely that they will ultimately pay for things going forward.

00:25:59
And then you solidify that through some type of in person event. And by the way, that could be I know a lot of people listening to this. You have global audiences. You could absolutely do something through Zoom or teams, and I have no problem with that. But there's nothing as strong as an in person connection.

00:26:19
I absolutely believe that if you can get people in person so that's why you see a lot of these masterminds that get together. And they get together most of the time every month through some kind of maybe small paid to start with activity. But the thing that keeps them together is they get together annually for that in person thing. So for us and Creator Economy Expo, as you mentioned, we created what was called a never ending ticket and somebody could spend and it was a moving price tag because it was based on ethereum, but it ended up being about 1500 or $2,000 for a lifetime ticket. And we have 75 people in this group right now and it was fine.

00:27:03
And we got together regularly and we still do online. But what really makes it is when they get together for the annual event, they're all friends. There's a lot of these people that are working with each other. This is a group of people. That I become friends with that if I stop doing whatever I'm doing, they will continue to go on.

00:27:21
These are forever contacts. People that are just trying to help each other. They're all content creators. It's really wonderful to see. It's a great community.

00:27:29
So from that standpoint, if I have a learning from it is yes of all. So if we had an audience at that time, let's say of 15,000 email subscribers right now we've got about 30,000 email subscribers than when we started. So let's say 10,000, 5000. That's a great I don't know if you call that a community, it's an audience. Okay, we start there.

00:27:48
We know that there's some people that would want to spend more to get more education, more networking, more opportunities. So we created this small higher priced opportunity and that did really well. Great. And then they are now our VIPs at the event. We have a VIP networking spot for them.

00:28:07
They get to go to the speaker get together. So they love that and doing all that and lots of other goodies and knickknacks that we send to them. Wonderful. It's a great little thing. And then we get together every two months now ongoing.

00:28:20
And then we'll get together again for Creator Economy Expo in person in May. So I would absolutely say if you can do some kind of a small in person as part of a larger event that works really well. Or get them. Mark Schaefer does a really good job getting his crew together. Small group, very educational, high networking.

00:28:38
He does that every once a year in Nashville. It's a lot of other examples that do that. Can it be free? Sure, you can start free, get them involved in whatever way. But I think you have what I was surprised at and discounted because I'd never done that model until recently.

00:28:56
I'm like, will people really spend that much money? And what you find out is yes, they absolutely will. It's not going to be 1000 people, but it probably will be 100 people. And those are the people that also want you to succeed. So it's really great.

00:29:10
And then you can let them in and they will tell you the next product that you should launch. They will be the first ones to try out your new things. So we're launching right now a product called Tilt Publishing which is an book imprint for content creators. We're very excited about it and the first people that want to try it are our people in our CEX VIP group, which is really nice to have that support. And also it's great to know that when I launch Creator Economy Expo and I keep doing it, we keep doing it with the team every year we're going to have 50 to 75 people already in attendance because they're absolutely going to come.

00:29:47
And it's great for sponsors because I already know, oh I already know these people are coming. I haven't even opened up registration. I know these people are coming, so it's really good. And so there's lots of amazing examples. If you don't have the money, you can start off online, make the content really good.

00:30:04
Jay Klaus has really perfected this because he actually gets together individually and talks individually with each of his people in his membership group. Again, great for him. I don't want to spend the time to do that. I want to do it all at once, if possible. So I'm trying to say, okay, how can I do every other month, create something of value, get everyone together, make sure they're communicating, and then move it into, let's get people together in person because that's when the partnerships really happen.

00:30:34
So many good ideas right here. And at the end of the day, what I get from Joe is that there is one way to do this. Building a community is really going to come down to what the experience is that you want to be providing and involved in. So it's only been a few weeks since Joe has sold his business. Where to from here for him.

00:30:53
So the great thing about what just happened with my last exit of the Tilt Ed Creator Economy Expo is I just get to focus on the things that I enjoy doing. So I will continue to be the host and program manage Creator Economy Expo. I love getting on stage. I love putting people together. I love throwing.

00:31:11
So this basically it's just an annual party. We'll keep doing that, and I'm excited to be part of that. I will continue with this old marketing podcast with Robert Rose, which is every Friday, and I will continue with my Content Inc. Podcast, which is every Monday, and keep doing those things. I enjoy doing them.

00:31:26
I have my own newsletter@Joepoliti.com, which is getting a little bit of a makeover, but I've been doing that one for quite a few years right now. And I'm working on a couple final nonfiction book doing. We have a book called The Content Entrepreneur that'll be coming out with our VIP group. Another we talked about groups before, so we'll get that one published out through. And then the big project I'm working on with Lulu and the Tilt as they've come together as one entity is Tilt Publishing will be an imprint for content creators.

00:31:59
And you might think that's a little bit old school because we're like, oh, are we talking about books here? And printing and whatever. But what I have found is that content creators are really good at creating content toward all these platforms. And then you say, Go ahead and publish a book, and they are deer in the headlights. How do I find the right editor?

00:32:18
What's the process? How do I get to all the distribution platforms? How can I find the distribution platforms that will make me the most money? How can I find the platforms that will help my overall business model so I can get the data, how can I look at different marketing aspects and get that out into audiences that make sense for me? Most content entrepreneurs aren't great at that.

00:32:39
I've been through this process many times and I've talked to a lot, especially recently, a lot of content creators. And like, thank goodness there's somebody that can help guide me so I don't have to do this myself or don't have to go through an antiquated process. It's hard for me to say that because I've been a McGraw Hill author for a long time, but the process has definitely changed. So what's happened is, the good news is more of the control is on the creator, is on the author. But what we don't want to do is give all of our revenue and all of our profit and all of our data to somebody like Amazon.

00:33:16
They have enough. Let's focus on how we can sell Direct to our biggest fans who want to give us the money, and we can keep that data and grow our businesses. So we're working on that. We've got three beta authors signed up in the last couple of weeks. I'm excited about that.

00:33:31
We're looking to get a couple more in by the end of the year. And then in January, we're going to launch the whole thing as a real thing, tilt Publishing and put it we'll have a couple different packages. Like, one is, okay, here's a minimal hands on, and here's more of a hands on to help them get their book published. And I guess the new movement around this, I'm not an Amazon hater, but I am pro content creator and pro content entrepreneur. And I've seen a model I don't like, and the model is, let's just not give everything to another company.

00:34:05
Let's take a little bit more control over our creation process and over the data and over the content and figure out a way that it'll make sense for our business. And that's why I'm sort of the next couple of years, I'm really going to be dabbling into this area of book publishing for entrepreneurs. So it's on to the next thing then. And you know what else is next here. This is pretty exciting for us.

00:34:29
Capshovians I have the immense pleasure of announcing that Joe actually be one of the speakers at Cabsovian's Live, happening January 23 and 24th, 2024 in Orlando. How cool is that? If you are an expert entrepreneur who is looking to kick 2020 off with focus and these strategy to scale, then you must attend Captovians Live. Not only will you be able to get access to Joe's brain and strategy, but also to a dozen other expert brains who will give you the keys to scaling your marketing and growth. And bonus, you get to hang out with us too.

00:35:02
I have some pretty cool and secret things planned, so you definitely don't want to miss out, head over to www.capshovianslife.com and grab your ticket now. And if you want to connect with. Joe, creator Economy Expo is May 5 to 7th. That's our wonderful in person event where you can talk to 500 content entrepreneurs dealing with all the same stuff that you're dealing with. And we're really about growth.

00:35:26
Growth in audience and growth in monetization. We've got a little bit of an AI theme going on for go figure for CEX 24. So May 5 to 7th in Cleveland, and you can find that at CEX events. We open registration in October. And then for me personally, I'm at Joe Pulizzi.

00:35:44
P-U-L-I-Z-Z-I on all the platforms. And joepulizzi.com is where you can get my newsletter. So we will leave those links in the show notes. And don't forget to grab that bonus clip, too. This is Deidre Tshien.

00:35:56
Stay awesome.