Joe Pulizzi - Content Inc.

Content creators are the rock star entrepreneurs of the twenty-first century, and Content Inc. delivers your winning business model.

BRIAN CLARK, Founder of Copyblogger and Unemployable

From the man who invented content marketing. Listen to this guy. He really understands the new world of marketing.

DON SCHULTZ (19342020), the father of integrated marketing, professor at Northwestern Universitys Medill School of Journalism, and author of 13 books

If youre serious about turning content into a business, this is the most detailed, honest, and useful book ever written.

JAY BAER, New York Times bestselling author of Youtility

What if you launched a business with nothing to sell, and instead focused first on serving the needs of an audience, trusting that the selling part would come later? Crazy? Or crazy-brilliant? Id say the latter. Because in todays world, you should serve before selling.

ANN HANDLEY, Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Everybody Writes

Now there is a better way to promote your business.

GUY KAWASAKI, chief evangelist of Canva and author of The Art of the Start 2.0

Use this as your road map to startup success.

SALLY HOGSHEAD, New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of How the World Sees You

The approach to business taught all over the world is to create a product and then spend a bunch of money to market and sell it. Joe outlines a radically new way to succeed in business: Develop your audience first by creating content that draws people in and then watch your business sell itself.

DAVID MEERMAN SCOTT, New York Times bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing and PR

Anyone, anywhere, with a passion and focus on a content niche can build a multimillion-dollar platform and business. I did it and so can you. Just follow Joes Content Inc. model.

JOHN LEE DUMAS, founder, Entrepreneurs On Fire

Copyright 2021 by Joe Pulizzi. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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For Cora

Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world: unreasonable people persist in trying to adapt the world to themselves. Therefore all progress depends on unreasonable people.

ADAPTED FROM GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

T he model described in this book saved my life.

Heres the synopsis:

I left a six-figure executive media position in 2007 to start a business. Wife. Two kids, ages four and six. Not much money in the bank.

Grappling through more mistakes than I care to mention (and almost quitting in 2009), my wife and I hit our first million dollars in sales in 2011. By 2015, we just missed $10 million in sales.

That same year, I wrote the first edition of this book, Content Inc., which detailed the exact business model we used to go from zero to millions in less than five years. More than 100,000 copies were sold in print, digital, and audio.

Heres the rest of the story.

In June 2016, we sold our company, the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), for a little less than $30 million to a billion-dollar, London-based events company.

I stayed on for a bit, left at the end of 2017, and took a sabbatical for the entire calendar year of 2018. I flew to Sicily with my father, spent more time with my wife and two boys than ever before, ran a couple half marathons, and barely looked at social media. It was, perhaps, the most perfect year of my life.

The next year I wrote a bestselling mystery novel.