<ul><li>Shift your mindset away from being an advertiser to building a media company delivering consistent, high-value content. </li><li>Your content platform and distribution channels become assets as powerful as products. </li><li>Rather than constantly pitching sales, provide ongoing education and value to build more durable mindshare. </li><li>Quality content that solves problems earns audience trust.</li></ul>

Becoming a Media Company, Not Just an Advertiser

Determine a specific target market vertical and buyer persona to create niche content tailored precisely to their preferences versus scattered content on various topics. Conduct research to deeply understand your core target customers' informational needs, problems, and interests. Customize content accordingly.

Identifying Your Target Market Vertical and Buyer Persona

<ul><li>Clearly define your central content mission – the informational needs, problems, and interests of your target audience that your content aims to address. </li><li>Let this mission guide ongoing creation of content formats, editorial themes, and messaging. </li><li>All content should tie back to serving the audience.</li></ul>

Developing a Content Mission Tied to Audience Needs

Create a diverse mix of content formats including blogs, podcasts, video, research reports, white papers, webinars, infographics, newsletters. Variety retains audience interest while also allowing you to build a more robust content platform. Expand reach.

Crafting a Diverse Mix of Content Formats

Map out the conversion pathways you want readers to follow from each content format to desired outcomes like sales, email subscribers, event sign-ups. Optimize these pathways through clear calls-to-action and seamless user experience across touchpoints.

Optimizing Conversion Pathways to Desired Outcomes

<ul><li>Monetize content through selected, unobtrusive avenues like sponsorships, premium memberships, virtual/live events and carefully vetted affiliate links. </li><li>Avoid over-commercialization that erodes audience trust. </li><li>Focus on serving audience needs through content.</li></ul>

Monetizing Content Strategically to Deliver Value 

Content marketing creates an emotional connection between your company and your customers.

Recognize success requires a major long-term commitment to consistently producing high-quality, value-adding content. Budget significant focus, time and resources accordingly. Maintain consistency without burning out. Take the marathon mindset.

Sustaining Consistency Over the Long-Term

<ul><li>Rigorously analyze performance metrics on how each content piece performs, including traffic, engagement, conversions. </li><li>Double down on what succeeds. </li><li>Improve or eliminate underperforming pieces. </li><li>Continuously refine content based on data.</li></ul>

Analyzing Performance Data to Refine Content

 In Content Inc., Joe Pulizzi makes the case for entrepreneurs to build media platforms and valuable content that attracts their ideal audience rather than pitching products alone. He provides strategies for using content to build a loyal following.

The NEW Rulebook for Entrepreneurial Success What’s the surest way to startup failure? Follow old, outdated rules. In Content Inc., one of today’s most sought-after content-marketing strategists reveals a new model for entrepreneurial success. Simply put, it’s about developing valuable content, building an audience around that content, and then creating a product for that audience. Notice a shift? Author Joe Pulizzi flips the traditional entrepreneurial approach of first creating a product and then trying to find customers. It’s a brilliant reverse-engineering of a model that rarely succeeds. The radical six-step business-building process revealed in this book is smart, simple, practical, and cost-effective. And best of all, it works. It’s a strategy Pulizzi used to build his own successful company, Content Marketing Institute, which has landed on Inc. magazine’s list of fastest growing private companies for three years straight. It’s also a strategy countless other entrepreneurs use to build their own multi-million dollar companies. Build an audience and you’ll be able to sell pretty much anything you want. Today’s markets are more dynamic and customers are more fickle than ever before. Why would you put all your eggs in one basket before securing a loyal customer base? Content Inc. shows you how to get customers first and develop products later. It’s the best way to build a solid, long-lasting business positioned for today’s content-driven world. This is the simple but profoundly successful entrepreneurial approach of one of today’s most creative business minds. A pioneer of content marketing, Pulizzi has cracked to code when it comes to the power of content in a world where marketers still hold fast to traditional models that no longer work. In Content Inc., he breaks down the business-startup process into six steps, making it simple for you to visualize, launch, and monetize your own business. These steps are: • The “Sweet Spot”: Identify the intersection of your unique competency and your personal passion • Content Tilting: Determine how you can “tilt” your sweet spot to find a place where little or no competition exists • Building the Base: Establish your number-one channel for disseminating content (blog, podcast, YouTube, etc.) • Harvesting Audience: Use social-media and SEO to convert one-time visitors into long-term subscribers • Diversification: Grow your business by expanding into multiple delivery channels • Monetization: Now that your expertise is established, you can begin charging money for your products or services This model has worked wonders for Pulizzi and countless other examples detailed in the book. Connect these six pieces like a puzzle, and before you know it, you’ll be running your own profitable, scalable business. Pulizzi walks you step by step through the process, based on his own success (and failures) and real-world multi-million dollar examples from multiple industries and countries. Whether you’re seeking to start a brand-new business or drive innovation in an existing one, Content Inc. provides everything you need to reverse-engineer the traditional entrepreneurial model for better, more sustainable success. Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, professional speaker, and podcaster. He is the founder of several startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014. CMI produces Content Marketing World, the world’s largest content marketing event, and publishes the leading content marketing magazine, Chief Content Officer. Pulizzi’s book Epic Content Marketing was named one of Fortune magazine’s Five Must Read Business Books of the Year.