Today I would like to narrate an inspiring story of Joe Pulizzi, the content marketing evangelist, who rose to fame because of Content Marketing Institute and CMI World, the international conference on content marketing.
He narrates in his article "A Content Marketing Love Letter" published in Content Marketing Institute magazine in 2017. In this inspiring article, he narrates his date with destiny.
It was May 2010, when he was almost bankrupt and was failing in his dream business of content marketing which he started in 2007.
According to him, it was one of the worst days of his professional life. The business he had started a couple years back was coming to a disappointing end.
It was not that he was not making money, but he was losing more money and he started questioning his whether he would survive or even be able to pay bills for his family.
The downtrend was coming back. There was this day in 2010, when he was almost broken. In fact, one of his major clients, who were doing business with him for the past couple years and Joe had served him with all the passion, had discontinued the contract.
He said it was in spite of the fact that he was providing qualified leads for content agencies and was producing top-notch content for them.
Hence, when the end of the contract was confirmed on the phone, he felt like a destroyed person. He narrates that he walked out of his home office and started wandering into his yard in disappointment and dismay.
He was clueless as what will happen next. He says that it was a strange feeling and he was feeling sorry for himself. Failure is crushing and it sweeps you like the ocean waves. It can overtake you. It can even kill you if you do not have the extraordinary willpower and determination to rise up.
He says when he looks back at that incident, it seems silly now. Because in the first world, according to him, such disasters are not the end of the world. But the feeling he was experiencing at the time was almost like that.
He also started thinking of going back to a full time job even though it was not meant for him. He admits that he was working as an executive a couple years prior to the incident and he was so frustrated that he decided never do a job again.
But the failure was so traumatic that he was now considering going back to the corporate world. Then things started to normalize at least the way he started feeling after couple days of this incident. He promised to himself that he would never make any decision in an most emotional state. The rest was history.
That week, he received an email from one of his subscribers. The lady said that she absolutely loved his blog and she decided to start content marketing for her company and that too with Joe Pulizzi.
She was doing content marketing for a long time, but she referred to it as article marketing or digital marketing, etc. She was happy that the practice has a name at the moment. And she wanted to implement a content marketing strategy and process for this in her company.
She wanted to know if Joe Pulizzi could help. That was basically a consulting gig. And Pulizzi was quite ecstatic over it.
This led him to fetch other emails he had received from subscribers during all those years. The content marketing blog actually started way back in April 2007, and people were not very candid and vocal. at the time.
During this activity of digging into old emails, he found out what the audience was really interested, at least in terms of the services they wanted to buy.
He was trying to bring his failing business back on track and he had the answers right in front of him. The answers were in the form of what the crowd was actually looking for. Someone was looking for training in content marketing, whereas someone was looking for a conference on it.
As there were many people who wanted to meet people, who were going through the same challenges that they were facing. It was possible only in a conference like situation. There was a need for benchmark research in content marketing and what practices marketers were resorting to and the strategies that were succeeding.
Some people also were in a kind of introduction stage and they wanted someone to help them with content creation and distribution. And this led to the proverbial "lightbulb" being switched on in his mind.
Content Marketing Institute
Content Marketing Institute was born as a result of a decision, which Joe took instantly and wrote on a cocktail napkin lying near his desktop. He scribbled something like...In three years, we will run a leading online destination for content marketing, the leading content marketing magazine and the host largest content marketing event on the planet.
These lines became historical in just six months. In May 2010, Content Marketing Institute was created. The concept was tremendously successful. People started visiting the site in huge numbers. Pulizzi was surprised as to what was happening.
.........To be continued.
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