Foreword
By all reasonable accounts, I had just thrown my life away.
Up until this point, I had done it all the “right” way. Excelled my first year of law school and graded on to law review. Clerked for great firms my second and third years.
And yet I had just quit my big law firm job only four years after graduation. Even worse, I had done it so I could “write on the Internet.”
Try explaining that one to your mom.
Now, most unhappy attorneys are afflicted with the desire to write. But you don’t quit your job to do it. And when it came to the Internet in 1998, you had to write a business plan to succeed, not content.
After all, the firm I quit was the one that took Michael Dell from dorm room to billionaire. I had access to connections, but I didn’t seem to want them.
In hindsight, perhaps I was a little crazy. The writing life was for me, I thought, but I didn’t want to be a cog in the machine of Hollywood films or New York publishing.
Every evening after work for four tedious years, I had been staring at a computer screen, exploring the Internet. All those people, all over the world—there had to be a way to make a living from reaching them with my words.
What I was actually setting out to do was to start a business. And yet I had never taken a business class, never read a marketing book, never once thought of myself as an entrepreneur.
I wanted to build an audience and find a way to make a living from it. Fortunately, my cluelessness was an asset, because the Internet turned a lot of conventional wisdom on its head.
At the time, e-mail newsletters were the vehicles for content publishing, before blogs took over. I started out creating witty pop culture e-zines with the hope of selling advertising.
As far as attracting an audience goes, I succeeded. Tens of thousands signed up, and one of my titles got coverage from Entertainment Weekly, Sight and Sound Magazine, and my then hometown Austin Chronicle.
What I didn’t get, however, was revenue. Online advertising is a tough game today, but in 1998 for a newbie like me, it seemed impossible.
My problem, I came to realize, was that I didn’t have a product or service to sell. Then I realized that I did have something to sell, and trust me … I needed the money.
My law license was still active. So in 1999 I started yet another e-mail newsletter, this one focused on legal issues related to the Internet. I was hoping to pick up enough client work to survive while I figured out the other business model.
It took off. I was soon turning away clients, picking and choosing the best work, securing the best retainers. I was amazed … but more importantly, I was hooked.
Through the process of starting one company that failed, and one firm that didn’t, I discovered something important—I loved starting businesses. Rather than a traditional writer, I was an entrepreneur who could write, and that’s served me well.
That’s because content is what people want online, and marketing and advertising are what people easily avoid. I knew how to create the former, and that’s how I attracted and held the attention that led to revenue, profits, and success.
The practice of law was still no fun, so I set my sights on the lucrative real estate industry, which was clueless about the things I knew about online content and marketing. Between 2001 and 2005—despite being completely unknown and with little more than several content-rich websites—I started and ran two virtual real estate brokerages.
I was now making more money than if I had remained an attorney at that big, prestigious law firm. I was actually making more than many of the senior partners. More importantly, I was convinced that relevant content designed to build an audience of prospects was the way to succeed when starting a new business.
In 2005, I decided I wanted more. I had no passion for real estate—I just had to prove to myself that I could succeed outside of law. With that out of the way, I truly believed that my journey as an entrepreneur had just begun.
In December 2005, I registered the domain name copyblogger.com. The idea was to teach people the unique intersection of content and copywriting skills I had used to start three successful service businesses. On January 9, 2006, the site launched.
What Copyblogger was (and is) about is called content marketing. I figured the terminology part out thanks to a guy named Joe Pulizzi, the author of the book you now hold in your hands. More on him in just a bit.
Back to 2006. Copyblogger takes off—despite the fact that I’m again completely unknown in the field—because people were frustrated with typical blogging and online copywriting advice. I merged the two topics together and advocated the heresy (at the time) that you should sell products and services with content instead of relying on advertising.
Here’s a short summary of what happened next:
Between 2007 and 2009, I launched a new start-up off Copyblogger every year, mostly software, each of which achieved seven figures in revenue in a year or less. In 2010, I merged several of those companies together to form Copyblogger Media in order to execute on a grander vision.
In 2014, Copyblogger Media introduced a complete SaaS system for content marketers and online entrepreneurs. We also hit $10 million in revenue.
Did I mention that we never took venture capital, didn’t advertise, and were profitable every year? That’s all thanks to the audience I started building in 2006.
Now, I’m not the only one with a story like this. Many start-up businesses have grown out of audience-first approaches, specifically from the blogging world. But the start-up community generally failed to take notice.
That changed a bit with the inclusion of a case study about Copyblogger Media in the New York Times bestseller The Lean Entrepreneur, by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits. That’s when my concept of the “minimum viable audience” reached well beyond the Copyblogger world.
An MVA is the point when your audience starts growing itself through social sharing and word of mouth. Even better, it’s also when you start getting the feedback that tells you what product or service your audience actually wants to buy.
A case study on a single page in The Lean Entrepreneur was certainly eye-opening to many fledgling entrepreneurs. But the book you’re holding right now is more like a master class that provides a six-step process for creating successful companies like the seven I’ve started so far (without all my early missteps and mistakes).
This is exactly what an entrepreneur like you needs to develop a content strategy that builds a winning company. And you don’t have to be a writer; but you do have to think like a media producer.
It goes without saying that I would have killed to have Content, Inc. in 1998 when I was starting out. So be prepared to be enlightened. And who better to deliver the goods than the guy who’s been talking about content marketing since 2001?
They call Joe Pulizzi the “godfather of content marketing” for good reason. He started his own multimillion-dollar company using the same content-intensive and audience-first approach he advocates here.
As I mentioned, Joe was the one who convinced me to adopt the term content marketing in 2008, just as he’s convinced marketing departments across the world to craft content strategies to market smarter. He’s an amazing industry evangelist and an even better human being.
There’s no better time than now to get started, and Content Inc. is the perfect starting point. Just in case you’re worried that the tactics and strategies you’re about to discover won’t work in the here and now, let me share this with you.
In January 2015, exactly nine years after Copyblogger debuted, I launched a simple e-mail newsletter called Further. It’s a personal development publication, which means I’ve once again entered a field where I’m completely unknown.
Although the project is young and has no definitive business model, it’s already achieved a minimum viable audience. That allows me to start evolving it and discovering what the audience wants—and that’s where the fun and profit begin.
This one could be my biggest yet. The path to yours begins here.
Brian Clark
CEO, Copyblogger Media