Lead Balloon Ep. 60 - Recession Lessons from Content Marketing Institute Founder Joe Pulizzi: Double Down, Dig In

When everyone else goes quiet, your voice carries that much further.

In the world of business, yet again, things looks grim.

A brewing trade war, the uncharted fallout of artificial intelligence, and political upheaval around the world...

All these factors have created an atmosphere of business uncertainty. Marketing jobs and budgets face the specter of the chopping block once again, and many are taking a "batten down the hatches" approach.

But at a time like this, it's important to remember: when everyone else goes quiet, your voice carries that much further.

CMI Founder Joe Pulizzi

And so in this episode, we're revisiting a pivotal conversation with Joe Pulizzi from the peak of the Covid lockdowns.

When uncertainty was at its worst, he shared the story of how he raised the multi-million-dollar brand "Content Marketing Institute" from the ashes of an entrepreneurial venture that failed during the Great Recession.

By "going big" on branded media when everyone else went home, that fledgling company changed marketing forever, rebranding the notion of "Content Marketing" and forging a media empire.

Pulizzi would go on to launch the "Content Marketing World" conference, write three best-selling books and co-launch “This Old Marketing” the podcast.

And his advice will come as a breath of fresh air for communications professionals who are uncertain about what comes after 2025.

It certainly did for Dusty in 2020. As he reveals for the first time in this episode, he was close to despair about the future of Podcamp Media when he first had this conversation with Joe.

But the interview forced Dusty to take a deep breath, double down on his podcast content marketing strategy, and dig in on making Podcamp Media succeed.

And here we are today.

Transcript

Dusty Weis

Things look grim. Five years ago, I caught my toddler saying this over and over again.

Dusty’s Kid

Things look grim! Things look grim!

Dusty Weis

That's your assessment of the current situation? Things look grim?

And I worried that he might have learned that phrase from me.

Because if you rewind back to May and June of 2020, things looked pretty darn grim. I had recently quit my cushy corporate content marketing job to launch an agency that I hoped would produce podcasts for corporate clients, just in time for the Covid pandemic to bring businesses grinding to a halt and discretionary marketing budgets to disappear.

I know it was for a lot of us, but I can look back at it now and say that was definitely a low point for me. I was feeling pretty cooked until we spoke to Joe Pulizzi, the founder of Content Marketing Institute.

Joe Pulizzi

If the Great Recession didn't happen, I don't know if Content Marketing Institute would have existed. I think the other media companies, if they would have been financially sound, would have picked up on it. Nobody was investing in that area and we were able to take a leadership position.

Dusty Weis

I didn't know it at the time, but Joe's story about pivoting into content marketing during a moment of extreme uncertainty and building a multi-million dollar brand out of it, really kept me going as a content marketer and entrepreneur. It changed my trajectory even.

And today I'm hoping that it'll do the same for you, because here we are five years later, and it's not a super virus this time, but it's a trade war.

It's artificial intelligence, political upheaval. It's uncertainty still, and it's Joe's exact same approach that's going to get us through it.

I'm Dusty Weis. From Podcamp Media, this is Lead Balloon, a podcast about irresistible tales from the world of PR and marketing, told by the well-meaning communications professionals who live them.

Thank you for tuning in. I have been thinking about this conversation a lot because things have gotten so grim again lately.

For us here at Podcamp media, Q4 of 24, Q1 of this year. I was a little bit uncertain about whether enough of our clients were going to re-up. Now, thankfully, they all have. I think, like a lot of us, they were just waiting for the sky to fall and eventually got tired of waiting for the sky to fall.

So they've all re-upped and we're on our way to a good, perhaps even a great 2025. But I know that's not the case for everyone right now. I've been hearing from a lot of folks who are out of work, or they're stuck in a situation that they need to leave, but they don't have anywhere to go. I've got other folks at big companies, and they're having a hard time making the case for why they should keep their content marketing budget right now.

And I didn't really have anywhere to point to any of these folks until I remembered my conversation with Joe Pulizzi in episode eight.

Now this happened less than a year after I launched Podcamp Media. Lead Balloon was taking off, but the podcast production part of the business was not. My anchor client had chosen not to re-sign. I had brought in a new client who didn't quite replace that revenue, and I had turned a slight profit, but I had not even paid myself yet.

And my wife and I had brought home our second child, just a couple of months prior, a beautiful, incredible baby girl. And then hard Covid lockdown. No prospects, no opportunities. Just this podcast and an interview with Joe Pulizzi, the guy who popularized the term “content marketing,” telling me that he had been through the exact same thing during the 2008 recession.

So a few caveats here. First, this was a time before I had even the most basic podcast studio to work in. I was sitting in my basement, the basement of my house. And I'm going to post the video of the conversation to our YouTube for the first time. Not because it's good watching or even watchable for the most part, only because it makes clear just how far we've come.

But the video quality is rough because there weren't any great services providing video podcast recording in spring of 2020. And oh yeah, the internet was clogged by people trying to work from home or do schooling from home. And so Joe and I actually just kept getting cut off, during the course of this interview. He was very patient and very kind with me about that.

Nonetheless, Joe Pulizzi, host of This Old Marketing podcast, best selling author... he took his time to share his content marketing entrepreneurial story with me, bedraggled and sitting in my basement.

Joe Pulizzi

So I'd always wanted to start my own business. Ever since I was a teenager, I had a little notebook of all my business ideas. You know, I was lucky enough to get into Penton Media. But for those people that don't know Penton Media. In 2000, I started at Penton Media. At the time, one of the largest business to business media companies on the planet.

And I started in a little division that nobody cared about called Penton Custom Media. And I didn't even know what custom media was at the point at that point. But what we learned was, we did not do traditional advertising. We did not do traditional sponsorships like everyone else at Penton did for Penton's magazines, mostly trade magazines that you'd never hear of unless you were in design, engineering or heating and air conditioning or something like that.

We did the magazines and the sponsorships for those. But what Penton Custom Media did, we would come in and we would help them with their own stories, you know, how do how do I talk more efficiently to my customers? How do I help them with their own needs instead of just talk about my products and services all the time?

Those look like custom magazines, print newsletters, those types of things, and then later on into webinars and podcasts and social media. But all that time, while I'm learning this art of custom publishing, custom media... it wasn't called content marketing at the time... I had this itch to start something. And back in 2006, I'm talking with my wife again about another business idea.

And my wife says, look, either you go start this business or you stop talking about it. And she just was totally she was done with me. And I said, okay. And we talked about and I said, I'm going to this. So this is the end of 2006. And I said, okay. By the end of March 2007, I'll make a decision.

Either I'm going to stay at Penton or get another job or go start my business. Well, on the last day of March 2007 is when I decided. I left formally left Penton, and on April 2nd, 2007 started what ultimately became Content Marketing Institute. Now, it's funny when you're when you're talking about recession and you know this, that exact day is when First Century Bank, I think it was, went bankrupt and they were a subprime.

That's the that is the exact day when we started the company.

Dusty Weis

The first domino to fall.

Joe Pulizzi

And then, of course, if you know your history, March of 2008 was Bear Stearns. On and on and on. And then we were deep into the Great Recession, all during while launching this business. While you're going through it, it's horrible. So I know what people are going through right now. If you're in a business of any size right now, we're all sweating it.

Everybody's sweating it. But also at the same time now, I realize, it probably couldn't have been a better time to launch the business because while everyone else is battening down the hatches, we were investing and trying to build an audience.

Dusty Weis

So let's let's talk about that pivot there for a second. When you launched your company in the spring of 2007, you called it Junta 42. And, you had a business model that was very different from how it ended up. What were you doing at the time?

Joe Pulizzi

So launch. So April 2nd was my actually my first blog post. It was called the Content Marketing Revolution. But the name of the company was going to be Junta 42, which... that's a whole ‘nother conversation about why I called it that. I thought it was the coolest web 2.0 name.

Dusty Weis

That's an old Douglas Adams reference.

Joe Pulizzi

And you're exactly right. 42 and junta or “junta” means a lot of things. It means a military coup, but it also means a meeting. So meeting and 42, the meaning of life coming together. I thought it was the greatest thing ever. But basically, the business model that we launched into, outside of starting this blog and trying to build an audience,

We were we were basically trying to become the eHarmony for content marketing is the best way to describe it. We had a database of agencies and journalists who knew how to create content, and we were matching them up with marketers and brands that needed content or wanted to do print magazines or newsletters or article marketing or whatever the case was, and we would match them up.

Dusty Weis

And you were meeting with early success doing that.

Joe Pulizzi

We did. We launched it in June of 2008. And, you know, we were lucky that we started to land some pretty big deals as we were going. I mean, there were a couple million dollar deals that went through the system that we didn't get paid out of the million dollar deals. The way that it worked is an agency would spend about $5,000 a year to be in the system, and then we would send them leads.

Like it or not, that was the business model.

Dusty Weis

And it worked for the time being at least. Joe and his wife, Pam, were able to sign enough clients to keep the lights on and get their entrepreneurial legs under them. But then, well...

News Reporter 1

The Dow tumbled more than 500 points.

News Reporter 2

The American financial system is rocked to its foundation.

News Reporter 3

This was the day we were afraid to wake up to the bankruptcy of one major Wall Street investment bank, the shotgun wedding of another, and.

Jim Cramer

They are losing their jobs. And these firms are going to go out of business. And he's nuts. They're nuts. They know nothing!

Dusty Weis

Those of us Elder millennials, maybe a bit too accustomed to the sound of the financial markets crumbling. We heard it earlier this year. We heard it during the Covid lockdown. We heard it after nine - 11. And yeah, like Joe Pulizzi, we heard it in 2008 as well. In that moment, Junta 42’s clients started dropping like flies, the bills started piling up and Joe Pulizzi had to take a long, hard look at why his business model wasn't working.

Joe Pulizzi

So there's two things. First of all, agencies... and you learn this in hindsight. Agencies never spend money on marketing anyways, right? So never start a business when you're targeting agencies. Just don't don't do it. So first of all, they never spend money. Second of all, they had no money because most of them were just struggling to stay alive so they could make it to 2010.

Joe Pulizzi

Who knew how long this thing was going to last? And by September, we were like, okay, people are not. Even though the system's working, people are not signing up. They don't have any money. I don't have any people. I mean, I got brands signing up and they want to be matched up with agencies, but the agencies won't even be in the system because they can't afford $500 a month, right, to do it.

Dusty Weis

So here you've got this compelling business plan, and it was so compelling that you staked your family's fortune on it. You and your wife were both partners on this business venture, and you're faced with the decision of whether or not to abandon your original plan. How did you go about weighing that decision to stay the course or not?

And what eventually compelled you to change gears?

Joe Pulizzi

Yeah. So here's the so here's the horrible, here's the horrible, horrible and great story at the same time. Right. So it's September of 2009. We need money to keep the lights on. I mean, we need we need money to keep this thing in business. And one of our best case studies hadn't renewed in the system. The agency did not renew.

It did not sit on the automatic renewal for the credit card. And I'm like, oh, there must be some mistake because we just delivered a multimillion dollar account to this agency. So I get the CEO on the phone, call her up, and I say... I'll just call her Judy... “Hey, Judy, I see you're not signed up.

Must be some kind of mistake. Can I get your updated credit card? And we'll get you up in the system so that we keep things going.” And I needed that $5,000 badly. And she said, no, Joe, we're not going to re up to the, you know, $5,000 deal even though we just landed you $1 million project. She says, I think we can get better ROI somewhere else.

And I'm floored. I'm like, you can get better the thousand percent ROI. I said, if you can get better than that from an ROI perspective, tell me what it is and I'm going to sign up for it. Well, of course she's just using an excuse. She didn't. I don't know if she didn't have the money or what the deal was, but she said, no, Joe, I'm not going to re-up in the system.

Hangs up the phone and I'm devastated. I hit my low point because here it is, our best case study, and I can't even resell them into the system. I remember this. So I hang up the phone and I go outside into our backyard and I'm just feeling completely sorry for myself. I'm like, oh my God, what did I do?

I left an executive position at a publishing company. I was making six figures. Plus things were great, and I put everything on the line for nothing. And so I, you know, the next two weeks, I'm thinking, all right, what am I going to do? Am I going to go find a job somewhere? I don't think this business model can continue.

And I actually nobody really knew this at the time, but I was starting to check in on some people, like any jobs available. What's going on? Because I really didn't think. The I thought the business model was dead. Like, there's no way that you if I can't land the biggest, the best deal that I have, then that it's not going to happen.

So for whatever reason. So it's about two weeks later. So again, September, October time frame 2009. So whatever reason, I'm in my email inbox and I'm looking for feedback from our blog subscribers. So luckily from 2007 to this point in 2009, we had been blogging on a regular basis. When I say we mostly me 3 to 4 times a week blogging about how to practice this in content marketing, targeting marketing professionals. And we'd built up an audience of five to 10,000 people on a regular basis.

The email list was starting to grow, and I would get a lot of feedback, and I started going through all this feedback for some reason, probably because I was just in depression. And they're starting to say, Joe, can you do any consulting? We have a large enterprise. Can you come in and do some consulting? Joe, here's a speaking event we'd like you to speak at.

Joe, can you do that? Joe, are there any events out there for content marketers? I'd like to send my team to these events. So all these things are coming up in front of me, and I'm like, oh my God, here I am. I'm trying to sell this thing, this eHarmony for content marketing thing. Then nobody wants to buy that.

Nobody wants to do anything with it. And my audience is telling me what they're willing to buy. They're emailing it to me.

And for a year and a half, I was totally ignoring it, like, oh, that's nice. Yeah, I wish there was an event that people could go to. Yeah, I wish there was an informational resource for content marketing where people could really get an education on this thing, and then it hit me like a lightning bolt. I'm like, oh my God, I can't believe I was so dense and I didn't see all these things.

And it was, I don't know why. I had a cocktail napkin in front of me. I was probably drinking heavily at the time.

Dusty Weis

A lot of that going around these days too.

Joe Pulizzi

Yeah, exactly. So I have the cocktail napkin and I remember drawing this. I wish I still had it, but I remember it well. I said, okay, we're going to create the leading online educational resource for content marketing. I put a circle around that. I set a circle around. We were going to create the leading and largest magazine, dedicated print magazine dedicated to content marketing, and they said, we are going to create the largest international event for content marketing.

So this is at the end of 2009. We're not called Content Marketing Institute at this point. We're still Junta 42. And I basically... that was the visual business model. And I went back to my wife and I said, I think this is it. Like I think this is. And she's like, you're crazy. You're really crazy.

But thank God she loved me and she believed in me. And from that moment on, we pivoted the business model and said, okay, it's we're going with this thing called Content Marketing Institute. And we ended up launching Content Marketing Institute in May of 2010, and it just took off from there. I ended up luckily pre-funding it.

We went out to partners that just knew me and I just staked my reputation on it. And I said you know would you be a benefactor and and pay $10,000 because we didn't have any... you know I mean I, we were on baloney and ramen noodles at that point. And, and so we're like, okay, what are we going to do?

And two small kids and the kids at that time were three and six. So we're like, okay, what do we do? But they had five wonderful companies, gave us in total about $50,000 to make it through new development, new website. Content Marketing Institute launches May of 2010. Then Chief Content Officer magazine launches in 2011 and Content Marketing World launches in September of 2011.

We're holding it in Cleveland and we were hoping and like, can we get 100 people? Could we get 100 people to come to Cleveland for an event called Content Marketing World? And believe it or not, and you could see the momentum at the beginning of 2011 start to happen. And then going out there for the opening, introduction and keynote at Content Marketing World, there were 660 people.

How are we doing? That's that's the moment because right before I went out on stage and that's the first moment in September 2011 that I said, oh my God, I think this thing is going to work. And my wife and I are literally crying backstage. David Meerman Scott, if you know David, prolific marketing speaker, he's standing next to us, watching us hug and cry because he's the he's the keynote after me.

It's funny, when we started this whole little idea, we're thinking, let's do a little gathering of about 100 people and you all showed up.

Dusty Weis

So it's wild to me because, having recently launched a business myself, you have a lot of difficult conversations going into it. You have conversations with potential funders and pitching to your first clients, and and all of that is like an incredible stress level. But then the conversation that stands out most vividly to me, too, is the conversation that I had with my wife where I turned to her and said, hey, you know that really, really good, stable job that I'm lucky to have.

I want to leave that in the dust and stake our family's fortunes on this cockamamie idea that I've been rolling around in my head for a little while. And maybe it was the palomas and the Mexican sunshine talking, but she just turned to me and said, I trust you explicitly. If this is a thing you feel like you have to do, go out and do it.

And, and, and it's funny because it sounds like our wives have a lot in common, with each other. They're both married to, loud men who enjoy talking a lot. And both of them, are completely and totally reticent to get on the microphone themselves.

Joe Pulizzi

Yeah they’re so shy to do this kind of stuff. Exactly.

Dusty Weis

But, just looking back at it, do you think you'd be in the the same position that you are right now if you hadn't had, the complete, unwavering support of your wife over the years?

Joe Pulizzi

You know, actually, in this funny, I don't even know if and when I would have started a business. And entrepreneurs know this, right? There's no good time to start a business. You can always find an excuse. It was 2006. I was like, the kids are two and four. This is a horrible time.

You know, we've got a mortgage on the house. We just bought a house. Why would we take a risk like that? And of course, in hindsight, the riskiest thing to do and now, in my opinion, as being an entrepreneur, is to stay with a company where you have no control. At least, you know, we have control to make some of our horrible decisions that we've made.

But without her support, that wouldn't have happened. And the other thing is when we were going into debt and taking out more credit cards and things like that, she could have easily said no, we gave it a shot.

Dusty Weis

Yeah, pull the ripcord.

Joe Pulizzi

We're done. We gave it a shot. And like I coulda said, you're right. We did give it a shot, and I'll always have that. And now I can go back and find another job. But she said, you know,

We have a saying in our house, in our family, it's go big or go home.

She said that, go big or go home. What are we doing here? Are we going big? Then go. Then go big. Give everything you've got to it. No, we're not leaving. No regrets.

Dusty Weis

When you're counting on your business to keep a roof over your family's head, that's a ton of pressure. So supportive spouse. You mentioned the cocktails and the cocktail napkins, but...

Joe Pulizzi

That definitely helps!

Dusty Weis

How else do you deal with that pressure? Like, how do you how do you just keep from from letting the despair and uncertainty overwhelm you at times?

Joe Pulizzi

The I think what really... aw geez. I was nervous all the time. I was a wreck. I'm lucky I didn't have a heart attack or something because I was always a wreck wondering what I was doing. But I think you have to have this belief in yourself and a belief in the idea that is unreal, that...

No, you know, it's silly, right? But you have to go all in and you have to believe it. And I think what we probably did better than most is we really focused on a niche that I believed we could be the leading expert in the world. We really did say, okay, well, what do we what can we do better than anyone else?

And so what we can do... this blog thing we can do daily, how-to articles better than anyone else. And what was great. And you talk about times like today there are some wonderful journalists, writers and content creators available. Right now they've gotten let go by media again. There's another huge round of layoffs that have happened in media companies.

The great content creators are available. We did that. We went to the mastheads of some of these magazines, and I reached out to people, I'm like, hey, would you help me with this research, find people that we actually had no right in working with? And that's what's exciting. You know, first of all, what's going on right now is terrible all the way around.

I have no good things to say about that. But it is the greatest time ever right now to launch a business and to grow a business because you've got so many people battening down the hatches and we kept pushing through, and that's what we did. I mean, we focused on this niche, that content marketing, which nobody was talking about.

Nobody called it content marketing. So we sort of renamed it that thing like it always had been that way to say, okay, we're going to call content marketing right now because we were targeting marketing people, and marketing people don't listen to anything that's called custom media, custom publishing. They're already falling asleep. If you say, “Are you doing custom publishing?”

They're sleeping. You have to call whatever you're doing “Marketing” for marketing people to pay attention. “Direct marketing, search marketing, social media marketing, content marketing.” Same thing. It's very simplistic, but it works. So we were focusing on this thing called content marketing and doing this blog better than hopefully anybody else out there and all the other media companies and marketing media companies in our area.

They were just holding on for dear life because they had to.

And I get it. But if you have the resilience and you can say, look, it's going to be lean for the next couple of years, but we can come out of this stronger and better than it. And that's what happened. So by 2010, that's when we made that formal pivot to Content Marketing Institute. It just took off right away, because the whole time we'd been investing in our audience and building this audience and everyone else we reached out to in 2008, 2009 and said, hey, this content marketing is a thing.

Are you going to cover it? We can't cover anything new. We just let our our, marketing writer go, we're not going to do an event or no new events, so we can't partner with you on an event in content marketing. Or whatever ideas we had. Research projects, all kinds of stuff.

So, you know, we just did our thing. And then 2010 came in and it took off. So. Yeah.

Dusty Weis

The Paul Harvey “rest of the story” is Content Marketing Institute blew up. You wrote three bestselling books, Content Marketing World, the conference, also blew up and became a major destination for anybody that works in this space. And then the This Old Marketing podcast became a huge success with millions of listens too. So you basically redefined an entire sector of marketing practices overnight.

So while personal results might vary, looking at this new recession here, what do you see that's similar to the recession that we went through back then? And what's different? And what do marketing entrepreneurs need to do to come out of this recession with at least a fraction of that success?

Joe Pulizzi

What's great is you just take your expectations for the next two years down to nothing, and build the business, build an audience. Right. What's your niche? What do you what are you going to do to build that audience? Is it going to be a podcast? Is it going to be an Instagram series? Is it going to be a blog?

You know, what is it? An email newsletter? To really build that audience so that you become the leading expert in something so that when people are ready to buy, they trust you. They know you, they're going to be loyal to you and they'll buy from you. Perfect timing.

Dusty Weis

So I was actually just the other day, I was I was talking to, someone who's who's been planning to make the leap to full time entrepreneur. He was recently laid off, but he's got a good business plan. He's looking at the podcast space, and he says that he keeps getting hung up on the want ads.

He does a little bit of work on on his business plan, and then he's like, oh, but here's a steady, full time job that I could apply for. And I told him, I get it. I'm a year into this thing and I still have these, like regular crises of confidence. But, the question I guess I would have for you is, does that go away?

For how long were you tempted back toward the stability of a regular job before you've finally just embraced, “You know what? I'm the CEO. I'm an entrepreneur.”

Joe Pulizzi

You'll always be tempted. I was always to, I don't know, I won't speak for everyone. I was always tempted. I was tempted until until the September 2011 when I came out on stage for Content Marketing World. You always doubt yourself. It's a natural human thing that you don't feel that you can do it.

It's going to be there. You're always going to want to focus on, oh, is there a plan B out there? And all entrepreneurs are crazy in some way, and you just have to look at that and say, no, I'm going to be one of those crazy ones that make it. We're going to push through. So you just have to look at those want ads and laugh and say, yeah, there's some other person that's going to take that job and good for them, because I'm going to go back to work and work my butt off 12, 14 hours a day.

I'm going to be thinking about it all the time so that in five years or seven years, I have the financial freedom to do anything I want to.

Dusty Weis

Let's say, hypothetically, you were living in a world in 2006, 2007 where due to effective oversight and responsible banking practices, there was no housing bubble and the economy didn't grind to a halt. How would your life be different right now?

Joe Pulizzi

If the Great Recession didn't happen, I don't know if Content Marketing Institute would have existed because it was such. It was growing so fast. There was such an opportunity there. I think the other media companies, if they would have been financially sound, would have picked up on it. We had no right in launching a Content Marketing World. We had no right in launching the the daily how-to blog.

Somebody else should have done that. And then here we are, little old us. We just came around. Nobody was investing in that area and we were able to take a leadership position. So that's what, you know, kind of back to the beginning. That's what's exciting from a business standpoint about what's going on now, because you're going to have a number of individuals, entrepreneurs and small businesses be able to do amazing things because everyone else is battening down the hatches or unfortunately, going out of business or focusing on their core audience and core area of expertise.

When you can come in and do something great for an underserved audience. So I, to be honest, I don't think I... I might be working at a publishing company, which is so, so sad. Not because there's anything wrong with that, but I don't know if I would have been an entrepreneur.

Dusty Weis

And it's not your jam.

Joe Pulizzi

I probably would have went back and got a job somewhere. So I don't know.

Dusty Weis

It's crazy This has been an awesome conversation. And again, I just hope a comfort to a lot of people facing a lot of uncertainty right now. I appreciate your taking the time. Joe Pulizzi, the godfather of content marketing, founder of Content Marketing Institute, you wrote Killing Marketing Content Inc, Epic Content Marketing, and now most recently, the marketing themed murder mystery The Will to Die.

Thanks for joining us on Lead Balloon.

Joe Pulizzi

Thanks, Dusty. Anytime, my friend.

Dusty Weis

And thank you for tuning in.

You know, when I first had this conversation with Joe Pulizzi back in May of 2020, I didn't know then that in five years I'd be sitting in a place like this in a podcast studio that I got to build for my own company.

I didn't know that even before the end of the year, I would sign two new clients and hire my first full time employee.

I didn't know that I would eventually clear more than $1 million in sales.

But I stopped panicking. I stopped checking the want ads for a little bit at least. And I trusted the content marketing process. The process where, if you provide value, build an audience and serve them, when the time comes that they need your services, they will call you first.

So now that things look grim once again, remember: when everyone else goes quiet, your voice carries that much further. I hope that lesson is helpful to you in whatever your situation is right now.

Here on Lead Balloon, I like to tell folks that we're like Freakonomics for PR and marketing professionals. So we hope to see you back here in this feed again sometime soon. Follow us on your favorite podcast app, or check out Podcamp Media on YouTube. Lead Balloon is produced by Podcamp Media, where we do provide branded podcast production solutions for businesses.

Our podcast studios are located in the heart of beautiful downtown Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We work with brands all over North America to help them launch and build podcasts that work. Check out our website, PodcampMedia.com. Music for this episode by Shane Becker. And until the next time, folks, thanks for listening. I'm Dusty Weis.