What you can do to protect yourself from AI – with Joe Pulizzi

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Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rachel: Lynne, today we are diving into something Australian freelancers are feeling right now; AI anxiety. 

Lynne: Freelancers all around the world really. 

Rachel: Well, globally. I know at Rachel’s List we’re seeing freelancers struggling with finding leads and being ghosted and clients cutting corners with AI or not needing them anymore, but it is happening globally. That’s what we’re seeing everywhere. 

Lynne: Our guest today, Joe Pulizzi – I always love an Italian last name – has a very different take and he says, while we can’t out create AI. We can out connect it. And I think that’s really powerful and it’s an interesting shift for freelancers to think about, isn’t it?

Rachel: Absolutely. I’m reading Joe’s book at the moment and it’s really blowing my mind and making me think. So differently about what the future might hold for all of us, what it might hold for our kids. We were just talking about that offline with Joe. Interesting times. 

Lynne: Interesting. Before we get started, if you’re not familiar with Joe Pulizzi and you have to listen to his podcast, he’s got two amazing ones and I love them. He’s one of the world’s leading thinkers on content community in the creator economy. He’s the author of multiple bestselling books, including the latest, Burn the Playbook. That’s the one you’re ready? Which we are chatting about, and Joe has also founded multiple startups, including the Content Marketing Institute and The Tilt.

He has two weekly podcasts, as I said, which is the Motivational Content Inc. Podcast, lovely bite-size like tips, and the award-winning marketing news show, This Old Marketing with Robert Rose, which is the longest running marketing news podcast on the planet. Well done. Okay. 

Rachel: Amazing. Joe has also sparked a bit of controversy lately with his posts, which I’ve found on LinkedIn and in The Tilt newsletter about what’s coming for creators. And that has also kind of generated a lot of conversation among freelancers around the world, including here in Australia. So, we’re going to dive into that. 

Lynne: Yes. So exciting to have you on the podcast, Joe. Welcome 

Joe Pulizzi: Lynne and Rachel. Thank you so much for having me. I don’t know if I have any new solutions for the craziness that’s going on with AI, but I guess my focus right now is I’m going down the rabbit hole. I’m trying to figure out and experiment with this and look at new models and just share with the world, including yourselves, this angst that we all have because we don’t know what’s going to happen. 

Rachel: Exactly, and you really did throw the cat amongst the pigeons with that post recently that said, we have a three-year window before everything changes as we know it in content and marketing. I would love to know what the reaction has been like. Did your inbox just explode after that? 

Joe: It was one of my better posts if your count engagement, I guess is the, so I talked about this idea. I went to a conference in AI conference in the States called Macon Marketing artificial intelligence conference run by Paul Wrighter and Kathy McPhillips – great friends of mine and we just got into wonderful discussions about what is the future of AI as it comes for to marketers and content creation and the consensus with a lot of the experts there were we have this small window of opportunity, and we can talk about some of those things, but until we get to the point where most of the content we’re engaging with is synthetically created. 

Now what I mean by that is, right now we can see that already happening with the AI search engines or ChatGPT or whatever, where they’ll just give you an amalgamation of the millions of commentary on a topic, and that’s what you get. And you get that in text form. So, we’re getting that already, but it’s going to be more prevalent. But then we’re going to get it in audio form and we’re going to get it in video form where it’s not going to necessarily come from a human being. It’s going to be created as the moment arises that you need that information. And it’s going to come through our phones, but it’s going to come through our glasses and our devices, household devices, and our cars are going to become more important with this, especially as we’re not going to be driving these cars, we’re just going to be moving. So, it’s a lot of changes happening especially for content creators, for freelancers, for marketers who are trying to build audiences and create content. We’re in a kind of a tough spot. We know that AI is changing, but we don’t know how it’s going to necessarily affect our job. So, as I talked about in the newsletter post, I’m like, okay, well what can we do now to protect ourselves or, or diversify ourselves to give ourselves a chance to do the thing that we’re doing right now? And to a lot of your listeners, that would be, creating content from a freelance standpoint or building your own audience through newsletters or podcasts or whatever the case is. 

It was not excitement it’s like, why are you doing this to me? And I won’t be able to sleep at night, and will I have a job tomorrow? And where’s my, my client? Is my client going to be there in the morning? So those types of things came up very quickly. 

Lynne: It’s so interesting, isn’t it? Because anyone who’s been doing this for a while, and I certainly have, we’ve all lived through major industry shifts before and particularly when print moved online. And how is the AI transition similar? Do you think that there are mistakes we learned, we did last time that we can learn from this time. 

Joe: I might have a different kind of take to that because I started in print media, so that was when I started in the media industry in 2000, I started at the largest North American media company, Penton Media back then and we were print focused and in-person event focused. That was the entire business model. And then the internet came in and we had to take this as a serious thing and everybody was told, hey, learn, educate yourselves about what’s going on – experiment and all those kinds of things. But as a business model, really all we did, we just checked the box to the internet.

We were like, okay, we still have our print magazine or newsletter, and we still have our in-person event. Those are the important things. But okay, let’s have the website, check the box. We had a web article, check the box and we’ll have a newsletter and then we’ll have a link to the print issue. Check the box. So, we’re like, okay, we’re not really changing the business model. We’re just sort of adding it as, oh, okay, we have to do it, that’s fine. Well, I started in 2000 and when I started there, there was seven people, seven layers of management between myself and the CEO. And two years later I was reporting to the CEO, and it had nothing to do with me being good at my job, basically because I was cheap and adaptable and all those wonderful editors, writers, sales reps, designers, they were all still good at their job, but that job didn’t exist anymore. That was gone, and they were all let go. So that’s what the internet did to publishing, print publishing at that time.

So now we’re saying, okay, what does AI do to our industry? And I think it’s a hundred, I don’t know what the magnitude is ten times, a hundred times worse? Better? I don’t know which way we’re going with this thing, but I think in some cases we’re making the same mistake as creators in this industry say, okay, well we’re going to experiment. We’re going to use it and see if it works. We’ll use it as a brainstorming tool. We definitely want to learn on all these. We want to learn on ChatGPT, we want to learn Claude, on Perplexity and all those things. But we’re not looking at the fact that the model is changing entirely, and the jobs that we’re doing right now are not going to exist in two to three years. They just will not be around. And I guess that’s what it’s a horrible thing to think about. Because I’m sure, like me, I’ve been writing content similar way for the last decade or so. And to have somebody tell me, hey, you know what, the thing that you’re doing right now with your newsletter and everything in three years, it’s not really going to be relevant. It’s not going to be discoverable. The algorithms are going to take over. It’s a tough thing to swallow. But I think the earlier we come at this and say, okay, well what am I good at? What do I really enjoy doing? And figure out how we can diversify those things now, maybe we’ll give ourselves a chance.

So, Lynne, to answer your question, I think we have to take this so much more seriously than what, because it’s going to be destructive what happens. I was just talking to a marketing professional earlier today and I’m like you’ve got to prepare that your job’s not going to be there in 24 months. Now, if it’s there. Great. I was wrong. But if you do the things now, you might protect yourself and give yourself an opportunity to keep being creative and keep doing the thing that you love and keep getting paid for it. 

Lynne: So interesting, isn’t it? I mean, we did learn when I first started, we were still using printing presses all using film and typesetters and stuff. I saw all the typesetters go and then we saw the digital revolution. And then I remember digital photography in the magazines that I worked for and it’s just been continue and each time you just got to go with it because that’s what we learn and find out. But I guess one of the challenges I see with AI now is it says is how can creative still be found? Because AI is sort of now feeding. It’s making decisions about what people see and everything. Is there a way that we can still stay top of mind? Big question

Joe: I don’t know if I’ve got, I hate answering some of these questions because I don’t know if I’m going to be right. This is what I think is going, so I’m telling you what I think is going to happen. So right now, discovery is harder and harder on traditional search engines. The algorithm is being made for us. Organic content is down across the board. So, what can we do to get found in AI because more and more people are using AI to search for things.

What we do know is text is critically important, so AI is not listening necessarily to a podcast or watching a video, they’re taking the transcript of that. And that’s how they’re training themselves, and that’s how we can position ourselves as experts. So, if we’re a freelance expert in the sewing industry or in automotive or whatever, we want to make sure that we have content associated with our name on credible sites, including our own, that we’re attached to that. So that when AI goes in and they’re training themselves on that data, you can be found. So, I’ll give you a really good example, and this is kind of silly, but you can work yourself into the equation on some of these things. So, this is about a year and a half ago, and I asked, ChatGPT at the time. I said, what is Joe Pulizzi’s favourite colour? It came out with purple, and I’m like, that’s the silliest thing in the world. Everybody knows my favourite colour is orange. I wear orange everywhere. It’s on all my books, everything. But for some reason they picked up some resource that it said, purple. Fine, well that’s my fault. That’s on me. So, I wrote an article, an in-depth article entitled that Joe Pulizzi’s favourite colour is orange. And I put that on there and I made sure, and lo and behold, if you type in on any AI search engine, now you’ll make sure that Joe Pulizzi’s favourite colour is orange. Because I had to make sure and text, I couldn’t just say it on a podcast for an interview like this. I had to make sure I was specific about it and link to it. 

So right now we can be very strategic with text to make sure that our knowledge, and I know that a lot of your audience, they’re doing content creative work for hire, but for yourself and you want to be known, make sure, are there any associations that need expert content talking about the freelance writing process or in the certain industry. You want to make sure you’re found for that. You want to have your own newsletter and your own site that links to these things. You want to make sure that if there is a sponsor or a partner that needs content, that you can provide that content. So, we want to give away a lot of this. We’ve been doing this since the search engine was around, but now we’re not doing it to be found in Google or search engine. We’re being found so that our expertise isn’t lost because in a few years when it’s going to be almost impossible to get found through any kind of discovery, because AI will determine who the experts are. We have this time period, 24 to 36 months to do this. So, the first thing, Lynne, I would say is have a strategic tech strategy so that you are found.

The second thing I would focus on, and Rachel you pointed out a little bit in my article that I was talking about, is we want to make sure that we build data, assets that we can control – newsletters, podcasts, memberships, anywhere where we’re actually have the data of people have that relationship where there’s not a middle person or a middle entity or platform involved where we have their information. We can communicate with them. We have their emails, their cell phone numbers, whatever the case is. And then once we get that and build that, we want to make sure we move that offline, which I think that is the big maybe the human touch that we could put on some of these things that AI can’t take away from. AI cannot, right now, cannot fake our entities in person. They cannot fake me shaking your hand, meeting you in person, doing a speech in person. Well, maybe a little bit there, but we’re not going to get there yet. We’re still a little bit away from that. But taking the controlled owned data that we have, moving it offline and making sure that you’re known in those circles, so known by AI and then known by humans.

I would say, everyone listening to this, we need to take this really seriously if we want to continue on with what we’re doing. Because if you have a lot of freelance writers in a certain area. We know, let’s say there’s a hundred, focusing on a certain area in Australia, in twelve months there’s going to be fifty and in twelve more months than there, there’s going to be twenty-five. Because more and more people, whether it’s right or not, we’re not saying that it’s right that they use AI. We’re saying they’re using AI. We know the data tells us that. They’re going to say it’s good enough. It’s not the great content that maybe we’re creating. It’s not the human humanity, it’s not the great storytelling, but they’re going to go online there and at some point. Which I don’t want to come to terms with because I don’t want it to be true. But I believe that in two to three years, you’ll have as good or better, probably better writing coming from an AI because it’s millions of, they’re taking all the hundreds of thousands of the best writers in the world are going to come together and create one incredible writer. And that’s whatever AI agent you’re using. I hate that. I don’t like it, because we know that a lot of this it didn’t get there in the right way, but here we are and you’re going to be able to do that. And the ones that are going to survive are the ones that are known. 

Rachel: Okay. 

Joe: So right now, let’s get to the point where there’s some optimism. So right now, in the next two to three years. Become known. Build your newsletter, focus on one or two channels where you can be incredible and known at. You don’t have to be everywhere. Get that in data and then be strategic about the events that you go to, the dinners you go to, the coffee meetings you take, those types of things. The relationships that you have are what’s going to get you the gigs. Because people are going to want to work with you. And it’s you attached to the freelance writing. It’s not just the freelance writing. And I think that’s what a lot of freelance writers can’t get past. They’re like, hey, my writing speaks for itself. Maybe it doesn’t in three years. What it does is your name as the expert in that thing attached to your writing, that’s going to get you a higher-level rate. And that’s what we want to go toward. 

Lynne: Oh, so interesting.

Rachel: Okay. This is really interesting. Okay, so thinking about a freelancer now who works with all these small business clients, they have no idea about AI. They might have heard about it in passing, but they’re basically just throwing a project at you because they know you’ll handle it. You’ll get them the outcome they want. You know how, how do you see all of that changing in three to five years? Are there still going to be those small businesses that want to work with humans and are ignoring that they could go and plug it into ChatGPT and get something that is passable? Or can you see all that shifting really fast? 

Joe: So first of all, I answer the question you just asked. I do think there will be companies out there that will want to work with human beings. In the same percentage that people like vinyl records. There will always be a small percentage that prefer that and that’s wonderful but that won’t be the majority. The majority will figure out and say, alright, what are we spending on this? So, you’re saying, I can have a lookalike over here and I can type it into the computer here, and I can have an output in two and a half seconds. That’s pretty close. I’m saying I don’t like it, and I know everybody listening to this, like, come on, that’s not the right way but it’s the truth. That’s absolutely going to happen. And on the marketing side, because again, I just had this conversation we were talking about how we’re having conversations with CMOs now that know, first of all that their job is in jeopardy. Because they can be replaced really, really easily. Because their job can be dictated by an AI agent. Like now. And then if you have a department of, so that marketing department of twenty, let’s say it’s a midsize company of five million, twenty million. They’ve got a marketing department of ten to twenty. So, let’s say it’s twenty. That marketing department last year was twenty-five, now it’s twenty. Next year it’s going to be fifteen, then it’s going to be ten, then it’s going to be two. It’s because all these – now I don’t want it to be that way. 

What I want it to be is, oh, it’s still twenty and those twenty are doing way different things. They’re way more creative. They get a lot more free time because AI is going to be doing all this stuff. Oh, we don’t have to do the show notes anymore. We don’t have to do the thumbnails anymore. We don’t have to route any of this. It’s all updated naturally. I don’t have to have the intern anymore. All those things. I would like to say that that’s true, but that’s going to be true plus, it’s going to do our jobs because it’s going to, you’re going to just put in – it’s math. You’re going to put in a series of calculations, say, here’s the persona where, give me all the data here, I’m going to put the persona. Here’s the thing, here’s the content we want. Here’s what do you think. And they’re going to spit out and say, here’s the probability of these three campaigns working, and here’s how you execute them. Would you like me to execute A, B or CA? Done. And by the way, I hate even talking about this because these are my friends. It’s depressing. This is, I’ve been in marketing for twenty years, so I don’t, it’s depressing, but that’s where we’re going. So, I think that as a freelance writer, if you know that we’re going that way, you have to figure out how you are going to differentiate yourself.

When good enough becomes the standard and sadly, that’s going to be the standard. 

Lynne: So, interesting. Do you think that smaller markets like Australia have an advantage here? I mean, we don’t have, there’s not many companies in Australia, actually, with a twenty plus marketing team. There’s a few big FMCG companies, but a lot of them are in a smaller sort of environment. Do you think that helps? 

Joe: I think anything smaller helps. I don’t know if it’s the same case in Australia, but I have a lot of freelance writer friends that are generalists and they write on anything. So not just usually anything that’s business related, anything consumer, but broad, outside of verticals and industries where I think that the opportunities lie are in the niches of the niches. So, if there are five or six companies that focus on a particular niche of automotive that’s done specifically in Australia, if you become the expert in that, you have an advantage. And I don’t know if at this point you can get to niche. I really think that there are opportunities to go down and actually keep asking yourself the question. It’s like, okay, well I’m a generalist, but where, what do I enjoy doing the most? And what am I best at? And hopefully those two things come together and I’m good at this type of financial writing or whatever the case is.

Well, that’s your tilt, what we call tilt. That’s your area of differentiation. That’s what you can build your own assets around. And that’s what I would focus on. So, I would start doing the analysis for anybody listening and start to write down what are the things that you write about and list them. And then on the other side, where do you enjoy because your joy is really important in all this too. Like what you like to do. 

Lynne: Yes. 

Joe: Life is short. Let’s focus on what we like to do. And then if some of those intersect, that’s where you find your recombination. Adam Alter calls it recombination. So, you take those two things, you bring them together and you’re like, that’s my niche. That’s the thing. It’s crypto and financial, it’s automotive specifically done in this region, in Australia, in this industry. So those types of things, that’s what I would start. And the great thing is, you don’t have to do this today. You can start building this over the next couple years and say, yes, I’m going to keep and don’t give up on the other jobs. You can keep those clients, but you’re going to say, what’s future me going to do? And every day you could start building future. You don’t have to just say, I give up to the AI Gods, there’s nothing I can do. And when they don’t want freelance writing, they don’t want freelance writing, that’s bull.

We can absolutely be proactive in this and say, no, if I can become the expert in this thing. Yes, freelance writing will still be there. Will there be other revenue opportunities too? Maybe. If you become the leading expert in any niche, you can generate revenue in five, ten, twelve different ways. You can take sponsorship, you can do little mini events, you can do micro communities, you can do private events, webinars, you can do all, you could sell books, you could take donations, you could do all sorts of things. So, I wouldn’t just limit it to, I get paid for my writing. You might just have to say, maybe you get paid for your expertise instead of just your words. And if you do that, there’s a lot of power in that in the future, I believe. 

Lynne: So interesting, isn’t it? 

Rachel: Let’s talk a little bit about, I know you’re big on freelancers building something they own. We’ve talked a little bit about that, but what does that look like in practice? 

Joe: So right now, where a lot of freelancers go wrong as they feel, because social has made us feel the same way. We’ve got to be in all the places, and you don’t. You need to really choose and focus. And you have a choice in this kind of like Harry Potter sorting hat. You get a choice where you want to go, you’re not going to be told where to go. So, you get the choice. You’re probably really good at writing and maybe your social media preference would be LinkedIn. Great. Or maybe it’s Facebook. Whatever that is you could choose one of those.

Those are that we call a rented channel. We don’t control the algorithm. The good news is most of you are really good at text already. So, if you don’t have an email newsletter, you might want to consider an email newsletter or consider taking that blog and then having some kind of outgoing deliverable in the form of email because we want that email name because we want to make sure, we have the data.

So generally, if you’re looking at a freelancer just getting started and they make the mind shift change from, I’m just a freelancer to, I am a content creator or a content entrepreneur, if you will, they have one good social media channel. They generally have an email newsletter so that that call to action and social goes to the email newsletter. Your call to action everywhere you go is to get people to sign up for that email newsletter. And then at some point, there’s an in-person variable. You’re going to have a meetup at an event. You’re going to get a dinner together. The drinks with your VIP club – you might have an online community that goes offline. That’s generally what it looks like. And as long as you’re getting paid for your freelance writing, you don’t necessarily have to worry about making money off any of this now, but you’re setting yourself up for that. So, when I started from just writing, this is back in 2007, to creating what became Content Marketing Institute, I just was, it was a blog. I was blogging four times a week. I started getting people to subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog, and then they were signing up for the newsletter and then we would get, we got up to about ten thousand subscribers of the newsletter, and then I had somebody reach out and say, hey, can I sponsor that? I’m like, oh, money. That’s good. I need that. I have two kids. They’re five and seven. I need to feed them. Money would be fantastic. So that’s what really started, and then we started to do formal sponsorship packages together and Content Marketing Institute was born. 

So, it’s not too much different. I enjoyed writing, that was my first go-to or did it in a blog. You may not do it in a blog today. You might just do it in a newsletter. You have the newsletter somewhere online. Great. If you use a Kit or a Substack or something like that, you can get part of their recommendation network so they can do some of that marketing for you. But if you just focus on that it doesn’t take up too much of your time, and I think it’s not waste of time to spend that on your future and then have all your client-side stuff going on at the same time. 

Rachel: I can hear the wheels turning in our audience’s ears, right, because when we have done surveys asking if people have newsletters, it’s like crickets. It’s a very small amount of people that have newsletters or client newsletters, where they actually have sequences, which, people come in and they have a sequence to nurture that that lead right to the client stage. So, it’s good advice. 

Joe: It’s tough though, right? A lot of our, in our community that we’ve been building over the past many years, we had a lot of people just start as freelance writers and it’s very difficult for a lot of them to market themselves because they would just say, no, I market through my work. I show the clips; this is what I do that’s on my website. Those types of things and I’m like, you know what? You’ve got to give away some of the secret sauce. You’ve got to say like whatever because it could be then you’re giving away industry expertise.

It could be that you’re giving away writing expertise, we don’t know what the expertise is that you’re going to be building. But it can start small, even fifty, a hundred people. I espouse to Kevin Kelly’s a thousand true fans theory. You don’t have to have a huge audience in the future to make a significant, meaning in somebody’s life or to actually build a business model. So that’s what I love. And Lynne, you mentioned about focusing on small groups. Don’t worry if it’s ten, twenty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty people. If your stuff is valuable, you can make a living from that. Because I mean, I said ten thousand – ten thousand was the kind of my limit to say, okay, then I saw a sponsorship. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I know of a lot of creators here in the States that have way less than a thousand people on their list, but they have people supporting them financially. 

Lynne: So interesting. I love the idea about community and collaboration. I do a lot of that, and I guess while Rachel is the queen of newsletters, I’m the queen of events. This has been my year of saying yes, and I’ve been to lots of workshops and because I have a really clear niche. I work in homewares and interiors and things, and there’s lots of events and once you get to a point, people ask you, and the more you go and then people remind you. Do you think that’s another way that you’re a bit about connection and community? Does that help? 

Joe: Well, it’s lovely that you’re doing that and that’s so important. And I can’t stress that what you’re doing should be the model because like what Rachel and I are sort of talking about is, yes, you want to build your direct audience in a newsletter. I think that that is critical. But the next step outside, especially with what we’re talking about is in AI, is for the in-person event. That is the thing that AI cannot take away from us, at least in a very, very long time that I can see and building those direct connections. And as you know Lynne, when you shake somebody’s hand, meet somebody at an event, lead a round table, speak at an event, it makes ten x the impact that any digital content will make or print content will make.

So, if we can do that, and I guess what I would say, where a lot of freelancer’s struggle is they don’t strategically do this. So, how do you strategically do this? So right now, we’re coming up on the time of the year. This is a good time to do this. You want to list all the events in 2026 that you need to be at per your expertise for that tilt.

We were talking about that thing that you’re really good at, that you’re doing, we want to figure out what that is. Well then you list, well where are the events in my area that I need to be at? So, this is part of your diversification into making sure you have work or you’re making money outside AI is to say, okay, I’m going to be at these events. Okay, who’s going to be at those events? Do I have some of those people in my audience? Are they on LinkedIn? How do I put those together? And at first it might be just, I got two coffee meetings with people, I’ve got an after-session cocktail reception with somebody. Great, whatever. And then that will move into, hey, I’m, we’re all getting together for dinner. Or I’m going to do a side event with somebody because we’re going to have a little session out here. And then it gets into what I started, my wife and I started doing. It’s like, hey, we’re not just going to partner with somebody on an event, we’re going to do our own event. So those are the things that start working for you where you start, stop looking like a freelance writer, and you start looking like a little baby media company and its joyous and it’s a wonderful thing. When it gets to be that point all you’ve created is more options for yourself.

You’ve just created more ways that you can generate revenue. And it absolutely is scary. But if you can start, start very small, so the next event, somebody’s going to say, list the event and make one coffee meeting, or something like that, that you’re like, great, I’ve done that. And then you go to the next event and then it’s two, or it’s a gathering of three or four, and you start doing that.

Andy Crestodina is a good friend. He runs Orbit Studios in Chicago, and he’s been doing this for ten years. He has a dinner at every event he goes to. He reaches out to all the people he thinks might go to this event and he says, I’m doing a dinner. He does the dinner; he picks up the dinner God bless him. And I can’t tell you how many connections and things and opportunities that that has had in his business. He’s turning away business he has so much business and a lot of it is because they know him personally. So, to be known personally is going to be really important in the age of AI.

Rachel: I’m already seeing that with getting clients over the line. Something that used to work before where you’d send a services guide or have a chat to them on the phone or even a zoom and then, green light and send the contract, you got the project. That isn’t working in the same way anymore. I’m starting to have leads say, do you want to meet for a coffee? And before I was like, meet for a coffee? That’s just a waste of time if I don’t know exactly what your budget is or whether this is going to be a good fit or whatever. But now I’m saying, yes, let’s go meet for that coffee because they get to know me and they trust me at that coffee, I’ve got that job. 

I also love how you write about those really old school type things, like handwritten notes. I know when we did the conference, I got heaps of handwritten notes and cards from people that were branded and really beautiful. I know you did too, Lynne. And that’s always a surprise to get that, isn’t it, in this digital world, to get something tangible in the mail note 

Lynne: Rather than a text.

Rachel: Exactly. Rather than a text. At Rachel’s List, we’re experimenting with the new website, using apps like Bonjorno, where we have a video and talk to someone when they sign up.  That sort of thing. 

Joe That’s nice. 

Rachel: You’ve talked about all of that stuff. I mean, should we be looking at all of those touch points and going and strategising about them as well?

Joe: Absolutely. You mentioned print. I mean, thank you cards. Of course, any kind of personal touch is important, but I think the offline opportunity in print, that could be postcards, it could be a print newsletter, it could be a mini print magazine. It could be a book. I mean a book by the way, best business card ever developed.  You go to an event, and you don’t give them your business card. You give them your book. They almost want to buy from you because you gave them something of substance. So those types of things are really important, and especially when it’s so crowded online. If you can separate – I don’t know about you or how the, how the post is working in Australia, but in the United States, if you send a magazine today, it gets noticed because everybody stopped producing their magazines and most of the mail you get is spam mail. It’s clutter, it’s bills, it’s whatever. 

But it’s really important if you could do that. So that’s why you’re saying, and I know it can be expensive, so, but that’s, that’s where you can work with partners and consortiums and things like that to say, hey, if we put out something quarterly or every six months, we could really make an impact. And that could then integrate with, hey, we’re having a gathering at so and so to talk about this issue, which you already know that they’re interested in because they’re on your email list. And those types of things can really play. I mean, when we launched Chief Content Officer Magazine as part of Content Marketing Institute, we could start to show in the database how a CMO would get this, and then after nine to twelve months, they would start sending people to our event. And I’m like, how did that even, how did that even get in front of them? Because there wasn’t a lot of competition. Very hard to do that on a LinkedIn or a TikTok or a Facebook or an Instagram or whatever. A lot easier to do that in post. So, you don’t have all that struggle with competition?

Lynne: So interesting. Well, I do love the old-fashioned sort of thank you and things like that. And seeing people make gives you, well, I mean, I did a great little project for somebody that I was at a lunch with and she was sitting, and she said you may remember that a month ago we had this conversation, you suggested this. I took it up, but can you have a look at it first before I send it out? And so, I said, it’s a great idea, but you haven’t done blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I said, I can fix it for you if you want and she said, yep, done, please. And so, I fixed it, it was a great thing. And she just went, this is awesome.

It was just a minor thing, but it actually paid for two of those lunches and I thought, there you are. 

Joe: See there is such thing as a free lunch. You got it! 

Lynne: There is, there is.

Joe: There you go. That’s perfect. 

Lynne: I also think when you talked about things like TikTok and LinkedIn people make a lot of mistakes, don’t they? About that when they’re on, I guess what you call owned land, it’s not your control. What sort of mistakes do you see people making? 

Joe: Well, we talked a little bit about the first mistake that I see a lot of even experienced creators get in, they feel they have to be on all the channels. When we used to go in and we used to do all, I mean this is back when I’d go do marketing content audits and, and big enterprises. And we’d go in and we’d look at all they’re doing and then they’d say, Joe, what’s the big new content idea we need to create? Because they said, okay, you’re the content marketing guy. What are you going to recommend? And I always recommend you need to kill some of these things you’re doing. You’re doing all these, you’re doing webinars, you’re on Instagram, you’re on Facebook, what are you on Snapchat for? Like all these things. We’d go and they said, you’re distributing content twenty different ways. It’s like you are a jack of all trades, master of none. You know what that’s going to do? Absolutely nothing. It’s going to make an impact on nobody’s life because you’re not focused and you’re not giving special attention to any one of these. You’re just sort of checking the box on doing all of them. And I think we get into that. Oh, I’ve got to. Should I be on Threads? What is anybody on Twitter still, doing all those things. So, I would say the first thing is choose one. Choose one, commit to it, be good at it. And it’s an algorithm and it’s very hard to get through, but your personal touch with your tilt with what you’re talking about, focus on, on just that.

So that’s kind of where I would, I would focus. And I’m still, as Rachel said, I’m still a big believer in the email newsletter. I’ve been talking about it for fifteen years. I still think as long right now, they can’t. Right. I haven’t found that they’ve taken that algorithm to the step where I can’t get my email through with all Google’s doing and their promotions tab and all that stuff. So, we still have that opportunity there. I would just focus on one area of expertise, on one social platform, on one owned controlled platform. And then just do the work, make the calendar. Say, I’m going to do a newsletter. I mean, at minimum, every two weeks. I think you’ve got to get a newsletter out there. I think if you do it every month, I think people will start thinking it might be spam. 

I think weekly. I think for freelance writers, a nice weekly note that’s always helpful that you’re not pitching yourself in is a really good way to go. But if you’re just like, hey, I can’t, I can’t be great every week. I can be great every two weeks. Do it. Every two weeks is fine. We can live with that. I’d rather you have a great newsletter that’s really providing value instead of just allaying it and say, oh, I’ve got to make the donuts, so I better just go do that. So that’s, that’s kind of what I would focus on. It doesn’t mean you have to kill your other social channels, but you’re probably just say, hey, you have your stuff out there people can find you if they want to. But this is the place that you’re going to spend thirty minutes a day and try to build that audience around.

Rachel: Okay. Well we talked a bit about your Burn the Playbook, your, your latest book, and we talked a bit about it offline, as  kind of terrified parents who, don’t know what to suggest to their kids because that pathway that we kind of travelled down to get to build our careers is no longer working like it did. I read, is this right that you wrote the book for your kids and you were kind of inspired? Talk to us a bit about it and what you hope readers take away from it. 

Joe: It was kind of a personal endeavour that I ended up publishing. I had all the, as any parent, anyone who has kids, like you want to tell them all the things, but you don’t want to tell them. So, they get so annoyed at you, they stop listening. I think sometimes I do that where I’m like, oh, in my day, this is how I did it. I think you should do, have you thought about, all those things. And I said, you know what? I’m just going to put the way I see the world right now and my advice to them in a book. And what was great is I wrote the draft, and I sent the draft to both of them and I said, would you please read this and give me feedback? Now I think they were coaxed a little bit by their mother, and she said, please, for the love of God, would you read this? Give your dad some feedback. But we picked a place, we went out to dinner together and they both had really amazing notes and I took a lot of those ideas and put them into the book.

But it was this idea where I think a lot of people are still living by the rules that were set fifty years ago. And even today, where, where people, they’re like, well I need to go to school and I need to spend this amount in school, and I need to get this major because I’m going to get this job. And we don’t live in that world anymore and I don’t think we’ve lived in that world for quite some time. I really believe that owning something, anything is sort of your key to finding freedom. So, something around, and then we’re talking, this is the whole thing we’re talking about today, is what do you, what brings joy to your life? What do you love to do? And share that with other people. We’re talking about sharing it through things like newsletters and in-person events and whatever, but however that is shared to you and if you can do that and you do it really well and you build a group of people that follow you can make a living for yourself. So that checks the box on meaning, because you’re doing something you’re passionate about and you love, and you’re checking the box on freedom because you’re not controlled by some company telling you when or where you have to work. Or even if you’re great at your job letting you go. Which is what saddens me right now that’s happening to a lot of my friends who are amazing thinkers and caring people, and they are losing their job because honestly, its companies don’t value their people. They’re incentivised on efficiency. They’re not incentivised on how many people they have working for them, so they want more revenue per employee. They feel that AI can help them get them there. Whether or not that’s right or wrong, doesn’t matter. That’s what they believe and that’s what they’re doing. The book is basically all about, hey, let’s wake up however we did things twenty years ago, this is not how it’s working today. I want to make sure everybody is living for something meaningful that they have the freedom that they want in their life. And hopefully, I wanted to build generational wealth for my kids and my family, so they get taken care of. And that was foremost on my mind when my wife and I started the business in 2007. It’s like, how do we take care of our kids? Right? That’s what we want. Yes. And our family and their families and we want to do something like that.

So that’s kind of what the book is about. There’s little chapters on you can’t make meaning in the world if you’re not healthy. So, I’ve got a health chapter. It’s like you can’t make wealth long term if you don’t think about your finances. So, there’s a financial chapter. So, it’s really to your point Rachel, like if somebody was getting out of university, I think this book is really helpful for them. But it’s also helpful for somebody that it’s not satisfied with the job that they have, or they’re worried that the job that they have is going to go away, or they’re worried about their business and their business failing in the future. So those types of things kind of gives you a slap to start and say, wake up, this is not the way you think it is anymore. Or stop telling yourself this lie, you know this is true to go on with, okay, what do we do about it? And it’s really all about focusing on the crazy you. Like what makes you special and lean into that craziness. And did you know if you lean into that craziness and that uniqueness about you, you could probably make a living for yourself.

So that’s what we talk about.

Rachel: It was interesting you mentioned, I think in the book where, was it your kid that said, I don’t want to go to university, or what’s the point of going to university if there’s nothing at the other end of it? And you said, well, it’s actually the discipline of sitting down and powering through those three years, having the discipline to write all the essays and get the marks and do the study and all of that. And I was like nodding along to that because my university degree is nothing. It’s nothing compared to what I’m doing in my business and in my career. It was just about discipline. That’s how I see it. It taught me how to write better and how to research and all of that. So, there’s still a place for uni.

Joe: Well, no, no. We talked about it like I’m not negative against college, university. I am very pro, I’m just like, don’t specify yourself into a place that won’t exist. I’m all for go get a nice general degree in liberal arts or something that is just about human behaviour. That would be great. And then focus on making a lot of bad decisions. Make some bad decisions. Go live your life. Focus on how to get along with other people. And you’re inside kind of a safe community, hopefully where you could do all those things and you can learn a little bit of responsibility and then really get to a point where teach your thing.

It’s like, what’s the thing that university teaches me? I get a project; I finish a project. I become somebody who finishes things. I get another project and that’s really, really important and that’s what I love about college. It’s like, hey, you’re a person that gets things done. It’s really important skill to have. 

Lynne: Exactly. 

Rachel: I wanted to quickly ask you, because we’ve talked, it’s come up a few times about you are seeing your friends, losing their jobs after twenty years, ten years in an organisation. What are you seeing people doing who are in that position? I’d just love to hear what’s going on around you with people who perhaps think, well, there’s nothing for me in this industry anymore, so I’m going to do x. Have you got some interesting stories there? 

Joe: Absolutely. What’s interesting, I have a couple that they’re really good about marketing in the in-between times. They get their blogs back up or their newsletters and as soon as they get a job, they stop them, which I’m like, oh gee, if you’d have never stopped, you’d have probably never been in this situation. So, a lot of them are – I have a couple friends that are six to nine months now they still haven’t found anything.

A lot of the jobs that have been put up haven’t been, they’re not filling anything. We’re going through our own issues here in the United States on a lot of fronts right now, but a lot of people just aren’t filling jobs for the uncertainty that’s out there interestingly, and some people – one person started a coffee shop, that’s what they always wanted to do. Got a loan to do it. Great. It’s now’s a perfect time to do things you wanted to do – they’ve started. One started writing their own book. Had the book like we all have, right. Had the fiction book, mystery book in the drawer. Finally dusted it off and started to do this. It’s horrible, the situation that a lot of them are going through, and it’s very, very tough times, but it also gives them excuse to do the things they always wanted to do. So, that’s the positive of, hey, maybe if they just focus on doing the thing they really want to do, maybe they can make a living out of doing that. So, you write a book, you self-publish it, you sell it to a lot of people. You write another book, you market. I mean, there’s a lot of things that can happen from that as well. It doesn’t just mean we have to always do the way we, we did it before, so it’s not easy.

I expect more of that. I expect a lot of the consultants that are out there that have their own businesses, the consulting businesses is a lot harder because of the tools that clients have today. It’s kind of interesting to kind of, now’s a really good time to take a step back and say, okay, I can’t control what happens with AI, but I can control what I do. So, this is now a really good time to control what we can do and coming out of it, whatever happens, you’re going to be prepared for war, and I think it is, it’s going to be okay. 

Lynne: I’m famous for my redundancy scones. So, when my friends have made redundant, I have them over for scones and I try and help them set up as a freelancer if that’s what they want to do. And I’ve had many, I don’t know, hundreds of people over the years come and now, there’s been a whole rush in these last few months. And it’s interesting when you see people a year later, the ones that have thrived and the ones that haven’t, and I could pretty well pick them when I have scones now is like the people that go, okay. I’ve got to do this, I’m going to do, and the people that do it, like within the next couple of weeks, and I’ve had some people say I haven’t really been on LinkedIn, I haven’t done this. And if I check on their LinkedIn in six months and they still haven’t done it, they’re never going to do well. Whereas the people, I’ve met people at a function or an industry event a month later and they say, thanks for that. I went home and I did this, I fixed up my website and I did that. And by that stage they’ve already got some gigs, and it just goes on. A lot of it is about their attitude and their confidence in themselves.

Joe: That’s a beautiful story. Iin the book we talk about a thing called a Misogi goal, which is basically it’s a Japanese idea for a big, interesting, almost hard to do goal that you’re going to do over ninety days. And I love that because it takes about sixty-six days to build a habit. So, in your example about, oh hey, I’m going to get better at LinkedIn, you say set them a Misogi goal for the next ninety days. Every day you’re going to do it. You’re not going to miss a day. You get two thirds of that way through. That’s a habit. You are a doer. You are on LinkedIn and you’re past that point. You’re never going to have to be reminded again. It’s the same thing about, oh, I’m going to do a newsletter for the next ninety days. Whatever the case is. I love that. Because you’re just giving them one thing to do. Just focus on doing one thing well and then once you do that, you built that habit and then you get to those ninety days, you’re like, okay, now I can build another habit. So, it’s not like we have to remake ourselves all in the next six months or a year, but we can do it one goal at a time. And I think that’s really good. 

Lynne: I think you don’t have to do all the things. The person I had for scones yesterday who hasn’t created her LinkedIn, I said, you don’t have your photo up there. And she said, oh, I’ve be meaning to, I’ve got to get a new photo shoot. You really need two days to sit down and fix it all. And I said, you don’t. I said, maybe you just go home, and you upload the photo you’ve got. Yes, it’s five years old, but it looks nice. Just do that. And I said, and then maybe fix your bio. And that’s it. And then yes, you can do the photo shoot at some point, but in the meantime, you’ve got some traction on LinkedIn. You don’t have to spend two days fixing your LinkedIn spend five minutes just doing something. We like to overcomplicate it, right? Don’t make it complicated. 

Joe: Just do the things, make the list, do the things, check them off. Whatever you don’t get done today, that’s what tomorrows for. 

Rachel: Well, Joe, I want to throw something back at you because you’ve talked a lot about what freelancers can do in the next three years – become experts, niche down, all of that sort of stuff. I suppose learning schema, which makes my eyes glaze over and how to get into AI searches also plays a part in that. But I would love to ask you, what are you doing to ensure that you are thriving in three to five years? What are your plans for the future? 

Joe: So, actually my article this week coming out is on this text. I create a lot of content. I’ve got the two podcasts, I’ve got the newsletter, but I don’t think I’ve done a really good job making sure it’s found by everything that needs to be found today. What I realised with my podcast is I don’t have the transcripts – really easy stuff to do but I’ve never uploaded the transcripts. And the transcripts are the most important thing to get found in AI. So little things like, hey, if you’re doing anything in video or audio as a freelance writer, make sure that you take those transcripts and upload them somewhere. 

Rachel: We do it now. 

Joe: So, it could be found.

Lynne: We’ve done it for the last four months. 

Joe: Right. It’s just like, I just started doing it. I’m like, what an idiot. I can’t believe it.

Rachel: You’ve got five hundred? You better hurry up! 

Joe: I know. It’s so silly. It’s like, oh, I wish I had been doing it. It’s okay. Better late than ever. I’m going to go start doing that. So, I’ve got that and then I realise that I’m putting out so much textual content. I have some people in my area that run associations and things that would love to have an article for me, that I could absolutely give them a modified article of that. So, great and I just talked with somebody today about, okay, I’ve got five hundred evergreen episodes, content that I’ve done, and maybe some writers out here have written a lot of content. Is there the way that we can recombine some of those things and put them on other findable areas like Substack or Medium or someplace that makes sense and is findable by some of these AI search engines? So, my concern is, like right now, if you go into Google, you type in Joe Pulizzi, you’ll get a content marketing guy and or creator economy guy. And that’s fine, but that’s short-lived. I don’t know what are, where am I? How am I going to live on in the future? I don’t know what the truth is going to be. And I am honestly a little bit concerned by it, so I have to make sure I’m proactive to make sure for this, for this textual thing.

So that’s just kind of blocking and tackling textual. So, making sure is LinkedIn up to date? Is my website up to date? Is it easily findable? Do I have my newsletter sequence going well? Is the signup? So those types of things so that people can connect with me really easily. That’s kind of what I’m working on now and just focusing on probably at this point, I’m not at the say yes to everything where I was twenty years ago where I was saying yes to every meeting. Now I’m being a little bit more particular about, okay, I want to focus on writing these articles or doing this book and being really good at it. And I’ve got to make sure that I put that time on my calendar and make sure that nobody takes that time away from me. And it means saying no to some things that maybe in the past I would say yes to. So that’s kind of where I’m at and just focus, focus, focus. I’m just all about like, okay, what can I be the best in the world at? What can we be one of the leading experts in the world at and how do I make sure that I’m found for that? And that seems like enough over the next twelve months from a career standpoint. 

Personal standpoint, whatever gives you happiness and joy, and especially if it’s with other people, like lean into that, like now is a really good time to lean in your relationships and check in on people. I mean there’s some horrifying stats about like, people that use social media too much and things that happen in depression and I’ve got kids that I’m worried about, we talked about. So those types of things that I’m really like, okay, well how can I be a better friend, a better son, those types of things and do check-ins as often as possible. I sent out two letters in the mail this week. To your writing thank you’s – something is about that. Everybody listening to this should say, I’m going to send out a letter to somebody this week and then I’m going to do it next week and see if you can create a habit out of it. 

Rachel: I’ve got a draw full of postcards that I’ve never sent out. So that’s going to be happening now. 

Lynne: That’s your thing. 

Rachel: That’s going to be my ninety day. 

Joe: Postcards are the best. Right? That’s the best. 

Rachel: Joe, we could talk to you all day, but it’s probably going to go on too long so, I’m going to ask one last question that we love to ask all our guests and we know it’s really popular with our listeners. Your favourite tech tips and tools, whatever you’d be lost without. 

Joe: My newest, I know a lot of people don’t do podcasts but Descript has saved my life. I spend 75% less time on putting my podcast together with Descript and basically, I didn’t do video podcasts before I had it. So basically, I upload me talking to the camera and then I can edit it. In the words, I’m not a tech guy, so I’m not great with all the technology, but the fact that I can edit the video and the audio through text was a game changer for me. Descript is sort of the thing that I’ve been focusing most on. 

Lynne: That’s what I use for this podcast too. It’s great. I feel that there’s so much more it can do that I don’t even touch too. 

Joe: And what’s wonderful about it is, is that then we talked about transcripts. Then you could take the transcript from the video, export it, and then put it online. So those things are just magical to save me the time to do that. And then it used to take me time to write up the show notes for all the podcasts so that the show notes are really easy because those come right from the transcripts that I do in Descript.

But for This Old Marketing, which is a news podcast that I do with Robert Rose, all I do now is I use Whispr Flow, which is a dictation tool, and I dictate right into here’s what the show is about, here’s what our marketing winners and losers here was, this and whatever and I put it into, it’s about a sixty second overview and then ChatGPT – wonder if people probably don’t want to hear this or were freelance writers, but ChatGPT boils up the show notes for me exactly as I dictate it. Then I can throw that right into Libsyn, which is my hosting platform. So that has saved a lot of time as well. I feel I can do more from an audio and a video standpoint with those three tools.

Lynne: Amazing’s really good. Well, I use Descript to do the transcript and it helps me draft the show notes for our podcast. 

Rachel: I have to get into Descript. I haven’t really explored it. 

Joe: The Whispr Flow has been a game. I’ve been using that for about a month now and what I can do, I can talk gibberish into Whispr Flow and I’m just like, because it, obviously you can talk a lot faster than you can type and it will take all of that and put it into something that makes sense back to you. 

Rachel: Okay. 

Joe: It gets bullet points and numbers depending on what you’re doing. And it just formats. I’m like, oh my God, that’s brilliant. I sound smart instead of the gibberish that I put into it. I was a little bit worried at first, but it has been a game changer as well. 

Rachel: Okay, well, we’ll pop those in the show notes, but also tell us where people can find you, where you’d like us to send them. 

Joe: If you’re interested in the book, Burn the Playbook, we’ve got the audio, the eBook or the print version if you’d like to get it and then everything that you can find about me is at joepulizzi.com, I’ve got a newsletter that goes out every week called The Tilt, if you like any and all this talk and you want to go down the AI rabbit hole. That seems to be all I’m writing about lately. But these, what we talked about today is probably going to be part of the next few newsletters as I’m struggling along with everyone else and I’m just trying to share what I’m finding.

Rachel: Well, Joe. 

Lynne: That’s so good. 

Rachel: I think you win for being like a guest that has been optimistic, terrifying, and really inspiring all in one. So, thank you.  

Joe: It’s all the emotions, 

Lynne: And practical.

Rachel: All the emotions in one day. 

Joe: I like that. It’s like, how’d you feel about listening to that podcast episode? Oh, I felt, at first, I felt terrible and then I felt great and then it felt terrible again.

Lynne: The rollercoaster. 

Rachel: We’ve got to look those things in the face. 

Lynne: That’s fantastic. 

Joe: It was a pleasure talking with you both. I appreciate you having me. 

Lynne: Thank you so much. We’ll be back next week. So, leave a rating or review if you love it, which, of course you did and that’ll helps other people find the show. And we’ll be back next week with another amazing guest. Rachel: Thanks everybody. Bye. 

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Credits:

Connect with Joe (and check out his new book, Burn the Playbook) through his website: https://www.joepulizzi.com/

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

If you have questions you’d like us to answer in our next Q&A episode, just send them here.

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Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co