It’s been a crazy couple of weeks and I have a lot to share with you.

 
I’m Launching the New Business in 2 Weeks
 
Tuesday, April 6^th marks the official launch of The Tilt.

The Tilt is a 2x-per-week email newsletter (Tuesday and Friday mornings) dedicated to content creators. Our goal is to help entrepreneurs and small teams grow loyal audiences and build content empires.

Each newsletter includes in-depth interviews with content creators, as well as critical technology news and revenue/profit opportunities that impact digital content creators.

If you are a content creator in any capacity, you will love it. Please sign up here (pretty please with chocolate sprinkles). We already have over 5,000 subscribers. Yay!


 
Keys to Building a Digital Content Platform

I’ve decided to do my book tour virtually this year…on Clubhouse. I know, crazy right?

Anyway, I’m doing some practice sessions in advance of that.

Gary Henderson, founder of DigitalMarketing.org, is my first guest Tuesday, March 30^th at 1PM ET. We’ll be unpacking how he built his content business, leveraging social media and SEO, as well as talking about NFTs and creator coins (of course).

Here’s the link. Hope to see you there.

 
Another Reason I Hate Facebook
 
Earlier this week, Sara Fischer from Axios reported that Facebook will soon begin testing on a new, paid platform for independent writers.

What does this mean?

According to Fischer, the platform includes tools for journalists to build actual websites, in addition to newsletters. She also says that Facebook will underwrite some writers to help get them off the ground.

The publishing platform, which has yet to be named, will be free-to-use, and will integrate with Facebook Pages.

Of course, this is not new. Facebook began doing this with news media companies years ago. Twitter's in as well. Twitter’s purchase of Revue, a newsletter platform for writers and publishers, is similar to Substack, a self-serve newsletter service that integrates payment and helps, in some cases, with distribution and promotion. LinkedIn is also said to be launching their own version of a creator program.

I think all three companies are smart for doing this, and it also scares me to death.

This is extremely seductive. Writers and content creators can skip over some of the more challenging work of building a platform with the help of something like Facebook. In addition, Facebook plugs into immediate distribution. This is great for Facebook…by doing this content creators will keep people on Facebook. The evil empire will be happy to share a very small percentage of the advertising billions they bring in.

So, let’s say that’s what the content creator does. Heads to Facebook, or LinkedIn or anything else. Builds up their platform on that channel.

Then, you are stuck. The audience you built is not your audience, it’s their audience. You are just renting it and getting paid to do it. Definitely seductive. It’s a drug for sure. You become addicted…and when you do, Facebook has you and they can do anything they want.

And then, let’s say you want to leave the platform…you’ll have to start over, and the withdrawal pains will be intense.

Here’s my advice, which you can take or leave - Stay away from them.

Spend a little more time building your platform. Wordpress and email programs and other tech integrations take time but work well. And you can control them. Yes, you’ll have to spend a little more time on marketing, but at the end of the day, you’ll be able to choose when and how to communicate with your audience. And as a content creator, I wouldn’t trade that for any shortcut on the planet.

 
You Need to Know about Discord

I’ll be honest. Six months ago I barely knew about Discord. Sure, my kids were on it, but why did that affect me?

Today, I’m a part of multiple Discord groups and now (on Tuesday) it was announced that Microsoft is trying to buy Discord for $10 Billion (with a b) dollars.

It sounds like Amazon and Epic Games were also in the hunt, but that Microsoft won out.

First, this is another amazing purchase for MSFT (remember when they bought Minecraft?). Microsoft has been trying to become the leader in gaming for years, and Discord is the home for just about every major conversation between gamers.

Don’t know Discord? It’s like a discussion group on steroids. It has 140 million users and does about $130 million in revenue per year.

Hard to believe but $10 billion is a steal. Discord is evolving into the conversation platform for everything cool…like Reddit but private and can be invitation only.

My recommendation? Find a Discord group you like and start figuring it out.

 
More NFT Craziness

I had three people text me last week about NFTs. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.

Regardless, you should know at least enough about them to have a dinner conversation with your family. Here’s a good overview from The Hustle.

For fun (and charity), Robert Rose and I are selling the very first episode of the This Old Marketing podcast. That’s right…you can own the very first episode of the 7+ year-old podcast. Bid here…auction ends April 3^rd at midnight.

All proceeds go to help children receive speech therapy services (Orange Effect Foundation).