My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

I’m sure just about everybody has had the experience of looking at a celebrity memoir and wondering: did they actually write that? In many cases, they didn’t, at least not by themselves. There’s actually an entire shadow economy of ghost writers who do the bulk of the work on these books – not just for celebrities, but all kinds of public figures ranging from big-name CEOs to politicians.

But how does one go about hiring a ghost writer? And what’s it like to work with one? To answer these questions, I turned to Dan Gerstein, the founder of Gotham Ghostwriters, an agency that specializes in connecting clients to professional ghostwriters.

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

Ben McCarthy didn’t set out to create a media company focused on Salesforce, he just began blogging about his use of the product as a way to document the various use cases he encountered. As it turned out, there were thousands of other people who were encountering those same use cases, and via Google searches they began landing on Ben’s blog posts.

Fast forward 10 years, and he now runs a 20-person media company that generates over 1 million pageviews per month and is the most authoritative resource for Salesforce customers.

In our interview, we discussed why there’s such a huge audience for Salesforce content, how he monetizes with webinars and white papers, and whether he wants to launch more media outlets centered around other cloud technologies.

Get $100 your CEX tickets by entering the discount code OWENS100

My newsletter: https://simonowens.substack.com/

When Joe Pulizzi launched The Tilt in 2021, he already had a pretty good idea of how to build a successful media company. Back in 2017, he had sold his previous media startup, The Content Marketing Institute, to one of the world’s largest event conglomerates.

Joe ran The Tilt with a very similar playbook – first starting with a weekly newsletter, and then expanding into an in-person conference called The Content Entrepreneur Expo, or CEX. The venture was so successful that he sold it to Lulu Press in 2023.

In our interview, Joe talked about his newsletter growth strategy, what it takes to put on a successful conference, and why he prefers the term “content entrepreneur” instead of “creator.”