CEX 2025 Date and Location Officially Announced
Very excited to “officially” announce that CEX (Content Entrepreneur Expo) 2025 is coming back to Cleveland, August 24-26, 2025. We are working on speaker planning now, and I’m totally hyped (I was told this word is acceptable to Gen Z).
If you are a part-time creator, full-time creator, or consultant/author/marketer who drives attention to your business with content, this is the best investment you can make in YOU.
Sign up before the end of the year while prices are the least expensive.
I’ll be hosting the 2025 event and very much look forward to meeting you in person.
Content Learnings from Italy and Vegas
What an incredible trip!
On November 9th my wife and I left Cleveland for Las Vegas, and then on to multiple regions of Italy. We arrived back the day before U.S. Thanksgiving. Feel free to peruse my Facebook page for all the pics.
I have so many thoughts and rough notes about the trip. Here are some of the things I learned and noticed along the way that you might find interesting.
No Vision in Vegas
I spoke to a group of business authors in Las Vegas at an event called Author Nation. My friend Joe Solari purchased this event last year (formerly called 20Books) and ran a truly fantastic event experience.
My presentation was how business authors can develop a multi-million-dollar business from their book. Here is the PowerPoint presentation if you’d like to see it.
Basically, they didn’t have a “this is what I want this business to become” statement.
In my 20+ years of talking to entrepreneurs, this is an ongoing issue. We all get into business with hopes and dreams, but we don’t have a clear vision of what we want this to become.
I have found that all great businesses start with a vision. That means getting specific including numbers and years to get there.
A great example is Howard Schultz, who took Il Giornale Coffee Company in 1985 and morphed it into what we now know as Starbucks. Starting from just an idea, he had a specific vision of where he wanted to take the company.
“Fifty outlets in 10 cities are planned for the next three to five years. Each will be small (about 400-700 square feet) and each location will be selected to provide a large number of pedestrian customers on a daily basis. They will be open five days a week from 6:30 am until 6:00 pm.”
In the next year, Howard opened three Il Giornale stores and then purchased Starbucks. The rest is history.
The point is, there was a vision. That vision can always change and be adapted, but you need to start with something clear with tangible numbers you can measure.
I’ve seen visions that say “we want to be the best” or something like that. What does “the best” mean? How do I measure it?
When my wife and I launched our business in 2007, the vision was to create and then sell the company for at least $15 million dollars by 2015 (we didn’t accomplish this until 2016). I read that vision every day, and it helped me with a number of strategic decisions along the way.
Now to author/entrepreneurs…almost NONE of them have a business vision. They often have a writing mission (number of books per year or over a set number of years). That’s great, but that won’t help you with business strategy unless you know how much you can make off each book and what the larger business model looks like.
Anyway, if you are an entrepreneur and don’t have a vision for your business that’s measurable, get one.
ChatGPT to Porto Ercole
From Vegas we flew to Rome, and then a two-hour train to Porto Ercole. Porto Ercole is a beautiful, sleepy fishing port on the Tyrrhenian Sea in Tuscany. How did we end up there?
I hate to admit this, but I use ChatGPT quite a bit for travel. I set up a new string specifically for finding the perfect Tuscan city for our trip to Italy. My requirements were:
– Needed to be in Tuscany
– Needed to be less than a three-hour train from Rome airport
– Not many tourists in mid-November
– On the water is a plus
After much back and forth, I received this from Vito (I call my ChatGPT Vito. Just go with it.)
“Porto Ercole is a charming seaside town located on the Monte Argentario peninsula in Tuscany. It offers a picturesque setting with a blend of natural beauty, historic architecture, and a relaxed atmosphere. Known for its fortresses, scenic harbors, and beautiful coastal views, Porto Ercole can be a romantic getaway.”
That was the first paragraph. I received activities, attractions, places to stay, the weather and transportation to and from.
And Vito hit a home run.
We absolutely loved it. It was everything my wife and I were looking for in a four-day stay.
To me, ChatGPT and AI tools can be incredible assistants and agents. For writing, I like to do that for myself.
Content Marketing in Milano
From Porto Ercole we took a train to Florence and then the bullet train to Milan, Italy (over 300 kilometers per hour).
I spoke at an event called Performance Strategies on the topic “Content Marketing for 2025.” Here’s my full PowerPoint presentation. This was the longest presentation of my speaking career (three+ hours with a break in between).
The audience was incredible (Italian marketers who work at mid-sized Italian brands). About half the audience listened through translation headphones and, to accommodate, I spoke the slowest of my career (I usually present quickly).
Some observations:
– When Italian marketers think about content, they do so in campaigns. This basically means telling stories around a topic for a short time, and then starting something new. Of course, this is a content marketing no no. Content marketing is not a campaign. It should never stop (only be modified and adapt).
– Advertising is HUGE in Italy. Even more so than in the United States. That is the biggest challenge for a content marketer in Italy. It’s different. Change is what we are fighting against.
– Like in the United States, Italian marketers want to be on all the social media channels. This is understandable, but hardly ever attainable. My advice was pick one or two where you can excel and forget the rest (or use them as customer service channels only).
My unconventional content strategies for 2025 included:
1. Stronger differentiation. Take a real look at your content. It is different enough to break through the content clutter and build an audience? Is it targeted to a specific enough audience to truly be incredibly helpful and compelling and valuable.
2. Grow employee creators. Your best marketing assets are your employees. Give them ownership over your various content projects and watch them flourish.
3. Hunting for assets. You should be actively looking to purchase content assets from creators and media companies. This is just starting to heat up.
4. Start killing things. We all have limited content energy. The more you are doing the more likely you are producing mediocre content. Considering killing some content projects and move those resources to content projects where you can be the leading informational provider on that subject to that audience.
5. Everything is a show. Any content you have should be part of a show. Filling up your social media buckets with non-show content is probably a waste.
6. Double down on print. 100 percent deliverability and lack of competition. Enough said.
7. Drive diverse revenue. The more revenue lines you have coming from your audience the greater the asset.
Here’s a video presentation of these I produced for This Old Marketing that cover some of these strategies.
From Milan, we flew (with my cousin) to Sicilia to see my cousins in Marsala. Marsala is a beach town on the western-most coast of Sicily. If you want the flavor of Sicily without the busyness of Palermo, Marsala is a beautiful choice (I’ll have more about seeing my family in another newsletter edition). In short, it was fantastico.
After our wonderful weekend, we decided to take a breather day near the Rome airport before we headed back to the states. The airport is actually about an hour from Rome in the city of Fiumicino. We discovered a wonderful little Airbnb on the water leading from the Tyrrhenian sea to the Tiber river.
The night we arrived, we walked to dinner past rows and rows of fishing boats. In the morning on our way to breakfast, all those boats were gone. We (my wife) had the idea of coming back later in the day to watch the fishing boats return to port.
To be honest, I wasn’t big on this idea initially, but I wasn’t complaining about sitting in the Italian sun waiting for the boats to return. Outside of a few people enjoying siesta, it was pretty much just us sitting on a bench by the water.
But at three in the afternoon, everything changed.
With the first boat in site, dozens of people starting flocking to the first boat position. Some were stacking empty fish containers. Others were driving cold-storage trucks (presumably for the fish). Others were gathering but we didn’t have a clue why…until…
As soon as the boat was tied up, Styrofoam container after container were pushed out the first window and stacked onto a rolling cart. Thousands of fish, including cuddlefish and branzino, and also octopus, shrimp and stingray, were placed orderly on the cart.
Off the back of the boat was where the action happened. A tall, youthful Italian jumped off the back of the boat and starting auctioning off another group of fish. The crowd gathered and the conversation became heated. Quick sales happened initially for 20, 50 and even 100 euro. Then, as the bidding died down, the prices came down. Some in the crowd left with two large bags of fish (with hundreds of fish inside) for just five or 10 euro.
And then, just a few minutes after the first boat arrived, a second boat came in. Again the machine started. The Stryofoam containers. The cold trucks. And the group of people gathered at the next spot. More people showed up and we started all over again with a new auctioneer.
We stayed and watched eight or nine boats come in and it was as good as theater gets. What’s interesting is that no fish were wasted. Even the fish that didn’t sell ended up in the hands of some guy that took the excess into town to sell somewhere else. In addition, it seemed all the fisherman (they were all men) ended up with a couple bags of their favorite catch from the day.
We had so many questions. What if the boats couldn’t go out due to weather? What’s the furthest restaurant or fish store where the fish end up being sold? What’s it like being a fisherman who is up at dawn but done by four in the afternoon?
That evening my wife enjoyed her seafood (I had pasta) and we marveled at all the people involved and how hard they worked to make our current meal happen.
As a side note, I was thinking about how these boats made money. The primary way is each boat is contracted by one or a number of “fish stores” who purchase a supply of fish in advance. The secondary way is selling the excess inventory, like the auctioneers did off the back of the boat.
My wife had a third idea that maybe one of the boats would employ. Many people will pay a nice sum of money for the opportunity to go out on a fishing boat for a day. I could see cruise lines selling this as an excursion package or the local tourism board selling these places like hotcakes. We would certainly want to buy one of these packages.
I wonder how many more ways each boat makes money.
The tip here is that maybe you aren’t selling your inventory in all the ways you can.
I hope you all had a wonderful holiday (in the US) and shoot me a note if you have any questions.