Exclusive: Marketing Vox Publisher Expands Empire with Defense Industry Daily Blog

Marketing Vox publisher Tig Tillinghast has expanded his empire with a second blog, Defense Industry Daily. Tillinghast says expects to have three other vertical industry blogs online by Fall 2005. "So many vertical markets are so underserved online," he says.

Defense Industry Daily is getting very positive response from advertisers, Tillinghast says, and the defense community has embraced it rapidly. The blog, begun in March, is getting 60,000 page views a month with no promotion. Procurement officers from all military branches and top defense industry players are already reading it, he notes, including "all the big guys like Boeing, Raytheon, etc." A project manager for a multi-billion company "actually emailed me about the details of a story. I was amazed he was reading it."

Industry bigs are finding the Defense Industry Daily posts in search engines because "we're writing about a topic that people are spending hundreds of billions on and yet nobody is writing anything about it online. So we are often top 10 in Goggle because there is a vacuum in free public information on the industry." Tillinghast gives much credit to the editor, Joe Katzman, who also writes the blog Winds of Change, and is knowledgeable about the defense industry.

One of the leading print defense industry publications, Jane's Defense Weekly costs approximately $1000 for a subscription. "I have amazing respect for them," Tillinghast says, "but they treat online like a lot of print publications do: they try to protect print subscribers." The online space, therefore, was wide open.

An ancient business model
"Henry Copeland keeps asking "what is your model?" It's "the most ancient model: you build a high value audience and sell it to advertisers." Tillinghast says he wants vertical market readers to think "one of me wrote this" and will choose his markets very carefully. Calcanis and Denton have leverageable, extendable plans, he says. "I figure we are a tiny little group, with a maximum of eight publications that we can really right. "

He said the idea came to him last August after a magazine editor conference he attends every year with editors of major MSM. "It's really informal," he said. "We go skinny dipping." He realized that "they are scared of online and are abdicating some opportunities. After that weekend I thought I'd be a fool not to start other projects I'd been thinking about."

"I am pretty certain it could become a big company," he says, "but I don't want to do that. This guy wants to create really cool things, make a ton of money, run bird dogs. There's training to be done. I have a puppy, Flying Cloud, who is 9 months old and she has a nose like no one's business."

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Posted by: Kevin Dugan at April 26, 2005 10:06 AM

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Defense Industry Daily from Micro Persuasion
BL Ochman has the scoop on a new blog for the defense industry called Defense Industry Daily. It's the latest project from Tig Tillinghast. He's the force behind one of my favorite blogs, MarketingVOX. According to BL, Tillinghast says expects [Read More]

Tracked on April 26, 2005 9:25 AM