Ep 4: Rand Fishkin
Rand Fishkin is co-founder and CEO of audience research startup SparkToro. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, speaking, startups, and his book, Lost and Founder. When Rand’s not working, he’s usually cooking a fancy meal for the love of his life, author Geraldine DeRuiter. If you bribe him with great pasta or great cocktails, he’ll spill big tech’s dark secrets.
This podcast is particularly special to me given that Rand had a direct influence on my career. Thank you to Rand for taking a shot on this podcast before I had even published the first episode, it means the world to me.
In this episode, Rand and I discuss the mental health challenges of working in high-growth companies. We discuss what he’s up to at SparkToro, the current state of SEO, our addiction to paid ads, and how SparkToro helps you find repeatable processes to influence your Direct & Organic (branded) traffic channels through influence-driven marketing.
This episode is dedicated to my father, Bill King. A brilliant engineer who started his own company and struggled greatly with mental health after the company collapsed. He took his own life in 2015 as a result, and since then I’ve been connecting with more people like Rand to spread awareness of mental health issues in tech. RIP Dad, I miss you every day.
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Audio Transcription
Bill King 0:00
All righty. Welcome to episode number four of the growth theory optimal podcast. Today is a very special day in a very special episode. My guest today is Rand Fishkin ran is the founder of spark Toro. It's a platform that helps you understand this sources of influence that influence the people you're trying to market to Rand was previously the founder of Moz, or SEO Moz. If you haven't heard of that, it's one of the most influential digital marketing companies in the world. I had the pleasure of meeting Rand previously, and I am so honored that he took the time to have a conversation with me and we don't just talk about SEO, we don't talk about growing your funnel or reaching people you're trying to target we get into a little bit more about the the life behind being a founder. Also, we get into some mechanics of how you actually drive influence. One of the top channels that you would drive traffic to your brand is through direct and organic and most folks don't know how to influence that. So he goes deep on that in this episode, so it's both inspiring from hearing his story and some of the things that and the challenges you've gone through, but socially useful and tactical, and you'll get a lot from this episode. Before we get in the conversation. please hit like and subscribe if you could. That'd be amazing. Do me a favor and enjoy this episode. I'm really excited about it. Let's get into episode number four with Rand Fishkin. Thank you.
Bill King 1:38
is Friday afternoon. I am here with someone that I have admired for a long time. And we actually met one time and played beer pong after a search live in Boston. And it was a really fun time. Time. Ran thank you so much for joining me. This is definitely not like a super casual. It's more of a casual podcast. We're not like oh, welcome to the show. I t shirt. Good. Good. Color. See hoodie. Yeah, that's your casual Friday for the past year and a half. Right? I didn't even do my makeup. There you go. There you go. Let me fly early. Let it let go. These days. We're all going crazy. This is actually the most collared shirt. I haven't worn that in like a year and a half either. So we're trying to we're trying to bring
Rand Fishkin 2:21
like you're on the Italian Riviera. So thanks. Appreciate that. All right. So how's your week going? You go? Doing good.
Pretty good. It's been a little weird. I don't know old stuff from the past coming up right with the mouse thing. And then yeah, just trying to like stay focused on spark Toro. And then also deal with like a whole bunch of other new things coming around. pandemic ending a little bit's not ending, but Seattle is like I think 75% vaccinated. So our case rate is plummeting, which is exciting. And we went out to some restaurants and sat indoors. Kind of great.
Bill King 3:02
Yeah. Have you guys been staying in pretty much the whole time? Are you still still hunkered down a bit?
Rand Fishkin 3:06
Yeah, we were pretty much Yes. 17 months or whatever, we just really didn't leave the house or our backyard. And that was a little tough. I mean, granted, we we definitely had an easier than most but yeah, it's been kind of cool the last few weeks, kind of lifting slowly, we're taking a flight next week to go see some Geraldine family her her aunt, oh, good, California who's kind of sick and we're not sure how many years we're gonna get left with her. So you're gonna hear you're trying to make the time.
Bill King 3:40
Alright, well, that's that's important life lesson in general is to be present. Whenever you have opportunities, I'm going through the same thing, my grandmother's getting up there in years, we have to bring into her Parkinson's appointments and everything else. And, you know, like, she's given me the talk, you know, like to sit you down and telling you about those things. And it's like, when you when you're you've grown up with, you've been around these people for years, and you spend time with them. And then that that like kind of moment happens. It's kind of crazy to think about it, but you just have to remember that all of our time is limited here. And like, we just have to enjoy every moment. So I appreciate the fact that you're taking a few moments out of your incredibly busy day to come here and talk about things My pleasure, and
Rand Fishkin 4:19
yeah, this stuff, right? This is like the big stuff because, you know, my grandmother died during the pandemic, we didn't we didn't really get to see her kind of the last nine months that she was alive. Like we'd you know, we'd go by their their care facility that that she my grandfather were living in and we could like wave from outside the window and call them on the phone. But yeah, just didn't get to see her for all that time and it was just heartbreaking. You know, no, no real, you know, even get a real funeral. It's hard to do this thing over zoom and just sucked. But it made me really grateful for all those years that we did get to see her. I mean Build up crazy, crazy story like, what was that? Whatever, two and a half years ago. Last and founder came out, write the book and and we went to New York. Thank you. Yeah, very nastic book, I've read it. This is this is like my most beloved memory of that book, I think it'll stick with me my whole life, which is right after it was published. My publisher, Penguin Random House, like, had a big event in New York, sort of a launch event, you know, maybe maybe it's only 150 or 200. People like it was this small space, but very full. Mike King, whom I'm sure you know, and a lot of folks in one of them. He's an amazing guy. I know. Mike King was the host of the event, right? So he basically sat down with me did this interview. And my grandparents were still living in New Jersey, we got a car to drive them to New York. And my grandmother and grandfather got to not I mean, they, you know, they stayed at a hotel, like with us in New York City, and then like, walk to the event, and we went out to dinner afterward until like, midnight, you know, my grandmother, talking it up with a bunch of Internet Marketing nerds. Like, I don't know, I will, I will never not be grateful. And just so thrilled that those, you know, that her life in her early 90s, she was 92 when she went to the, to that event. To be able to do that, man, that's that's the dream. You know, how do you you can't complain?
Bill King 6:29
Yeah, I mean, so my grandmother, she, she is. So her parents were the only survivors from the Holocaust out of seven kids. And she's been through so much, and the humbleness of people that are like the previous generation to my parents. I'll be 37 December. And like, I know that the days are kind of limited with that, like generation and everything. And yeah, some of the like, you probably have realized this, because you're on the road all the time. And like, every minute you have with your family is super valuable. I think the earlier you figure those things out, and you realize that, that is the most important thing to like, optimize your life around is like those moments with those people. That actually I think that is that is super important, because this day will come for everybody, including us.
Rand Fishkin 7:17
Yeah. And like, it's not about the amount of time you have, it's about the quality and appreciating those moments, you know, and this was one of the you know, it's one of those things where I actually really love travel for this reason, I love the, you know, the conference and speaking world For this reason, because I, I don't think you can force quality time, you can't be like, hey, Bill, let's get some great quality time in in this one hour together. You can't do that, right? If you want to have those amazing serendipitous experiences with someone, you just need a lot of exposure. And then some of those moments will come in, you can't rely on, hey, we only get to see you once every few years. But, you know, the two hour meal that we'll have that'll just be have to be really special for us. No, that's not not how it works, right? So, Hey, you, you do what you can, but I think the beautiful thing about our industry is right, that enables us to, to travel, it gives us enough money to sort of, you know, get by in life without without a ton of the pain that a lot of other people feel especially in the United States, health care, that kind of stuff. And it's it's hard. It's hard not to be grateful. And also sometimes difficult to remind yourself that you have to feel that way. Because it doesn't always doesn't always cut well.
Bill King 8:39
Yeah, that's one thing. So I started doing meditation probably like, two, three years ago, when I moved to Charlotte, I was working at a startup after after I after I left HubSpot and just wanted to go do something different. I found a tremendous amount of guilt for being not around like my niece was born and all these other things, and my grandmother's getting older and everything like that. And I was feeling a lot of guilt. And I was like I don't think I have the tools mentally to deal with these things. And so I ended up finding some books on meditation just by random chance, and started learning about like building skill sets that were outside of just traditional things you do every single day. So like how do you handle these moments? Like, how do you process thoughts? And like, how do you like frame them for yourself? Those are a lot of things that like mindfulness meditation, like teaches you to deal with. And so I've been a huge, huge advocate of that. And like, the whole idea of like, we're born with a certain set of kind of like things that we know and tools like we go to school, we learn like history and everything like that. But the most valuable things like dealing with grief and like being present in the moment. It's not things that come to people, I think naturally. And so like that experience was kind of forced me to learn those things. But then I think to myself, there's a lot of people who don't have access to those things or have never been exposed to it. So the stuff you're talking about right now, like everybody goes through it. And so the thing that I would probably say is my takeaways Like, the clock is always ticking for all of us, right? And the more important thing is just enjoy the time that you have with the people you have. Because you never know where it's coming. You know? So yeah,
Rand Fishkin 10:09
yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is this is one of those things like, I'm really grateful that I, I'm very grateful that I left Moz and started spark Toro when I did. I'm also kind of mad at myself for, you know, sticking around those last four years and just being miserable. Why did I do that? Why did I feel that obligation that was not? Not a real thing, especially, you know, in a field where, you know, we can do anything, right. Like, there's so much demand for internet marketing knowledge for growth, marketing, for software for tac, right, that so much demand, and so little supply? Like you, you know, it is it is all on the table for us. And so we, you know, let's just take advantage of that, that there's no reason not to the other thing, too, like being on social media and like, you know, building like a brand, everything that comes with a cost to because you're like trapped in this algorithm cycle of like always trying to be relevant and this and that, yeah, I'm sure I'm, I'm sure I'm, you're laughing because you can relate to it. But it's like training, right? Like like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram, they train you algorithmically what to do, and what not to do and how to behave and how not to behave. And then they reward you with those little dopamine shots of likes, and visibility and views and all that. And then you think you got to create more. The New York Times actually had a really good piece yesterday, the day before about Tick Tock creators and how they're, like burning out and just feeling this incredible pain from trying to create content every day, and how the TIC Tock algorithm, you know, will basically feature people then and then and feature them and they'll be a star one day and completely irrelevant. The next it's so brutal, man.
Bill King 11:50
I mean, I was like, I took a step out of kind of, like, out of the normal playbook I usually do when I email people just to chat. And I was like, hey, Rand, I would love to use this moment, because I'm sure people are gonna listen. But my own father was an engineer, turn start his own company, struggle with mental health and stuff like that. And so like, whenever I talk to people founders working in this Boston startup scene, or just around in general, I have a tremendous amount of empathy. Because the the cost that it it requires for you to be a successful founder. Sometimes, when you look at backwards, you're like, was that actually worth the cost for me to actually go do that, like, a lot of people don't want to talk about that, right? They just want to see the big people who like have the yacht in the exit, but like, 99% of people don't make it that way. And so I I'm just say, thank you for like, sharing that like, off air like second because I was like, I would love to just like have a real conversation with people who like have been through these things. And just like, be kind to people, like, you know, like, not this, this world is not about like, growing businesses and everything else. It's like these things we're talking about right now is the most important thing. So I mean,
Rand Fishkin 12:59
I think the frustrating part, I agree with you. But also, I recognize that for so many people, you know, I think the United States has a unique situation because of the lack of social safety net here that they don't have a choice, right? Like, there's no there's no, oh, yeah, I should prioritize whatever my friends and my family and my mental health, it's like, I got to get up and hustle every day. Because, Dear God, this, this late stage, capitalism will beat the crap out of me and everyone I love if I don't make it. And that has. I have a real problem with that. I think there's like there's sort of these two divergent philosophies that emerge from that, you know, one of those is, Hey, I had to work really hard. So you should have to work really hard. And if you don't work hard, you don't deserve the rewards of capitalism. And I hate that philosophy. Right? Like, man, it was, the journey was hard for me. So how do I make it easier for you? That that's the philosophy that resonates with me, I, I don't want to pull the ladder up after me. I want to I want to throw down more ladders. I want to build stairs. I want to build an elevator. Like, let's, let's lift more people up. Let's let's put up you know, let's make the bottom less painful. It's it's crappy work. I don't know. I hate this idea that we value people based on how hard they work or how valuable their work is. Yep, screw that. That's not what we need.
Bill King 14:37
Yeah, first, you know, what's weird, too, is like, this conversation we're having. It's like, so every time I have this conversation out loud or in the ether, all of a sudden, I get all these DMS or like all these emails from people who are like, hey, by the way, like, this happened to me or like, I lost this person because of like, you know, whatever. Or like, hey, this person, you know, was like not feeling well because of overextending themselves. But Nobody wants to put it out there because it's like still kind of taboo. And so the reason why I wanted to like talk about this not like we plan this at all, but we just kind of got into it. But like, the most important thing is like, there are opportunities for you to learn about what, how to prioritize things, and how to build your own life strategy, right? Don't follow somebody else's playbook. Whatever it is that you met, you find to be a good mix of happiness, like, surround yourself with that, right? So if it's working, like you said, do it, you have to do it. But if you you don't have to, you don't necessarily have to go press for every penny that you need to make, you know what I mean? So yeah,
Rand Fishkin 15:36
I yeah, personally, I just, I really dislike the whole hustle culture in tech thing, it feels very, I don't know, sort of hyper toxic masculinity, I get that it is marketed to both men and women. So I don't, I know it's not intentionally gender, but if it does feel a little gendered, and then it also has this like, these connotations of you are, your only value is the work that you contribute to whatever the economic growth of your company or brand or whatnot, and then kind of like, mixed in with personal brand celebrity attempt senai none of those things are appealing to me, right. Yeah. And it's weird, because I, you know, obviously, I have a personal brand and I have done work that has resulted in, you know, companies growing and those kinds of things and, and being an entrepreneur, you know, now for the second time a spark Toro and so I have lots of people who they sort of assume, oh, well, Rand will be like, whatever, you know, Tim Ferriss, or Neil Patel, or like, a whole slew of other people. And so, you know, I must fall into that sort of realm. And it just doesn't, doesn't work for me at all. So, yeah,
Bill King 16:53
well, people people create, like, a perception of you that is different from the person that you actually are, like, because they get to know, the like Internet persona, or like the guy who's like up on stage. And it's like, you know, he's just their normal person, right. And he has ups and downs and like bad days, just like everybody else. Anyways, I appreciate the like, the candid conversation, because I'm sure there's some people out there who like, you know, things aren't like going that well for them. And, like, everybody's killing it online. And we're all like, we're all crushing it. And the charts are always going up. And it's like, Is that real? I don't think so.
Rand Fishkin 17:29
Yeah, I mean, this is the you know, this is one of the, the oddities of sort of the venture capital meets tech startup world is that there's this, you know, the entire structure of venture capital, right is basically a big, big tax Dodge, so that you can get capital gains long term capital gains, on all your investments. And, you know, the weird part of this is that the model has become, you know, invest in whatever 100 companies expect that 95 of them will sort of die in return you a little nothing, maybe you just your money back, and then two or three will sort of be, you know, three to 5x. And one or two companies will make the whole fund back, right. So, so you're intentionally saying, hey, you entrepreneur have a one or two and 100 chance of, you know, hitting this hitting it big. And if you don't, oh, man, it's not going to be good for you. It's not going to be good for your team, or your employees, or your co founders not going to be good for your friends and family. It is not going to be good for your customers. Everybody is going to suffer. You ready to roll those dice baby? Yeah, roll them with me. Yeah. I don't know. Why is that so compelling to people? It's the lottery mentality just doesn't doesn't work in it, you know, that. That downside is pretty is pretty darn rough rougher for for some than for others, for sure. And I get that venture capital can be useful in certain cases. But I think while it is right for only a very few entrepreneurs, it is marketed to every one of us. That philosophy is marketed to all of us as the way and there's this really awful sort of underlying culture in in tech and marketing and, you know, sort of all the worlds that that overlap with the idea that if you don't try to do that, if you're not trying to be the next HubSpot, Salesforce, Google, Amazon, whatever. You are a pejorative intended lifestyle entrepreneur. Right? And oh, man, oh man. They crap on lifestyle businesses and lifestyle entrepreneurs like, Oh, you cute little adorable dummy. I guess you don't have what it takes to play with the big kids. You stay in your little sandbox. You let us know when you're ready to do something real You can feel it like you can, you can hear it in their voices on stage and the way they say yes and no to companies and the way it's it's leaked and leached into the media and social media and how, you know, it's how it's talked about on Twitter and LinkedIn and it's bad. It's real bad. So, um, yeah, hopefully, conversations can start to emerge that change that narrative a little bit.
Bill King 20:28
Yeah, I mean, like, you've met our mission, Brian before, like, you know, like, fantastic people. That company had the right timing, the right product, the right team, like, and I was just so happen to just stumble on the front door, and they throw a janitor job to me. I just was there. But like, having exposure to that, and seeing that it actually is humbling, because you're like, Oh, actually, like, a lot of things had to go right for this place to become what it is today. And like, you had to have everything going for you. Right? And it's sometimes if you have all those things, but it's wrong time, or you make the wrong hire, or like, maybe like something changes, maybe it doesn't happen, but you'd never hear about that. And that's that's the thing. Like, you gotta keep that in context like,
Rand Fishkin 21:11
money. Yeah, whatever. 10,000 stories a year written about HubSpot. Two stories a year written about the 1000 companies. That didn't make it right. The 10,000 companies that didn't make it, which, you know, look, it's fine. I I liked our mission, Brian a lot. I think those guys are great. I think that they are some of the the best of, you know, that sort of classic venture backed success story, gone public, all that kind of stuff. You know, I know the guys from like, similarweb pretty well. And I like those guys, too. I think they're solid, and they have a good playbook and those kinds of things. And I know tons of people who are equally talented and hardworking and smart and made good decisions. And didn't, it didn't work out.
Bill King 22:02
Yep. Yep, I actually, so I started my career actually playing poker. Like, that was my thing. And no good equals exact same thing. You would you would meet some players who were insanely talented, mathematical wizards, but they just couldn't control the emotional side of their, like, you know, sort of the business side of things like they either were, they want to play against the toughest players to prove that they were like, the best or whatever. And then, you know, you have these other players who were like, you know, they kind of assumed that they didn't know anything, and they actually were more successful. And there's always weird things at play that you never think about until afterwards, right?
Rand Fishkin 22:36
I mean, it feels to me like I remember we mas back in it's, it's, I guess, sort of the middle years of growth over the last few years that I've CEO, had this had an employee who was competed in all the world's strongman competitions, right, so he's this giant guy, six foot seven 320 odd pounds, just absolutely massive how to how to giant tub of peanut butter on his desk, because he had to, he had to consume enough calories every day just to maintain weight and, and muscle mass and all these kinds of things. Right? So it's just, you know, fascinating example of biology, anatomy. But also, you know, people there I remember a conversation with him where I was like, Oh, yeah, you know, you people probably never messed with you. And he was like, Are you kidding? No. anywhere I go, there's somebody who wants to fight me. They just see me and they're like, you, I need to fight you, you are the biggest, you know, first human being around and, you know, your arms look like tree trunks. And so, I must fight you. And, you know, he was like, it's kind of exhausting. I try not to go out very much because of this problem. And I just thought, Wow, what a What a strange mental model. Human beings must have right because
Bill King 23:56
I, first of all, you're you're on startup number two, which is like, first of all, that's a feat that most people don't get to. And not only are you starting your second company, it's you know, it's rather successful and you've like been able to build a product that I think the market certainly understands and needs the second one Yes, I'm not sure about the first one. Fair enough, fair enough shot shot. So like, tell everybody about like what how did spark Toro start and i think i i think i could be completely misremembering this but didn't wasn't that like part of the previous place and then there were some tech that you like, took in or now or is that did I miss remember that or like how did spark Toro start?
Rand Fishkin 24:49
no spark Toro has no overlap with my previous company. And it did not. was not not born out of that. I mean, I guess you could say Oh, You know, my later experiences at Moz kind of around, like realizing that that search was just becoming an incredibly competitive right panel. And that many, many brands that had been successful in search were successful. Most mostly because they built up demand for their brand through other people's audiences through through whatever, you know, PR through brand building brand marketing. Yep. As opposed to, through search. The example I always like to give is Airbnb, right? They did no SEO whatsoever, couldn't rank for crap for years and years and years. And then, you know, once Airbnb was more searched for then all the other generic terms combined, you know, homes for rent, whatever, or vacation homes, you know, that kind of thing. Then they decided to make some SEO investments, and maybe three, four years ago, and now today, you know, they ranked number one for everything because Airbnb is the dominant brand. And so as I was observing this sort of pattern over and over again, and then working and trying to help some companies who basically had products and services that people did not search for, or that or that search was not the right way to acquire customers, I realized that there's this huge problem around finding the sources of influence that reach your audience. just discard, right, like what I want to know is, hey, I want to sell, you know, my fancy new, I don't know, architectural lighting product to architects, what do they read? What do they listen to? What do they watch? What do they talk about? What are they who do they follow? Oh, this information is not available. Right? Like, you just you can't find it out. You can go survey and interview. But generally speaking, there is not a Oh, yeah, 17% of architects listen to the architect sessions podcast, that this you can't that date is completely invisible is not available. And as a marketer, how, how the hell do you do your budgeting, your prioritization, if you don't know
Bill King 27:06
that, right? So just I mean, what you just said is so key, like, if like today's in today's market or world where everything is trackable, like if you're not doing something that fits into that attribution model, good luck explaining that, like good luck explaining to the to the people who are paying the bill for your Google Ads account and all the other things that you're trying to say it's like, you have to have a real leap of faith to believe that somebody could be able to just grow presence of some brand without some sort of like, either relying dataset that you already have, you can prove that this has happened, or you have some sort of like industry knowledge that nobody else has, and you have the secret. So it's gonna be difficult. And we all know like, you know, this, you look in all these different analytics accounts. What's the best channel that performs direct organic, when people are looking for your brand? Like, it's pretty clear.
Rand Fishkin 27:55
Like there's, there's no, there's no beating it. And so, anyway, that that's where the idea for spark Toro came from. And then, you know, Casey, Henry, and I had worked together at Moz, many years ago. And then he'd worked with Dharmesh at HubSpot, and then Wistia and all that. So we got together and had this conversation that was like, hey, maybe we want to work on this problem together. Casey had been sort of experimenting with some stuff that he thought could do the trick a little bit. And it turned out Yeah, you know, there's enough publicly crawlable social and web profile data that you can start to build an index of, you know, sort of human profiles, and then aggregate and anonymize those profiles and draw conclusions like okay, well, we know about 16,000 people who have architect in their bio on one or more social network that's publicly crawlable. Online. What are their what what behaviors? Do they share most what things they have most in common? no fancy machine learning? no fancy technology, like it's division. It's great school division, okay. 16,000 are good as well. You know, 17% of them, whatever engaged with the social account of the archinect, podcasts sessions. Let's tell people that now you can do way smarter marketing right now. Oh, let me go sponsor that podcast. Let me see if I can get an intro to the host and be a guest on that podcast. Like, there you go.
Bill King 29:21
Yeah, I mean, like the the, like, the foundations of what you're talking about are exactly what someone who's like a quote unquote, like growth minded person would do. That's a what is our best channel. It's direct organic, like, it converts at the highest. And the problem is, how do I recreate that? Like, that's a lot of the things people look for they, they look into their data, and they're like, how do I find the thing is working best? How do I double down the thing that is working best? Well, for years, right? I mean, how many times were like, you know, people would talk about dark traffic, whether it's SEO conferences or other and they'd be like, Well, you know, that's just kind of like traffic you can influence and like, I don't know how We didn't like it that didn't strike me as like, that seems insane because there's obviously something going into it. But it was just kind of like the the notion for years was like, Oh, that's dark traffic, like, we don't know what's going on with it. Like, don't worry about it, just go build some more links and build some more like FAQ posts. Like that's, that was like the general consensus. That's still
Rand Fishkin 30:18
the general consensus. I see. One of the weirdest things definitely in my career was spending, like the first 15 years of my career trying to convince people to do SEO. And then as I was finally leaving the SEO field, now, everybody is doing SEO. Right? Now it's like, okay, now I'm gonna try and convince you to do some of the, you know, sort of brand and audience building marketing that was very popular in sort of the century before Google came out. It's true. Yeah. And that. Look, it's, it's exciting to me, that digital marketers are so savvy, that they're, they're very data driven, and action oriented. I think those things are great. And I think it's just a matter of, you know, hey, give me 15 years on this one, maybe maybe I can get a lot more marketers to pay attention to sources of influence outside of just Google and Facebook.
Bill King 31:13
So I work at a company that helps you do content for SEO, right? We couldn't have like, been in a more ironic situation here where you're like, Okay, this is the playbook and like, so were saying, hey, there's still opportunity here. Really, you should probably be doing both, if you really wanted today, especially if you don't have a blank check the money printer, one of my favorite means that you posted on on Twitter was the Google money printing machine. So like, if you're a company that doesn't have a million dollars to go spend every month, and like I've been in the shoes to spend that money, like it's not as great as people think everybody's like, Oh, go get a bajillion dollars. And like, all your problems are solved. It's like, not really, it's pretty competitive. And, you know, it's pretty hard to differentiate yourself. And like, there's a lot of things that go into growing today versus just pressing the button on the on the ads button, right? I mean, like, were you like, so the hypothesis was like, okay, everybody's going this way on the market. I'm seeing an opportunity here where I can build a tool that will help them get to a system around that. Do you feel like the education on the market like hasn't caught up to that yet? Because I see you're spending a lot of a lot of energy. And you always created content, it was more strategic, like here's how to do SEO. Now you're more like you're shifting to, here's how this is different. And you're changing perceptions, which obviously, like when you're growing Spark, Toro is like heart because everybody comes in with a predisposed notion, right? So tell me a little bit more about like, how you're thinking about that as you're growing the company because me as a person who works at a, like a startup that helps you do SEO? people still don't even understand that. So tell me a little bit more about that. Sure, sure.
Rand Fishkin 32:53
So that I think the basic challenge that we have at spark Toro is helping marketers and those who invest in marketing, whether that's founders and CEOs, or CMOS, or whomever it is teams agencies, that there are opportunities outside of the channels that have that are already named, right. So sort of the five or six big ones are SEO, PPC, display advertising, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing. Yep. That's sort of like the you know, it's not, I think for a while people tried to fit it under the inbound umbrella. Now, it's just sort of digital marketing, right? That sort of it's all the digital marketing channels. And what we're essentially saying is, Hey, friends, the way that you build brand awareness, the way that you earn an audience's attention, the way that you get them to know you, like you and trust you so that when you show up in their social feeds, when you show up in their search results, when you show up in their ad results, they prefer to click you. When you get into their email inbox, they recognize your name, and they click on your offer. And that is very difficult to do exclusively by starting and staying only in those lanes. Right? The reason that many brands tend to build up over time is because, oh, well, I heard about it on or I saw someone talk about it on or I went to this conference and someone spoke about it. Or I listened to this podcast where they mentioned that I watched this YouTube video where they talked about it I follow this person on social and they mentioned and I read this publication, what are all those things their sources of influence for an audience and our educational challenge has been to give that a naming convention to say that has a word associated with it. Rep. It frustratingly infuriatingly. It used to be called influencer Mark Getting like when you and I probably had that dinner, right? But now nowadays influencer has come to mean something totally different. And so we can't use that terminology. And so I've been struggling to like find a new one. Is it? Whatever, you gotta call it something? Yep,
Bill King 35:15
I was just there for conversational marketing. And now we're trying to figure out what this meant.
Rand Fishkin 35:20
When people hear conversational, they think of like, you know, back and forth chat type of thing. They rarely think of, Oh, I should sponsor that podcast, or I should submit a guest editorial to the Washington Post's You know, this section that my audience reads, whatever it is. So unfortunately, it's been very challenging to give that a name. But even just having that conversation with someone like, hey, let me go show you the sources of influence that this audience pays attention to, so that you can go do marketing, paid, organic, outreach, whatever kind in those places. It's not about caring whether they give you a link, or whether they send you direct traffic, or whether you can attribute that traffic, it is growing your brand presence through a source of influence that you know, your audience already pays attention to, and trusts. That is how most marketing was done, you know, outside of big brand advertising or TV ads for the 20th century. And it still works very, very well.
Bill King 36:22
But it's funny, it's funny how things have come full circle, where like, when I first got into marketing, I actually was a journalism major in school and had a baseball blog, and was like, why aren't anybody coming to my website. And so I went down the rabbit hole, and barely, I haven't even come out yet. Actually, I'm still in that rabbit hole of trying to figure out how to get all this stuff together. But like, so now everybody's built systems in technologies to prove what I just said is or what you just said, is the right way to do it. And here's how we know what's working. Meanwhile, there's massive holes in a lot of those systems on how people actually become aware of brands, right. So like, the whole idea of like, demand capture or demand creation, like that is so important to know, when you're going up against companies. I'm in this state, like, we're only six people, where they have infinite more resources. And so the question is, do I just give it the same attribution model? And do I just like, try to pick one or pick my, you know, like SEO or, or PPC, which is insane to think about, but and I and you know, for prices for us, so like, you can do that. Or you can do other things that maybe is completely undiscovered or being under under invested in? This is traditional, like, thoughts that people would have if they were thinking clearly, but they come into it with this notion. So if you could, like, tell everybody who's listening to this, who's probably like a growth nerd who's like a data like hardcore person, how do you think about Bill?
Rand Fishkin 37:48
How about I answer that question, right, after I'm able to fix my camera door, we can just cut it up.
Bill King 37:59
Okay, so most of the people that are listening to this podcast, I hope, it's pretty new are probably in a growth role when they're they're living in the data. And it's all about the model. It's all about testing. It's all about paid ads. It's all about like, the stuff that we've been doing now for what seems like a long time. But it actually hasn't been that long. So one of the things like you're seeing something in the market that I also see, which is a few things, number one, data and privacy is going to become an enormous factor in like marketing in the digital space. But what what what's your message to people who are using the playbook like the traditional playbook? What are the things that you've learned in like, what is like the thing you would pass on to them to start thinking about when they're thinking about like plans for next year? Or like opportunities that maybe they're not tapping into that you've discovered?
Rand Fishkin 38:51
Sure. Yeah. So I think there's a whole bunch of questions in there. Right. So what do I think about data privacy issues? How do I think about attribution and being able to prove the value? What do I think about playbook marketing? And what would I recommend for the future and building up strategic advantages? So I'll try to take those one by one you got so data and privacy I, I think that that will make things harder on advertisers. But I'm, I believe the platforms will generally work around it. I think, to be honest, most consumers don't give a crap on privacy. They just they just don't, right. Like, if if Apple asks them, Hey, will you opt into Facebook's thing? They'll say no, but will they do any other work or be willing to pay one dime to actually protect? No, this is just not important. Right? You know, I don't really care if the shoe from Zappos follows me around the internet. Yeah, they just don't care. It's cute in terms of in terms of tracking and and being able to prove the efficacy of investing in channels that are not paid search or or paid social or display advertising, which are the ones that are most easily trackable, right? Because the platform's have an incentive to provide you with every last detail of data and to show you, oh, yeah, if you're a customer and seeing this ad, they never would have bought from you six months. It's a pile of baloney. And I didn't even show up like on the same, you know, it on the page where they were scrolling. But never mind that Google will say it was Google that that contributed to close enough. So I think first off, there's some Miss attribution that happens automatically in very easy to attract channels. But the problem is, executives, the boards of directors behind them, the sort of whole chain of command has been set up because the last 20 years of trackable online digital marketing, to incentivize marketers to prove every visit, right? prove the value of every visit. Sure, you got us on that podcast? Sure. You got us in that newspaper? Sure. You got us that blog post? But what did it do for us? Yes, and I bet a lot of the answers have now become, well, we got a link, which helps our SEO and look SEO traffic converts, that's become the answer. Which you got
Bill King 41:27
to respect. I mean, that's some real high class BS. You know, like, if you're gonna if you're gonna,
Rand Fishkin 41:33
technically some of it is a little bit true, right. So there is a great kernel of truth to it. But also, the the podcast and the, you know, conference that you went to, and the networking that you've done, and the relationships that you've built, and the webinar that you hosted, and all these things that have untrackable, you can't see the visits, we don't know they were there, those also contributed, the only advice I have for people in that in that world is to do what classic advertisers have done throughout history, which is essentially to AB test via time series or geography. So when Coca Cola wants to determine whether their new billboard plan is working, they run a ton of ads in Houston, and none of those ads in Dallas, and they're like, those markets are pretty similar. So let's see if we get brand lift in one market versus the other, and how much. And you can do this by investing time series wise, like, Hey, we're gonna do a whole bunch of podcast marketing, webinar marketing, YouTube marketing, we're gonna do a bunch of reaching out to social media sources of influence, we're going to do a whole bunch of guest contributions. And we're going to see whether branded search traffic, direct traffic type in, go up email subscriptions, do they go up coverage? Does it go up? Or does it stay flat? Go down, whatever, right? That is how you can test that you can do it geographically as well. Right? So you know, some folks will be like, hey, let's test doing a bunch of podcasts in Canada, hey, look at our Canadian traffic, holy crap, this is this works. Let's go do it in the States, you know, that kind of thing. So those are, those are ways that you can prove that if you really need to, I also recommend to marketers that they try and show that their competitors are winning with it, like, hey, competitor, x, did a bunch of this type of marketing. You know, they they did a bunch of guest contributions, look at their branded search traffic in Google Trends. You see these spikes. These were the days that they were featured. These are the days these they contributed this live stream, join this Twitter chat, you know, posted this thing on LinkedIn, contribute to this podcast, whatever, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. If it worked for them, it can work for us. A lot of people, a lot of executives in particular are convinced by competitive examples. And then your last question is around strategy for the long term. I recommend building a flywheel something that scales with decreasing friction that you can do over and over again, whatever it is, you know, whether that's pitching to be in other people's publications, or whether that's building up social media presence, or SEO or content marketing, your email newsletter, I don't care what you do, just do it with with one or two things in mind, either. Every time you do that thing, it gets a little bit easier for you and your return stay the same or it stays the same amount of difficulty for you to do that thing over and over again. But your returns from doing it go up each time. So blogging is usually you know, blogging and content creation. It's just as hard to produce a new blog post every time usually, right it's just as hard to produce a new podcast episode. And and yet the return can go up again and again and again. And then something like maybe, you know, some social media stuff, some advertising stuff, each time you do it, it gets easier, but the return stays consistent. Yeah,
Bill King 44:58
it kind of reminds me of like, Like earlier days in SEO when, like, you know, the one of these processes like weren't figured out. And so it was like, Damn, it's really hard to go build links, it's really hard to do all this stuff. And it's like, Yeah, but the people were seeing success have built foundations and engines around these processes, and now are leveraging it, you're on the forefront of something that used to be something, they just didn't have the tools on it. So like you as the founder, who's the expert in this, I see you putting a ton of effort into teaching people. This is how you build systems around this, this is how you do the testing. You're like, kind of re educating people on like some playbooks that kind of got lost for a lot of years because they used to just fit into these predisposed notions, right? So it's pretty interesting that you've, you found this, like, this kind of rediscovery of something that it seems obvious, but nobody has actually built a system in an engine around it. And so I think it's awesome, because not only is it supporting creators, like I want to see more individual people who are out there creating content and can support it, like some of the newsletters you see out there. Like when rich Minsky's like substack newsletter, like I pay for that, like, it's awesome. And getting access to that is incredibly valuable thing. But like, in order to do that, people just kind of don't know how to do it. So if you could give people like, who are listening right now are saying, amazing. I would love to do more of this. But it sounds hard. It's not scalable. Like what are some of the tips that you can get people to like, even get started? Because you know, this, sometimes just getting started and like working up the the engine or the process around it is the hardest part? What are some of the things you would give people like advice to bet to put some systems around this, if they wanted to try it?
Rand Fishkin 46:36
So first off, it is hard to do. And that is why it's a competitive advantage. Exactly. Right. Yeah. If it were, if it were as easy to invest in as throw money at Facebook, throw money at Google, everyone would do it. And the ROI, the return on investment for those who do it well would be lower right. And the return on investment for a lot of people would be middling or naughty, or non existent. So the way, the way that I recommend is essentially to find one to three things that you are good at, where you provide unique value, where you have passion and interest where your customers actually are, that that could be, hey, I am really good at building relationships with people who run email newsletters, and have podcasts and have webinar series and, you know, do video content, whatever and like I can be a good guest contributor to blogs and, and websites. And like I built up a brand around my contributions, I don't recommend the guest posting thing guest posting is I think just a tactic that's become mostly spam. Yep. But if you can become a known brand, and a writer, who is a consistent, regular guest contributor to many publications of note, that works pretty darn well. You know, I would recommend finding finding those elements for yourself. And then you essentially want to go discover your, your your audience's sources of interest, right and engagement. So that that usually falls into one of just a few categories. It is podcasts and YouTube. Right. So sort of video and audio might or might not be YouTube, maybe it's like Vimeo, maybe they have their own Wistia channel, whatever webinars and events that could be online or starting to come back conferences and events series. It could be social media sources. So they follow a lot of these people on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, whatever it is, it could be publications, online publications, like blogs and news websites and industry, sources of influence niche industry sources of influence, that that's kind of it right? those tend to be the big ones. Sometimes there's a you know, there's a few other interesting, unique ones, email newsletters are starting to get interesting for sure. So I think that that's a place to play, but you go find which one's your audience pays attention to. This is obviously what spark Toro does. So I'm a little biased and telling you this, but spark Toro isn't the only place where you can figure this out, you can survey your audience, you can interview them, you can look at the sources that have sent you traffic, you could go take those sources that sent you good traffic and plug them into similar web and see, you know what, who else sent you Who else visits those websites, and what other sites they visit and start to go figure it out from that. You could certainly just start doing broad searches in these sectors like oh, I'm just going to look for all the podcasts that's mentioned architecture. And let me see which ones have a lot of reviews and subscribers and, and then you you build a list of those publications, and you start practicing. Right, I would start practicing with sort of the middle to long tail. I wouldn't go after the podcast that has a million subscribers. I'd go after the one who has like a 100 I wouldn't go after the webinar that's going to get 10,000 people, I'd go after the webinar that's going to get 50. Right. And then you start pitching and refining and getting good, you start building up your sample repository of like, Guest appearances and contributions and, or, or you play the ad game. Right? You can go directly to podcasts and webinars and events, and email newsletters and etc, etc, etc, and sponsor them. So if organic contributions are not for you, guess what you can work around Facebook and Google's ad duopoly and go direct with your dollars to, and then you try and measure the impact. Hey, this email newsletter came out, did we get a lift in branded search? Did that lift in branded search continue for how long? How many people who came via that lift in branded search eventually converted? We can't measure it perfectly. But we can do a reasonable job right. We've recaptured some of their email addresses, we looked at that audience cohort over the next 12 months. Okay, what if we do more of them? If we do more of them? Do we get more of that activity? That that's how that's how you play this game.
Bill King 51:08
That's, that's I think that's a very simple way for people to kind of like the light bulb for people who are listening to understand what exactly you mean by all this stuff. Because I think a lot of people are like, how do I approach that problem? And I think you're making an easier way for people to say, okay, in order for me to influence brand, here's how I'll measure it. It's by direct brand searches increasing great, we have the criteria. Second is how do I influence that KPI, you can do tests, you can do audit, like platform hacking using spark Toro and finding what they care about. That's the basic synthesis of what we're saying. So I hope that and this is, you know, I
Rand Fishkin 51:45
think the one thing we missed in the conversation is probably my fault is you have to find the story and the message that resonates. Right, like Bill it. If you tell someone like, Oh, yeah, HubSpot, you should use it instead of WordPress. That's not the story. Right? That's not, that's not how you convince someone to what you do is you sell them on why, right? You, you talk about the things that, you know, resonate with your target audience that turn them into interested customers, and then you find ways to have that conversation paid or organic, through the places they listened to. But if you if you haven't found that story yet, you're gonna, you're gonna have to do that. First, you got to find that message that resonates. And my favorite way to do that is is surveys and interviews. Like I asked people, why did you buy spark Toro? What? How would you, you know, describe to somebody else, and I look for things in common like, oh, our customers who've been with us a long time and get a ton of value. They signed up for these reasons. And they describe it as this. And this is the problem they say it solves for them. That's how we need to describe it when we talk about it. Yep,
Bill King 52:55
yeah. And you can also use some like growth tactics to get to that, like moment of what it is that people respond to, like, you can do a light ad campaign and run an ad test in like, get the sample on a specific audience like, optimization. Yeah, exactly. You can send out emails and test out the subject, like whatever it is, Alright, we're getting towards time. I know you got other things to do. If people want to take what you just said, and start applying it to their business, like, Where is the place for them over there at spark? Toro? Do you have like some, like educational content where people can say, Okay, I want to start testing this out? Like, where's the best place for them to find out that?
Rand Fishkin 53:29
Yeah, yeah. So if you if you sign up for a free spark Toro account, start running some searches, you'll get like an email series that comes from me and, and sort of, you know, walk through a bunch of this stuff. We do have some of the stuff on the blog, too. So you can you can test it out and play with it there. Yeah, the weird part is there's there's not a lot of other people who are talking about or promoting this idea of sort of marketing through sources of influence. But you know, you if you if you go read a bunch of the 20th century publications on like, advertising, and Ogilvy and stuff, right, they'll they'll talk about this as being one of the big ways to go do it, you find your audience and find the messages that resonate. You tell those you tell that audience that message in those places, they pay attention? I hope that through folks like yourself and many other kind folks that we can, you know, kind of get this message out of like, hey, maybe don't give up entirely on brand marketing, because it really works. Yep.
Bill King 54:29
I mean, like, I've seen it work in other places, but the question was, like, how do you do it? That's always the big question. Like, how do you put the systems around it? I hope that everybody hears this and is pumped about it because I am and checks out, spark Toro. I just want to say thank you. We went through the whole gamut of things like about life, about like, you know, all the crazy things, and I really appreciate it and I hope that we have this conversation again in the year and spark tour is a billion dollar company and even if it isn't I know that things will be fine right rant
Rand Fishkin 55:03
about sparklers. It is not fun to to be a unicorn, right? slow, steady, long, profitable survival happy customers happy team. That's what we want to build. Yeah. And Bill It is an honor to get to talk to you and YouTube's conversation. I really appreciate how much transparency and authenticity you bring to these chats. It's it's great, man.
Bill King 55:27
Thanks core course I appreciate Rand. Alright buddy. Appreciate it. We will talk to you soon. Have a good weekend. Goodbye. Take care.