Podcasts about whiteboard fridays

Rand Fishkin is the CEO of SparkToro, former CEO of Moz and Godfather of all things SEO. Famous for his Whiteboard Fridays, yellow Pumas and dazzling facial hair, Rand has long been one of the most recognisable figures of the digital industry. Above all, however, he is a man admired for his uncompromising ethics and disarming honesty, so we were hugely excited to meet with him to discuss the limitations of nebulous brand values, why he is not interested in helping big business, the unsettling reason such a small number of big brands command so much media attention, why your brand purpose needn't seek to change the world.

"If I only knew then what I know now..." We've all wondered how we would do things differently if given the chance for a do-over. Here's how Rand Fishkin applied the lessons learned from the past to the launch of his new startup, SparkToro. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, SparkToro Founder Rand Fishkin talks about starting over. Rand rose to marketing stardom as the Founder and CEO of Moz, where he became known as one of the foremost experts on SEO in the world.  When he exited the company a few years ago and founded SparkToro, he reflected on the lessons learned from his experience at Moz to develop a fresh new approach to everything from raising investment funding, to speaking out about issues some might consider controversial and the development of a marketing strategy for his startup. Check out the full episode, or read the transcript below, for details. Resources from this episode: Visit the SparkToro website Get Rand's book Lost and Founder Follow Rand on Twitter Email Rand at rand@sparktoro.com Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I am your host Kathleen Booth. And this week I am incredibly excited to tell you that my guest is none other than Rand Fishkin. Welcome Rand. Rand (00:26): Thanks for having me, Kathleen. Great to be here Kathleen (00:28): To say that I'm excited is an understatement. I, this is, I'm just going to throw it out there and this is embarrassing, but I have had a marketing crush on you for a long time. Rand (00:39): Marketing crush. One of the most unusual types of crushing. Kathleen (00:42): I mean, you have to really be a marketing nerd to develop like marketing crushes and I truly have one. So I will just tell a brief story about how and why I developed this crush. And then I'm going to ask you to tell a little bit about yourself. So I, I started reading your content when you were at Moz and I always just loved, loved it for two reasons. One is, it was incredibly substantive. There's a lot of crappy content out there and I've been a marketer for a long time. And I don't like to waste my time with stuff that isn't going to teach me something new. Kathleen (01:17): And I just always felt like I learned something when I read your content, but I loved also your delivery and the fact that you let your personality shine through and you, weren't afraid to be kind of fun about it. And that's what first you know, turned me on to the content you were creating. But then I think what really cemented it was actually when you left Moz and you wrote your book Lost and Founder, I was a business owner for 11 years. I owned a digital marketing agency and I had what I would call a less than glorious exit. You know, there were a lot of failures along the way. I even actually toyed with writing a book. It's the first time I've ever said this to my podcast listeners. I toyed with writing a book called full frontal failure about like how important it is to just own it and put yourself out there and how, like being an entrepreneur is so lonely and nobody talks about the bruises and the, you know, the bad parts and I saw your book and I read it and I was like, Oh my God, this is what I'm talking about. Kathleen (02:18): So it really spoke to me and then you started SparkToro and I was so fascinated and impressed by how you built the audience first. And really again, what putting out incredibly substantive content, I loved everything you did with Jumpshot while it was still available. Anyway, so I mean, I could go on and on and on, but that was kind of my journey following you. And I've always just loved how unflinchingly, honest you are. And the most recent example of that is the amazing blog you put out about why you left Moz's board of directors and, and you've always been a champion of diversity, and I love that it made room for two women of to join the board. So I'm going to stop now, cause this is getting a little awkward. Rand (03:04): No, no. I mean I think what's, you know, what's wonderful, Kathleen is I always felt like the the contributions that I, that I wish, you know, resonated more in the world are exactly the ones you're talking about, right. Transparency around entrepreneurship and around the hard parts of broken relationships and broken systems and you know, work around diversity and equity and inclusion and those kinds of things. And yet, you know, mostly for better or worse, right? Mostly what I'm known for is like, Oh, you really helped me learn keyword research. Kathleen (03:45): Whiteboard Fridays. Rand (03:49): I'm, I'm very grateful and honored to have helped people with those things as well, of course, right. That, that built my career and, and helped build Moz. But I think there are, there are lots of places to get that information and to your point, it, it can be pretty lonely and challenging to find real people telling real stories about the painful and hard parts of work and life and and recognizing what opportunities they've had and which ones maybe they didn't earn. Which, which has certainly been the case with me too. So, Kathleen (04:29): Yeah. And I would add to that and helping other people perhaps avoid some of the pitfalls you did. I love that you shared your term sheet and lost and founder. You know, I, I actually sent that to a friend of mine right after I wrote it. He said he was starting to look at maybe taking on investment. He had a completely bootstrapped, very, very successful software company, but he didn't have a succession plan. He didn't have children who wanted to take over and he wanted to retire. And I said, I have a book, you have to read, read it before you take any investment. And I just think that's, so what a gift to be able to like, pass that on and allow people to, to avoid some of the things that you've had to encounter in your journey. So thank you for that. Rand (05:09): Oh my gosh. I'm honored. Thanks. Kathleen (05:11): Yeah. Well, the big reason other than the adulation I'm pouring on you, that I wanted to have you here was that I, the thing I think is so interesting and what makes me want to ask you like a thousand different questions is that you are somebody who has started and grown a very successful business in Moz and learned a lot along the way and SparkToro's a more recent journey. And you know, we always say like, Oh, if I had only known that, then what I know now, and you kind of had that opportunity a little bit with SparkToro. So that's really what I want to dig into as someone who has been there, done that and seen both the good and the bad of growth and what works with marketing and what doesn't when you decided to start SparkToro, can you, can we, maybe we could start by having you walk me through, what were the lessons you pulled from your earlier experiences to put together? What, in your mind was the plan that would work for a brand new company from a marketing standpoint? Because of course we talk about inbound marketing on this podcast. Rand (06:16): Yeah. let's see. I had a bunch of things that I really wanted to do very differently. And some of those, some of those, I kind of outlined at the end of Lost and Founder, but you know, I wanted to fund SparkToro differently. I knew that I wanted to raise investment because I didn't, you know, to your point around leaving a company and not having a financial exit, right. I didn't have a financial exit from Moz. And so, you know, I needed to I had a nice severance agreement, but otherwise right. Had to start getting income pretty darn fast. And I knew that I wanted to build a company that could be successful, successful, meaning for its employees and its customers and its shareholders be successful for all three of those groups without having to be hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Rand (07:16): And so the VC model just does not really allow for that, right. It is you know, Moz is a company that got to $50 million in recurring revenue and is considered kind of a, like frustrating mediocre plateau, you know, of a, of a company, because it just won't, it won't go away and die, which would be fine, right. In venture capital world. It's fine. If 98 out of a hundred companies that they invest in die or right. Or could it get to a fast growth rate and North of a hundred million dollars in revenue? That's fine, too. Everything in between is no good. Right. Kathleen (07:56): That's so funny because I feel like if you talk to any startup founder, well, I don't know any, but most 99% of startup founders would say $50 million company. Yeah. Sign me up. Like that sounds great. It's weird. Rand (08:09): And I think almost all of us, in fact, all of us should feel that way, but the venture capital asset class has biased a lot of people to think like, Oh yeah, that's, that's not good enough. And that's pretty, that's pretty dumb, right? Because what we want, what we want as a society and as people, and as human beings who are familiar with how capitalism and economics interact and politics, we should want lots of little companies, right? What makes a sector robust? What makes an economy vibrant is competition and lots of diversity of, of, you know, different companies owning parts of the market and innovating as a result of that. What you absolutely don't want. The last thing you want, if you want a healthy economy and a healthy politic and a healthy sort of income equality you want, you do not want Facebook owning 90% of social media, Google owning 95% of search Amazon owning, you know, whatever it is. Rand (09:16): Percent of e-commerce 50% of e-commerce, right? Those are negative externalities and the results of you know, a sort of system that gravitates toward the most powerful. And that is bad for everybody, right? Bad for entrepreneurs, bad for employees, bad for consumers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. So I knew that I wanted to build a company that could be successful without the forced venture type of outcome. I knew that I wanted to keep the team really small. I don't like building big teams. Casey doesn't either, both of us have worked at, you know, companies that are like at Moz when it was like 20 people and 25 people. That was great. 50 people. Okay. Still, all right. 75, Ooh. I'm not feeling as great about this hundred, 200 plus really I'm not a match for what the kind of working environment that I like. And so, yeah, that was another intentional decision to, to longterm. Keep the team small. We knew we wanted to build an audience before we launched a product. We knew we did not want to launch an MVP. We wanted to launch a very robust sort of impressive product. That would be remarkable to a lot of people. The first time they tried it. So all those things are very different. Kathleen (10:40): Yeah. Let's talk for a minute about building an audience before you build a product. That's something that I'm personally passionate about. I, I spent two years as head of marketing at IMPACT. And I, after I exited my agency, I always said I would never be in an agency again. But I stayed in IMPACT because that was Bob Ruffolo, the CEO, his vision was to build a media company around the agency. And I was like, that is interesting to me and that model was build the audience and then, and then we'll have products we can roll out to them. So it's not exactly what you're talking about, but it's that same mindset of, if you have a really passionate audience, it unlocks so much opportunity. I'm interested in knowing like, how did you go about that with SparkToro? I kind of saw it from a reader standpoint. Cause I think I've read every one of your blogs since the beginning, but maybe explain to my listeners a little bit about why you chose that approach and then how, how you approached it. Because I think a lot of people have a hard time understanding how exactly you would go about doing that. Rand (11:38): Yeah. Yeah. And I did it quite differently than with Moz, right? So Moz was like blog five nights a week you know, try and get traffic to all those posts, try and get good at SEO earn, you know, links to those posts. And then, you know, slowly build up this sort of content and SEO, flywheel and SparkToro was essentially built on the back of what I call social media marketing and digital PR. Right. So I did lots and lots of and continue to do lots and lots of podcasts and webinars and conferences and events and guest contributions and you know, get interviewed for other publications platforms, blogs, media channels, research reports get quoted in news, like all, all that kind of stuff. Right. Essentially leverage the power of other people's platforms because SparkToro, when it launched had none of its own and also leverage the social media platforms that I carried over from us. Rand (12:40): Right. So I didn't, I didn't get to carry it over, like my, you know, my content library and all the search traffic, but I got to bring with me, you know, some of that social media presence and, and that following on like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram that essentially kickstarted the SparkToro audience and the sort of what, what started as our beta invite list and then became our early access customer list. I think for any startup, for any business that's trying to build its audience and email addresses the most important thing to capture, you know, getting website visits, getting social followers yeah, those are okay. Not, not like a problem or anything, but an email address is so incredibly valuable. You can do so much with those direct communication, you know, broadcast communication. And of course all sorts of, you know, stuff on the ad platforms too. Rand (13:43): So we, over the course of about 18 months, which was essentially the development time, the R and D and testing and beta process for SparkToro we had about 15, 16,000 email subscribers who said like, I want to get notified at launch or like I'm interested in being a beta tester if you'll have us. And that helped us. And even though we launched in April of 2020, like the worst possible time in the last hundred years to launch a company we did manage to get our first, I think almost 150 ish customers via that, that list of folks. Right. Who said, like, I'm interested in what you're doing. And so that platform has done through, you know, social broadcasting. I published probably, I mean, you, you, you read them all. So I think over the course of 18 months, I don't think I published 30 blog posts even right. Fairly small limited number, but I probably did a hundred. Yeah. You know, interviews and conversations on other people's this sort of digital PR approach to things. And I would do that again. I think that's a, that's a great way to play it. I mean, you know, obviously we're having a podcast conversation. Kathleen (15:01): That's very meta. Rand (15:05): Yeah. Which is a little bit of the reason that's so valuable is because when you don't have an audience of your own finding the audiences that are, that potentially will resonate with you and leveraging them from other folks, platforms is a super valuable way to go. It also worked really well because we had that sort of free signup funnel, you know, before launch, it was give us your email address to get notified at launch. And after launch, it was tries searching SparkToro for free, and then, you know, register to create a forever free account. And that that funnel has also been very successful for us. So, you know, I'll be on a webinar, I'll be on a podcast. I'll, I'll do a video live stream or something I did when a couple of days ago. And you could see like the spike in Google analytics, right. Cause lots of people are paying attention to podcasts. We're having a conversation and they're like, Oh, let me go try this SparkToro thing. Right. So it works really well. As long as you've got your funnel optimized for that type of acquisition. Kathleen (16:05): It's interesting that you say, you know, you, you were successful because you essentially identified other people who had audiences and you were able to draft off of that a little bit. I'm going to put a pin in that. Cause then we're going to come back to what SparkToro does. Cause I feel like that's the perfect segue before we get there though. So I want to make sure I understand correctly. You had about an 18 month development period during which the product was not publicly launched. You mentioned you wrote 30, let's call it 30 blogs. In addition to doing your digital PR, I do want to add as the reader, that, that sounds simple, but it wasn't because these were not just opinion pieces or, you know, 10 ways you can write a great subject line. These were blogs that included a lot of original research that you did in conjunction with the Jumpshot data, as well as some real thought leadership around what was happening with Google and, and being able to get clicks in search results. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that because I do feel like that was one of the reasons that I avidly followed you, was the quality of the information in those blogs was not to be found anywhere else. I couldn't find that information elsewhere. Rand (17:17): No I didn't. Yeah. I think that's absolutely right. So, you know, part of my thesis around building a successful whole marketing flywheel is going and finding a way that you can contribute unique value that your audience cannot get elsewhere. Right. And you know, I've written about this and I talk about it all the time and when you know, startup founders and marketers ask me like, Oh, well, where should, where do you recommend that someone new to marketing start building their their funnel, their channels, their, their, their flywheel. My recommendation is always something you're passionate and interested about somewhere where your customers actually pay attention and somewhere where you can add unique value that no one else is providing. And so this was, you know, this was sort of my stab at what, what can I do uniquely? I had this relationship with Jumpshot. Rand (18:07): I had been using their their data at Moz. I've been really impressed by their click stream data quality. And so I continued that relationship sort of helping them by being a vocal supporter and proponent of their day of using their data. And in exchange, they gave me a bunch of, you know, research time. So they, you know, they had someone super friendly guy named Sean who worked with me on their, on the R and D side of Jumpshot. And I'd be like, Hey Sean, can you pull this data for me? And he'd pull it, send it over, I'd put it into Excel and play around with it and produce some nice looking charts and graphs and publish that and try and try and tease out the interesting bits of like, Oh, here's the distribution of where web traffic is coming from? Like, you know, more than two thirds of all web traffic is controlled by the alphabet corporation, right. Rand (19:00): Between Google and YouTube and Gmail and Google maps and yada yada, yada, that entity was referring more than two thirds of all web traffic to sort of the top. I think we pulled the top 20,000 or so websites. Right. so that feels a little monopoly. Yes. Great. It's sort of, yeah. Sorta dangerous. And then you look at, you know, web search as a whole, and of course, Google at the same time was trying to claim to who was at the attorneys general of the United States who were looking into it from, I think like 40 some odd States, quote your research as part of that. Right. So, you know Congress through what's his name? Congressman David Cellini I think is the, the representative who's looking into an a, on the house subcommittee for antitrust and, you know, they're, they're asking Google, all these questions and Google is giving them these clearly obviously BS lie responses. Rand (19:59): And so I'm able to call that out, right. I'm able to look at the data and be like, Nope, you're lying to Congress. I don't know if there's consequences for that. Apparently there's not, but yeah. Let's not go down that road right now. Cause I'm yeah. If you would like to take away women's rights, apparently it is totally cool to lie to Congress, but, you know but yeah, so being able to call out, you know, Sundar, Pichai, Google CEO, and say like, look, the thing, the thing that you told Congress under oath is provably false. Maybe, maybe Congress wants to do something about that. Right. You know, maybe that's going to come back to bite you in the butt. I hope it does. Cause I, you know, I don't think that's acceptable behavior. And I don't think any of us should, should, should accept that, but, but these are kinds of things, right. Rand (20:47): That it did, it did two things, right? One, it brought a lot of folks like yourself to SparkToro subscribing to the, the blog, paying attention to the publications. And it also helped create in my opinion, a very accurate narrative around how do we, as marketers break free from the duopoly of Facebook and Google, like, can we do other things, other marketing things, can we pay attention to other channels? Can we spend our dollars and time to go find other publications in people and sources of influence that reach our audiences and not exclusively rely on these untrustworthy and potentially risky partners. And that obviously serve SparkToro's interest as well, because fundamentally at the core of SparkToro is I'm trying to solve this problem. Right? The, the reason I created the company is because I'm frustrated with the Google Facebook duopoly. Over-Marketing Kathleen (21:51): Well, let's take a minute and actually have you explain what SparkToro does cause we kind of skip that part in the beginning and I'm gonna make sure we don't completely miss it. Rand (22:01): Yeah. Fair enough. I, I don't love to be self promotional, which is a little, Kathleen (22:06): But I mean it's germane given what we're talking about. I'm the same way, but yeah, Rand (22:09): Yeah. Right. Is that weird? You, you like, you should, that, that's the goal of marketing and you know, Kathleen (22:16): I always say marketers are terrible at marketing themselves. I'm I'm, I've been trying to get a personal website launched for the last two years. And I don't know if it'll ever go live because having to write my own website copy is like the most insane form of torture about myself. Rand (22:33): Open offer. I have been working with a wonderful technical writer. I'm a woman out of the UK on some of our case studies for SparkToro. And she is amazing. If you want someone to interview you and then turn that into your copy, Kathleen (22:47): I will get her name from you because I can't, I cannot write about myself. Rand (22:51): I love working with consultants and agencies. I know that's weird. Like startup founders is supposed to want to build that strength internally. I don't, that's one of the things I did at Moz that like, we always tried to hire instead of work with consultants and agencies. I think that was a really dumb move. At SparkToro I'm using tons of agencies anyway. You would ask, what does the company do? This is very fair. Right? So trying to solve this problem around Facebook and Google's do opoly over online marketing and advertising. And if you're in e-commerce Amazon sort of makes how to try opoly. Essentially what we realized is that the, the challenge comes in when folks are asked to understand where they can reach their audiences outside, they're outside those platforms. So like, Kathleen, if you and I start a new company to sell, I don't know bone broth, we're like, Oh yeah, let's, let's do the, the, the bone broth thing. Rand (23:53): And like, w we'll we'll we'll make lovely stuff and then we'll sell it online. And where do we reach people who are interested in things like, you know, paleo and keto diets, right? Cause that has a big overlap with it. And people who are big into like college enrich foods and people who are big into cooking. I don't know the result though. And where do we, where do we find those communities? Like, okay, I, I know a few recipe websites, but are those the right places or not? And so what you want to be able to do ideally is go find all the people online who are talking about whatever bone broth or collagen or keto diets, or I don't know, maybe you have a big affinity overlap with yoga instructors or something, right? You want to go to those communities, go find those people and then figure out, probably figure out like their home address so that you can break into their house and steal their phone and log into it, right. Rand (24:55): Get their unlock code, log in and then see all the things they were browsing and reading and watching and listening to and following. But of course that's illegal and super unethical. And so the next best thing to do, because surveys and interviews don't work for this. Like that's the way most marketers get this data. That's how I got it before. And it does not work because people just can't. It's not that they don't answer, honestly. It's just, they can't remember. You know, if you ask someone like, Hey, tell me a hundred people you follow on Twitter. What? No, I can't. How am I supposed to remember that? I can tell you maybe like five, Kathleen (25:34): Right? The classic story. When I used to own my agency, I had a client I worked with who said, Oh, we, we train all of our sales people to say, how did you hear about us? And one of the most common answers we get is, Oh, I saw your ad in the Washington post. And my client was like, I have literally never advertised in the Washington post. You know? Rand (25:51): And this, this speaks to another fundamental problem, which we found with a ton of you know, agencies and consultants who would work with businesses. And you, you go talk to the executive team and they'd be like, all right, I want you to get us placed in the wall street journal. Why the wall street journal, like we're selling bone broth here. I golf with our customers every weekend. They read the wall street journal. You get us covered in the wall street journal. Like, no, my friend, I look, you you're getting super biased responses. And like you and your golf buddies, I'm sure do read the wall street journal, but that is not sample size of three. Yeah. Right. And so apart from breaking into people's houses, what the other way to do that? We saw a few really, really smart businesses marketing teams and customer research teams who had their engineers basically take a list of their customer's email addresses, send them through a service like full contact or Clearbit and get all of their social accounts. Rand (26:54): So like, you know, here's Kathleen and here's Rand and here's, Rand's LinkedIn account. And here's his Facebook page of it's public. And here's his Instagram, if that's public and here's his Twitter and here's, Kathleen's, you know, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, Quora, Medium, blah, blah, blah. And then they would crawl those social URLs. If they're public and extract all the data, they could like everything that's publicly shared by that person online just like Google. And then they would aggregate it together and be like, okay, our customers follow these social sources. They listen to these podcasts, they're sharing these YouTube channels. They're sharing these articles and websites. Now we can put our data together and go advertise and market in smart ways in smart places. And Casey and I were like, Oh, that's genius. Kathleen (27:44): Amazing. What is incredible? And also, are you kidding? Rand (27:48): You custom built with like three engineers on your team over nine months, this process, just to get that one piece of data. No, that's unfair. We should build that for the whole internet. Right. Let's just build that for everybody. So now you can go to SparkToro and sort of instantly, you know, search for any audience and discover what they read, watch, listen to and follow Kathleen (28:11): It's awesome. And, and I can, I will add, as we go through this conversation, I am a customer currently. I was actually one of your beta users at a different company. So your funnel works because I am the living breathing example of it. But now going back to, so you had 18 months, you created this awesome content. One of the things that really struck me that you said was you partnered with Jumpshot and, you know, they have this data and they assigned a researcher to you. And, and the reason that struck me is that I imagine there are probably a lot of people listening, especially if there are people who are engaging in, in creating a startup who are saying, that's great, Rand Fishkin could do that because he's around Fishkin. And he worked at Moz and people are going to give him anything. Kathleen (28:57): But I think the truth is though that the, at least the, the lesson I extracted from what you said is about partnership. Like if you are somebody who doesn't have a huge following, if you are somebody who doesn't have access to a ton of proprietary data, who out there is in an adjacent space to you, is complimentary, who does. And I mean, I did this in my last job because I worked for a small cybersecurity startup that had like no web traffic. And we put on a, a four day virtual summit on IOT security and the partners we had were unbelievable. Nobody had heard of us, but they had all heard of our partners. And my whole deal was, I'm not going to charge you to be a sponsor. You're going to get a speaking slot. All I ask is that you promote this and am going to put in all the elbow grease, right? Kathleen (29:43): Like I'm going to do the marketing. I'm going to get like 500 people to come to this thing or whatever it was. And I think to me, like, I love that example of Jumpshot because you don't have to be a Rand Fishkin. I think you just have to understand what's in it for the other partner and the fact that you were able to shine a spotlight on their data and give them visibility. You know, there's, there's something for everyone out there in terms of figuring out the right partnerships. So I feel like that's a really valuable lesson. Rand (30:10): Yeah. I was going to say a lot of, a lot of amazing data is public or publicly available. I a guy just emailed me in the, in the SEO space. Jeff, what's his last name? Jeff Baker, I think. And he had put together this study where he analyzed a bunch of SEO tools. It just use their public, like, you know, he subscribed to the free trials or paid for a month of access or whatever. And then like did a big comparison and published it on. He pitched it to search engine land, which is a big publication in the, you know, search marketing world. They accepted it, you know, despite that he didn't, it's not like he had a big history with them. He didn't have a big following previously. He pitched it to them. They published it. He emailed me and was like, Hey, I think you'd be interested in this. Rand (30:51): Would you share it? I was like, yeah, this looks great. And did really nice work here. Right? It's small sample size, but excellent methodology. Sure. I'll share it with my audience. Right. I posted it to Twitter and LinkedIn, it got picked up by a bunch of more people like great, you know, he had no special, you know, relationship previously. I think there's opportunities like that to find unanswered or unasked questions in virtually any topic and field, and then expound on that take advantage of that, that opportunity in the market, underserved opportunity in the market to create unique value that your audience can't find elsewhere. And if you do that even just a few times, you know, I am not talking about publishing every night or every week, you can publish, you know, five times the year and be very successful with this kind of thing. If you become known for providing that source of information, data opinion you know, analysis that is unavailable elsewhere. Kathleen (32:00): Well, and I would also say having a point of view, which is something that you've done consistently on everything. Yep. And this is a, this is something I want to explore just for a minute, because you know, having, having owned an agency, I've talked to so many business owners and, and, you know, heads of marketing having worked at other agencies like hundreds, hundreds over the year, the years. And there's a lot of, I feel like this is the third rail for so many of them. Like there are a lot of people who just firmly believe you don't take a position on anything period. End of story. I am not one of them, I believe in taking positions. But then there's this whole other gray space in between of like how, how firmly can you plant your flag in one direction or the other? Kathleen (32:45): And a lot of business owners get very afraid of offending anyone and then kind of shying away from that. They become, I always refer to it as like the milk toast of marketing. You don't offend anybody, but nobody really likes you that much either. So I would love to hear your thoughts on, because I think I do think it takes guts. You know, and what you take a stand on has to match your personal passions and what you truly believe in because you are putting yourself out and taking risks. So maybe talk through a little bit as the owner of the business, how you thought about this and, and how in your head, you reconcile the risks of taking controversial positions with what you see as the, the kind of things you could gain out of it. Rand (33:27): Yeah. So let's see, I think about this in sort of three ways. I think about it from a an ethics and philosophy sort of perspective. Like, am I a good person? Am I doing good things for the world? Am I prioritizing the goodness that I do for the world over a personal greed, right. Making more money? And if the answer to that becomes no, then I am obviously the definition of evil, right? Evil is not like I'm going to go murder people. You know, like that that's almost never happens almost all evil, at least in our society exists because people trade the courage of doing what they know to be the right thing for money or power or influence. Right. And that there's, that's evil. So I think about it from that perspective and on that vector, this is just an incredibly easy answer, right? Rand (34:28): Like you, you should obviously do it the second way. I think about it is from a marketing and branding perspective, which is essentially what kind, what do I want to be known for recognized for appreciated for what kind of audience do I want to attract? Who do I want to you know, bring to my community and who would I like to keep out of my community? And from that perspective, it, it also is a relatively easy answer, right? Like, I, I want people I'm happy to have you know, what would have been classically called political disagreements on like, well, what should the tax code look like? Or how should we do zoning and you know, a neighborhood or well, what about, what about investments in whatever it is, you know, military versus environmental spending versus regulation on mining, like, okay, those are all political conversations that I think are, are reasonable. And then there are unreasonable political conversations like, well, should we allow blacks and Jewish people to live? That's not a political conversation. Right? I of, that's not, that's just human, right. Rand (35:42): That's not an open for debate conversation. Right. And I think unfortunately there has been a a rash of sort of, well, don't you want diversity of thought and diversity of thought just means a diversity of thought to me is like a look I'd like to be white supremacists and not get criticized for it. And so can we just agree to, let me be like that? No, we cannot agree on that. That is an untenable well position. We're not, I'm not okay with it, so right. I'm I am, I'm happy to turn away those audiences and build a, you know, build an audience around that. That resonates with my perspective. I also think about it from a third perspective, which is what does the structure of the business that I'm building forced me to accept and allow me to work with them. Rand (36:37): And so this was one of another really big reason. I didn't want to raise venture capital because yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. Right. Like in the venture backed world, you do not that you need to be milk toast, but you are absolutely pressured to build a giant market and building a giant market often means attempting to turn off almost no one. Yeah. Right. Attempting to be uncontroversial in a lot of ways. And and I don't think that's a healthy or right thing. I am. I mean, I'll definitely say, I think probably a lot of Americans and a lot of people all around the world who are facing sort of this nationalist, autocratic surge in politics that we've been seeing globally. Right. A lot of, a lot of those folks, a lot of folks are frustrated that like these sorts of issues have become so front of the top of mind for so many people all the time, I, I feel that frustration too, right? Rand (37:43): Like I'm, I am absolutely in the world of, gosh, I, you know, I really disliked a lot of previous administration's policies and like things in the United States, but I never felt like they were going to absolve us of our democracy. And now suddenly we have to worry about that. And that that's very frustrating. I don't like that. So I think that this these sort of three things have guided me towards an ability to say, okay, the structure of my business, the way that I want to attract customers and market to them and the audience that I want to build. And my philosophy and ethics are all in alignment. I don't know that every business owner gets to do that, but yeah, I hope I hope they do because they should. It's absolutely. It's, it's obviously the, the best way to go. I need more people Kathleen (38:38): That hits the nail on the head, because I know I've always said this, like when it comes to taking a position, there's not like any one position everybody should take. I mean, that's where the owner of the company, the founder has to kind of a very much align with them as a person and you are going to attract the people that are naturally attracted to that same position. And so it is, it is interesting, but I think it takes a lot of guts and I really commend you for it. And, and you're right. Yeah. I don't think you could do it if you had traditional investment in your company. Rand (39:09): Yeah. I mean, I certainly could, but it would put me in conflict with some of the goals and expectations. It could create strife and you know, who knows if I would be able to maintain that longterm. I think, you know, as a, as a key example, right. You can see with with Facebook and Zuckerberg, this sort of like and, and Larry and Sergei and Eric Schmidt and Sundar Pichai at Google, you can feel this sort of tension between like, they sort of know what the right thing to do is, but they're really scared about doing it because of fears of a combination of like political interference from, you know, people who's in who's interested is not, and market fears around, you know, where, what their users will do, what their customers will do, and the fact that they have to generate billions of extra dollars of revenue every quarter. Kathleen (40:07): Yeah. Yeah. It's a prison that they've grown into over time. I think. Rand (40:12): Yeah. I mean, we, we amplify that, like there's a lot of, there are a lot of people I'm sure there are people listening to this podcast right now who equate a person's worth with their productivity and their economic entrepreneurial contributions, right. And their financial success. That is a pretty terrible metric of a person's worth, right? Like we all know we should be measuring people's worth in the kindness that they bring to the world around them and the way they build relationships and how they and, and fundamentally all human beings are worth while. Right. All of us have, that's why human rights exists. And, and reducing that to this late stage capitalist model of like, you are how much money you make. That's, that's a bad way to go friends. Kathleen (41:08): And this is why you are widely known as the nicest guy in marketing. Is that, so that is the word on the street. I'm just gonna, Rand (41:16): Or a significant number of people on Twitter who disagree. Kathleen (41:19): Oh, well, there's a significant number of people on Twitter who disagree with everything. So so going back for a minute to, you made a point about digital PR and again, I'm going to just sort of put this through the filter of, there are probably a lot of people who think, Oh, well, that's easy for Rand Fishkin. Cause he's everybody knows who he is so he can get the interview. So any advice for founders who don't have the reputation as to how to go about doing that? Rand (41:47): Yeah. Yeah. So this is an area where I think before you start your company, it is hugely valuable to build up your expertise in a niche and to build up a network as well. Right? So that doesn't have to be through, you know, blogging. It could be through your social channels. It could be through video. It could be through hosting your own podcast. It could be through unique research that you do. It could be through one on one consulting and help that you give people whatever it is, right. But build your expertise and then use that expertise to build your network so that you are known for having that talent and being able to contribute in those ways. Once you do that, then it is so much easier to do all of the forms of digital PR and, and earning amplification getting attention. I cannot recommend it enough, but I think for whatever reason, there's this sort of sense of in the entrepreneurial world. Like I start my company, I build my product and then I figure out how to market it. No, Kathleen (42:52): Oh, backwards. Rand (42:55): That's not how you do it. Right. First, if you build up a community of people who care about the problem you're solving, even before you have the product that solves it, your launch and your growth will be so much easier. Right. So don't, you know, I'm not, I'm not saying this from the perspective of like, yes, I obviously have the privilege of, you know, the 20 years that I spent at Moz building up a, a reasonably sized following in this sort of niche of digital marketing world. But that, that can be a relatively easy, easily achieved, not necessarily the same degree, but easily started down the path of, and you don't need 15,000 people on your email list if you have 1500 or 150, that is still such a better starting point than zero. Yeah. Kathleen (43:41): Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So when you think about the future of SparkToro and where you're going to go from here, what how do you think you're going to grow it moving forward? Is it still the same strategy of digital PR and really great content? Or are you changing anything starting anything new? Rand (43:59): I, so I really, Kathleen, I really desperately want to invest in self hosted self created episodic content. Like what I did with whiteboard Friday at Moz, right? Like a series, probably something with video. Cause I'm reasonably good and experienced with video. Maybe involving a whiteboard too. I don't know. But the what's holding me back right now is, is time and bandwidth and investment dollars. Right. So I know that, you know, if I was going to do something like that, I'd probably want a video producer that's super challenging during COVID just, you know, by for one thing. And it's also a really hard to make the time available when it's just me and Casey working on SparkToro. So I think, you know, it might be next year when we're, you know, able to grow enough, to be able to bring in another hire or to invest in a, you know, whatever a content agency that helps me produce that that content with some consistency. Rand (45:00): But I, I do think that would be a very valuable thing. And even doing that something like once a month, you know, having a monthly episode of a, whatever, 15 to 30 minute video series on topics related to things that are of interest to our audience, that probably would do pretty well. So episodic content I think is, is very under invested in because it's hard to start. It's hard to get the motivation to keep going. It, it generally doesn't, you know, take off immediately. Like it's a, it's a slow burn, slow build process, but it is something we really want to invest in. Kathleen (45:37): I love that. Well, I will watch it when it starts tell me then I'm in the Rand super fan club clearly. Rand (45:47): What I love, I love what I love about it is like the, it almost works like the Netflix model, you know, where you, you see one episode of the show and you're like, Ooh, that was really good. I kind of want to binge watch all of them. Right. And if there's a big catalog, you just get all this engagement and yeah, I'd like that. I think that model has legs. I don't see a ton of people investing in it. So I'd like to do something like that. Nice. Kathleen (46:13): Well, we're going to come up to the top of the hour and I have a thousand more questions I want to ask, but we don't have time for it. So what I'm going to do is shift gears because there are two questions that I ask all of my guests at the end of every interview. And I don't want to end without having the opportunity to find out what you have to say about this. The first one is this podcast is all about inbound marketing. Is there a particular company or individual that today you think is really kind of setting the gold standard for what it means to be a great inbound marketer? Rand (46:47): Ooh. Okay. Kathleen (46:49): You can name more than one if you want to. Rand (46:51): Yeah. I mean, there's a bunch of folks who have been really impressing me lately. Let's see. So I don't know if you follow Melanie Deziel. She wrote a, she, yes. Yeah. Okay. So she writes, she just published, I think earlier this year Content Fuel Framework which I think, Hey, look at that. Hey Melanie, look, I'm promoting your book. No, I, I, I think, I think the world of Melanie she's extraordinary and she just she just keeps contributing in, in such a remarkable ways. I think she's keynoting content marketing world, the digital version, this week. Kathleen (47:30): Wow. That's awesome. Rand (47:31): Isn't it incredible. So amazing stuff from her. I've also been really impressed with, do you follow Nandini Jammi on Twitter? She's @nandoodles. Kathleen (47:43): I feel like I maybe even touched base with her about coming on the podcast. Rand (47:48): Oh, amazing. Yeah. So she is my God. She's so impressive. Like she's kind of my hero. She's she's been working on kind of a, a, a new version of brand safety and advert and helping advertisers save money and optimize their spend away from manipulative and sort of trolling. And I don't know what you would you call it, like sort of non-factual you know, Macedonian creatives. Kathleen (48:24): This is why, so I know her not through the podcast, but I'm in week four at a new job. And my company is, amongst other things, we solve for publishers. We have an anti malvertising software. This is why I know her. Rand (48:40): Got it right. She was one of the cofounders of Sleeping giants. Now she's the co founder of check my ads. And so they, you know, she, but she writes about and talks about all these topics on, you know, national media and and, and online. And she's just extraordinarily smart. I think she, she's a what I would say she's like a very sharp edged person on Twitter. And like many folks, right? She's, she's, she's much more sort of heartfelt and, and a little more, you know, leans into kindness off of Twitter, which, which we probably all do when we're not limited to 280 characters, but I think the world of her I'm super impressed with her work. Sarah Evans from, she's @PRSarahEvans on Twitter. She has a newsletter. She does amazing work in the PR field, especially for early stage companies. Super impressed with her. Yeah. So that's awesome. Kathleen (49:36): I love all of those and none of them have been on the podcast. So I'm going to have to reach out to them now and ask them to come on. Rand (49:41): I have so many recommendations for you Kathleen. Kathleen (49:46): We're going to talk. Second question is the biggest challenge I hear a lot of marketers say they experiences is that keeping up with the changing world of digital marketing is like drinking from a fire hose. How do you personally keep yourself educated, stay up to date on all of these changes? Rand (50:03): I built my own tool for it. I dunno. I dunno if you have checked out, but we have this thing called trending on SparkToro. It's just sparktoro.com/trending. And when you go there, it's basically like the 25 most diversely shared articles, every 12 hours by digital on Twitter. So we essentially just built a little system, you know, where people OAuth their account, their Twitter account, into the trending tool. It's free. It's not like part of our paid package or anything, but yeah, like, I don't know, seven or 800 marketers every day, read, trending, and check it out. And so, yeah, it's fun too cause people reply and be like, Oh, so cool. Our article was on trending today. Rand (50:51): You can get traffic from it. And you can, you can go there once a week or once a month and click the, like, what was the most shared article this month, this week, any given day. And that has been super useful. Like really it helps Casey and I just kind of stay on top of everything going on in digital marketing world. With very little effort, like we don't have to scroll through a bunch of feeds. We can just like, Oh, all right. That one looks interesting. That's cool. Kathleen (51:20): So it takes the firehose and turns it into a little garden hose for people. Rand (51:24): Exactly. Kathleen (51:25): I love that. Yeah. well we are now coming to the top of the hour and so unfortunately we're going to need to wrap it up. If people are listening and they have questions for you want to follow you or connect with you, learn more about SparkToro, what is the best way for them to do that? Rand (51:42): Sure. So my email address is rand@sparktoro.com. I'm pretty fast on email. I am most active on Twitter where I'm @Randfish. And if you are interested in trying SparkToro for free forever, it sparktoro.com. Kathleen (51:57): Awesome. All right, there, you have it. We, we could go for 10 hours, but we only had one. If you enjoyed this episode, as much as I did head to Apple podcasts or the platform or your choice, and I would love it, if you would leave the podcast a review because that's how other people find us. And if you know someone else who's a kick ass inbound marketing person, tweet me @workmommywork because I would love to interview them. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Rand. This was amazing. Rand (52:25): Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Kathleen.

SEO best practices are constantly changing as search engines fine tune the way they determine how to rank content. Here's what's working right now. This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, iPullRank founder Mike King shares the SEO strategies that he's using now to get results for his clients. From content and keyword strategies, to natural language generation, internal link generation and technical content optimization, Mike goes into detail with tips about how you can spot SEO issues that might be hurting your rankings, and what you can do to fix existing problems and proactively position your site to rank well. If you love getting into the technical weeds (like I do), this episode is for you! Resources from this episode: Visit the iPullRank website Check out Mike's movie Runtime Follow Mike on Twitter Read Mike's Medium article "This, too, shall pass" Transcript Kathleen (00:00): Welcome back to the inbound success podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week I am excited to welcome my guest Mike King, who is the managing director of iPullRank. Welcome Mike Mike (00:32): Kathleen. Thanks for having me. Kathleen (00:34): So excited for you to be here because I heard you speak back in, I think we decided it was 2016. I was attending Wistia Fest, which is not a thing anymore. It was an awesome annual conference that Wistia ran for a few years there. And I went to it and I, I saw you, you speak on the main stage about SEO. And I remember at the time thinking this guy is amazing. His talk is really good. It's packed with incredible substance, which you can't always say for main stage talks. And, and like, wow, I was just so impressed. And it was funny because recently when I was asking people in my network who I should interview for this podcast, your name came up and I kind of connected the dots. And I was like, that's that guy? So I'm so excited that like this has come full circle and now I get to meet you and, and pick your brain. Mike (01:40): Thanks for having me. And yeah, that was a great show. I really enjoyed Wista Fest. I really appreciate them as a company too. Like just their ethos. It kind of reminds me of early Moz. So yeah, I really love those guys. Kathleen (01:54): And they did a very Seinfeld-esque thing where they had a great conference that was growing and they were like, we're not going to do it anymore because we've realized it's not the right thing for us, but they definitely left while they were on top. So that was cool. So before we jump into all things SEO, can you maybe give my audience a little history on yourself and how you came to be doing what you're doing now? And also what iPullRank does. And I should note, as I say that, that this is basically the sixth anniversary of the company, so happy anniversary, that's a huge accomplishment. Mike (02:32): Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. I mean, it feels crazy to be here six years and, you know, just because of like the, the weight of everything that's happening in the world. So yeah, I'm very appreciative that we are still around. So yeah, me, my background, I did music for a living for a number of years, but, you know, before that, I grew up a very nerdy kid who learned to code from 12 and all this, and actually got into a bike accident. And and I didn't have health insurance cause you know, I was a rapper and this before Obamacare and I had to get a job to pay my medical bills. So first place to hire me was an SEO agency because of my, my technical skills. And then I ended up working at some bigger agencies and then some search focus firms. Mike (03:25): And then after that, I was just like, I'm pretty sure I can do this myself. And so six years ago I started the agency just put a, put like $5,000 in a bank account and never really looked back. And so what we do is, is digital marketing of course, with a primary focus on SEO and content strategy. And, you know, we work with a lot of clients and we really build that rapport and that trust. And then they allow us to do other things as well. So we've got some expertise in things like analytics and machine learning and so on. And there's just a lot of overlap between those that allows us to be very effective and the things that we do for our clients. Kathleen (04:03): I think it's interesting that you say, you know, your background, you were kind of nerdy and you learned to code because I feel like what marketing has evolved into these days, that is a super power, like people who know, who understand code and who, who are more data driven and, and kind of think like a programmer there's so much you can do with that knowledge, as opposed to the way marketing was taught way back when I studied marketing, which was like a much more about like strategy and creative. And it's just, it's a different discipline today. Mike (04:39): Yeah. And I think that we kind of exist at the confluence of like marketing technology, creative and like media, right? Like, so there's when I worked at some bigger ad agencies, everything was pretty rigid in kind of like what you just described. It's like, okay, you do that. We have a strategy, we do the creative, we run the media and that's it. But because with SEO specifically, you have to like fix the website, you end up like touching a lot of other different areas. And so that's why we ended up getting into machine learning and things like that because all of that supports what we're trying to do. And I kind of look at it as though, you know, the web is a program. You know, the search engine is a program. Your website is a program, that's an input for the search engines program. Mike (05:31): And so if you think of it as just like an ecosystem of program, you can make your website do anything and then you can make it ultimately, you know, work for these other programs. So if you think about something like personalization that is literally turning your marketing mix into a program that reacts to people's you know, their, their features and their behaviors. So yeah, I agree with you. It's definitely a superpower because if you think of, of everything in your marketing in that way, you understand that you just have so much control over what can be done. Kathleen (06:08): Yeah. It's amazing. And, and I know, you know, you have pretty deep SEO knowledge and experience. In fact, you were recently you were, you're going to be speaking at Moz con live, which of course, due to the crazy situation that we're in as a world, you presented at Moz con virtual you did something really different and creative that I want to maybe start with here. So can you talk a little bit about that? Cause it's so cool. Mike (06:38): Yeah. We made a movie. And the way I describe it as it's like Batman, the animated series meets the TV show, mr. Robot. And so they told me like the theme of Moz Con this year was going to be something like circus or carnival related. And I was like, all right, why don't we use a character that's like, kind of like the joker and make it like the three ring circus of technical SEO. And so you've got this protagonist who she's like this hacker type who is when you first meet her. She's just like doing all this SEO stuff, like super fast. So of course you got to present it in like a Hollywood way. Cause otherwise people would get bored. And then she runs into a problem. She meets me. I'm kinda like her coach. And so during the process of me coaching her to beat these different challenges, I'm also teaching the viewer different technical SEO tactics. Mike (07:32): So going into this, you know, like you said, I was excited to speak at Moz con live cause to me it's like the super bowl of SEO conferences. And when they said that they were going to go virtual at first, I was a bit disappointed because I really enjoy the, you know, speaking in front of 2000 people with my newest, coolest tactics and all of that. But then I realized like, no, this is an opportunity because not only is this virtual, but they want to do a prerecorded. And I'm like, alright, let's maximize this media, let's do a movie. And so my, the, the creative folks on my team were super excited about it. And we came up with a few different concepts of how we could do it. And then we just made it happen. You know, we, the, the music in the film is mostly in house. Mike (08:21): Like the person that is the voice actor for both the clown character and the woman, that's a protagonist also sings. The first song that you hear when the wind starts. Yes. Her name is Neferkara, she's our office manager. And she's so talented. And it was really cool to be able to like extract the talents of different people across the team. So like I wrote the script, I'm also a voice actor in it, our senior visual designer, she did the design concepts and then we've got designer who's also an animator who contributed. And then, because the timeline was so compressed, we also brought in a couple of freelancers to help us out. And it was just like, you know, one of those round the clock projects until we turned it in, like we literally turned it in. Like they said, we need it by 3:00 AM. At this point I had sent on the email at two 59 and 48 seconds. But yeah, we made it happen. It was a really fun project. Kathleen (09:23): So I just want to pause for a second. And for anybody who's listening, he made a movie. Like this wasn't just, let's film a video. This is like, you made a movie, you wrote a script, you brought in talent, it had a story. It was animated, which I think is, makes it even harder and more work. That just blew me away when I heard that. And when I saw it, I was blown away too, because it's really good. No, it's really good. And so where I, I'm sure the thing that everybody's thinking as I listened to this is wait, now I need to go online and see this movie. So where is this movie? Where does it live? Mike (10:05): Yeah. You can watch it on our website. You just go to i pull rank dot com slash runtime. Runtime is the name of the film. And it's right there and we watch it. Kathleen (10:16): So cool. So a lot of what that movie was about is what is working right now in SEO. And that's really what I wanted to talk to you about because, you know, SEO is one of those things that like, you can't learn it and be done, right. It's just constantly changing to the point where this week, you know, all I look online and, and I'm seeing like, Oh, there's a core algorithm update with Google. And then, and then two days later, it's no, they just made a mistake. And you know, there's all this craziness happening in the world of SEO, which is why it's so appropriate. So people who are listening to this can't see. But if you check out the show notes, you'll see it. Mike has this awesome zoom background, which is like, it looks like the house is on fire and the Simpsons is my best guess? Mike (11:01): It's from that meme with the dog where everything is on fire. And he's like, this is fine. Kathleen (11:05): Yeah. Everything's fine. It's fine. Literally the world is on fire. I feel like that's SEO half the time. Mike (11:12): Pretty much. Yeah. Kathleen (11:15): So, so yeah, I would love it. If you could just sort of like talk about with what you're seeing. I mean, most of the people listen to this podcast are pretty experienced and they understand content marketing and they get keyword optimization, but there's a whole nother level out there that I think unless you're a specialist, you, you just, you can't keep up with Mike (11:35): Yeah, that's the thing. So, I mean, SEO does change every day. There's algorithm updates regularly lately. And the thing is, people are very reactive to those algorithm updates. That's not the way you should approach it. Like if they roll out a new algorithm update, you got to wait a couple of weeks and see how that settles. Google is a software company, just like any other software company. And so when they roll things out, they may say, okay, we're going to roll out these five things at once. And they may say like, okay, four of those things didn't work. Let's pull those back. And only one of them stays there. So if you're jerking the wheel back and forth in reaction to them, you may end up being caught up in one of those things that wasn't actually a problem for your site. Mike (12:18): So I always tell my clients like, Hey, if you hear about an algorithm update, wait two weeks and then see where you fall from there. And the reality is that, you know, most of the things that you would want to do in reaction to one of those updates anyway, were things that we probably already told you you should do. Right? So it's not, it's not, it's very rare that it's a dramatic change to whatever you thought about doing or whatever your, no, you should have been doing it. And so it's all about prioritization from there, but to your point of it being another level, like most people that are doing content marketing don't necessarily know like how search engines think about content, right? So you may think like, okay, these are my target keywords. I got to talk about these keywords when I'm writing about a thing, that's the top level of it. Mike (13:12): So the way you got to think about it is that your keywords have keywords. And what I mean by that is that there's a context that's built based on what currently ranks for any given keyword. So as an example, if you rank for the, or you want to rank for the keyword basketball, and right now, the things that ranked for basketball also feature, you know, NBA bubble and LeBron James, and, you know, championship. Like if those words are featured on pages that rank, you also have to use those, those words on your page when you're trying to rank for basketball. And that's a simplified version of it. Like there are, you know, you gotta think about as far as like the topics being covered, the current, the people, places and things that are being covered. And we call this whole process of understanding that and using it technical content optimization, and it uses a lot of natural language processing to understand these concepts and so on. Mike (14:10): But the ultimate output from that is a very data-driven brief that we use to inform the content that we create. And these concepts are super powerful. You know, like again, most people are just being like, Hey, I want to rank for basketball. So I'm going to talk about basketball and use that word 49 times, but we will beat you because we're thinking about it the same way the search engine itself is, and we're looking at those topics and incorporating them so strategically, I would say that any content marketer that is, you know, optimizing for SEO, they should look into these concepts, more, plenty of tools out there for it. Search metrics, have a tool called content experience. SEMrush has a tool for optimization like this. There's a tool called phrase. So there's plenty of tools out there that do this level of analysis. Mike (15:02): And there's also a tool called content success by a company called Ryte. And what they do is like, as you're writing something, they'll say, here's my target keywords. It'll say, okay, well, use these words more, talk about these subjects more so you can be more optimized with respect to what search engines expect. So that's, that's one of the bigger ones that I would say that people that, you know, have knowledge about SEO don't know about this, and when they discover it, they see just like these small changes of how their writing would dramatically improve their rankings and so on. Kathleen (15:38): Yeah. It's interesting. Have you also heard, I keep hearing a lot of buzz about a newer tool called market muse. Have you heard about that? Mike (15:45): Yeah, they, yeah. Market Muse. They do a very similar thing. So they they've actually got a lot of different features and functionality to support this type of work. And they're also going into leveraging natural language generation pretty heavily as well. They do something that I can't remember the name of the product, but basically they'll give you a first draft of a piece of content based on what you're trying to target. And that type of technology has dramatically improved in the last couple of years, you know, or even the last few months. And that when people used to try to like generate content, they usually do, what's called content spinning. And that's where you kind of like take an existing article and just like change the words around like use synonyms and things like that. That's always been bad content. Now you have something called GPT two and also GPT three, which was put out by Elon Musk's company, open AI. And it's like really good at writing content. Like as long as you configure it, right. A human cannot tell the difference between a piece of content written by a human and written by this. Kathleen (16:59): It's funny that you say that because I just talked to somebody who rewrote 60% of his website using GPT three, cause he got access to the early beta and he was like, it's performing so much better. It did a better job of saying what we do than I could have done. And, and all these people in the Slack group I'm in, went to look at it and we were all like, that's amazing. It's crazy. It's like a little freaky though, because I don't know, like what does that mean for, for the future of us as marketers? Right. Mike (17:29): I think it means good things. You know, I think it frees us up to write content that's valuable and creative rather than like, imagine your eCommerce site. Right. And you're like, okay, to optimize these pages, I gotta write 200 words on every category page. No one wants to do, wants to do that. No one wants to write the copy that goes on product detail pages. They just want to be able to like take that data and turn it into something. Well, now you can't. And so it frees up actual copywriters and creative content marketers, and so on to think about how do we make interactive content? How do we write things that are like emotional and so on? Like, you know, I don't think we're going to get to a point in the near term that something like GPT three is going to be able to write conversion copy right now. I think he can give us some insights, but I don't think it's going to be able to very much be able to say like, okay, this certain type of person I want to write for them. Kathleen (18:30): Well, I think your key, you said the three key words, which was in the near term, I think eventually it'll figure it out, Mike (18:37): Right? Like we get to enough computing power and, and people are writing the right algorithms. Yes. You can retrain anything. But right now... Kathleen (18:45): Hopefully by that point you and I will be sitting on a beach somewhere and having a pina colada retired. Mike (18:54): But the other thing is that I think that we're going to get to a point where you can say, I want to rank for this keyword. And those types of tools would just ingest what ranks there and then use all those features that I'm talking about that we use as humans and it's going to write the perfectly optimized content for you. So then what is going to, what's gonna make, what's going to be differentiator between you and me and how we create the content. I think it's going to be those creative aspects that are going to be even more valuable. So GPT three does not replace your editorial team because you're still gonna need editors to edit whatever it spits out. And then you're going to need creative people that can create things that don't exist because GBT three learns from what does exist. Kathleen (19:41): Yeah. It's pretty crazy. But it also goes back to that point I was making earlier where, you know, programming and knowledge of code is a super power because you can't just like get access to GPT three and just like, it will know how to write your website. Like you had there's there's you have to understand how to leverage those tools. And there's a certain degree of technical sophistication required for that. At least at this stage, I'm sure at some point someone will build a software interface that will make it easy for anybody to do it, but that doesn't exist yet. Yeah. So that's pretty cool. So, all right. So we have number one, understanding the context around your SEO and that your keywords have keywords. I love that. What else do you got for us? Mike (20:23): Let's see. So I'm a strong believer that for, you know, the last like five or six years, SEO has become more content marketing. And a lot of people that do SEO don't know much about the technical side of it. And I don't think there's necessarily a problem with those people. I just think that the technical stuff needs to be brought back to the forefront because a lot of things have changed about the web in the last couple years. You know, JavaScript is more prominent in the way that search engines can understand that stuff and so on has changed. And so there's been a lot of new tactics that have popped up as a result of that. So one of which is AB testing specifically for SEO. So if you've got a big site and you're like, Hey, we're considering making this change before. Mike (21:20): It's like, well, we make the change and see what happens. Now you can do that as kind of like a step approach by taking a you know, representative sample of URLs, making that change there and validating or invalidating that hypothesis that this will work. And then once you see that it works, you can roll it out at scale. So I think that that's something that every SEO needs to know how to do, because that's a good way to avoid losing money. But you know, again, that goes back to the technical aspects because that is a very technical thing to do. Like you got to know more about CDNs and how sites are set up, or you got to know about Google tag manager and things like that. So my point here is that, you know, we're, we're still going through what I've, I've called for a number of years. Mike (22:07): Now, this technical SEO Renaissance where people that sit at the intersection of like code and, you know, creative marketing sophistication, and, you know, I guess SEO are able to really capitalize on things that others can. And I very much encourage, you know, SEO or content marketers to learn more about these things. So at least they can be aware and discuss with more technical people. Like how can we deploy this in such a way that what I'm doing as a content marketer works even better. So, you know, it used to be that you could just like build a site and put a bunch of great content on it. And the links that you would attract as a result of those, those that content would yield better rankings for you. But because Google has gotten more sophisticated and they have better understanding of the pages that are very rich in that type of content, you've got to understand things like server side rendering and dynamic rendering and, and Google's capabilities like where they end. So you can make sure that that content always has the best chance of ranking. Kathleen (23:22): How much do you think the average marketer needs to learn about technical SEO? Because like, I've always, you know, I've always kind of looked at the landscape of the marketing industry and there are some people who like all they do 24 seven, like their one job is they are a technical SEO expert and they do it really, really well. But I do think, I mean, it seems to me there is some baseline level of technical, technical SEO understanding that every marketer should have. I'm curious where you fall on that. Mike (23:53): Yeah. And I don't think that everyone needs to know how to do like 301 redirects and fix AC access files and so on and so forth. I think they just need to be exposed to those ideas. So if you're someone who read Moz's, you know, beginner's guide to SEO, I think that is a good base layer foundation of understanding technical SEO, because you're exposed to all those problems that you might have. And you can say like, Hey, I don't think the page that we just published is in our site map, that's important. Or I looked at, I looked at this plugin and it showed me that, you know, what is showing up for Google is not what I see in my browser. Like understanding those base level concepts is enough because you can find an awesome technical SEO, like you described, or even just an engineer themselves and be like, Hey, I'm at, I see these problems. I'm not the expert here, but can we look into this so that we can make sure that the content I'm creating is visible to Google? Kathleen (25:01): Yeah. That's kind of what I was going to say is it's like, you need to know enough to be able to recognize that you have a problem so that, you know, when to make that call, right. Like whether it's, I have a feeling, my images are too large. And so my page is loading too slowly or, you know, it might be, I need you know, more structured data on my website. I don't know how to do that, but I know what it is and that it needs to be done. Like there's sort of that level that I think is important for marketers to have. Mike (25:30): Yeah, absolutely. Cause you know, I mean, I personally come from a time back in my day where, you know, doing websites was you had one title and that was webmaster everything from master of all the web. Yeah. You were like a network administrator, you are front end and back end developer, you did Photoshop. Like you did everything. Right. So for me, like I want to know everything because I'm just used to that. But the modern web doesn't work that way. And so people have their, like their separation of concerns and that's fine. But I do believe that having like a general understanding of what someone like that technical SEO or engineer does just makes the end product even better. So I would recommend people just learn that foundational. Kathleen (26:23): Yeah. That's good advice. All right. So other things that you're seeing really kind of move the needle these days from an SEO standpoint. Mike (26:35): Yeah. so I mean, I'm, I'm starting to get super tactical. One of the things that we run with every single website that we pick up, especially because we work with mostly enterprise brands is they always have a bunch of external links pointing to pages that no longer exist. So the worst I've ever seen was, you know, one of the bigger sports organizations had 12 million links pointing to pages that 302 redirected. Now a Googler will tell you, there's no difference from how they handle 302s and 301s. I can definitively tell you that that is not true based on my experience. And this was a case where it was like one of the few things that we were able to push through in the organization was converting those 12 million, 302s and the 301s and their traffic shot up dramatically from organic search. So ever since then, I've, I've made sure that we always look for that. And every time you always find it, that's a problem. And one of the things that we do to make sure that that's not a problem moving forward is is with Ahrefs, which is one of the link index tools. They have a API end point for telling you what pages have broken links. So what you can do is set up a script. And again, this is something that you would work with your engineering team on. Kathleen (28:02): It all comes back to that coding. Mike (28:04): And I have a script that pings that API and says, all right, here's your list of broken links now automatically set up your 301 redirects from now. So then you don't have to worry about that as a problem. One issue though, is that Google and I believe this would be true. I don't have any definitive evidence of this, but it's something that I've like my hypothesis based on things that I've read in patents. They store copies of your site forever. So if you make a change to a page, they're able to look at what the previous version of that page is just like the way back machine. Yeah. And so if you implement a 301 redirect from one page to another, and those pages don't match up, like the content that used to be there, it doesn't match up with the content that is there. Mike (28:51): Now, they won't apply all the value of the link that you're redirecting. So the way that we've gotten around that, and again goes back to code. Google has something that they call the natural language processing API, which will allow you to determine the topics of pages. So what you would want to do is look for an old version of whatever page was there. Again, the way back machine is a good place for that and run it through that NLP API. And then they'll tell you all the topics and were called entities that were on that page. And then you run your other pages through that and find whatever page has the closest match topic. And then that's where you redirect it to. And then you're more likely to get more value out of that. Kathleen (29:39): That's cool. I did not know that. See, this is why I wanted to talk to you. I knew I was going to learn some new things. And by the way you were like, now we're getting tactical, I love this part of the conversation. So let's go into the tactical weeds. Do you guys have anything else like that? Mike (29:55): Absolutely. So another one that again, another commonplace thing that we see when we bring on clients, well, the first thing that we do is our SEO quick hits. So what are the things that are, you know, high value that we can do very quickly to show that, right? And another thing that we find, and this is especially important for big sites, but it's important for all types of sites. And there are links internally to pages that redirect. So 301 redirect is, you know, they're your last resort basically like when you have links pointing from an external site, it is difficult to reach out to a hundred or a thousand sites and say, Hey, can you update? So the 301 is the best thing you can do in that case, but within your own site, you have complete control. So you shouldn't be linking 301s because for every 301, there's a small loss of link equity. So again, whenever we get a site, we'll crawl a site and see what that internal linking structure looks like. And if there's a bunch of links to 301s, we fix those by just linking directly to the final destination URL. And then while I can see improvements from there, and the same is true of links to 404s. So those two things, and, and also with the external links, if you fix those three things, you will always see an improvement in organic search. Kathleen (31:17): That's awesome. And I feel like that's just like good website housekeeping. And it's funny you mentioned that because I was just doing that. We migrated the site at the company I work for, we migrated it from WordPress to HubSpot. And when we did that, it meant that everything basically was on one domain instead of sub domains. And, and it was like, it was a painful few days, but so necessary. I, I spent like three days going through old blogs, like fixing what were section headings and turning them into H2s changing the link so that they went to, they were like internal links and not external links that went to 301s, like the whole process was such a slog, but when it was done, I it's the same feeling I have like when I clean out the junk drawer in my kitchen. I'm like, Oh, I feel so good. Now it's all clean and perfect. Mike (32:06): Yeah. It's tedious, but it's work done. Kathleen (32:08): Yeah, it is. It is awesome. Well, I mean, I literally feel like I could sit here all day and talk to you about SEO and you're this endless fountain of, of incredibly useful knowledge, but we only have so much time. So shifting gears for a minute, I always ask people at the end of my interviews, two questions, the first of which is the podcast is all about inbound marketing and people who are doing it really well. Is there a particular company or individual that you can point to that you think is really setting the standard, what it means to be a great inbound marketer these days? Mike (32:43): Hmm. I mean, I feel like it's a cop out to mention Rand, but Rand is really good at it. Kathleen (32:49): You know what, you know what, I just want to say this came up once before. He's almost never mentioned, which blows my mind because he is the person that I would probably mention. So talk, discuss Rand. Mike (33:03): Rand is, he's like a inbound marketing machine, you know, like if you think back to the things that he was doing with Moz, where it was like he was blogging every night and he created the Fridays, Whiteboard Fridays, which he does, or he was doing every Friday. He had the beginner's guide to SEO, which he did the first iteration of, and then Brittany Mueller has taken over. So yeah, I think if, if you want to point to someone who is doing it and isn't a huge brand, like he's obviously, you know, a big influence in the space, you can watch him do it again right now with his new startup, which is Spark Toro. And so you see him blogging pretty regularly. He's putting out videos on like how to use the product. He is identifying new social channels that work for him. Mike (33:54): Cause you know, Twitter engagement is down pretty dramatically. Linkedin engagement is up and I'm starting to see him pop up there more. He's doing a ton of different, you know, podcasts and webinars and things. So I think Rand is a really good example of how to do it right. And how to really laser focus in on your audience and then like continually know what they need and put it in front of them. So then show like, Hey, I've also got this product. That's very valuable. And then the other thing is that, you know, he's always had like a very empathetic approach to everything that he's done. And what was really striking to me was that they have an email through Spark Toro that goes out right before they're going to charge you like a week or so. And it's like, Hey, you know, this is of course a subscription product, but we don't want to just like lock you into a subscription and make you forget like, Hey, your, your bill is coming up. If you want to cancel. That's okay. You're welcome to come back. So it's like proactively being like, Hey, we're going to bill you just like, no. And I really think that speaks to his approach and why it's a better approach than a lot of other things that you see out there. It's really good in that market. Kathleen (35:13): I could not agree more. And I, a couple things I would add to that. One is that, so it's Rand Fishkin, who was the founder of Moz, who now, as you've mentioned, founded this new company Spark Toro, which has an incredible product. That's a whole nother conversation, but the couple of things I've noticed about him, one, what he did that was so brilliant in Spark Toro is he started producing content before he had a product. Like I was following him before he ever launched that product. And he was building that audience. So that by the time the product was ready, you have this like ready-made group of people who were, who were waiting to just say yes to him, which is so smart. The other thing is that the content he creates is phenomenal. It's very, very high quality. So, you know, some people might hear, Oh, he blogs every day or however often he blogs and think, eh, you know, sure you could do that, but it's checking the box. Kathleen (36:04): He does not check the box. It's very, very good content. And he does a lot of research. Like that's why people follow him so much. And then the other thing that I just love about him, and I think this, you reminded me of this when you talked about the email about billing, is he's so transparent even about the negatives, like what people might perceive to be negatives. So he has this book he wrote called Lost and Founder, which is very transparent accounting of how he wound up leaving Moz and all the lessons he learned. All the mistakes that he says he made and what he would do differently. And it's just like, if you've ever owned a business, which you do, and I have, reading that book, it's so relatable and so refreshing to hear an entrepreneur talk about the things they didn't do right. Cause sometimes you feel like people only talk about their successes and that is so not a true picture of entrepreneurship. Mike (36:55): Yeah. I got an advanced copy of the book you know, at a, at a very challenging point in running my business and it was, and you know, I was like walking out the door to go on vacation. Like I can't see it anymore. And I took a copy of the book and it was so refreshing to read it and feel like, okay, there's someone else out there that understands this? Could you, you've got books. Like The Hard Thing About Hard Things by then, but that book is kind of BS. Cause it's like, Oh, everything got hard. And then I went and raised $60 million. Kathleen (37:27): Thank you for saying that. Cause I thought the same thing I'm like, yeah. Huh. Mike (37:31): Like that's not how this works in real life. So yeah, that book is definitely refreshing in that regard. Kathleen (37:37): Yeah. I totally agree with you. Well, and to add to that, you yourself have just published what I think is an absolutely beautiful article on medium about your experience as an entrepreneur and all the lessons that you had learned. It's like you basically wrote a letter to yourself sort of from the future about the things that you should be doing differently. And I just thought it was so spot on to, I mean, I just, I just know I related to it as somebody who has owned a business and specifically an agency and like been in those shoes. So I will put the link to that in the show notes because it's definitely something everybody should read. It's really great. All right, second question that I hear all the time from marketers is how do you keep up? Because marketing and specifically SEO, as we talked about changes so quickly, how do you personally make sure that you stay educated and kind of on the cutting edge of everything that's happening? Mike (38:31): Yes. Two things. One, following people that are not our industry. So I follow a lot of developers and things. And I just read voraciously, you know, I read all types of stuff and it's, it's very important to me to like have ideas that are not about my day to day. So then I can figure out ways to assimilate them to my day to day. And also it just like keeps me more broadly creative than if I'm just focused in on one thing. So yeah, it's just that, that curiosity and that thirst for knowledge and the way that I action that is my following more people and just keeping stuff coming at me. Kathleen (39:11): Awesome. I love it. Any one or two people you want to mention who you think are worth following? Mike (39:18): I'm putting you on the spot. Yeah, I can't really think of anybody. I would just say, you know, look at me on Twitter and look at who I follow. Kathleen (39:26): That's a good idea. There you go. Mike (39:27): The people, the people that you know are that will pop up first will be the people I've followed most recently. So yeah. Check those out. Kathleen (39:35): That's a good tip. All right. Well, Mike, I'm sure there are people listening who are like, I want to ask this guy a question. I definitely want to see his movie. I want to learn more about this company. What's the best way for them to connect with you online? Mike (39:49): Yeah. Just go to i pull rank dot com or just reach out to me on Twitter, which is just @ipullrank. Kathleen (39:54): Awesome. All right. Again, all of those links will be in the show notes. So head there to check those out. And in the meantime, if you enjoyed this episode, I would love it if you would head to Apple podcasts or the platform of your choice and leave the podcast, preferably a five star review. So that, that would help us get found by other listeners. And of course, if you know somebody else who's doing kick ass inbound marketing work, tweet me at @workmommywork because I would love to make them my next guest. That is it for this week. Thank you so much, Mike. This was a ton of fun. Mike (40:28): Thanks for having me.

Cyrus Shepard, Founder of Zyppy https://zyppy.com/ @CyrusShepard Often adorned in his signature fedora, Cyrus Shepard is one of the most recognizable faces in the SEO industry. Cyrus joined me for some day drinking on Suds & Search earlier this summer to talk about a bunch of topics in SEO. He is an SEO consultant at Moz and the owner of Zyppy, an SEO agency he founded in 2018. Cyrus formerly served as lead SEO at Moz and remains extremely active at Moz to this day. He frequently appears on Whiteboard Fridays and continues to publish blogs on the Moz site. In most years, Cyrus MCs or co-MCs Mozcon, the biggest conference in SEO. I start our conversation asking about Mozcon and the challenges of MCing a virtual event. What I like best about Cyrus is that he's an excellent teacher. Over the course of his career, he's written guides and done presentations that give SEOs really useful advice. Our conversation was no expectation. This interview is packed with actionable SEO tips. Grab something cold to drink and join me for a conversation with one of the most sought after SEO experts in the world Cyrus Shepard. We're going to talk about the best ways to perform keyword research, the proper way to prepare an SEO report, a novel approach to evaluating keyword rankings and I'm going to ask him about the time he wore a toupee for two weeks. Listen to Suds & Search Podcasts: Google Podcast: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9teXNvdW5kd2lzZS5jb20vcnNzLzE1OTUzNTQ3MjgwNTZz Apple Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/suds-search-interviews-todays-search-marketing-experts/id1526688363 Spotify Podcast: https://open.spotify.com/show/5ALxRpeDgIvg63bK6eoUTe SearchLab 1801 W Belle Plaine Suite 107 Chicago, IL 60613 (312) 256-1574 Catch SearchLab on these platforms: https://www.linkedin.com/company/searchlabdigital/ https://www.facebook.com/SearchLabDigital/ https://twitter.com/SearchLabAgency https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3kf-yP3bwhI6YvFFeKfegA Suds and Search Video Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSrUsIw8Jit8A6IwPpFw7IPKuuyGF0Ii Local Search Tuesday's Video Series https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqSrUsIw8JiuxY0eDWZr7Us_WgNNP-GDnSubscribe to Suds & Search | Interviews With Today's Search Marketing Experts on Soundwise

How can brands stand out and drive incredible customer loyalty? This week on The Inbound Success Podcast, Katie Martell talks about what it means to find your "exceptional truth" as a brand, and why that should be the guide for everything you do as a marketer. As Katie says, "the only thing in the middle of the road, is roadkill," and brands that fail to speak their truth get lost in the crowd. In our conversation, we wade into the controversial waters of whether and when brands should speak out and take a stand, and how to do it in a way that keeps you tightly aligned with your customers. Highlights from my conversation with Katie include: Katie says it is the job of the marketer to understand what is happening in the world. Marketing controls brand perception, and brand perception influences whether someone will buy from you. If you're in marketing, you have to understand where your brand fits in the world of your buyer's identity. When you know what your buyers care about, you can align that with your brand values, and you have an opportunity to take a position that will strengthen your place in the market. Katie says that brands that don't take a position get lost in a crowded marketplace and are not a part of the conversation. By taking a stance about what you believe, you can change the conversation in your market and, in doing so, become a market leader. Katie says brands need to find "exceptional truths" - little kernels of truth that get buyers to stop, pause, and rethink the way they see the world. When you've created that seed of doubt, buyers are open. They're leaning in, they're listening to what else you have to say. And that is when marketing works at its best. That's when they're more receptive to your pitch. This takes knowing buyers so well that you know where they're misinformed or what they don't know or what they don't understand so that you can challenge that. This approach is based on the concepts outlined in the book The Challenger Sale, which is typically used in the sales world but has a lot of application to marketing. Marketers need to be confident to convince the organizations they work for that this type of challenge is the right approach. This can be hard because marketing is a "voyeuristic" profession - meaning that everyone can "see" marketing so they think they are an expert and know how it should be done. As a marketer coming into a new company, its important to determine what your exceptional truth is and then find ways of rolling that out across your marketing in a way that makes your brand unique and different. Resources from this episode: Visit Katie's website Follow Katie on Twitter Connect with Katie on LinkedIn Listen to the podcast to hear Katie's take on why it is so important for brands to find their exceptional truths, and how to use that in your marketing to gain a competitive edge. Transcript Kathleen Booth (Host): Welcome back to the Inbound Success Podcast. I'm your host Kathleen Booth. And this week, my guest is Katie Martell, who is an on demand communications strategist based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Welcome Katie. Katie Martell (Guest): Hi Kathleen. Thank you so much for having me. Katie and Kathleen recording this episode. Kathleen: I am excited to have you here. For everyone listening, I heard Katie speak at Marketing Profs B2B Marketing Forum in, what was that? September or October? October of 2019. Back in the days when we still went to conferences in person. And I was just so blown away. She gave such an amazing talk on Rabble Rousers and it really not only struck me for the content of the talk, but also, you were just an amazing speaker. We can have a separate conversation about that. But anyway, that's why I wanted to have you on and share some of your amazing wisdom with everyone who's listening. So I could go on and on about you. but before I go down too much of a tangent, I would love it if you would explain what an on-demand communication strategist is and what you do, and also a little bit of your background and how you wound up doing that. About Katie Martell Katie: I would love to, and I have to start by saying thank you for the kind words about that talk last year. So the title of that talk was something like "Market Like a Rabble Rouser" and it came from this fascination I have with the world of politics and persuasion mixed with what I do as a marketer. So I've been a marketer in the B2B realm for 11 years now. And what's been interesting is, I've been marketing to marketers for the majority of my career. And that was first at a B2B data services company. We were an early sponsor of the Marketing Profs event. That was a startup that I grew up to acquisition. And then it was a PR firm, an analyst from my own MarTech startups. So I've kind of lived multiple lives, worn many different hats, but always marketing in this world of B2B tech, and MarTech specifically. So I've been a student of marketing in a time when it's completely changing from what was the kind of capital M marketing that we've known it to be. And so this talk was just honestly, they had asked me what I wanted to talk about, which is a moment in time where you go, "Oh, that's a dangerous, that's a dangerous ask of me." And I was honest. I said, "Let's talk about what's happening in the world of misinformation, persuasion." I'm talking Russian trolls, I'm talking campaign interference. I'm talking all the stuff that, you know, you read on the headlines, on whatever news outlet you choose to follow. And let's talk about what marketers can learn from it. So I get up on stage. I give this talk. It went over a little bit of time because that's, hello, it's me. Well, people were absolutely polarized in the audience. We had half the room, a little more than half, I will say, who were like, "Yeah, we got the takeaway. This is great. Thanks so much." And the other half that I just think, I don't know what, didn't go across as well for many, because I presented a lot of information about Russian trolls and some of the exact campaign ads they used and it was pretty incendiary stuff, but that was the point. I was trying to get people riled up and hey, achievement unlocked. Kathleen: But I also think, isn't that polarized response just such a perfect reflection of why that talk was needed in the first place? Katie: I hope so. I was encouraging folks to really, you know, rouse the rabble, you know,? Create emotional responses, shake things up, and that's kind of what I did on stage. Kathleen: Well, and to be clear, just to interject, your talk was not an inherently political talk in the sense that you weren't taking sides, you were presenting facts, right? And people can take that and do with it what they want, but I just wanted to put that out there. Marketers need to pay attention to what is happening in the world Katie: Well, I appreciate it. And let the lesson and the takeaway here be that we need, as marketers, to pay attention to what's happening in the world. I mean, the world around us, look at this past week and today's date. I don't know if you're going to give the date here. It's June 1st. So we are coming off of a weekend of civil unrest, Black Lives Matter protests. It is a time where, if you check social media, you're bombarded with hashtag activism and names and everybody from brands to individuals getting involved in this current conversation. We as marketers should be watching this and learning. Kathleen: Yes. I mean, actually, it's interesting that we are having this conversation today because I literally, just this morning, was online on social media and I saw one person saying something about how you have to speak out and you have to make your positions known. And another person's literally saying "I'm not going to support businesses that don't say anything." It's interesting. There's so many different sides to what's happening right now, but it really doesn't matter what you believe about the current situation. The fact is that the world around us is going to make judgments and make personal buying decisions. And they could be different ones, person to person, but they're going to be made based upon what you do and or do not say right now, right. So if you're not paying attention as a marketer, you're not doing your job Katie: Because this is our job. It is our job. Marketing controls brand perception, right? Brand perception is the reality for consumers. They make a decision about us before they engage with us by the way we act through marketing. That's the kind of inherent "duh" that we know about our jobs, but what that means at a time like this and what it started to mean over the past, I would say, decade or so as the world of social movements, identity, and brands and corporate world they've started to intersect. And so what that now means is, if you're in marketing, you have to understand where your brand fits in the world of your buyer's identity, whether they believe in the Black Lives Matter movements, right? These kinds of areas that were kind of gray areas before of, we don't want to get political. It's not appropriate for every brand to have a comment on what's happening. For example, we're talking about the treatment of African American individuals in the US, if your brand happens to live values that embrace diversity and inclusion and have large representation from that community and you take steps to make sure that their employee experience is great and yada, yada, yada, you might as well leverage that in marketing. You might as well show the world that you're on the same side as the giant movement that's now building in States and cities around the world. My God, this is a great opportunity for marketers, which I know sounds dirty to say out loud, but it's absolutely a time to take advantage of the global zeitgeist right now, and be part of the conversation, be part of the narrative, earn trust. It might help you differentiate. It is a way of saying to the world, "This is where we play, this is what we believe, this is who we are as a brand" that may go well beyond what your product or your service does. That is an opportunity. Kathleen: I agree with you. This is such an interesting conversation. In the past year, I had a conversation about this with someone who I've always considered to be very much a professional mentor/idol/role model. I've come to realize as I've gotten to know this person better that they feel very strongly about keeping all politics, all commentary on social issues, completely out of business. And that is their personal belief. It has come into focus, I think, with this last election cycle, and we had a big debate where the person was saying companies should never post about politics. I personally don't believe that, nor do I think every company should post about politics. People will disagree with me and that's fine, but I think that it all comes back to really understanding your brand. And in this case, especially for privately held companies, brands are very inextricably interwoven with the person that owns the company. This is going to come right down to the owners of the company and what they personally believe in. There are some companies where the person that owns it is never going to talk about politics because that person, as an individual, doesn't talk about politics even in social settings. But then you have companies, and there's some examples I'd love to cite, like Penzeys Spices. They are a spice company out of the Midwest. I had discovered them years ago because I was looking for some really niche spices. I like to cook and I had followed them, and then I started seeing this stuff on Facebook and they come out really, really strongly. This is a long story, but I got into a really big debate with this person. And the person was saying, you are going to lose customers and that's not good for your business. And you're going to alienate people and that's not good for your business. And my feeling is, that might be fine. If you're somebody who believes that you want to live your beliefs and you want your business to live those beliefs, you may lose customers, but you will probably have the ones you keep drive tremendous loyalty and you may gain as much, if not more, than you lose. So, diatribe over. You're the guest, not me! Katie: Oh, please! I love your point of view. I'm honored to be here because I think you are just brilliant and I love your work. You hit on something really polarizing right now which works at multiple levels. It also kind of hearkens back to the fundamental truth that not all marketing advice is going to apply to every company. And I feel like that's an important disclaimer, because we tend in marketing to say, brands should do this, they shouldn't do that. It's really, to your point, what is right for your business, your customers, and most importantly, your goals. Now that spice company, I don't know them, but I guarantee their goal is not to be the spice for everyone. It sounds like they know exactly who their buyer is and they know exactly what that buyer wants from them. They want a spice company that stands for more than spice. Great. Not all car companies are going to be a car for everybody, right? Just like with Patagonia, right? If you're buying a jacket to go skiing and they have a set of brand values that they know aligns with the subset of the total market, but that subset will be inherently loyal to them because Patagonia is an example of a brand that's been consistent against their values. For years, they've always been kind of counterintuitively anti consumption. They sell retail products. They need to drive consumption. Remember that famous ad that was like, "Don't buy this jacket"? You don't know it. You have to Google it. And it's Patagonia saying "We cause too much waste in our industry. We build products that may cost you a little more, but they're sustainably made and we want you to wear them for longer. We're going to help you repair them. We're going to give you some tools to make sure that you can make sure you get the most out of them. They're longer lasting." These are brand values that the buyer can relate to because the buyer also shares those values. So this really isn't a new marketing problem. We like to think it is because of social media and hashtag activism and all the propaganda that's happening. But this really isn't old school marketing best practice. Know your buyer, know where you fit in their world. Bill Bernbach has a great quote that's like, "If you stand for nothing, you'll find some people for you and some people against you. And if you stand for nothing, you'll find nobody for you and nobody against you." Which is worse for a marketer? To be completely out of the conversation or to be clear about where you sit and stand and who you're intended for? I love old time radio. There's a great Sirius XM station about the radio shows from the era of when that was entertainment. Somebody had this quote in the old timey accent. They were like, "The only thing you find in the middle of the road is roadkill my dear." Right now, today, brands do not have to have a comment on who should be president. That is politics. That is up to the individual. We each have a right to vote. Stay out of it unless you're relating to the campaign or you're lobbying for a certain group. Honestly, we need to have a say about issues that matter for our buyers. That's it. If it doesn't matter to your buyers, it shouldn't matter to you and your marketing. If you're a founder, I'm going to kind of disagree with you on this, but if you're a founder trying to lever your organization for your own political, personal views, that's a mistake because not everyone in your company is going to agree with you. Just like not every one of your buyers is going to agree with you. You have to find middle ground. That's what this is about. When you canvas for a political campaign and you're going door to door for, I don't know, Bernie Sanders, you don't open the door and knock on the door and say, let me tell you why you're wrong about insert political candidate. You find common ground. You say, what do we share? What are we aligned on? And how do we then move forward together? It's not about polarizing. It's about recruiting people to see the world the way you do. And those people likely bring the same set of values that you do. Kathleen: To be clear, I should say because I probably didn't explain this, I'm not advocating that businesses come out and say "Vote for so and so." I'm more coming out and saying that the context that came up when I talked about it with somebody, was that there were things happening politically that impacted other issues, whether that's the environment or social issues, et cetera, there was like a trickle down. And there were businesses that at the time were coming out and standing for or against those environmental or social issues. That was what sparked the conversation. It's very interesting to me because the things that swim in my brain when I get into this conversation are, there is an increasing amount of data that started to come out, particularly with younger generations, that they are actually much more likely to buy from businesses that are willing to say what they stand for. Again, I'm not talking about politics, I'm talking broadly about things that you stand for. And I loved your statement about the only thing in the middle of the road is roadkill. Because you know, you look at social activism and business today and you see companies like Tom's shoes, which stand for something, and Patagonia, which stands for something. These businesses are doing very, very well, particularly amongst a younger demographic. And so I think part of it is knowing who you sell to, as you said. Part of it is also recognizing that over time, things are going to change as this younger demographic ages and people follow them, who knows? I don't know what will happen with the next generation, but today's 20 year olds are going to be the 30 and 40 year olds of tomorrow and the next decade, et cetera. And so as our customer populations age, their preferences come with them as they do. It reminds me of the conversation that I've had with people about niching down as a business. I used to own a marketing agency and agencies talk about this all the time. Should we be the agency for everyone? Or should we declare that we are serving this one niche? And the fear that everybody always has when you get into that conversation is the fear of having to say "no" and turn people away. What most data shows, and most people find when they do it, is that when you niche down, you actually thrive. You make more money because you really find the right fit customer and they have a higher perception of you. They stick with you longer, et cetera. And so, there's an echo of that going through my head as I listened to us talk about this. Understanding your brand promise Katie: Absolutely. And again, it comes back to branding basics. You have to know the promise that you're going to make to anyone. That's what brand is. Brand is a promise. When they engage with you, they want to know that they're going to get something that you've promised them. You don't have to take a stance around hot button issues. Stay away from hot button issues, unless you're ready for that, unless that's really core to your business and your values and live throughout the organization. There are many examples, from our history, of B2B companies that stand for something in their industry. This is where this needs to be applied to B2B. B2B listeners might be thinking, this doesn't apply to me because I sell, I don't know, refrigeration. And I'm here to tell you, there is, within the world of refrigeration, a company called Stirling Ultracold, that was kind of a smaller player within this world of refrigeration. They would sell to pharmaceutical companies, and we're talking commercial grade keeping stuff cold, right? That's the extent of my knowledge, but they are ultra low temperature freezers that companies need. This is a great example of a company in a world that we would think, what is controversial about this space? The way they were disrupting their own industry was just with this idea of sustainability and energy costs and carbon footprint -- these things that their product enabled companies to decrease. They saved something like 70% of energy costs. Energy and sustainability and carbon footprint was never a consideration point for this buyer before. They just didn't look at it along that list of criteria that they're making their decision against. It didn't matter. Suddenly, here's a company who comes forward with a great PR program, really strong thought leadership, a leader who says, "I believe we have a responsibility to have a smaller carbon footprint. And guess what? My products enable you to have it." It suddenly changed the entire perimeter of an industry. That is the exact same advice that you and I are preaching right now. Just take a stance in what you believe in your own market. That's how you're going to change the conversation in market. That's how you're going to find buyers that are aligned with you around this value that now matters, and in a broader sense, you know, to the world, but really in this industry. And that's how you're going to differentiate and earn that trust, is when you declare "Here's what we're about." And you do that with confidence, because that allows the buyer to look at you and say, "I know exactly what I'm signing up for." Change the conversation in your industry Kathleen: I love that. And it reminds me of a talk that I heard by April Dunford. Katie: Love April Dunford, high five. Kathleen: I heard it at HubSpot's Inbound conference. April Dunford is an expert on positioning and she gives this talk about the four different ways you can approach positioning for your business. And I don't remember the nickname she has for it, but the example that she gives for one of the ways is about changing the conversation. And she talks about Tesla and how before Tesla, the leader in the electric car market was the Prius. And the whole conversation in electric cars was about battery life. How long could you drive before you needed to recharge? You could substitute refrigeration, but the bottom line is that, as a new entrant, if you think about coming into an established market, you're not going to have the first mover advantage. You're not creating a category per se. So how do you catapult yourself to the head of that market? You do it by changing the conversation. And so she talks about how Tesla came in and totally changed the conversation by saying, "Yeah, whatever. Battery life. Of course, we all have battery life. It's really all about how sexy is the design and how fast does the car go?" And now, you see a completely different dialogue happening in electric cars. You see Tesla as a front runner. And you see a lot more electric car manufacturers focusing on design and speed because they made it sexy. And that's the new conversation. And it sounds like that's exactly the same thing this refrigeration company did. Finding your "exceptional truth" Katie: They had to. And this is really where I think, and I know I'm a little biased. I come from a communications background. I've seen the power of content marketing and PR and all of that working in tandem to lift up brands. I mean, I'm a startup girl at heart. When you can't be the loudest voice in the room and you can't be the dominant player of which, by the way, there's only one in every industry. So the majority are not dominant players. All of us need to figure out how to get more strategic with the way we leverage PR and content. I think we've fallen into a bit of a trap, and I'll use that word gingerly because of the rise of inbound marketing, because of the rise of the tools and tech that allow us to publish a lot of content. What we've sacrificed are the kernels of little ideas that we're using to seed the market. We've become really good at publishing education tips and best practices, which are great and necessary. This podcast is a great example of one. The issue is that we've lost sight of what creates movements, what creates change in people. It's that little kernel of truth. I call them exceptional truths that get people to stop, you know, pump the brakes and go, "Wait a minute. I've been thinking about things all wrong." And when you get a person, a human being to stop and kind of pause, you've got them, that's it. When you've created that seed of doubt, the way that they saw the world may not be that capital T, truth, they're open. They're leaning in, they're listening to what else you have to say. And that is when marketing works at its best. That's when they're more receptive to your pitch, to your ideas and your path forward, but it takes knowing the buyers so well that you know where they're misinformed or what they don't know or what they don't understand so that you can challenge that. This is drawing from, everyone knows, The Challenger Sale. Applying The Challenger Sale to marketing Kathleen: I was just going to say, I used to be in sales and in the sales world, this is The Challenger Sale. Katie: Yes. I don't know what happened. I mean, how can The Challenger Sale extend its way to marketing? Not to say that it hasn't, but you know, is that a puppy? Kathleen: Yes. I have two who are laying at my feet and every now and then they lift their heads up and say, "Wait, there's a world out there!" They're getting excited about The Challenger Sale. Katie: They probably are just as confused as I am as to why The Challenger Sale didn't work its way into the world of PR and content marketing. To me, we need to challenge the way the buyer sees the world. I think very few brands do that. Kathleen: It's very true. I have worked in sales before and when I was in that job, I read The Challenger Sale. I used that approach in sales and it made me very successful. And you're spot on. That has so much applicability in marketing. I owned an agency for 11 years and I worked with a lot of different companies and there is, in marketing, this lemmings syndrome where we see the lemmings running ahead of us and we want to follow them off the cliff. If they're doing it, it must be the right thing to do. And it extends from everything, from messaging and the way we talk about what we do, to things like brand colors. I used to do websites for attorneys and they all wanted forest green and maroon and these very stodgy, old attorney colors. And I remember I had one client and I was like, "Let's just do something crazy." And they were like, "But nobody else did that." And I was like, "Precisely." There's this inclination both amongst marketers and within the business world to play within the lines. And I think that does hurt us. There's a sea of sameness out there and it's the content we create, it's the colors on our websites, it's the way we message. It's, you know, "Hey, you should or should not talk about this in our industry. We don't talk about that so I'm not going to" and I really think that that has tied our hands behind our backs, Katie: I have a lot of empathy. I mean, I'm a Pisces. I'm gonna look at every situation from both sides. And it's empath to the Nth degree over here. But I do have a lot of empathy for the modern marketer. And this comes from being one, but also selling and marketing to them for 10 years. I've been on the megaphone side of MarTech vendors back in the day when there was a hundred of us, marketing solutions in a world of digital marketing that was now starting to shift. Don't forget, 10 years ago, we now had to be good at becoming top ranked on Google. We now had to start using social media to develop a two way dialogue. We then had to automate everything. Then we had to start measuring everything. Now we're trying to leverage AI. It has moved at such a pace. It all happened in nine years. It has moved at such a pace that the marketer, the poor beleaguered marketing ops person and lead gen new roles that are being created because of this ecosystem in MarTech have inherent uncertainty, an inherent doubt and inherent fear because thinking about it, you and I work, we do marketing for a living. This is our income. How are we going to support our families? This is more than a job and an industry, buyers and marketing. I always had this kind of point of view when I was marketing to marketers. The buyer is more than a director of marketing at an IT company. They are an individual who's just trying to figure it out. And a brand like a HubSpot who comes out right at the turning point of an industry in flux to say, we have 10 ways that you can do this better. And five tips for this and seven strategies for success in that, that brand is going to win. That fearful buyer who's like, I just need a job, and I need to keep ahead. The biggest fear for the marketing buyer is falling behind. If we fall behind, we're no longer relevant. If we're no longer relevant, guess what? There's some 23 year old who's going to come up and take our spot because they know Tik Tok. I'm being hyperbolic, but that's constantly on our minds. And so we have to have empathy for that marketer who's like, we are going to do the things that work and copy the things that work because they work and we need a win. It's really those organizations that can allow their marketing team to do what they do best. That means leave them alone. Let them understand the buyer and the market, the way that they're supposed to. The challenge of being a marketer Katie: Somebody else said to me that marketing is a very voyeuristic profession. Everyone can see it. Unlike finance, unlike R&D or engineering, or even sales, to an extent. Everyone can see marketing. Everyone in a business thinks that they're an expert in marketing because they see marketing all day. They see billboards. They see ads. They feel like they know the science and the practice of marketing. That creates a lot of pressure on the marketing team to kind of do whatever everyone else thinks they should be doing. So we have a department that's not only fearful of falling behind, but also facing pressure from the business to do things that may be counterintuitive to what marketing should do. To your point, the lawyers with the maroon versus doing something different. The telling of exceptional truths, the disruption, the rabble rousing, it works on teams that allow marketers to operate with confidence and hire marketers that are allowing them the space to push back and say, "No, this is what marketing does. Our job is to understand who the buyer is, what they need and why we're uniquely fit that market. And that may look different than what you expect, but that's why you hired me." If you're listening to this and you're young and you love marketing, but you're unsure of the path ahead, that's the strongest thing I think you can do is to hone this sense of what marketing does for business and the sense of confidence that you need to bring to every meeting. You almost have to defend your job at every go, but the more you do it, the more resilient you get, the better you get at it. Kathleen: Well, I think it also points to what you should look for in a place of work. I completely agree with everything you just said, and, and I don't often talk about where I work now, but I'm at this company Attila Security, which is in cybersecurity. I knew I had landed in the right place and I had this sense when I interviewed. When I got into the company and I met with the CEO and I presented him with my 90 day plan and strategy, this was about 30 days in, he said, "Yeah, just do it. I hired you because you know what you're doing", you know? "You don't need my permission." And I was like, "Wow, what a great feeling". When you're interviewing, that's a thing to really watch for and to dig into and to see if that's a trait that you're going to find amongst the leadership team of the company that you go and work for. Katie: I wonder how to ask that in an interview. I'm a startup girl who's just been at companies where inherently, there's no one to tell me what to do. What would you ask if you were interviewing? Kathleen: As somebody who hires a lot, I've always been a big believer in behavioral based interview questions. Those are basically, you don't ask people "What would you do?", you ask, "What did you do?" And you ask people to talk about actual experiences. So I would probably ask something along the lines of, you know and it depends on if it's a company that's had marketers before. I would say, "Tell me about a time when a prior head of marketing proposed something that you weren't sure about or didn't necessarily agree with, what did you do?" And if they haven't had marketers before, if it's a startup, I would probably ask them something about being at a prior company. Or I would say, "Tell me about a time the head of sales proposed something," or somebody else in the company presuming that there are other leaders. Because I think past behavior speaks better than hypotheticals. Everybody can come up with the right answer, hypothetically. For what it's worth, that's kind of the approach that I've taken, but some of it is also just a feeling that you get from talking with people. And I think that's something that you hone over time as you work in more places and you're exposed to more different types of people. Standing out in a world saturated with marketing content Kathleen: But one of the things I was thinking about as you were talking, you mentioned HubSpot and how they solve for something very specific at a time when it was a real need. And, it got me kind of circling back to a little bit of what we started with here, which is this need to tell exceptional truths and should companies go there? Should they not go there? One of the things that I started thinking about as you were talking is that the interesting unique moment that we live in right now is that content marketing has become so commonplace. And there are so many companies creating content that there is this saturation. There's just a lot out there. There's a lot of blogs. There's a lot of newsletters. There's a lot of video out there. We're all busy. Nobody has the time to read all of it. So how do you choose what you're going to consume? And this applies to anybody, any buyer out there has this dilemma whether they're actively searching for something or not. And it seems to me that one of the factors that's really affecting what works now in marketing is that one of the most effective ways to stand out amongst a very saturated world of content is to have a point of view. We've talked a lot about in the marketing world about authenticity, and a hot topic lately has been email newsletters and getting really real in your email newsletters and showing personality and individuality, even in company newsletters. And the reason that that's working so well, I believe, is because it is different. Just the fact that it's different and just the fact that it doesn't sound like everybody else, people gravitate to that. So I'd love to know kind of what you think about that. Katie: I a hundred percent agree. Mic drop because you said it yourself. This idea that everyone is a publisher, everyone can produce content - it makes it more important than ever to do what we were suggesting 20 minutes ago, which is to know exactly who you're talking to, what they value, the ways you share that value and just be confident that that is the niche that you have decided to own. You cannot be all things to all people. I'm hearkening back to my marketing undergraduate. This was a long time ago now. It's the one thing I learned. This is not new, right? We just have a proliferation of information now available to us. It makes it more important than ever to have not only a clear point of view, but first a very clear intended audience. You cannot be the solution, in your case, for all CIOs. You're the solution for all CIOs that are extremely risk averse or something. There's something about your buyers that you are really aligned to. Well, many companies fail to understand what that niche looks like and where that alignment happens. I have a newsletter. I call it the "World's best newsletter." I started it when I started consulting, frankly, honestly, truthfully as a way of reminding the world that I wasn't gone. I was leaving a startup at that time that I had co-founded and I was the public face of, and I needed a way to take that momentum and transfer it into my consulting, speaking, whatever it is that I do, practice. So I started a newsletter. I had no intentions with it. I had no best practices around it. I probably break every rule in the book. People love it. And what I do with it is what I've done from day one. I collect the things that hook my attention throughout the week, that I believe more people need to read, and I send it out weekly. And I say, "Here's what is important to me". I am a human being with other other interests outside of marketing. I'm a fierce advocate for feminism, and I'm a fierce advocate for human rights. And I have a documentary coming out about the intersection of marketing and social movements. And all of that is jam packed into this little newsletter, seven links and a quote of the week. It makes no sense. If you were to tell me, as a marketing consultant, it wouldn't make any sense. There's a lot of marketing stuff in there, but sometimes there's a really important New York Times cover story about racism in America. It works for me because people know what they want from me. It's neat. I have been really reticent to do that. It feels wrong. It goes against everything I'm taught as an email marketer, but you know what? It performs. It might be because it's real. I think it's because it's honestly what people want from me. I think that's really what matters. And they come back to it week after week because it serves that need and it's fresh. They don't get it from other people. Finding your unique brand voice Katie: If you're a business, trying to figure out what to send in your newsletter, think about that first. Just like a product and the way that you develop a product, look at the consideration set. What are you up against? What are the other emails looking like from your competitors or even others in the same general industry? Do something different. Maybe it's just doing it shorter. Maybe it's coming at it from a totally different angle, right? Content and thought leadership should be treated like product development. Not only is it something new and different, but it's like this muscle that you have to work on. You've gotta be really good at coming up with the processes to uncover those insights from inside the business to say, "This is what we believe, what we know." And then really, really good at delivering that in a fresh and new way. That's what makes the job of content fun and hard. But it's not what most people do. Most people opt for the easy ebook, the 10 tips, best practices. And then they wonder why isn't this performing? How to find your exceptional truth Kathleen: So true. So if somebody is listening and they're a marketer, who's come into a company and they're thinking about - and let's talk about startups because I think that's the best way to illustrate how this works. If you come into a startup as the first head of marketing, it is a green field, right? You get to shape the clay. If you're coming into an established company, that's a different story, but it's still, the challenge is still there. It's just how you navigate. It might be different. Putting on my hat as head of marketing at a startup, I'm coming in, it's the first time we're going to have a marketing strategy. If I wanted to come in and really mine the richness of what you talk about as exceptional truths, what is the playbook for doing that? Katie: Well, good luck finding a playbook. The place to start, in my mind, is to ask yourself the question, just like you would if you were starting a movement and activism, "What is the change that you want to see in market?" What is that end result that you're hoping to get people to switch? It could just be, you want them to choose you instead of a competitor. Great. So what does that mean? What belief do you need to shift? What misinformation do you have to correct? What new insight, to quote the Challenger model, do you have to bring to the table to get them to see the world a bit differently? I'll give you an example from HubSpot again, because I think HubSpot did this so well. And it's an example that we can all relate to. Your podcast. The name is a great example of the power of what they were able to do, how this came to market. I hate to say it, they were just a blogging, search engine optimization, social media, and eventually an email tool mixed into one. They were not the only player doing this at the time. However, they thought about this brilliantly. They needed people to see the way they wanted things to change. They were advocating for us to use these tools instead of cold calling, billboards, et cetera. The way that they got people to make that shift was to create a dichotomy or create an enemy. I actually presented on this at their conference two years ago, create an enemy. You can find it on their inbound library. And they saw the world in two ways. There's inbound and outbound. There's the new way forward, Mrs. Beleaguered marketer, who doesn't want to lose her job, the way that you're not going to fall to irrelevancy. And there's the old way that you're going to fall behind if you keep using it. They were extremely polarizing with this perspective. It was just one article that started all of this, right? They were like, "Here's the way forward. This inbound and outbound. One is good. One is bad. White, black, right? Devil, whatever it is." And 80% of the market was like, "Oh man, there's no way I'm going to go there." They were pissed because HubSpot is over here, challenging the existing status quo, the way they sell. 20% saw that and went, "Oh, you're right. Let's opt into this." And so HubSpot now of course built an entire movement around inbound marketing. It is a practice. It is a job title. It is a category in and of itself because they started with that kernel of what changes do we need to create. We need to figure out a way to get people to move from A to B, to go from what they think they know to what we want to advocate for. And then they brilliantly built a movement around it. And they did so with a ton of content ideas, a community of people that were proud to call themselves inbound marketers and this kind of repetitive, consistent muscle they use to push the movement forward, now extending years and a $125 million IPO and19,000 people at their conference. It just has ballooned because they were smart about this kernel of truth that they've never deviated from. Are you going to be the next HubSpot? No. This is right place, right time, right conditions and market. But, you do have to find and be willing to provoke, with purpose, the existing beliefs of buyers, and then be consistent about that. If you can do that, your startup is going to make a lot of noise. You're going to punch well above your weight. Even if you don't have the biggest budget, you're going to make waves and you have to be willing to do that or risk falling into irrelevance. Kathleen: It's a really incredible story, that story of HubSpot and it's certainly not the only one. You have Mark Benioff at Salesforce who famously picketed outside with a sign that had a big red X through the word software. And he similarly named the enemy and it was software and his solution was move to the cloud, software as a service. That is an approach that absolutely works. I would say to go out and read The Challenger Sale. So many sales people read it, but so few marketers do, and I love that you brought it up in this conversation. Kathleen's two questions Kathleen: We are going to run out of time soon so I want to make sure I ask you my questions. I could talk to you forever. My first question that I always ask my guests is of course, this podcast is all about inbound marketing, and is there a particular company or individual that you think is just a great example of how to do inbound marketing in today's world? Katie: I think Rand Fishkin and his work with Moz and now with SparkToro which he actually details really well in a book called Lost and Founder. It's a great book. If you're thinking of starting a company read this first. It may scare you away, but he always was the example for me of somebody who was again, challenging white hat versus black hat, giving away all the industry secrets to become a trusted industry resource, to ranked the highest, but it really builds trust in his company and him as an individual. And I think it's just his consistency, Whiteboard Fridays, he was writing five days a week. That's still the best example of consistent inbound marketing. Kathleen: You know, it's so funny because I could not agree with you more. He is somebody that I have followed really closely. I read his book. I read everything he does at SparkToro. I follow him religiously. And I have been very surprised. I think you might be the first person that has mentioned his name. I ask this question of every single guest and that has baffled me because I think he's amazing. So I'm really happy that you said that. Katie: He's also the world's nicest guy. We both spoke at the SpiceWorld conference in, I want to say, 2018. Both of us were speaking in the marketing track and I'm sitting here backstage fan girling because I love him. Who hasn't read his stuff? He comes off stage with the mustache. He's the nicest guy. He's just, you know, very down to earth. And I think that's the secret. He wrote this content to truly help others. And I think that genuine purpose behind the content is really what sets him apart. More people should have mentioned him. Kathleen: Yes. I agree. And maybe they will now because we'll turn them on to his stuff. All right. Second question. You mentioned earlier that the biggest fear of marketers is falling behind. And the second question I always ask everybody is exactly that. It's like every marketer I talk to says, they feel like they're drinking from a fire hose. There's too much to keep up with. So how do you personally stay up to date and keep yourself educated? Katie: 100% LinkedIn. I'm a huge advocate for using LinkedIn appropriately. I have a big following there, so I love it as a platform, but I also use it to consume a lot of best practices. I ask a lot of questions. I'm constantly looking through comments. It's become a resource that just, I find invaluable. It's a mess. Sometimes now people take advantage of LinkedIn to post some really nonsense stuff, but at the core of it, it's there. Can I give two answers? There's a lot of Slack communities that are being built around specific topic areas. I'm not in marketing, but I'm part of a great marketing operations Slack group that keeps me knowing what's going on. I work with a lot of MarTech vendors still as an amplifier now and a community evangelist. I need to know what's going on. And so even on that, in the practice, these Slack groups are hidden sources of insight. So if there's not a Slack group for your world, your community, build it, invite people. They will come. This is not field of dreams. They're desperate to connect, one-On-one, sometimes outside of the loud world that is LinkedIn. Kathleen: That group would not happen to be the MoPro's would it? Katie: No, but now I want to join that one. Kathleen: I'll send you a link. A guy I interviewed once for this podcast has a marketing operations Slack group that I am in. But I agree with you. I have a ton of Slack groups and there's only like, let's say, two or three of them that I'm religious about checking every day. They're just insanely valuable. But, love all of those suggestions. Again, I could talk to you all day long, but we're not going to do that because we both have other things we need to do. Great conversation. I'm sure people will have opinions, both ways, about what we said here today, but that's okay. That's why these conversations are important to have. If you listened and you disagree, tweet me. I would love to hear your perspective. This is all about learning and listening and I'd love to hear what more folks think about this. How to connect with Katie Kathleen: But Katie, if somebody wants to learn more about you or connect with you online, what is the best way for them to do that? Katie: They can Google me. I'm very, very, very Google-able. You can LinkedIn me. You can find my website. I'm just, I'm everywhere. Kathleen, congratulations on over 150 episodes of this. This is a service to the community and we are grateful for it and it's a lot of work to put these together. So thank you for doing what you do and thank you for having me, really. Kathleen: Well, I very much appreciate it. And I will put links to your personal website as well as your LinkedIn in the show notes. So head there if you want to connect with Katie, and she does produce some amazing stuff, so I highly recommend it. You know what to do next... Kathleen: If you're listening and you liked what you heard today, or you just felt like you learned something new, I would love it if you would leave the podcast a five star review on Apple podcasts, because that is how other people learn about the podcast. And finally, if you know somebody else who's doing amazing inbound marketing work, please tweet me @workmommywork, because I would love to make them my next guest. That's it for this week. Thank you so much, Katie. Katie: Thank you, Kathleen. Everyone take care.

Rand Fishkin is the co-founder and CEO of SparkToro. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his blogging, videos, speaking, and his book, Lost and Founder. A global speaker, he donates his speaker fees to Give Directly. Popular for his insightful blog posts and Whiteboard Fridays, he most recently founded SparkToro, a startup focused on audience and influencer intelligence. Open and honest about his mental health, Rand has written and shared his story around depression and how it affected his life and he's sharing his insights in this interview about how influencer marketing can work for your company - and it's not as hard as you might think. 

Knowing how to properly manage SEO is crucial to your small business’s digital marketing strategy. It determines how easy you are to find on search engines like Google, and how effective your online marketing will be. On today’s show, we’re excited to welcome Rand Fishkin, one of the leading global authorities on SEO and inbound marketing. Rand is the founder and former CEO of Moz, as well as an author and an Inc 500 honoree five years running. He has accumulated an impressive 500,000 plus social media followers and his wildly popular web series Whiteboard Fridays has amassed millions of views. https://www.myasbn.com/small-business/marketing/rand-fishkin-expert-seo-content-marketing-tactics-small-business/

The first episode talks about how we should be creating video content for all the parts of the sales funnel. We invited Tyler Lessard, the VP of Marketing at Vidyard.  Here are the links to some of the things we spoke about on the podcast. Chalk TalksInbound marketing conferenceBrian Hallingan, CEO of Hubspot Transcript of the podcast episode Tyler Lessard: 50% of your content should be video. Peter: This is Time for Marketing. The marketing podcast that will tell you everything you've missed when you didn't attend the marketing conference. Peter: Hi, my name is Peter, and I welcome you to the very first episode of the Time for Marketing podcast. I'm a marketing person myself. I have worked in SEO, I've worked in content marketing, I've worked in email marketing, and because of that, I've been to a lot of marketing conferences. I've learned a lot there, but sadly, I was never able to go to all of the conferences I wanted to go to. That means, of course, I've missed a lot of interesting talks, and probably, so have you. The idea of what we're doing here is, we want to change that. We don't want to miss any interesting talks on any conference anymore. So, what I do in this podcast is I look for interesting people who speak at marketing conferences, I invite them and allow them to sum up their presentations in five minutes. I give them questions about what they told us, and release all that in a podcast. This is the very first episode. We have a lot of excellent guests lined up. We have a really nice guest for the first episode, and because I don't want you to miss any of the future guests, I will ask you to subscribe. You can, of course, go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts, and if you like the podcast, of course after you finish listening to it, go to iTunes and rate and comment on the podcast. All right, our first guest is-- Tyler: Tyler Lessard. Peter: He works at-- Tyler: I'm the VP marketing here at Vidyard. The company is a video platform for businesses. Peter: We found him as a speaker at the content marketing conference. The title of his presentation was, "The art of creating customer experiences with sight, sound, and motion." I would like to ask you to sum up your speech in the next five minutes, and give us the most important points that you gave at the conference. Tyler: Yes, absolutely. I think tied to what I said with regards to video being a more and more important part of the customer life cycle, I think most of us will agree that today's audiences expect richer or more personalized, more interesting communications. Whether it's your top of funnel marketing activities, whether it's how they're learning about your products and your company, how they're interacting with sales representatives, or even existing customers, how they're being educated on how to use your products or services, or how they're being communicated with by their account reps. Gone are the days of long text-based emails, and white papers, and things like that, and more and more it's about short-form blog content, short-form infographics, and of course, rich media and video content. One of the things that I'm really passionate about is this notion of, in this new world, as we're changing the ways we communicate with prospects and with customers, video becomes a very important part to how we build relationships and how we create really, what I call remarkable experiences with individuals. Again, as they more and more go into self-service mode, right? If you think back 10, 15 years, most B2B companies were about, there was more a direct sales process. You would have that face time with clients, and you'd build relationships as you go through that buyer's journey, but these days, that's getting less and less. People are more expecting to consume content on their own time and in their own digital worlds. As marketing and sales leaders, we need to be providing them with the kind of content that still builds relationships, that still wows them, that still builds an emotional connection to our brand. As I hinted at earlier, I don't think that text-based emails and white papers are enough to do that. Really, the impetus here is to challenge us as marketers to think about, how do we build relationships with prospects throughout the buyer's journey? How do we use things like video to connect in more emotional and engaging ways? As we look at, some of the big takeaways are, as you think about your top of funnel marketing. We've all thought about, we have some brand videos and things like that, but how does video become even a more important part of storytelling at that top of the funnel? Storytelling is really important to engage people, again, in a more emotional and personal conversation. How do we use visual content to relate to our potential buyers, to show them that we understand the pains that they're feeling, maybe to make them laugh, maybe to inspire them? Video is an incredible medium to do those kinds of things at the top of the funnel. Then as we move through the buyer's journey, again, video, I think is, this is where video is really an unsung hero, is how we educate and nurture our potential buyers. Again, I think this is really takeaway number two is, we need to be more prescriptive in how we think about using video during those education phases. When somebody is on our website, how are we showcasing our products or services to them? Are we forcing them to read big long documents? Or are we giving them a great two-minute explainer that shows them exactly what it is we do? As they're learning about different topics, we use a lot of video content now on our blogs to, again, showcase different ideas or to have real people explaining solutions or problems or ideas as opposed to just having the written word. It's not to say it should be all video, but it's a very important thing to start complimenting your other forms of content with video. I'll give you one really specific example that we do. We have a series called Chalk Talks. If you search for Vidyard and Chalk Talks, you'll find it. We have about 20 different Chalk Talk episodes, which are each about five to eight minutes in length. They go very specific on a certain topic in the world of video. For our customers, we have Chalk Talk episodes on how to build a video strategy, or how to use video in sales, or how to use video for SEO purposes. Each one is a very specific topic that gives you a lot of great detailed information, but it's delivered in a way that's very visual, very personal. It's usually myself on camera, and I find that people, we often get great feedback where they love that kind of content because they can relate to it. Again, because we're presenting it in a visual and audible way, it's more memorable, it's easier to learn than them reading long-form content. I think the big thing there, again, is just thinking about, how do we educate our buyers through rich media content, through video? As it can be a much more engaging and memorable content format. I think you've got those two things to think about. Video as top of funnel to really engage and build an emotional connection, video in mid-funnel to educate buyers and be more memorable in how you're doing that. Finally, the last takeaway is, how are our sales teams engaging these potential buyers? Are they doing it in a way that's really going to stand out and make people want to do business with the company? That's where empowering our sales teams with some of these great video content or, and this might seem frightening to some of you, but empowering our sales reps to record and send their own custom videos. Whether they're webcam videos where they're talking directly to a prospect, screen capture videos where they're, again, walking through a topic or showcasing what your products or services can do. I think these are things that we need to think a lot more about and, again, making sure our sales reps are also set up to be able to deliver the kinds of experiences that people expect today. I think those are really the main emphasis points that we're talking about, and it's this idea of creating a more immersive customer experience throughout that buyer's journey, using a rich range of on-demand video content, or one-to-one video messages. Peter: All right. These were very, very specific takeaways to how to use video in marketing. It seems that what you're saying is making companies open up a bit more. You said that salespeople should be able to generate video, and then use that video in their sales process when they feel that that should be positive for the sales process. This sort of sounds scary on one side, but on the other side, we've learned that the Internet makes companies open up, allows different channels and different people within the companies to start sending out the messages. This is yet another step that sounds really interesting, right? Tyler: I think you're absolutely right. You nailed it that there's a big trend here towards transparency, and towards rehumanizing the marketing and sales of businesses. I think honestly, over the last five to 10 years, a lot of the market, I think, went too far the other way. We over digitized and we started hiding behind our websites and our keyboards and our emails and things like that. I think a lot of businesses lost that personal and human touch out to their base. I think the younger generation, and the millennials, are really forcing that back because they're growing up on these social networks, and they're expecting more authentic, genuine human-to-human communication. They're recording and sending videos every day. The number of videos, there's over 10 billion videos played every single day on Snapchat, and over 100 million hours of video played back every day on Facebook. It's shaping this generation to be expecting authentic, simple video content as part of how they communicate. I think for some companies, it's a bit of a challenge because you need to think about, how am I going to create this content as a marketing organization? Or am I comfortable allowing my sales reps to record short videos and send them out? I think on the flip side, you have to think about the opportunity that exists there, and the ability for your people to tell better stories, to be more open and transparent, and to focus on, again, building human relationships. I think that's what will help a lot of companies stand out from the competition. Peter: As we probably prepare workflows and rules on how everyone within the company can be a voice on social media, if we prepare stuff like that for video creation, then probably we can create video that would be okay with everyone, or if everyone within the company creates that, we just need to have rules and ideas on how to do that. Right? Tyler: Yes. I absolutely, I think so. For more and more companies, what we're seeing, whether they're small 10-person companies, or large enterprises, is that more and more, they're building in some kind of video production capabilities or expertise in-house within the company. We heard this not long ago from-- actually, I recall a great quote from the CEO of HubSpot, Brian Halligan. HubSpot is a company that they were really the godfathers of inbound marketing, if you will, and they really built an industry around the idea of the blog. About a year and a half ago, at inbound, Brian Halligan got on stage and said, "50% of your content should be video." He said very directly, "Stop hiring bloggers, start hiring producers." This really struck me because this was an audience of 15,000 people who for the past five years had been told, "Hire bloggers, be great writers." Now, they're being told, "You need to hire producers." It wasn't to say get rid of the bloggers, and I think more and more, it's about, you need people with those skill sets who are comfortable and are able to create quick video content, and can help people in the organization. I think even if it's somebody in your company who, maybe that's not their primary role, but there's somebody who's adept at creating and editing video, a lot of people can do it now. Especially the younger generation. It amazes me even what my children and what my younger relatives can do. You just got to ask around. I think that's important to helping this sort of thing. Because if your CEO may not be comfortable recording something and putting it on social, but if there's somebody within the organization who can quickly get them on camera, do some really quick edits, and post it as a thought leadership video, do it. Get out there. Get those messages out, and find people in your company who can help with basic capture and editing. As long as the content is valuable, if it's authentic, and if it has pretty good audio, it could work, and you don't need to worry about high production value and spending $10,000 on an agency, just to record a quick two-minute educational piece of content. Peter: Yes. What's interesting with using video on different channels, or maybe let's call it using video content on different channels is what I've seen from Moz doing-- a lot of people know their Whiteboard Fridays, their weekly videos. Of course, the transcriptions of those videos for a long time. We started right now is also producing a podcast or having audio recordings, and then posting them on SoundCloud, I believe. Directly from video, what they do is they create one message, but then they are able to send that message out on three different channels. Video, text, and audio. Of course, that then helps on social media, that can help on organic traffic with a lot of text. Of course, podcasts have, especially in the US, a big number of listeners. Probably, video as a starting point for content is very good, and then you should spread it out. Tyler: Yes, I love that. We actually took some of the inspiration for our own Chalk Talks video series from Whiteboard Fridays. We said, "Well, let's take a chalkboard approach instead of a whiteboard approach for a different visual style." We took a great cue from Rand Fishkin and the Moz folks that I think showed you can create that kind of content on high frequency, on a weekly basis, without having to put a ton of additional effort into it. If you come up with a repeatable format, and exactly to your point, Peter, when we create those Chalk Talk videos, every one of those goes out as a blog post, and we transcribe the audio, and the transcription becomes a part of that. They go into our main resource center on our website, where again, the transcriptions are a part of the page, so people searching for it can find them, and then our sales team uses those a ton. When they're out there engaging with customers or prospects, they'll use those videos as a way to answer commonly asked questions or to help educate or nurture them through the buyer's journey. There's lots of different ways in which that-- and then as well as you mentioned, the audio can be repurposed as podcasts. It really is a great way to create a hub and spoke model of content. Let's start with a video, and then you can branch off and turn it into a variety of different related assets. It's a great approach. Peter: All right. Video cannot only be used as a top of funnel channel, but should be used as the middle and the bottom of the funnel channel, and video should probably use-- the content that is produced for video should probably be used in different channels, and this will make the production not cheaper, but because the content that is made once will be used on different channels, the production will be-- Tyler: Generate more return and more value from those pieces of content. You nailed it. Absolutely, Peter, you nailed it. Peter: Yes. Are those the four takeaways that we can leave our listeners with? Tyler: I think you've got it. I think that was a great summary, and yes. All of that comes down to, just do it. Don't be afraid to start thinking about how to create more video content. A big underpinning idea to make all those things happen is, try to do more content in-house. Don't think that every time you want to create a video, you need to go out to an expensive agency. Yes, just do it on top of those big four ideas. I think we got it, Peter. Peter: All right. Thank you very much, Tyler. This was an excellent recap of why and how to use video. This was a very nice first episode of the podcast. You were an excellent guest, and I'm really glad we did that. Have a great day in Canada, nice wishes from Slovenia. This is it. Tyler: Thank you very much, and thank you for having me. Happy marketing, everyone. All the best. Peter: This was episode number one. Nothing else to add at the end of the podcast than go and subscribe, go and rate, go and vote, go and listen. Have a great day.

In this Marketing Over Coffee: Learn about Startup Life, Moz, Sparktoro and more! Direct Link to File Brought to you by our sponsors: LinkedIn and Optimove Book available April 24th, the man behind Whiteboard Fridays, from Moz and now at Sparktoro Going from $5M to $45M Working with Brad Feld and Jerry Colonna “When you’re […] The post Lost and Founder by Rand Fishkin appeared first on Marketing Over Coffee Marketing Podcast.

Seeking out experiences where you’re forced to learn, will create so many of these moments, where you’re going to look at things completely differently when you’re done. In this episode of Nat Chat, I’m joined by Cory Ames. Cory was going to college at Gonzaga University where he took on an apprenticeship with a marketing agency. His apprenticeship with that agency quickly earned him bigger and bigger roles, where within a couple of years, he was actually running the whole company while being only 23 years old. He figured everything out on his own through various projects in college and by reaching out to others to learn from them. Currently, Cory’s out of that marketing agency and is working on some of his own projects. Cory’s a great model to follow for those wanting to pursue their goals, those wanting to self-educate themselves, and for those wanting to get into entrepreneurial pursuits. We cover a wide range of topics, including: Deconstructing skills and learning them on your own Self-educating yourself outside of the college environment His journey towards running a multi-million dollar company at only 23 years old Finding the confidence to leave school and pursue your goals Promoting your skillset and finding clients for your skills Resources and books that have helped Cory out along the way And much more. Please enjoy, and reach out to Cory on Twitter! If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more on self-education, be sure to check out my episode with Zak Slayback and my episode with Zen Dude Fitness, where we go in-depth on self-educating yourself and much more. You’ll also like my episode with Tasha Meys, where we discuss finding mentors, promoting your skillset, and more. Find Cory Online: Twitter Linkedin Website Cory’s Newsletter Mentioned in the show: Gonzaga University [0:28] Nat’s Wiki Strategy article [1:30] WordPress [8:26] Firegang [12:09] Moz’s Whiteboard Fridays [15:50] Clickminded Course [16:30] Backlinko Blog [16:32] Airbnb [16:58] Zoom [27:55] Books mentioned: The 4-Hour Chef [3:25] (Nat’s Notes) The Art of Learning [3:30] (Nat's Notes) The 4-Hour Workweek [8:08] (Nat’s Notes) Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got [36:55] People mentioned: Casey Ames [1:35] Taylor Pearson [1:36] (Nat Chat episode with Taylor) Tim Ferriss [3:25] Josh Waitzkin [3:30] Tommy Griffith [16:30] Blake Boles [23:19] (Nat Chat episode with Blake) Jay Abraham [37:10] 1:17 - Intro to Cory, what he’s currently working on, and him detailing his experience with learning photography. Also, how he’s finding people to reach out to, to learn photography. 5:34 - Some of the things Cory’s learned so far with photography within the deconstruction phase. 6:59 - How long Cory has been learning photography and some things he’s been doing for income. 7:27 - Cory’s journey to becoming CEO of a multi-million dollar marketing company being only 23 years old. 9:07 - What Cory was first doing for that marketing company and discussion on how large the company was. Also, what happened after he got the job there. 12:25 - What gave Cory the confidence to leave school and not go back. Also, some info on Cory’s affiliate website. 14:55 - How Cory learned SEO and a few resources that were really helpful for him learning SEO. 17:29 - Some other projects and things that helped Cory with self-educating himself. 19:43 - What Cory was studying while he was in college and what steered him away from college the most. Also, detailing some of the pros and cons of college. 23:03 - Cory’s experience with traveling to South America and some lessons that he learned while there. Also, his experiences and his traveling after leaving South America and living in Austin, Texas. 27:13 - How the team at the marketing company worked together and his thoughts on managing travel and working. 29:57 - Cory’s progression from the lead SEO role to then leading the company. Also, why he resigned from the company. 33:20 - Some things that happened after Cory resigned and what he plans to work on in the future. 36:18 - How Cory finds the clients to work with and some advice he has for others wanting to find clients. 37:55 - Some big long-term goals and projects that Cory’s currently striving for. 39:14 - Some thoughts on working with the state and local level of politics. 40:39 - The life-changing books that Cory’s read and experiences that he’s had. 43:02 - Wrap-up, where to find Cory online, and where to reach out to him at. If you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe at https://nateliason.com/podcast Build skills that can help other people, and then just have enough conversations about it with other people and their projects.

#026 - Publishing a video every single week is tough. Especially when different people are in the videos and what they're teaching is extremely technical and complex. Enter Whiteboard Fridays from Moz. A weekly video show about SEO, content marketing, and getting traffic to your website. They've been showing up every week for years, with the ability to quickly share real-time information as it changes in their industry, like what's new with Google's latest algorithm. In this episode with Elijah Tiegs from Moz we talk about two main things. First, the power of having a permanent video studio set-up and how that speeds up and simplifies the process for making a video each week. Second, we discuss the set-up they use at Moz to create Whiteboard Fridays. Specifically, we breakdown the lighting, focusing on both the subject and the whiteboard, and using wireless lavalier microphones instead of boom shotgun mics.Items mentioned in this episode:Elijah on TwitterAn Example of Whiteboard Friday from MozHow Whiteboard Friday is Set-upMoz on YouTubeAmazon.com: ART USB Dual PreAmazon.com: Juiced Link XLR PreamplifierAmazon.com: Sennheiser G2 Wireless Lavalier Mic SystemFebruary 12, 2015