
Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups - smilliken
http://hackersandfounders.tv/RDmt/rand-fishkin-inbound-marketing-for-startups/
======
danberger
The best content came out of the Q&A at ~69m. A guy asked two questions: (1)
how do you find the angle about what to publish content about and (2) when do
you start publishing content to get inbound traffic?

Rand responded: He goes to topsy top 1000 [1], alltop [2] to find featured
blogs that are getting the most buzz, Google Plus popular section, the
subreddit most relevant to you, and followerwonk [3] to see what the top 100
twitter accounts in your industry are talking about

Basically, all of the above actions get you immersed in the market you're
trying to penetrate and gives you an understanding of what will be of value to
them. You can then use this information to generate content that will go
viral.

Unfortionately, he didn't answer the second question :(

[1] <http://topsy.com/top1k> [2] <http://alltop.com/> [3]
<http://www.followerwonk.com>

~~~
randfish
Hey Dan - at 71:51, the gentleman re-asks the question (after I tackled the
first part) and I give an answer :-)

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Jd
Got an email that if I upvote this item on Hacker News I get two free months
of SEOMoz. How much of that sort of stuff happens here? How many of the 127+
points this item has are from incentivized SEO?

~~~
iamelgringo
Sorry about that confusion. I misworded that email.

That's not at _all_ what I meant, and I didn't mean to game the system at all.
I apologize about the confusion.

For various reasons, I'm not really active on this community any more. So, I
asked H&F members if they would be kind enough to do if for me.

I asked H&F members to submit and upvote, tweet, like and Google Plus to give
Rand some press.

Rand flew down to SV on his own dime to talk to our H&F members for free. He
didn't ask us to promote SEOMoz, and never required anything out of us. He was
truly one of the most delightful, genuine and kind speakers that we've had at
H&F. I'm more than happy to do whatever I can to help him and his company out.

BizSpark sponsored the event by buying everyone pizza and beer. H&F doesn't
get a dime out of this. Hackers & Founders is completely boot strapped
ourselves, and do a lot of this for love of the game. And, we're pursuing
becoming a for benefit corporation.

When Rand and I first started talking, about speaking to our people a few
months ago. I arranged for SEOMoz to give H&F members two free months of
SEOMoz for free. I emailed that offer to our people last month, but no one
signed up. I figured that after Rand spoke, people would be a bit more
interested in trying the SEOMoz service out.

I emailed the link to the free trial out with the link to the video to our
Meetup, because I'd received about 20 emails asking for both the video as well
as the free trial in the past 24 hours.

The free trial is also publicly available as a sponsor link on our meetup page
at <http://www.hackersandfounders.com>.

I apologize if people thought that I was trying to game the system. I'm not.
I'm trying to give a friend, and a great entrepreneur a boost. He helped out
community out a great deal. His writing has helped me out a great deal in the
past.

And, for what it's worth, SEOMOz has an affiliate program. If people sign up
for a one month trial, the referrers get $25. It's not really worth that
effort for me, and that's not what H&F does. So, we chose to waive the
affiliate fee and SEOMoz chipped in the extra month to help everybody out.

~~~
Jd
Clarification much appreciated. Original email (e.g. request for upvote)
probably would have been fine if you hadn't presented the 2 months of SEOMoz
as a prize for the upvote.

~~~
iamelgringo
That wasn't my intent. I was trying to be funny rather than "pay" for the
vote.

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gabaix
Rand, why did you choose to use the Hubspot term _Inbound Marketing_? _Inbound
Marketing_ is more often used as a replacement for _Market Research_. Your
definition really means _Permission Marketing_.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inbound_marketing>
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permission_marketing>

In 2009, Hubspot decided to coin the term _Inbound Marketing_ in a new way so
they can claim the space ("first inbound marketing software"). Since then,
they changed the entire Google results (starting with Wikipedia) so that they
come up on most queries. The rare times I used _Inbound Marketing_ with
traditional marketers, they always meant _Market Research_.

~~~
randfish
I was never actually aware of the "market research" definition; this is the
first I've heard of it.

At Moz, I've long been looking for a phrase that means "content marketing +
white hat SEO + social media + email marketing + conversion rate
optimization." Inbound marketing has come to take on that definition, and I
like the terminology. Permission marketing always had an association to me
with list building (usually email), but never SEO, social, CRO, etc.

If another term/phrase catches on that encompasses all those facets of
organic/natural/inbound/white hat/mostly-non-paid web marketing, I'd likely
switch to that. In the meantime, it's far easier and more comfortable to go
with the prevailing convention.

BTW - Saw your other comment below and am totally flattered. Not sure how I
can live up to that, but thank you :-)

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jaredsohn
Find the slides here: [http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/gaining-traction-
inbound-...](http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/gaining-traction-inbound-
marketing-for-startups)

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apurvamehta
I was there last night. Rand is a supremely talented presenter and did a great
job of explaining how early stage startups can gain traction through organic
(inbound) marketing.

He explained the basic concepts of online marketing and the basics of
marketing strategy in a supremely succinct and inspiring way. It was golden!
It was entertaining! Highly recommended!

~~~
sunkan
I was there and 100% agree on everything you said.

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gabaix
Back when I was doing SEO, Rand Fishkin was my hero. You could not find a more
humble person, while delivering tremendous value in the white-hat community. I
am glad he still speaks and educates as much as he can.

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dools
This was a really fantastic summary of why you should do inbound marketing and
how you can get started delivered in a lively and entertaining fashion.

Congratulations Rand! Looking forward to seeing more from you on the speaking
front.

I can personally attest to the value of "mining the social web". When we first
launched decal mockups[1] to get some eyeballs amongst designers my only
strategy for getting traffic was to post it on HN.

When it slid off the newest page and into oblivion I was really down in the
dumps but I just added a stream in hootsuite for the word "mockups", then
anytime someone mentioned mockups I posted a link to the site and got 70
people signing up within the first week.

It's a fantastic way to engage with early adopters (although I would warn
against automating it - I think possibly it was the fact that each message was
personalised that meant I got very few negative reactions - only one that I
can remember which was some guy telling me to "diaf" :)

[1] <http://www.decalcms.com/mockups>

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rcavezza
When asked about paid marketing. Starts around 74:30

"Holy crazy crap does retargeting work."

"If you do great inbound, the first money you should spend should be on
retargeting... people that were sort of interested but left"

"...uses a company called has offers in Seattle - they've been very effective
for us".

"would not recommend raw display. It will perform poorly for you."

~~~
secret_target
<Shameless plug>

I'm part of a stealth startup that's handling retargeting for about 30
startups now and I can confirm that it is indeed a brutally effective method
for acquiring users. We're seeing that on average, retargeted ads perform
about 350% better than any other kind of targeted ad. It seems a little crazy
until you recalibrate your understanding of what's happening. Instead of
trying to push new information on a user (which no one likes), with
retargeting, you're _pulling_ people back to something they've already
expressed an interest in. It works marvelously.

Example: We're running retargeting for an SaaS startup that gets a lot of
airtime on HN, and they're snagging new users at less than $2/head. Once these
folks get on board, they spend on average $40/year on the service. Our little
team had a "f___ yeah" moment after the 4th day or so when we saw how well it
was working. We're now hustling to hire folks to meet the demand coming from
word of mouth.

If any HNers on here want to ad retargeting to their startup, web app, side
project, mobile app landing page, or whatever the heck you're building, hit me
up at the e-mail address in my profile.

We're still building out our actual product so startups and technical people
make for the best customers. Less explaining, more appreciation for results,
more understanding when we goof up.

</shameless plug>

~~~
chargrilled
Do you offer anything over Google's boomerang retargeting?

We've already had decent success with that.

~~~
secret_target
Massively wider reach for your ads.

My understanding of Google's program is that it runs your ad across its
DoubleClick exchange. We run our clients ads across DoubleClick just like
them... as well as the rest of the ad networks... plus our publisher partner
inventory. Google's DoubleClick inventory is a part of our overall inventory.

~~~
chargrilled
I was under the impression that Doubleclick was the largest exchange by some
distance.

How much wider reach do you get from going to multiple exchanges? It's maybe
time I did some research on moving away from boomerang!

~~~
secret_target
DoubleClick is very much the largest and awesomest exchange. But there's A LOT
of display ads on the web.

The data we have suggests that DoubleClick offers up about 4b daily
impressions to retarget against. The overall retargeting ecosphere that folks
like us and a few others are retargeting against is in the 10-14b
impressions/day range. DoubleClick's massive and have a lot of the best
inventory, but it's still just a part of the whole.

NOTE: I'm sure there's other display-heads on HN who might have different
data. Either way, Google's exchange is no more than 30-50% of the total
exchange inventory out there.

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chalst
Is this video worth watching? Why?

This comments thread contains several comments from people who seem to have
got something valuable from this video, but I have not been able to gather
what that something is. There also seems to be a lot of SEO fluff here, which
should be downvoted.

~~~
rgrieselhuber
It's definitely worth watching, IMO, especially if you view SEO as "fluff".

Rand does a great job of explaining how SEO and inbound marketing are
attractive alternatives to interruption marketing. If you're annoyed by paid
advertising and believe that what you build should benefit your users, then I
think you'll get a lot out of it.

~~~
chalst
OK, I am convinced that I should take a look.

The "fluff" I was talking about is all the contentless puff comments that
appeared, couched in un-HN-ish language: I guess they are a fan club from some
SEO social network or another.

------
dshah
Rand is a great entrepreneur and one of the world's foremost authorities on
inbound marketing.

If you're a startup founder, you should watch this video. It's great content,
well delivered.

------
iradik
What a great speaker Rand is. Definitely makes me interested in the service.
Loved the examples of real marketing such as urbnspoon, dropbox, seomoz, and
simply hired.

Also, he gave 2 months of his svc away for free for the talk:
<http://www.seomoz.org/partners/hackers> \- Found this in the hackers and
founders site.

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firefox
This is a fantastic presentation, it brought me from a "I want to shoot
myself" mood to "oh yeah there's hope!"

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BrentonG
Rand killed it last night! Well balanced talk from story, strategy to
tactics...extremely powerful to see the juxtaposition of paid and inbound
marketing. Earned media converts so much better on all levels. However he
didn't talk about the speed of user acquisition...comparing both channels.

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tuomasb
I think it's a bit ironic given the nature of the talk that the link on the
video page to seomoz.org has rel="nofollow" while comments down below don't
have. No link juice for those who provide content(talk) and all the link juice
for commenters.

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dontbelame
My personal favorite is towards the end of the talk when Rand left great tips
(the last 15 minutes or so before QnA) The top 10 ways to get in bound traffic
are practical and insightful for any early stage startup. It kicks ass!

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portentint
"You can't just do awesome shit in your products"

Amen!

