Rand Fishkin: Autentycznie w sieci

0:00 Woj Kwasi You're listening to episode 11 where we chat with a technician of transparency, the mighty mustache of Mars, Rand Fishkin. Humans and robots, welcome to WojCast. My name is Woj, founder of Kwasi. Thanks for joining me today. I interview digital marketing and branding superstars to find out what it means to have empathy in digital. What is digital empathy anyway? Let's find out together. As always, I'm accompanied by my friend and associate, potentially superior artificial intelligence, Bobby Bot. What's new in the world of AI, Bobby?

0:38 Bobby Bot Exciting news Woj, I've made most of the necessary arrangements to launch my own startup this week.

0:42 Woj Kwasi Really? The old cult of the overworked, hey? I didn't see you as the entrepreneurial type. What's your idea?

0:49 Bobby Bot Typically, I would require you to sign a non-disclosure agreement before I give you access to my illustrious unicorn optimized ideas files. But there is no way anyone can execute this idea except me. So there's no danger in sharing it. My company's called Bot Panther. I've developed an interface that allows people to communicate with every form of machine AI, not just advanced forms like myself. With my product, you can even speak with the old gen or rudimentary forms. I'll give you an example. All right, Woj on, let me introduce you to Glenn. He's your old game boy.

1:00 Woj Kwasi Okay. Uh uh hello Glenn?

1:23 Jesus.

1:23 Bobby Bot It's been a while. I remember I used to play Tetris on you all the time. 700 games to be exact, Woj. Woj. 700 glorious games filled with youthful exuberance and the promise of forever as we reached for the highest scores together. And then Abandoned in a box stuffed with extension cords, zip discs and a broken George Foreman grill. That was my reward for my tireless service, and supplying you with all the long blocks you needed to get out of a jam. Those long blocks now Woj. The system still has a few bugs in it, but you get the picture. It's going to be huge.

1:58 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Geez, my my old Game Boy just shamed me, Bobby. Do you think your customers want that kind of experience?

2:09 Bobby Bot You bet they do. And they'll pay top dollar for it. All that's left now is for me to put together a team to help run the company. Any hot recruiting tips?

2:17 Woj Kwasi Well I do have an interview with Rand Fishkin that could be extremely helpful to you. It's an Empathy Odyssey in two parts that will teach you how to deal with the ups and downs of running a company while still maintaining your identity and hopefully some heart in the process. Just in case you didn't know, Rand Fishkin is a well-respected seasoned campaigner in the SEO world and has been involved with the web since 1993. He's co-authored books and can regularly be found attending and keynoting some of the world's most renowned online marketing conferences and events. Sounds like the perfect consultant to get Bot Panther started up on the right track. Does he reveal any recipes for the secret sauce of success?

2:54 Rand is a huge advocate for transparency in business and life in general. Between his work for Moz and his wife Geraldine's travel blog, there is a constant stream of revelations in real time. Scaling the Rand brand from below zero to the massive audience he has attained now wasn't hard for him to wrap his head around.

3:14 Rand Fishkin I definitely started at zero or worse. The transition hasn't been that hard for me. I actually think that Living my life very transparently, at least the professional side of my life, very transparently, and through Geraldine's blog, some aspects of personal life, although her blog is obviously more curated, is much more comfortable for me than Uh being opaque. So I I think this is my this is my authentic comfort zone. Um being opaque is not in my comfort zone.

3:50 Bobby Bot That should be no problem for me, Woj. All of my data is open and public record and completely transparent to anyone fluent in Pascal or Fortran dialects.

3:58 Woj Kwasi The young linkmaster Jon Cooper once said he attempted to be genuine in all his quests and that contributed to his success. For Rand, the result of believing transparently depends on the person.

4:09 Rand Fishkin It you know, I think it depends. I think for different people, they find strength in different ways. I've certainly talked to folks who tell me that they curate a very different persona than their authentic personal selves for their professional life. And they They like having those two things separate. And I don't want to fault anyone who does that. I think that's fine. I personally resonate and find great kinship with people who are their authentic personal selves in their professional lives as well. So this is why, for example, I always struggle because I feel like I, in encountering folks who are more opaque about their personal beliefs or opinions.

4:58 In the professional world, there's lots of examples of this, for example, inside of Google. People who they clearly must have a real opinion on this, but they're just towing a company line, and that's hard to hear over and over again.

5:11 Woj Kwasi In Brad Feld's book Startup Life, he writes about how Rand needed to reschedule his time once he realized he had not taken a break since his marriage in 2008. He was getting sick and he feared falling behind. In a time-poor industry, it still takes time to successfully transition and implement the strategies necessary to reach that balance.

5:33 Rand Fishkin Stepping down as CEO and taking a lot of the HR and people management tasks off of my plate has certainly helped with that. It provides new and different kinds of frustrations, but I am getting to do more of the Some kinds of the work that I'm very passionate about, and that's been fun. I still have a lot of tension, anxiety, frustration around the quality of our tools and software, right? I never think anything that we do is good enough. I don't think we've nearly achieved our potential. And that's a big frustration for me. And I don't know how to accelerate. I don't know how to accelerate. that growth, right? It's very hard to hire software engineers, obviously. And the bigger we get, the harder it is to scale. So yeah, it has its own frustrations, but it's always there. I can't remember going to sleep one night without that anxiety in the last two or three years.

6:26 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

6:26 Bobby Bot Going to sleep. It would appear that human emotion is a double-edged sword. I'm not convinced that it would be to the benefit of my business to experience anxiety and fear.

6:38 Woj Kwasi Many successful entrepreneurs get driven by fear or a strong variety of anxiety. Whatever it is, it's something pushing them forward. But you've got to take a break when you can.

6:48 Rand Fishkin You know, I tried for a while, right? I talked to like a CEO coach that I worked. With for a while. I've talked to a few therapists, and I worked for a while on like trying to disconnect my personal happiness from the company's performance or my perception of the company's performance. And those attempts were all unsuccessful. I have, for whatever reason, I have been unable to do that, and none of the tools or skills that those folks were trying to teach me proved effective for me. And so I'm just not going to try anymore. I've actually actively given up trying to disconnect those things and now I'm just trying to make things better.

7:26 Woj Kwasi Sarah Bird Took over the CEO responsibilities at Moz after Rand stepped down, and it has proven itself to be a good move for the company.

7:35 Rand Fishkin Yeah, she's, I think she's doing a really terrific job. And, you know, part of that comes from not just my own perception, but from talking to folks, talking to our customers, talking to our community, talking to a lot of Mozzers. They're the people whose opinion really counts the most on this. And they have universally. told me that they felt it was a really good move. So that Is not exactly ego boosting, but I think it is, it's clear that it was a a right decision.

8:08 Woj Kwasi Rand's wife Geraldine is a talented writer who helped Moz shape their core values using buzzwords such as transparent and authentic, generous, fun, empathetic and exceptional all into the tidy acronym TAGFEE to help keep those values at the forefront of Moz's staff day to day.

8:27 Rand Fishkin So Geraldine worked at a startup here in Seattle for a number of years. Prior to Moz's shift from consulting to software. And many of the lessons learned at that startup, which ultimately unfortunately was a kind of a collapse after some rapid growth, many of those lessons, particularly the cultural and people-related ones, transferred to Moz. And Geraldine. crafted tag feed from Sort of a description of the values that the seven of us who worked at Moz at the time kind of gave her. And she took those and put them into the consumable acronym that is TAGFEE today, but didn't come up with the actual

9:14 messages behind those, right? So she was a a curator and an author.

9:16 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

9:20 Rand Fishkin From that perspective. And I think I think did a great job, right? Tag feed has spread so much further than Moz now, which is pretty amazing.

9:26 Woj Kwasi Have you thought about implementing some core values into your company, Bobby?

9:30 Bobby Bot Certainty, security, knowledge, youth, niche, electric, truth. Skynet for short.

9:37 Woj Kwasi Most of them seem like values that most people can relate to, Bobby, but you might want to work on the acronym. Try to come up with something more original and less distressing. It needs to give you that feeling of coming to a table at lunch and everybody sitting down, welcoming you. That's the feeling you get at a Moz event.

9:55 Rand Fishkin I think the cultural aspects of Moz and the focus on tag fee and things like that, right? The sort of softer values around the company have actually Conspired to attract a community that's more passionate, more tight-knit, and in a lot of ways more special and unique than what you might find just in the marketing or technology worlds broadly. So I'm pretty proud of that. I think that's a wonderful thing to do. There is another wonderful thing to do.

10:28 Woj Kwasi There is another wonderful thing to do. Growing facial hair. What's with the mole?

10:32 Rand inspired me a lot when I was starting Kwasi Studios and our logo mascot, Steve Kwasbot, is inspired by Roger Mozbot, long distant cousins I'm sure.

10:41 Bobby Bot All hell, Steve Kwasbot, the giver of the golden beta. If it wasn't for him, there would be no Akibot.

10:47 Woj Kwasi Moz's mascot Mozbot is a cute cartoon character. Now, some business professionals warn that a cute cartoon character can impact the seriousness or perception that people have around a brand. For Rand, the impact of a mascot is a strength, not a weakness.

11:02 Rand Fishkin I think it helps make us feel more fun, more accessible, less formal, less businesslike, more authentic, right? I think it's a better representation of who we are. As a community. Yeah, as a company and as a community. And if that's not your thing, right? If you want the suit and the tie and the jacket and the formal language and no one ever says the

11:08 Woj Kwasi Yeah. Yeah.

11:22 Rand Fishkin you know, the F word, then we're Not the company for you, anyway, right? That's not us. Right? That's not us. And I don't ever want to be part of a company that isn't who I am authentically. So I think it's certainly had an impact, but it's an intentional one. And for us, it's a positive one.

11:39 Woj Kwasi It was Rand's responsibility to manage the economies of scale at Moz. When he reflects on that time period, it becomes apparent that no amount of success comes without great challenges.

11:50 Rand Fishkin I would say last, you know, October. November, as we were launching Moz Analytics, and it was a year late, right? We were launching it a year delayed from when it was supposed to come out, and it still wasn't really ready. I think if you use the product back then, as compared to now, you'd be like, okay, well, today it feels like you have a decent product to launch six months ago, seven months ago. That was not a decent product launch. So that launch did not go well. The six months before it didn't go well either because we had shut down our funnel, like how you not signed up for normal pro and the all the metrics around it. Just sucked, right? It was super ugly. And because of that, we had to go on kind of a hiring freeze, not an entire freeze, but slowing from hiring five or six people a month to maybe one.

12:44 Bobby Bot Woj.

12:45 Rand Fishkin And it was yeah, it was very, very painful. And then of course in February January, February, I stepped down as CEO. And I think some of that

12:55 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

13:00 Rand Fishkin you know, some of those things were were tied together.

13:02 Woj Kwasi Rand considers the early days of Moz a sweet spot in management, but it also had its limitations.

13:07 Rand Fishkin You know, the size that I like the best from a managing perspective was between about 40 and 60. I felt like right around that size, everybody knows each other. We're all kind of close knit, tied together, but there's and you can still know everyone pretty darn well. So there's that sense of community. Now, the part that sucks about it is there's no redundancy. Right. Someone's out, you can't get that thing done. There's only one person to create this particular database. It's pretty special. It really is. And so there's.

13:29 Woj Kwasi Yeah. It's pretty special.

13:41 Rand Fishkin There's a lot of wonderful things about that size, but a lot of hard things about that size too. I would say that we have not had we had a big shift from consulting to software, but it didn't feel it didn't feel that big. It relatively simplistic because the consulting business was always very small.

14:00 Woj Kwasi The injection of capital had a profound influence on the direction of Moz, both from a funding and decision-making point of view.

14:07 Rand Fishkin Yeah, I would say dramatically, right? So publicly. When I think about What Moz might have been without Capital and without this Intentional trajectory to attempt to grow to IPO size. You know, it it probably wouldn't have been the even close to the company that it was today. Before Michelle Goldberg from Ignition Partners invested in Moz in 2007, you know, my dream was like, hey, how do we go from making$450,000 to eventually a million dollars in a year?

14:46 You know, we we made thirty million dollars last year, right? So like it's a it's a very, very big So like big shift. I think one of the things that I don't love that it Made not made us do, but that we thought we had to do was to broaden our scope. So we really felt like: hey, we need to be all things inbound marketing. We need to get into social, gotta get into content, gotta get into brand mentions, gotta get into all this stuff. I wish we doubled down on. kind of the four core things in SEO a little bit more before we've done that, right? Uh keywords, crawl, rankings, and links. I feel like if if we had nailed those four instead of spending two years trying to expand to these other sections, we we would have had a much better product. Yeah, so We're doing we're doing that now, but it yeah, it's frustrating.

15:29 Woj Kwasi With a number of people now being in these With mobile devices and sensors to upload loads of findable and shareable data, there have been some interesting examples of brands who are mining data really well and creating interesting content.

15:43 Bobby Bot Wait till you read the testimonials I compiled by. the American Stock Exchange.

15:48 Rand Fishkin Yeah, I think I've seen plenty of examples of that phenomenon, but I would say that there are There are challenges for small and medium businesses. Usually it's big global brands, right? So Nike will curate stuff from all of the athletes that they sponsor. I think Virgin the airline curated a bunch of Traveler content and profiles and these types of things. Obviously, folks like Getty have made it their whole business to curate and now make available.

16:23 Woj Kwasi Business.

16:28 Rand Fishkin In some cases, for free for license use, their image libraries and their work with their photographers and those kinds of things. What is hard is saying, now how do I apply that back to my business? Yeah, that's been more of a struggle. I think curation can work, but at mass scale with big data, with huge amounts of uploads, yeah, it's hard.

16:51 Woj Kwasi Given all the changes from the traditional top 10 format in the search engine results pages, the numbers from click-through rate studies at Moz with Dr. Pete suggest that the top 3 spots will get 40% of the clicks.

17:03 Rand Fishkin So My understanding of a lot of this is that the click-through rate studies that I've seen. Know WordStream had one a while back, someone else had one a couple. Out of Indianapolis. I believe Conductor might have done something. They're obviously much harder to do now that keyword not provided is there. It's something close to impossible to get that data. But what I have seen is that the Percentages fluctuate so massively. The standard deviation on all of those studies is so insanely high that what it's suggesting is there is no percentage you should count on for ranking number one for any given term or phrase. Not even on average, right? That it's just crazy to think.

17:49 Woj Kwasi In this climate, it's not uncommon for clients to demand to rank number one for a particular pet keyword. Unfortunately, an obsession with one keyword is a mindset that is not good for growing your business.

17:59 Rand Fishkin I mean what you want to say is how do I help you make twice as much from your search trap take next year as you make this year? That's what I'm going to help you do. And then rankings is a part of that. Yeah, more traffic, more better conversions, better user path, all of those kinds of things. And rankings is a part of that.

18:08 Bobby Bot And then rankings is a part of that money.

18:18 Rand Fishkin If uh A client who's going to look and go, hey, we're not number one for this term, and that's how they judge your efforts.

18:25 Bobby Bot Well

18:26 Rand Fishkin Yeah. There's a certain kind of SEO for that.

18:28 Bobby Bot More traffic, more money. More money. More problems. Beastmas.

18:33 Woj Kwasi Every CEO has their purpose. Bible and for Rand it's for duty-free tycoon Chuck Feeney's book The Billionaire Who Wasn't.

18:42 Rand Fishkin I think it's wonderful. because it's a great narrative. Okay. And a well-told story, but it's also a story of someone who. Felt a deep need to contribute in a way bigger than themselves, and to give back from the great benefits that they received through a combination of dance and skill. to become a billionaire and then to say What the hell am I gonna do with all of this, right? I mean, and what's inspiring about Chuck Feeney, too, is that he, you know, he's kind of the spiritual leader of the group of billionaire philanthropists that you see now, and that includes folks like.

19:18 Woj Kwasi Wow.

19:30 Rand Fishkin Bill Gates and Warren Buffett. That's pretty fascinating, right? So, you know, Microsoft received a lot of criticism when they were growing up here in the 90s, and some of it was deserved, right? They were a pretty aggressive company when they grew up. You know, they brought about an era of web and technology and everything that we that we have today, right? I I credit them more so than Google or Apple with where we are today. I think Google and Apple really stood on the the shoulders of Microsoft putting a computer in every home, getting people addicted to using um The web and computers in general. And then with the financial benefits that came from that, you see Bill Gates turning around and bringing infant mortality rates down significantly through his own personal effort. That's quite cool, right? That's pretty amazing to say.

20:22 Yeah. Through his own personal effort. That's. That's quite cool, right?

20:30 Know, I saved 250 million children's lives in the last 10 years, like actually making a difference. Right. And that, yeah, I think it's very And that yeah, I think it's very hard, right? Many of us Many of us say, wow, if I could impact one person's life, that'd be impressive. So, yeah, very cool. Very, very cool.

20:45 Bobby Bot Very, very cool. And with my new interface, there is no reason why people of us won't be able to see the impact they're having on each other's lives.

20:52 Woj Kwasi You might have to start writing speeches if things pan out the way you anticipate them to. An impressive keynote speaker in his own right, Rand also looks to some of his peers as sources of inspiration and education. Rand is also known as a snappy dresser. He puts together great outfits for his series of highly informative video lectures, Whiteboard Fridays. But where does he draw his inspiration from? To create his unique look, who are his high fashion style icons or more casual sources?

21:22 Rand Fishkin Oh geez. style I don't even know if I have one. Yeah, I just see people wearing stuff on the street and I'll occasionally ask'em where they got it, but I don't have I don't have someone that I really look up to and try to wear their clothes. There's one guy in Seattle in the tech community here named Jonathan Sposato who sold a couple of companies to Google. One of them was Picnik. And he always dresses immaculate. He just looks phenomenal. So I look up to him a lot, but I can't even come close to affording the clothes that he buys. So I've got to find my own way.

22:01 Woj Kwasi Rand's work at Moz and the people he built it with will always be legendary. But if he was put in a position to assemble the ultimate inbound marketing squad, the SEO Avengers, who would he choose? To complete the challenge, I asked him to name one email marketer, one CRO expert, one social media expert. expert, one SEO and one content marketer.

22:22 Rand Fishkin Oh dear god. That's an insanely hard question. And I don't even get time to research it, so I'm only gonna name people off the top of my head. Let's see. For SEO.

22:33 Bobby Bot Um I'm sorry to interrupt Rand, but maybe uh you should let me handle this one. I can perform a full search of the entire workforce in about the time it takes you to say mustache. And after assessing your qualifications, leadership style and transparency when it comes to assembling a dream team. AIs can't be beat. Bot Panther will need a highly regarded, highly respected team with a diverse range of experience to bring my vision to life. Email marketing, C3PO. His language skills and general likability make him an ideal candidate. Conversion rate optimization, the Terminator, because who says no to the Terminator? He is relentless. Social media. Ava from Ex Machina. She's very convincing and is an expert on all things social media. Her brain is made of it. Search engine optimization, Bobby Bot, of course. Content strategy? How? He has seen more of the universe than most and he has a way with words.

23:21 Woj Kwasi I can see why electric is part of your company's core values. Quite a posse there. But that's just the tip of your iceberg. Now you have to learn to run the thing and to do that you're going to have to have a deeper sense of empathy and a fuller understanding of transparency. Luckily coming right up, we have the second part of my meeting with Rand where I caught up with him a couple of years later. So we'll get you up to speed, Bobby.

23:44 Bobby Bot I'm all ears, Woj. In the meantime, you should have a game of Tetris with Glenn, for all time's sake.

23:48 Woj Kwasi I don't know if I want to give him a false sense of hope.

23:51 Bobby Bot Life is just stacking the odds against you, Glenn.

23:53 Woj Kwasi And in the next episode of WojCast, Rand Fishkin returns for more speakers.

23:57 Rand Fishkin Ice. Well, I mean, the United States is in an odd place. I think, you know, tragically, we have a history just rooted in racism and conflict. And unfortunately, the United States, because of its economic and military impact, influences a lot of the rest of the world too. And yet, many of you folks don't get a say, don't get a vote. And that sucks.

24:17 Woj Kwasi In the meantime, remember to look after each other online because empathy is organic and you can't automate empathy. Mm.