Rand Fishkin full interview from Content Marketing World 2016

I'm Rand Fishkin, I'm the founder of Moz. We're based in Seattle, Washington. And my work involves a lot of content creation and marketing and promotion, as well as lots of speaking at conferences and events, and a lot of evangelism for the brand. I also do a little bit of some software design and marketing strategy, too. So just a little bit. So tell me what is it that you're passionate about right now? Right now, I would have to say two things are sort of first and foremost on my mind. One of those is Moz has recently refocused a lot of its strategy and efforts on SEO. And that's very exciting for me because that's my first passion and what I love to do. And so teaching people about SEO, finding tips and tricks that I can share, building great software for that, that is number one. And the second one is I'm actually writing a book for Penguin Random House that's going to be maybe published next year, depending on the editing process. And so I have a rough draft due to my editor by the end of this year, December 31. And that is very much focused on challenging a lot of the conventional wisdom around building a startup, building a company, and how entrepreneurs might think differently about many of the usual pieces of advice. Okay. Can you give us a sneak peek into what that contains? Let's see. So for example, one of the common pieces of wisdom that you might hear out in the investment startup world is you should never say yes to the first offer to sell your company. You should try and turn it into something really big. If buyers are interested, that means you've got a long life ahead of you. And I'm going to argue, I argue in my book, the exact opposite. Okay, but if you have an opportunity to sell and it's for a number that's going to make you happy and give you a chance to do it again, you should take it. You should absolutely take it. So more sell at an earlier stage? Give yourself a chance to learn and to do it again. I have found that building a startup feels a lot like playing a video game. You know, the second time you play it through, you're way better. You know all the ins and outs, all the tips and tricks. You've seen this level before. You've seen that bad guy before. You know what to do. And that is a superpower when it comes to startups. So I think that companies, entrepreneurs can take advantage of that. That's awesome. Give themselves a second chance to do it rather than having to power through and find a way to become a billion dollar business the first time. I'm not saying that's right for everyone, but statistically speaking, since 90 plus percent of startups are going to completely fail anyway, statistically speaking, I would take that first exit opportunity. Cool. That's interesting. So to go into the content marketing field a bit again, first of all, for your own, because you're creating a lot of content yourself. What is your kind of content marketing master plan when you create a piece of content? What do you think about in creation, but also when publishing and making it shareable? Yeah, so the two big things, two biggest things for me are number one, does this fit with Mazza's values, which are my values since I'm the founder, which is nice. And that is we call it, we use an acronym called Tagfee, but it's really transparent, authentic, generous, fun, empathetic, and the exception. And three of those are particularly important when creating content. One is transparent. So basically saying, here's a bunch of information that I have or that I can uncover or that I know someone can uncover, and I'm going to uncover it for you because I know it will provide great value. The second one is deep empathy for both the consumer of the content, the person who's trying to learn this thing or do this thing or is interested in this topic, and the influencers of those folks, right? Because that's how it's going to receive the amplification, the broadcast, the reach that you need in order to stand out. And then the third one is the exception. It's always been very important to me to be the exception to the rule. I hate fitting in, you can probably tell. But I think in the case of content, that is super useful to say, this is not another top 10 list about how to do keyword research, right? And the last one is why Google AdWords' numbers are wrong and we have the data to prove it. And you would say, whoa, wait a minute, AdWords is wrong? I mean, that's Google, they have all this information, how could they possibly be misleading millions of people who are using their platform, and you can prove it with data? All right, now show me. I'm interested. That's an exception to the normal rule. And so I like doing pieces that fit those kind of values. When you've actually published a piece of content, how do you measure success for that piece of content? Yeah, for me, it's a little different than I think it is for most folks. I try not to tie content directly to revenue. That is, it's not really my goal and it isn't particularly that important to me. The true measure of success in my world is, does this content solve my audience's problem and challenge? Does it make them think more highly of Moz? Does it help them accomplish what they need accomplishing? If it does those things, I have total faith that it will be value-add to the business long term or short term. And I'm not particularly concerned about the direct revenue measures. I get that that model is not how many other businesses choose to invest. And they would say, well, that's crazy. I'm not going to invest in content like that. There's no way I'm putting dollars against it. I hope they do. I hope they do. And the reason why is that means the field is far less competitive. And it's a beautiful thing to have a bunch of people say, wait, I can't tie something directly to revenue? I'm not investing in it. Great. Awesome. Fantastic. My experience has always been that if there is a practice that provides value but that is hard or impossible to tie directly to revenue, most businesses won't invest in it. And that makes it even more of a competitive advantage to be good at it. I love that. So how do you figure out that it's been useful for that audience to do that? Yeah. So a few metrics are very helpful on this front. Sharing and amplification certainly is. Comments and engagement. On-site engagement and visits. And then there's certainly measures of feedback that are both direct and indirect. So you can measure things like traffic and time on site and pages per visit. You can measure the rate at which people who saw that piece of content came back to the website within the next 90 or 120 days. You can look at, if you want to tie some things to revenue when we do this, we can look at the number of people who are exposed to a piece of content who later at some point in their journey signed up for something else at Moz, signed up to an email list, followed one of our social accounts, took a free trial of our software, any of those kinds of things. That's cool. I like that. We actually have a, you might have seen it, we have a little platform that we use internally called One Metric. So it basically takes a bunch of these other data points and ranks all of the content that we have on our site or all the content we've produced in the last few weeks by this one metric. And the one metric is essentially an aggregate of time on site, pages per visit, total visits, total shares, links in, press mentions, maybe a few other things. And then it's rolled up into this one number between 0 and 100. Huh. Yeah, it works nicely. Yeah, that's nice. What is it that is mostly valued of those? I can't remember. I think the biggest weight for us is on the traffic and engagement metrics. So that would be like visits, time on site, pages per visit, you meet visitors. I think those have the heaviest bit, but it's fairly balanced. Moving on to video marketing. That's a space that a lot of people are talking about right now and a lot of companies are spending more and more of their budget on creating videos. Yeah. Why do you think that is? So video has some really unique powers. One that I've discovered, absolutely true, is the memorability of video and the ability for it to create a brand impression that lingers and that sits with someone is unmatched, totally unrivaled by text, by images, by a still image, by an infographic, right? Those kinds of things. I think that's because we as human beings associate a voice, a tone, body language, a personality, a face, all of those things with a video that we can't do with these other forms of content. And so that creates this powerful memorability. Whiteboard Friday is a great example of that, right? Something I film every week for Moz. And it's weird, this was May of this year. I was getting onto an airplane in Malaga, Spain, which I'd never been to before. And I didn't speak at a conference there, it was just for fun. I had spoken at a conference in Valencia and we were driving around Spain and touring around. I was getting on an airplane and a few people behind me, I heard a couple of guys go, ¿Qué ranfisgen? The only reason they know me is because of Whiteboard Friday. Whiteboard Friday isn't even in Spanish. So, yeah, it was a remarkable experience. I turned around and waved to them and they were like, hey, that's that guy from Whiteboard Friday. So I think that personal connection is a really powerful thing. Certainly that's one of the reasons people are investing in video. The other big reason is just frankly that people are watching so much video, right? Over the last ten years, video on the web has gone crazy as YouTube and platforms like it have grown. And I think that social platforms, everything from Facebook to Snapchat to Twitter, investing in video natively in those platforms means that there's just a tremendous amount more opportunity to be seen if you have video content. What do you think as brands, like companies, not as a person or private account, what do you think companies should be focusing on when starting on the video marketing journey? So before you start on video marketing, you should absolutely make sure that you have goals you are trying to achieve and that you know that video will help you achieve those goals. If that is not the case, x-nay on the idi-o-vay. That's a bad idea. Once you've established what those goals are, I think it really comes down to you to be experimental in your tactics and you're going to be able to do that. So we're going to try videos of these lengths with these people, featuring this type of content, produced this often, promoted on these channels, right? Whatever all the different aspects of creation, of creativity, of technical side, and of promotion and distribution are, you should experiment and you need to give yourself the room to experiment with those. So if you say to your boss or your client or whoever you're creating content for, they're going to create metrics for you in a month. It's insane! That is insane! Instead, I would strongly urge you to say, hey, we're going to test out all of these different things, the platform, the timing, the length, all that stuff. With video, we're going to see what resonates. In two months, we expect to have some data for you. That data can help guide our decisions about where we double down and invest and what we experiment with next. If you're expecting success in 60 days, video is not for you. Content marketing is not for you. Content marketing is not an overnight project. It is a long journey that takes months or years to get successful. The first two years that I did Whiteboard Friday, it sucked. It did worse than our average written posts in terms of visits, in terms of time spent. It did not do well. But then we eventually got good at it. We figured out, oh, what resonates? What do people like? How do we get the lighting right? How do we get the video format right? What's the right length? Where do we promote it? How do we get people into this? All that stuff. And as we got better and better at it, it started to improve. So it started, you know, here's our average text written content. It started down here. But then the slope got steeper and eventually, you know, now today, Whiteboard Friday is some of the top performing content for Moz as a whole. Which leads me to, what's your favorite piece of content that you've created yourself? My favorite piece of content. Not piece of content, but your favorite piece of content. That I've created or that anyone's created? Yes, yes. No, no, you've created. I'd like to do that too. Yeah, sure. I think... I think it would probably be... Years ago, I wrote the first version of this and we've updated it many times since. In the process of updating it again. It's called the Beginner's Guide SEO. And it is not the most amazing or remarkable piece of content, but it is the most helpful. I have probably personally met in the thousands, maybe even 10,000 people who've told me, that's how I got started in SEO, that's how I learned what to do and what not to do, that's how I made sure I didn't make dumb mistakes, that's what I gave to everyone on my team when I hired them. And being able to help people that much, even though it's not really commercial content, right? It doesn't promote Moz's products directly or anything. But that really inspires me. I also am particularly proud that this is a smaller thing, but it outranks Google for SEO Guide, which I really like. Because Google has their SEO Guide. And I'm like, yeah, we're on top of that. So based on that, that was your piece of content that is your favorite. How could someone learn from... a company learn from that, another brand, and how would you bring that? I think this is... It's really a question of empathy, right? It's a question of, can I put myself in the shoes of all these people who are trying and struggling to learn SEO in our case, right? Or trying and struggling to fill in the blank in your case, in whatever your company's case is. And if you can identify that, the missing resource, the thing people are always curious about, the thing that they have the hardest time with, the thing that nobody else is yet doing well, if you can get those and you can create that piece, I think you've got something remarkable in your hands. Awesome. So let's look a bit into the future. 2017. What do you see for our marketeers? I think that when it comes to marketing broadly, and then even content marketing specifically, we're obviously seeing a dramatic increase in the quantity of what's being produced. I think we're also seeing people get more serious about quality. And that means it's going to be tougher and tougher to stand out. Unless you choose to pursue things that are very different from what everyone else is doing. So my guess is that it will continue to be, it has been the last few years, and it will continue to be a major advantage to be an early adopter. An early adopter of social networks, an early adopter of new forms of content, an early adopter of new forms of promotion, an early adopter of new focuses, foci for your content that other people aren't pursuing. I also think, I think we're going to see, probably it's still on the upswing, we're going to keep seeing a rise in what I call dark patterns. So this is essentially user experiences that are designed to interrupt a visitor's flow, interrupt their experience in order to capture value from them, right? Get them to sign up for something, get their email address, get them to connect to their Facebook account or their Twitter account or Google account, whatever it is, so that you can market to them later. And this has been relatively successful for a lot of marketers. I think it's going to keep being successful, but I'm hoping, I'm thinking and hoping that in 2017 we reach that tipping point where it starts having worse and worse returns. Where basically people get sick and tired of it, they hit the back button, you find that putting these dark pattern kinds of UI elements on websites and apps removes value rather than add it. Maybe I'm idealistic, but that would be great to see, right? Because I hate it as a user, I hate recommending it as a marketer, I know it can be effective, but it feels wrong. Just straight up wrong to do that. Reminds a bit about the old pop-ups, right? It's totally the underlay pop-up 2.0, right? Yes. It feels a little less sketchy now because it's newer, but it is just bad news. I actually am hoping, I think that Google might end up penalizing websites that employ it directly and that will get a lot of marketers to change their view. Let's hope for that, that the larger forces will actually push for it as well. Awesome, thank you so much. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.