Rand Fishkin - The Successful Journey to Create 'Whiteboard Friday'

I'm Rand Fishkin. I'm the founder and wizard of Moz. I write a lot, I speak a lot, I film Whiteboard Friday. I have a book coming out about startups. My talk was called the invisible giant that mucks up our marketing. I think that a lot of the decisions that we make in the business and technology worlds and in the marketing world are essentially biased by cultural indoctrination, by the experiences of the past and by how things have always been done and by what's popular and what's talked about. That biases us away from making the best possible decision. I was explaining something to one of my coworkers on a whiteboard and he was like, oh, we have a new camera. I'll grab it and I'll film you. Then we looked at it and we were like, yeah, let's put it on the blog and see how it does. It didn't do very well, but we kind of had fun with it. We did it the next week and did it the next week. Eventually it started to build up some steam and I think it was mostly our interest in learning a little bit more about video and in seeing the engagement and the response that kept it up. Then over time it sort of went from our worst performing content to our best performing content. I think that's because we kept investing in it and we got better and better. I got better and better as presenter. The video quality got better and better. We developed a whole whiteboard room at our offices and then when we moved offices we built another one out that was even better. We invested in higher quality equipment. We got more polished with the topics and how we did topic selection and we got better with our keyword targeting and better with our transcripts. Everything just kept improving until eventually this became what it is today. We basically will post the video to our own website first. We use a service called SpeechPad and they make a transcript, but it's a pretty customized transcript. What you'll notice is that they take the whiteboard and we take a still shot of the whiteboard before I start marking it up during the video and then they will extract out elements of that and put them into the transcript or the blog post that accompanies it. Almost 50% of all Whiteboard Friday visitors read the post. They don't actually watch the video, which is kind of crazy, but that's fine. It works fine. We're making it accessible in whatever format they want. It also means that Google gets a bunch of images with great alt attributes and markup and they get all this text that is machine readable and parsable and has good keywords and good relevance. So the post can rank really well. Three months after that post goes up on our on Moz, we will upload the same video to YouTube. So that way if you're performing a search on YouTube specifically, which lots of search volume happens on YouTube itself, you can also find the Whiteboard Fridays there, but you realize that you're getting it 90 days after everybody else. So the incentive is always go to Moz, subscribe to our site. That's where you'll see it first and then a few months later you'll find it on YouTube. So rather than thinking about this isn't working today, we said what's the trajectory of where it is a year in versus when we started? We're like, oh, it's much better now than when we started. You know what? If it keeps up this trajectory, this is eventually going to be amazing. So let's stick with it. And I urged folks in my talk today to measure things not based on how does this ROI compare to that ROI, but rather on trajectory and on the investment that is needed to get to that amazing place. Very few CMOs will give you the rope to go do these types of experimental pieces of work. And because very few will, there's much less competition. And that means it's much easier to succeed if you do get that permission. I mean, I think it is totally okay to copy and to steal. That's great. I would say though that unless you can identify what unique value you bring and why your audience will be particularly passionate about what you do, you can't do it. You can't do it. You have to figure out what you bring and why your audience will be particularly passionate about that and why they have this, you know, whatever it is, whiteboard Friday shaped problem or video shaped problem. It's going to be tough to have a really extraordinary result unless you have great audience empathy and can identify, you know, why folks are going to pay attention and be passionate. And I think a lot of people invest in content of all kinds because they think they're supposed to. Right? It's not that they say, oh, you know, a bunch of people that we know have this problem. Let me see if we can solve it for them. And the best way to solve it is, I don't know, online education series and a quiz, you know, an interactive series of charts and graphs, a video, a weekly data series, Google spreadsheets, you know, template, whatever it is. But we have this piece of content that can solve this problem that we know real people have. I think too many people instead go, content's really hot. We should make some content. No, you should not make some content. You should solve some people's problems. You should help some people. If content is a great way to do that, awesome. I love it. Please go after that. If it's not, you know, maybe, maybe what you need to do is this is an in person thing and people need to get together for a dinner. Maybe it's a conference or an event that they need to have. Maybe it's a series of, you know, a dial ins for a webinar. Maybe it's a conference call, right? Maybe those solve the problems. Solve the problem. Don't make content just because you need, you think you need to make content for some reason. The engagement is the thing that matters most. And I, I kind of take it on faith that anything with, anything with high engagement is going to have positive results for the mission, even if it's not the financial, financials of the business, right? Moz is created to help people do better marketing and yeah, take a free trial of software. That's great. I appreciate that. It's wonderful. But did I help you as you're marketing better now? Awesome. That's, that's what we set out to do.