SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Startups

A New, Free Tool to Determine the True Influence of a Twitter Account

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Number of followers is a crap metric. And yet, as I’ve been watching and learning from folks who do content marketing, PR-focused outreach, social media marketing, and influencer campaigns, I’ve found that more than 90% of the time… that’s *exactly* what people use. They’ll nod their heads and say “yeah, I know it can be gamed,” or “yeah, some people…
SparkToro Startups

SparkToro Raised a Very Unusual Round of Funding & We’re Open-Sourcing Our Docs

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
The Short Version Our new company, SparkToro, LLC has just completed a $1.3mm angel financing. And, because we think our structure might be right for many other businesses, we’re making our documents open-source for anyone to use. The Story SparkToro is, obviously, a product of my and my cofounder, Casey‘s, experiences in the mostly venture-backed worlds of software startups. The…
Marketing SparkToro

Announcing SparkToro “Trending” — a Front Page for the Web Marketing World

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Over the last decade, there have been numerous attempts to create an news aggregation tool for web marketers — Threadwatch, Sphinn, Inbound.org, GrowthHackers, Alltop — but none of them quite scratched the itch. Plus, almost all of them were susceptible to rampant spam and/or ugly drama+trolling in the comments. Casey (SparkToro’s cofounder) and I have lots of experience in this…
Book Startups

I Wrote a Weird Kind of Business Book

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
For the last two years, I’ve been working on a book about what it’s like to build a tech startup and how Silicon Valley’s startup culture biases founders and companies to make a lot of poor decisions. That book, Lost and Founder, comes out in 14 days… I’m the usual mix of excitement and nervousness, elation and fear. The face…
Startups

New Jumpshot 2018 Data: Where Searches Happen on the Web (Google, Amazon, Facebook, & Beyond)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Over the last few years, I’ve been incredibly frustrated with inaccurate, unrepresentative data sources about how traffic flows on the web and where web searches take place. Some of these are well-intentioned mistakes (e.g.), while others feel like they’ve got a specific motivation. But one source that’s been consistently excellent is Jumpshot, a collector and provider of anonymized, clickstream-level data…
Startups

Why Web Marketers Should Invest in Demand Creation

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Every month, hundreds of thousands of people search on Google for “upcoming movies.” And in the SEO and web marketing worlds, there are a lot of practitioners who’d argue that movie studios should be investing more effort into ranking in the lists, news items, and search results that show for those queries. After all, according to the Moz Explorer tool,…

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