SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

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,…
Marketing

Contrarian Take: Don’t Start Your Content Marketing with “What Do My Customers Want?”

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
If you’re in the business of content marketing, I know you’ve seen advice like this: “Start with your customer personas.” “Create content that will resonate with your customers.” “Great content is content that your customers actually want to consume.” It sounds compelling. But in my experience, it’s wrong. Or at least, incomplete. Why?…

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