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Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Startups

So Why Do I Have the Platform & the Recognition?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Louis C.K. is one of the most entrepreneurial and authentic self-marketers in the entertainment world. I want to write loads about his email campaigns, his online ticket-sales, and the consistency of his persona, but tonight, it’s very late, I’ve just spent 22 hours on planes and in airports, and so this will have to do. From the NYTimes’ interview with…
Events Marketing

11 Tips I Gave to Marketers this Morning

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Today finds me blogging from Australia, where I had the privilege of keynoting SMX Sydney and participating in a site clinic (wearing an SMX lab coat, which is always fun). While looking through the show’s program guide, I discovered that I was also supposed to be on a panel today! The description read something like this: Bill Hunt and Rand…
Startups Team

Scaling Teams and the Fight Against Human Nature

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’ve talked to a lot of founders about their startup experiences and one of the more consistent topics we eventually get to is that, somewhere around 80-100 people, the team dynamics get really hard. So hard, in fact, that many founders opt to leave their companies at around this size and bring in more “professional” management. (via Ana Teresa on…
Startups

Why I Never Want to Have a “For-Profit” Business

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Making money is an excellent side-effect of successful businesses. But, it’s a terrible core purpose. Last week, Fred Wilson wrote one of my favorite posts in a while on Short-Term Thinking vs. Long-Term Thinking. Here’s an excerpt: …Sure Samsung is making a killing on handset sales right now. So is Apple. That goes to their bottom line and then onto…
Moz Personal Team

The Expectation of 100%

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s 4:36am. I’ve been awake for an hour, stumbling through email and catching up on reading. G and I flew back from London two nights ago, and although I slept great last night, I crashed at 10pm tonight and only managed 6 hours before the jetlag kicked in. Casey, who runs the inbound engineering team at Moz, and I had…
Data Marketing

What Do Correlation Metrics Really Tell Us About Search Rankings?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’m excited to see the marketing field getting more interested in correlation data and metrics around SEO. There’s a lot of folks citing data from SearchMetrics’ UK Study, from Mark Collier’s Open Algorithm project, and from Moz’s own ranking factors and follow-up reports. (Searchmetrics’ study at left, OpenAlgorithm at right) The trouble is how this data gets perceived and interpreted…
Hiring Startups Team

What Company Culture IS and IS NOT

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Frustrated. Disturbed. Disappointed. That’s how I feel after reading a recent article that appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek called “Job Applicants’ Cultural Fit Can Trump Qualifications.” I don’t typically like to rant against stuff on the web, but I’m worried this is a case where the popularity of the piece (note the thousand upvotes, 600+ comments, and hyper-negativity in the Reddit…

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