SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Psychology Team

The Uncomfortable Balance

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Every CEO, founder, manager, and probably most all of us at some point in our professional lives have asked these two questions: Am I pushing the people on my team too hard? Am I not pushing the people on my team hard enough? These two nag at me all the time. There are days when I marvel at what Mozzers…
Personal Psychology

The Mathematics of Core Values

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Over the holiday weekend, Geraldine took me to see Lincoln. I’d watched a clip aired during the Daily Show last week that had me excited to see the film, and Fred Wilson’s post sealed the deal. That clip contained the following quote: Euclid’s first common notion is this:  ‘Things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each…
Data Marketing

Is There a Long Tail to Referral Traffic?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I was recently chatting with my friend Matthew Brown of AudienceWise about the distribution of the web’s traffic, and we both wondered – do referrals from external domains follow a “long tail” distribution pattern? I surmised that only ~20% of the referrals that the average website receives comes from the tail of the distribution curve, whilst Matt felt that number…
Marketing Psychology

Broadening Our Thinking on the Practice of Conversion Rate Optimization

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Many times when businesses invest in improving online conversion rates, the practice goes something like this: Brainstorm a list of things that can be changed in the conversion process or on the landing page Determine which are easy to build/test Create a set of A/B or multivariate tests to run through them Allow winning changes to remain Unfortunately, this process…
Moz Startups Team

7 Ways We Try to Make Internal Emails Better

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Email is a tough communication medium. Conveying tone, voice, attitude and disposition are all stymied by the the format. Efficiency is a good thing over email, but it can lead to suspicion of dismisiveness or even contempt by a reader. And the cycle of misinterpreted emails leading to bad blood between people is something we’ve all experienced. So how do…
Personal Product Psychology

Where Does Creativity Come From?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I love discovering that long-held wisdom or cultural beliefs are mythology. Ideas are so often what hold people back from achieving greater potential – and freedom from the prison of those ideas can create revolutions that make us all better, stronger, and wiser. This weekend I watched some videos on the site Everything Is A Remix that changed my preconceptions…
Marketing

The Evolution of My Public Presentations

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This week at Distilled’s Searchlove conference in Boston (which, BTW, is probably the best marketing content I’ve seen at an event, period, including Mozcon – yes, I’m a little jealous), I presented the slide deck below on earning marketing love: Can’t Buy Me Love from Rand Fishkin For those of you who’ve seen me present this year, or who’ve followed…
Moz Team

Weaponized Humor

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
There’s a constant fight raging at Moz, and every other scaling startup I’ve seen. On one side are the forces of corporateness – trying to make the workplace a more stodgy, inauthentic, TPS-reports-to-be-filed place. On the other are the defenders of humanity and authenticity – the people who built the company and are, by and large, doing their best to…
Hiring Marketing Moz Team

Why Every Company Should Have a Marketing-Focused Webdev Team

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Ask any marketing consultant focused on inbound channels (SEO, social media, conversion rate optimization, email, etc.) what the most challenging part of their job is and 75%+ will say: “working with the engineering team.” This should come as no surprise. Engineering and webdev resources are, along with web marketers, the biggest scarcest and hardest to hire for web-based businesses. We…
Moz Product Startups

Why Does a Big Funding Round Slow Down Your Pace of Innovation?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
“Why can’t we build it faster?!” I’ve never met an entrepreneur in the software field who doesn’t ask themselves that question daily. For a lot of the past few years, I had an excuse: the constraint of capital. But, since April (when we raised $18mm), that argument’s invalidated. There’s an excess of cash on the balance sheet, and yet, from…

Keep up with SparkToro®