SparkToro Blog

Posts by Rand Fishkin:

Advertising Content Marketing Industry Marketing Psychology Tactics

If your audience’s sources of influence and your marketing budget don’t align, you’re gonna have a bad time

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Yes, this is a rant. It’s a rant about where leadership teams allocate their marketing budget vs. where their potential customers actually pay attention. For most, that’s heavily in digital performance ads (Meta, Google, Apple, and if you’re in e-commerce, Amazon/Pinterest), a healthy amount in social media/brand ads (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, maybe Reddit), and then a bit of “content marketing,”…
Personal Startups

Snackbar Studio Raised $2.15M Using SparkToro’s Funding Model (and we’re open sourcing the docs)

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Since SparkToro’s founding in 2018, I’ve been been passionately loud about our unique funding model (becase it’s a really good idea.) The model focuses on chill work, sustainability over growth-at-any-cost, and offers investors and founders a lower-risk way to benefit from long-term, profitable operation. Several companies and funds have used our structure to raise money since, including accelerator program TinySeed…
Content Marketing Product SparkToro

NEW: Topics, Interests, and Content Ideas Now Live in SparkToro V2

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Starting today, SparkToro V2 has an entirely new capability—The Topics Section—that adds massive value for content strategy, content creation, and/or audience research applications. In fact, this new data is what our customers told us (in a September survey) was the most valuable missing piece in the product: Let me show you what it can do, and why I’m so excited…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing SparkToro Tactics

How Can My Brand Appear in Answers from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Other AI/LLM Tools?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
It’s no surprise that marketers, founders, and business owners are starting to ask how their brands can be returned in the answers given by AI/LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini. But it’s downright shocking how difficult it is to find high-quality, accurate information about how to do this. Granted, you could just ask ChatGPT (the first answer is decent,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Advertising Data Industry Marketing Predictions

Is Google Losing Search Market Share?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
A recent Wall Street Journal made the top of feeds in the digital marketing world, claiming that Google is on the precipice of losing the lead in the search advertising wars. Supposedly, in 2025, for the first time, Google may fall under 50% of market share in search advertising (according to an eMarketer report the WSJ cites). The WSJ points…
5-Minute Whiteboards Data Marketing Predictions SEO Tactics

How to Fight Back Against a Traffic-Less Web

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Surveys, studies, analytics… they all show the same thing: getting traffic on the web is harder than ever and it’s getting worse much faster in the last 2 years than the decade before. Site owners are faced with two options: compete for the scraps Google and the other platforms provide, or play the game differently by engaging in Zero-Click answers,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Agencies Marketing Tactics

How Do We Anchor Content Marketing Efforts in a Multi-Platform Distribution World?

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This week, I’m taking a full 8 minutes because I want to address an incredibly important email from Russell Wojcik of Liquibase that came in reply to my previous 5-Minute Whiteboard on Content Marketing Evolving Beyond SEO: What distribution point do we rally around if it’s not just keyword rankings in Google? It’s a fair question because, for many content…
Advertising Agencies Industry Marketing Tactics

How Paid Media Buyers Can Get an Edge in 2024

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
(The following post was written by Sam Tomlinson, EVP of Warschawski and one of the smartest marketing strategists operating today, and published on his blog. He’s kindly given us permission to reprint it here. Once you start reading, you’ll see why I believe everyone who subscribes to SparkToro should check it out. -Rand) The past three months have been jam-packed…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing Tactics Zero Click

Content Marketing Needs to Evolve Beyond SEO

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I’m tired of seeing blog posts, videos, webinars, articles, guides, resources, social posts whose entire raison d’etre is an attempt to rank for keywords in Google. It limits our creativity AND the likelihood that meaningful marketing improvements will happen. Content marketing is bigger than SEO. I’m tired of 99% of my LinkedIn feed pretending it’s not. This week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard…

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