Category: 5-Minute Whiteboards

5-Minute Whiteboards Research Zero Click

How to Overcome the “Link in Comments” Problem on LinkedIn and Other Social Platforms

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Those pesky, anti-link, pro-native-content social platforms are at it again, muzzling the visibility of links anywhere and everywhere they can. Sure, they occasionally let something especially high-performing through, but as we learned when Twitter open-sourced its algo, these systems intentionally and consistently demote content with links… But… Amanda and I have been working on ways to outsmart these systems for…
5-Minute Whiteboards AI/LLMs Data Psychology Research

Never Ask an AI Tool How It Came Up with That Answer

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
This post on LinkedIn by Britney Muller is, IMHO, the most important short piece on AI you’ll read this year. It’s so critical to understand what she’s saying here that I’ve focused this week’s 5-Minute Whiteboard on explaining and demonstrating exactly the problem she’s so succinctly captured. If you’ve ever asked ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, or Deepseek why it gave…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing Tactics Zero Click

The 7 Marketing Problems Pinball-Shaped Buyer Journeys Create

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Last week, I showed you how Internet buyer journeys have transformed from the cleaner, more predictable funnel model of the 2000-2015 web into something shaped like a ball bouncing around a pinball-machine. These modern buyer journeys bounce back and forth between channels and content in ways that can’t be readily modeled nor cleanly attributed (despite what your analytics tool tells…
5-Minute Whiteboards Marketing Psychology Zero Click

The Pinball Customer Journey Has Replaced the Marketing Funnel

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
I like the marketing funnel. It’s a great analogy, and has served me well for years. I *STILL* think it works reasonably well as a way to describe how businesses experience the various points at which they engage/interact with users before they become customers. But, we cannot bury our heads in the sand and pretend it’s a reasonable way to…
5-Minute Whiteboards AI/LLMs Content Marketing SEO Tactics

We’ve Learned More About How to Appear in AI Answers

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Thanks to some recent experiments and research in the marketing world (and an unfortunate, manipulative attack by a Reddit mod), we’ve learned a lot more about how to influence the answers AI tools provide. This is particularly relevant for those seeking to have their brand names (or websites) appear when ChatGPT, CoPilot, Claude, Gemini, or others are asked for “the…
5-Minute Whiteboards Content Marketing Psychology Startups

Make Something People Want to Talk About

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
In my formative years as a tech entrepreneur, Paul Graham (cofounder of YCombinator), wrote a seminal essay entitled: Be Good. Most tech folks have forgotten the essay itself, but almost everyone has heard the viral piece of advice that came out of that post: “Make something people want.” It’s pithy. Short. Timeless. And a great bar to measure your product,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing Zero Click

Exactly What to Measure with Lift Based Marketing Investments

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
How do you earn budget if attribution is dead and traffic is vanity metric? Lift-based experimentation. That’s when, rather than try to assign a weight to every potential channel or tactic you (or an algorithm) think contributed to a particular conversion, you measure the lift in conversions that happen after a particular tactic or channel begins. Weirdly, it’s less precise,…
5-Minute Whiteboards Analytics Marketing

In a Zero-Click World, Traffic is a Terrible Goal

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
60% of marketers say their top goal for the next 12 months is “increasing traffic.” And 59% say their primary KPI is… also traffic. To all those folks, I say: you’re about to have a terrible, horrible, no-good year. The Internet is sending less traffic. Period. That’s a provable fact, and it’s true for every source of referral traffic —…
5-Minute Whiteboards Data Product SparkToro Tactics

How to Use SparkToro + LLMs to Do Marketing Magic

Rand FishkinBy Rand Fishkin
Most folks who follow me know I’m a bit of a late adopter and skeptic of AI. Yes, it can do some impressive things that takes humans a long, painful amount of time to replicate. But, they’re also stereotype machines whose reasoning and capabilities, especially in the creative and novel needs that marketing demands, isn’t replacing even 1% of jobs…

Keep up with SparkToro®