The best content came out of the Q&A at ~69m. A guy asked two questions: (1) how do you find the angle about what to publish content about and (2) when do you start publishing content to get inbound traffic?
Rand responded: He goes to topsy top 1000 [1], alltop [2] to find featured blogs that are getting the most buzz, Google Plus popular section, the subreddit most relevant to you, and followerwonk [3] to see what the top 100 twitter accounts in your industry are talking about
Basically, all of the above actions get you immersed in the market you're trying to penetrate and gives you an understanding of what will be of value to them. You can then use this information to generate content that will go viral.
Unfortionately, he didn't answer the second question :(
Got an email that if I upvote this item on Hacker News I get two free months of SEOMoz. How much of that sort of stuff happens here? How many of the 127+ points this item has are from incentivized SEO?
And, in the spirit of full disclosure, the actual email I sent out to the members of our meetup:
Video of Rand Fishkin's presentation, Gaining Traction: Inbound Marketing for Startups is live. One of the best presentations I've been at in a long time. I'll be watching it a couple of times.
Slides of the presentation are here.
I'd love for the video to make it to the top of Hacker News.... I'm not active on that site any more. Could ya'll hook a brother up?
I'd love to give Rand and SEOMoz.org some press, to boost their sales. He's an amazing guy, and SEOMoz is killer.
Help H&F help you...
The more views we get on those videos, the BizSpark team prove to their bosses that's it's worth buying all of you pizza and beer and wine, and renting out the "Fancy Pants" auditorium for us. It costs them about $20k every time we host an event there. ( Laura and I don't get anything out of it. )
So, if you'd like us to host more of those presentations...
Facebookify, Tweetify, Quorify, social newsif-y, etc...
Thanks
And, for helping out with that, you get:
Two free months of SEOMoz.
Seriously, it kicks ass. Try it out on your site.
Cheers,
Jonathan
Poorly worded, and I apologize for the confusion. See my other reply...
"I'd love for the video to make it to the top of Hacker News.... I'm not active on that site any more. Could ya'll hook a brother up? ....
And, for helping out with that, you get:
Two free months of SEOMoz."
Sorry about that confusion. I misworded that email.
That's not at _all_ what I meant, and I didn't mean to game the system at all. I apologize about the confusion.
For various reasons, I'm not really active on this community any more. So, I asked H&F members if they would be kind enough to do if for me.
I asked H&F members to submit and upvote, tweet, like and Google Plus to give Rand some press.
Rand flew down to SV on his own dime to talk to our H&F members for free. He didn't ask us to promote SEOMoz, and never required anything out of us. He was truly one of the most delightful, genuine and kind speakers that we've had at H&F. I'm more than happy to do whatever I can to help him and his company out.
BizSpark sponsored the event by buying everyone pizza and beer. H&F doesn't get a dime out of this. Hackers & Founders is completely boot strapped ourselves, and do a lot of this for love of the game. And, we're pursuing becoming a for benefit corporation.
When Rand and I first started talking, about speaking to our people a few months ago. I arranged for SEOMoz to give H&F members two free months of SEOMoz for free. I emailed that offer to our people last month, but no one signed up. I figured that after Rand spoke, people would be a bit more interested in trying the SEOMoz service out.
I emailed the link to the free trial out with the link to the video to our Meetup, because I'd received about 20 emails asking for both the video as well as the free trial in the past 24 hours.
I apologize if people thought that I was trying to game the system. I'm not. I'm trying to give a friend, and a great entrepreneur a boost. He helped out community out a great deal. His writing has helped me out a great deal in the past.
And, for what it's worth, SEOMOz has an affiliate program. If people sign up for a one month trial, the referrers get $25. It's not really worth that effort for me, and that's not what H&F does. So, we chose to waive the affiliate fee and SEOMoz chipped in the extra month to help everybody out.
Clarification much appreciated. Original email (e.g. request for upvote) probably would have been fine if you hadn't presented the 2 months of SEOMoz as a prize for the upvote.
In 2009, Hubspot decided to coin the term Inbound Marketing in a new way so they can claim the space ("first inbound marketing software"). Since then, they changed the entire Google results (starting with Wikipedia) so that they come up on most queries. The rare times I used Inbound Marketing with traditional marketers, they always meant Market Research.
I was never actually aware of the "market research" definition; this is the first I've heard of it.
At Moz, I've long been looking for a phrase that means "content marketing + white hat SEO + social media + email marketing + conversion rate optimization." Inbound marketing has come to take on that definition, and I like the terminology. Permission marketing always had an association to me with list building (usually email), but never SEO, social, CRO, etc.
If another term/phrase catches on that encompasses all those facets of organic/natural/inbound/white hat/mostly-non-paid web marketing, I'd likely switch to that. In the meantime, it's far easier and more comfortable to go with the prevailing convention.
BTW - Saw your other comment below and am totally flattered. Not sure how I can live up to that, but thank you :-)
I was there last night. Rand is a supremely talented presenter and did a great job of explaining how early stage startups can gain traction through organic (inbound) marketing.
He explained the basic concepts of online marketing and the basics of marketing strategy in a supremely succinct and inspiring way. It was golden! It was entertaining! Highly recommended!
Back when I was doing SEO, Rand Fishkin was my hero. You could not find a more humble person, while delivering tremendous value in the white-hat community. I am glad he still speaks and educates as much as he can.
This was a really fantastic summary of why you should do inbound marketing and how you can get started delivered in a lively and entertaining fashion.
Congratulations Rand! Looking forward to seeing more from you on the speaking front.
I can personally attest to the value of "mining the social web". When we first launched decal mockups[1] to get some eyeballs amongst designers my only strategy for getting traffic was to post it on HN.
When it slid off the newest page and into oblivion I was really down in the dumps but I just added a stream in hootsuite for the word "mockups", then anytime someone mentioned mockups I posted a link to the site and got 70 people signing up within the first week.
It's a fantastic way to engage with early adopters (although I would warn against automating it - I think possibly it was the fact that each message was personalised that meant I got very few negative reactions - only one that I can remember which was some guy telling me to "diaf" :)
I'm part of a stealth startup that's handling retargeting for about 30 startups now and I can confirm that it is indeed a brutally effective method for acquiring users. We're seeing that on average, retargeted ads perform about 350% better than any other kind of targeted ad. It seems a little crazy until you recalibrate your understanding of what's happening. Instead of trying to push new information on a user (which no one likes), with retargeting, you're _pulling_ people back to something they've already expressed an interest in. It works marvelously.
Example: We're running retargeting for an SaaS startup that gets a lot of airtime on HN, and they're snagging new users at less than $2/head. Once these folks get on board, they spend on average $40/year on the service. Our little team had a "f___ yeah" moment after the 4th day or so when we saw how well it was working. We're now hustling to hire folks to meet the demand coming from word of mouth.
If any HNers on here want to ad retargeting to their startup, web app, side project, mobile app landing page, or whatever the heck you're building, hit me up at the e-mail address in my profile.
We're still building out our actual product so startups and technical people make for the best customers. Less explaining, more appreciation for results, more understanding when we goof up.
My understanding of Google's program is that it runs your ad across its DoubleClick exchange. We run our clients ads across DoubleClick just like them... as well as the rest of the ad networks... plus our publisher partner inventory. Google's DoubleClick inventory is a part of our overall inventory.
DoubleClick is very much the largest and awesomest exchange. But there's A LOT of display ads on the web.
The data we have suggests that DoubleClick offers up about 4b daily impressions to retarget against. The overall retargeting ecosphere that folks like us and a few others are retargeting against is in the 10-14b impressions/day range. DoubleClick's massive and have a lot of the best inventory, but it's still just a part of the whole.
NOTE: I'm sure there's other display-heads on HN who might have different data. Either way, Google's exchange is no more than 30-50% of the total exchange inventory out there.
SEOMoz uses AdRoll (disclosure: i'm founder) for retargeting. It's been a pleasure working closely with the Moz team shaping their campaign...
We help thousands of brands with retargeting and, yes, the results range from "holy crazy crap" to "hot diggity dangermouse." We offer an easy-to-use platform, great ROI, and powerful personalized advertising (eg, LiquidAds.)
Like secret_target says, partnering with a retargeting platform gets you much wider reach and better results than working exclusively with a single inventory pool like Google. (Google has the monopoly in search, but not display...)
FYI: The AdRoll folks are indeed great. We've interviewed a handful of their customers as well as customers from many other retargeting platforms and have heard great things.
We see retargeting as a huge space with plenty of room for several players.
HasOffers is actually a self-service platform that handles the affiliate tracking aspect of running an affiliate program vs. a "full-service" firm like Commission Junction, LinkShare or Google Affiliate Network which will take a 20-30% cut on all sales.
Just wanted to clarify that it's really SEOMoz that does their own affiliate program essentially in-house using the HasOffers platform. (correct me if I'm wrong on this anyone from SEOMoz!)
We use HasOffers as well and its a great system. After trying lots of other affiliate systems including trying to build one in-house we are finally happy :)
This comments thread contains several comments from people who seem to have got something valuable from this video, but I have not been able to gather what that something is. There also seems to be a lot of SEO fluff here, which should be downvoted.
It's definitely worth watching, IMO, especially if you view SEO as "fluff".
Rand does a great job of explaining how SEO and inbound marketing are attractive alternatives to interruption marketing. If you're annoyed by paid advertising and believe that what you build should benefit your users, then I think you'll get a lot out of it.
The "fluff" I was talking about is all the contentless puff comments that appeared, couched in un-HN-ish language: I guess they are a fan club from some SEO social network or another.
What a great speaker Rand is. Definitely makes me interested in the service. Loved the examples of real marketing such as urbnspoon, dropbox, seomoz, and simply hired.
Rand killed it last night! Well balanced talk from story, strategy to tactics...extremely powerful to see the juxtaposition of paid and inbound marketing. Earned media converts so much better on all levels. However he didn't talk about the speed of user acquisition...comparing both channels.
I think it's a bit ironic given the nature of the talk that the link on the video page to seomoz.org has rel="nofollow" while comments down below don't have. No link juice for those who provide content(talk) and all the link juice for commenters.
My personal favorite is towards the end of the talk when Rand left great tips (the last 15 minutes or so before QnA) The top 10 ways to get in bound traffic are practical and insightful for any early stage startup. It kicks ass!
Rand responded: He goes to topsy top 1000 [1], alltop [2] to find featured blogs that are getting the most buzz, Google Plus popular section, the subreddit most relevant to you, and followerwonk [3] to see what the top 100 twitter accounts in your industry are talking about
Basically, all of the above actions get you immersed in the market you're trying to penetrate and gives you an understanding of what will be of value to them. You can then use this information to generate content that will go viral.
Unfortionately, he didn't answer the second question :(
[1] http://topsy.com/top1k [2] http://alltop.com/ [3] http://www.followerwonk.com