The Entrepreneurs Radio Show 028 Rand Fishkin

THE ENTREPRENEUR’S RADIO SHOW

Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs that Grow Your Business

Copyright © 2012, 2013 The Entrepreneur’s Radio Show of 16

EPISODE #28: RAND FISHKIN

Rand Fishkin

Travis: Hey, it’s Travis Lane Jenkins, welcome to a new episode of Diamonds in Your Own Backyard.

Sandra my co-host and good friend is in the center of Daytona International Raceway for a few weeks

attending to 25 Race team so Sandra I know you are listening, we miss you. We are going to force

onwards without you. Today we are talking about one of the most important elements of your business

which is the constant flow of new customers into your business through different channels of marketing.

Although before I introduce you to our incredible guest today, I have a favor to ask you. If you have

enjoyed this free podcasts that we create for you just go to iTunes and post a comment and rate the

show, that will let us know that what we are doing matters to you. This would be a big help for us in

reaching and helping as many entrepreneurs as possible with the great guests that come on the show.

Now with each and every show our objective is to basically give you a seat right next to us as if there

were four of us just at the table talking. So that you are part of the conversation with some of the most

brightest entrepreneurs and thought leaders in the world. People that have found success themselves

and want to help you by sharing what they know. Everyone that we talked to has found success doing

what it is they teach. It’s taking me years and lots of money to get access at this level and now you are

right here with us with this great people. So let me tell you a little bit about our guest today. His name is

Rand Fishkin. Rand co-founded the most popular SEO Software Company on the internet today called

SEOMOZ which has made an incredible impact on how business owners go about reaching their ideal

client online through SEO and really other aspects and I will explain that a little more later. I guess the

reason why I say that is I come to realize that SEOMOZ is really a lot more than just SEO or at least

from my perspective and I will get Rand’s take on that. The reason why I said that is his company does

a great job of explaining complicated marketing strategies in a brilliantly simple and even funny way

through slide shows that help you get better results and have a deeper understanding with marketing

and marketing strategies. Without further ado, welcome to the show Rand.

Rand: Thank you so much for having me Travis.

Travis: Yeah. So before we talk about the incredible accomplishments that you had and the things that

you teach within your business, would you mind giving us a little background our listeners are

entrepreneurs, would you mind giving us your background of how you got started and kind of what

transitioned you into this incredible success that you are today?

Rand: Sure, sure. The short answer is a lot of failure first. Which I think it’s how many entrepreneurs

how’s that happened. I went to University of Washington, dropped out in 2001, essentially to work at a




web design and marketing consultant business that my mom was running, she run sort of a print

design, business cards, logos, brochures, letterheads that kind of stuff.

Travis: Right.

Rand: And as our clients started in web design in 1990’s, late 90’s so I was helping out when I was in

high school, then college. Then I decided I didn’t want to go to school anymore. I was two classes away

from graduating. My parents, well my mom was okay. My dad was furious, my grandparents were

disappointed. That company did not do well for the first 5 or 6 years. We lost money. We went pretty

deeply into debt. I literally had the debt collector to my office which is my home to serve me papers, that

kind of thing. In 2003 we started doing some SEO work. We had been outsourcing it prior to then, we

couldn’t afford advertising and paid ads and neither could our customers. So we had to find free way of

getting traffic and SEO was the big one. Google was sort of on the rise at that time.

Travis: Right.

Rand: In 2006, we finally managed to turn the business around. Get back to sort of break even and

profitable. Over that time we built a very popular blog. I started blogging in 2003, the SEOMOZ

blogged, which was the real name of the business. So it’s a business actually named for a blog. That’s

one of the reasons that we started as dot org since it was never intended to be a business. Then that

blog became very popular and built up a community. In 2007, we launched our first version of a

subscription service you could PayPal us I think 29 bucks a month at that time and get access to some

of our tools that we have been using for our consulting clients that we’ve built. That kind of took off, sky

rocketed and in the end of 2007 we took a venture capital around 1.1 million dollars. Over the last few

years we have grown considerably, last year we took another funding around 18 million and we have

been profitable for about 4 years. Last year we did about 22 million dollars in revenue. We have about

18 thousand, today about 19 thousand customers as subscribers to our service and 106 employees. It

has been an exciting journey.

Travis: Nice. Yeah. And so that’s continuity income right?

Rand: Well it’s it does subscription fast model right? Think Netflix or Survey Monkey you pay monthly

with a credit card.

Travis: Right. So let me make sure that I understand this right. I guess I was under the perception that

your business was started around 2005, and I think a lot of people believe that most businesses have

overnight success. When they really tend to gloss over or not mention the five years of struggle. It

sounds like to me that maybe that was the case with you. You have five years of struggle before you

really started monetizing this thing right?




Rand: Yeah, I mean five years of trying to make whatever money we could and pay off our debt and

build anything very unsuccessfully.

Travis: Right.

Rand: But I try not to gloss over it too much but I think it’s very important for anyone else who’s thinking

about entrepreneurship and thinking about a business that they sort of have that perspective of “Wow,

not only is this design is easy, we got to go through some tough times.

Travis: Yeah, I agree with you. I don’t think the owners themselves gloss over. I think everybody else

Rand: Yeah, the media my goodness.

Travis: Yeah, and even people who watch you. They’re like “Look at this Rand guy, He’s killing it. He’s

making a fortune,” and they view you as a somewhat overnight success, you and other people. As in

overnight success and little do they know that there were years and years of turmoil and ups and

downs, and even catastrophic failures. Really it even why we created this show is because I think

entrepreneurship is presented in a light to where most people think that successful entrepreneurs are a

different breed from everybody else, and while there are some elements that we have and that’s

tenacity of not giving up and constantly seeking to grow and improve, it’s not this silver spoon club that

is only for a certain selected few. Most entrepreneurs have had a very flawed journey. I built my

business to 70 million dollars but I had to go bankrupt before I really come to realize my strengths and

weaknesses and focus on them.

Rand: Yeah.

Travis: And maybe five years to monetize it is not the right way to say it, but five years before you

achieve consistent profitability right.

Rand: That was correct.

Travis: Okay, and then I noticed that you, looking at one of the slideshows that you put up there you

doubled revenue last night or last year. That’s incredible! How do you?

Rand: Yeah, I’m pretty close to doubling every year since 2007.

Travis: Geez, that you know,

Rand: It’s funny when you talk to normal people like you and I, thank think “Wow, you’re doubling

revenue that’s pretty fantastic. I obviously pissed a lot of venture capitalist for a lot of investment

between 2008 to 2012 before we got successfully funded a second time. Their definition of success is a

much higher bar.




Travis: Right.

Rand: It’s refreshing that “Wow, doubling. That’s amazing.” Yeah it is amazing. For me, I never forget

that.

Travis: Yeah, I experienced that. It’s one thing to double 500 and then a million to 2 million, 4 million, 8

million but what happened is business models and the way you run things is not maybe a business

model, but the way you run things change at the 3 million mark, the 7 million mark, or it did for me.

Rand: Absolutely.

Travis: Even the 10 million mark and beyond. So, how have you adjusted to those transitions?

Rand: I think a lot of it is having the humility to know that you don’t know everything, and having the

respect for the challenges in the future. So you can tell yourself, “Hey, you are not a hotshot. What you

did last year was great and big part of that is the people who surrounded you and the industry that were

in and the business model that we’ve built. Some of those who are reluctant to and some of those who

strategize are terrific, but get ready because this next year you’ll have to learn twice as much. You’re

going to have a completely new experience. Every person that we hire at MOZ, I have never run a

company that big before. Every dollar of revenue that we’ve made I have never run a company that

made that much before, so I think that humility is very helpful. Certainly the open mindedness to say I’m

not going to be able to do things the way I did last year, if I want to get to where I’m going to get to. I’d

like to say, I frequently think to myself that “Who’s that idiot they put in charge of this company last

year.” “How could they let that kid run things?”

Travis: That’s brilliant of you to think that way Rand. I have to tell you that you’re a better man than me

for that because in my 30s, I’m in the top 1% of the world income and I’m really killing it. So I was

stubborn, I wasn’t arrogant but I was stubborn because I have grown the business in nontraditional

ways. I felt like I was on uncharted territories. So I wasn’t really coachable at that time, or as

coachable as I should have been, until I had my rear handed to me did I get that attitude adjustment. It

is admirable of you to take that mindset, and I think it’s going to give you, pay you really serious

dividends in growing your business. I think the key is surrounding yourself just like you said even at the

top with highly competent people that are not there just to say yes, and agree, and laugh for every time

Rand laughs right?

Rand: Oh, absolutely. Actually I wrote a recent blog post. I think it was called “Having my COO

challenge me makes me a better CEO. Our SEO CEO is Sarah Bird and Sarah was previously a lawyer

before joining the company and sort of a friend of mine. We sat down a couple of times back in 2007. I

was like “Why don’t you come on board, we don’t really need a chief counsel, you can do some

blogging for us and I could look into some things.” She joined the company and started coming to board




meetings as our counsel and was so incredibly valuable there that our investors said “hey, we should

make her operating officer” and we did and it’s been great. She and I have a close personal

relationship, and a fantastic respect for each other. But we also see the world in some different ways. I

think there are different perspectives. We occasionally come into conflict and that conflict process is

super healthy. It’s really healthy in making us both considering. We know when we are in the room with

someone who’s really smart. Who believes in the same core values, wants the same good things for

the company, and just thinks the different way to go about it is the right way. That’s incredible. I can’t

recommend that enough.

Travis: Yeah. Excellent, I see it happen with businesses. I see it happen with movie stars. They get

surrounded by people and everybody just wants to make you happy. What it does is it throws your

sense of reality often. It’s a very gradual process. You start losing touch with what really is or is not

happening and then your judgment and everything else starts proportionally getting off as well. So

that’s definitely typical in staying on target there. Now, has your business always focus on education as

much outside of SEO and for those of you who don’t know, SEO is search engine optimization. I was

really surprised to see how deep you went on a multiple of channels for education of just marketing

itself and your message in content creation and things.

Rand: We do a tremendous amount of content production. I think that’s a huge part in being successful

in SEO. There are numerous ways to go about doing successful SEO. In the past, certainly in the early

2000’s and even in the 08, 09, Google was pretty vulnerable to a lot of spam. You could see, and

unfortunately this is why SEO has garnered a lot of bad reputation in a lot of circles. Because there are

a lot of spammers and who do manipulative things. Of course that it only takes one person to email

spamming and a million addresses to create a bad impression of what SEO is or blog content

spamming. But nowadays content is one of the only big ways to win and the reason is that if you do

great content and I don’t just mean things that people will enjoy but that people will inflate so much that

they see a great percent of them will want to share it with other people and many of those share

methodologies Tweeting, putting it up in Facebook, putting it up in Google plus, on Linked In linking to it

from your blog, or your site, or your news article. All of those things are signals that can help influence

either directly or indirectly the Google ranking. Getting that content out there that’s going to get a lot of

people to share it is super important.

Travis: I guess the impressive thing is you guys teach much more than just SEO.

Rand: Yeah absolutely. We were very interested in being helpful on all the aspects of online marketing

which is actually content, social media, obviously SEO, email marketing, conversion rate optimization,

brand building, public relations and press releases, and getting in front of people for outreach. All of

those tactics interestingly, or all of those fields are things that you need to succeed in SEO today. You

could say, your just doing SEO at a very broad level or you could say you’re doing it in all of these




channels. Search engines no longer are what they used to be back in the early 2000s. You couldn’t get

anywhere without search engines. Now there are a lot of organic clicks that happen on the web that are

not just Google.

Travis: I watched a couple of your slideshows that I thought were brilliant, and it brought a saying to

mind a saying for me is “To know and not do is to not understand.” So, there are a lot of people that

thinks they know how to do things or they have a 50 foot view of how to do something SEO and other

things although they really don’t have a deep understanding. So, I see a lot of small business owners

that are just paralyzed because they don’t really have a deep understanding. A couple of those

slideshows one was “How SEO Blinded Me Then Opened My Eyes” which is great. Another great one it

was “Content Marketing Strategy” you really went deeper on the strategy. I think that what a lot of

people are missing there. Do you feel like what you’re teaching in your business is for SEO

professionals or is it for the Do it yourself also.

Rand: It’s both absolutely. When you look at the breakdown of the SEOMOZ customers it’s about 40%

agencies and consultants. Who help people about SEO it’s about another 40% in house marketers,

people who sit on teams inside companies, the head of SEO, or responsible for SEO, maybe a director

of online marketing something like that, and then 20% are made up of about independent operators.

People who kind of own and run their own web businesses of some kind, some of those are affiliate

marketers; some of those people do e-commerce. Some of those are people at the very early stage of

trying to build a start up and certainly we love helping all those types of folks and build the software in

such a way that we hope can be a use for it.

Travis: Okay. I really like and I may, I didn’t write the name of this down but if my memory serves me

correctly, you had something that you described as the serendipitous angle? Is that right?

Rand: Oh, yeah. I wrote about the power of serendipity on my blog and actually it comes from a

friend of mine. Ian Shapiro here in Seattle, who run a couple of companies. Start a company called

Spark 5, which was bought by Google. Now he is bought by Google. Dan describes this obligation of

CEOs to manufacture serendipity for their companies. He said that it’s brilliantly worded and well

explained. The challenge here is that you will encounter people have experiences that will lead to other

people and other experiences that will eventually get you to a fantastic result. He gives the example of

he was sitting on a plane going down to San Jose just to get to a conference and he hates talking to

people on the plane. He likes his quiet time but whenever he is flying from Seattle down to the Valley

he tries to make a point of talking to the person next to him because usually, especially if he is in 1st

class, it gets upgraded because usually it’s somebody interesting. He did that and it turned out to be

that the skies were ran NMA for Google. Google bought its company a year later.

Travis: Right.




Rand: That serendipitous attack , maybe he would have run into them here anyway over the

course of business here but maybe that would have never happened. It’s sort of a, you, as a CEO you

need to be conscious that while your marketing efforts should be measured and everything should be

tracked. You should do your best to have metrics. You should probably do some things that your

intuition says “This might lead into something interesting.” And force yourself to do the uncomfortable

part that might lead into something interesting, Because it could have a very powerful return of

investment despite the fact that is really quite impossible to measure and track and know what’s going

to be making a difference or not.

Travis: Right. You took that serendipity angle and you wrapped it into the marketing strategy which

I thought was brilliant. It really kind of ties you back to what you’re saying is “Put yourself out there.” I

don’t know about you, but I don’t mind talking, I actually enjoy interacting and mixing and mingling with

the public and getting out. But getting on the stage at times makes me a nervous wreck. Putting

yourself out there is taking some bold steps. Even doing a show like this, at times I find myself pushing

back. Putting yourself out there and also creating some high quality content that people care about. I

think when you mix the marketing strategy along with the serendipitous effect you really illustrated in

one slide just made a lot of sense. I just thought that is brilliant. The way that you’re illustrating that,

looking back on your business what do you think was the turning point for you and your business?

Rand: I think either there are 2 big ones. I think one of them was at the beginning of 2005. The

SEOMOZ blog started to get a rhythm to it. It was picking up more and more traffic. More people were

talking about it in the industry. I participated in tons and tons of forums and other blogs on SEO always

with the handle Randfish and I started to see mentions of the blog outside of my specific circle. I

thought “Wow, this is picking up. People are using us as a reference resource, and those kinds of

things. So I wrote a beginners guide to SEO. There wasn’t really one out there yet at least nothing free.

There was Erin Wolf’s SEO book which was certainly a great resource, quite expensive. I think it was 3,

4 hundred dollars to 5 hundred and it was an e-book. That beginners guide to SEO book kind of

covered lot of the basics and the in depth of some things, provided a lot of best practices. It wasn’t this

here’s all the super secret stuff. SEO is a lot less super-secret than people think it is. That guide did

very, very well at the same time a reporter from Newsweek was interviewing manufacturing Serendipity.

He was on a late night chat with this black hat SEO guy out of the UK. I don’t actually know the name of

the black hat SEO guy is, his real name but I think his handle was Earl something. I think it was Earl

Gray something like that. He was chatting with this black hat guy. I think I might write an article about

SEO, do you know of a white hat SEO Company that I also should write about? The guy said, you

should talk to Rand Fishkin at SEOMOZ. I thought “Wow, there’s the serendipitous power of making

friends with black hat guys in addition to learning a lot, you get a News referral. They flew out to

Seattle. This guy did a big interview with us they did a photo shoot, and we had a 3, 4 page spread in

Newsweek magazine in 2005 when Newsweek magazine was still a thing, now it’s defunct obviously.




That kind of catapulted the brand into significance and relevance and I start getting invited to a lot more

conferences. I think that was a big turning point for us. Even though we hadn’t yet started to turnaround

in profitability, I think that was the catalyst right there.

Travis: Oh yeah. The profitability was in the pipeline from that point forward that kind of sound like the

tipping point. What does MOZ mean?

Rand: Actually, when I initially created the blog on 03, I took it from DMOZ which had a number of

offshoots Chef Moz, DatMoz, a few other ones the Mozilla foundation obviously and the idea is that

information should be open, available and transparent. That is something that I believed in a long time

and I wished the SEO field when I got into it had been more transparent with information with a lot of

people hoarding whatever knowledge that they found and sort of playing off this marketing idea that

they had the secrets that nobody knew. So SEOMOZ was built to democratize that information and I

think it turned out to be a very successful strategy.

Travis: Yeah. Looks like it. One of the things, even in your chart is, it shows for that a period you were

providing a consulting services, and then it looks like you just completely transitioned into the software

side of things. Which really from a business model standpoint I would guesstimate that that problem

made your margins a dream because it is much less labor intensive and it’s very scalable, and you

could continue to double your numbers and not have to exponentially grow your staff as big as you

would if it were consulting businesses. Is that correct?

Rand: That is correct. In fact most of our coach that has sold today the budget line, most I would say,

virtually all is hosting. Hosting coach, seven person help team and we’ve got few engineers on

production engineering which is essentially keeping things up maintaining, bolstering that kind of stuff.

But the vast majority of it is the hardware, the hosting, the bandwidth, the processing cost and that bill

today is almost $800,000 dollars a month.

Travis: Wow.

Rand: And our margins in the last couple of years as we have been trying to aggressively grow swift

from the first 3 years that we were running this from 07 to 2010 and even in 2011 margins were

between 80 to 85% gross margins. And now today, we ended, past year at 69% maybe 68% so it looks

considerably, and I think we will have to invest again, and we are investing this year in our own data

center, moving off from Amazon which is very expensive at our scale. We are using EC2 the Amazon

web services and building out our own hardware and data center means a big upfront investment that

we could only have made with the venture investment that we got last year. So, now we can essentially

use that money to massively improve our profitability and margins again and that will give us the ability

to grow some more.




Travis: Right. Which is the cycle of growth; you basically take that big upfront cost and amortize it out.

To lower your fixed overhead expenses right?

Rand: Yeah. You just have to pull that money in the bank to do it.

Travis: Yeah, the thought of bringing venture capitalist on board is scary for a lot of people .

Rand: Man it was super scary for me. I thought they were going to take the company and kick me out

and that kind of stuff.

Travis: Yeah.

Rand: Not the case.

Travis: So good experience. In the scale of 1 to 10 and probably it’s not a great place to ask you this

publicly anyway is this something that you recommend for businesses?

Rand: For most businesses, it probably doesn’t make sense. I would say it is fairly rare that you find a

business model. The right kind of fit for institutional venture investors, and there’s a bunch of reasons

why.

Travis: From a growth to directory or from profitability? What makes you say that?

Rand: It’s kind of everything. I think that the thing you do here is to try and put your shoes in the

venture capitalist, try to put your feet in the venture capitalist shoes and think like they do. So they’ve

got a fund. I will give you a good example. Ignition was our first investor with an almost a billion dollar

fund and they invested a million dollars in SEOMOZ and owned about 14% of the company right after

that. Maybe it was 12% today they own 14% because they re-opt 3 million in this latest round. If you’re

super interested in this stuff you can read about it more on the blog. I can give you search for VC

process I rank number 1 for that venture capital that kind of stuff. You’ll see. And basically, the investor

has got to make they really need a return of 100 million dollars from you. So you think of owning 14%

and SEO really needs to get to about a billion to a billion and 5 in order for us to really move the needle

on ignition’s fund. That’s pretty darn crazy. I mean how few companies ever become worth a billion

dollars.

Travis: Yeah. I would have thought that their target would have been a percentage growth and then of

course they achieve their bigger numbers through multiple investments right?

Rand: That is the common model certainly and the investors do that but it’s a precarious process and

certainly they have to count on I am going to invest in 10 companies, one of them is going to




return the entire fund or really make a fund, two of them are going to be profitable and nice, and seven

of them are going to die.

Travis: Right.

Rand: Not the pretty common model.

Travis: Yeah it’s the risk model.

Rand: Risk model. So really they’re not. What they’re looking for is someone that they usually know

and they can trust as an entrepreneur. In a market that is underserved and has billion of dollars in

opportunity, with a business model that can scale very quickly, and hopefully one that’s in five to seven

years will either have some low but significant chance maybe 10 to 30% chance of being that billion

dollar company or they will fail. Right? Serve a long slow burn, growing slowly and eventually worth a

hundred million dollars. Yeah, we can still do it for them.

Travis: Right. At least not to those guys, right?

Rand: At least not to those guys. Yeah. There are smaller funds; there are funds that are 60 to a 100

million that makes some smaller investments. There are certainly all the seed stage and accelerator

programs, Microsoft accelerator here in Seattle, the TechStars Program which had held, funded with

David Cohen, Y Combinator from Paul Graham those kinds of things that makes much smaller

investments and don’t have nearly the need for returns.

Travis: Right. I don’t know if you are open to talk about this, but how does this drastic growth of your

business impacted you personally. A lot of people don’t realize the amount of adjustment and

refinement that comes with having such incredible success. It’s a gigantic responsibility.

Rand: I tell you honestly Travis, I don’t think of myself as a gigantic success. I think of myself as 1 mile

into the marathon and at least I’ve become fit enough to make it for the first mile. But certainly on the

personal side, I have a pretty one sided life. So I work probably almost all the time and I make time for

my wife and pretty much nothing else in my life.

Travis: I understand where you’re coming from.

Rand: Yeah. When I was younger, I used to love playing video games. They are still. Sometimes I see

a natural feel they are so fun I wish I had time to play that would be great. I used to go hiking a lot, I

used to go NFL football; I still watch games sometimes when I get a chance. I used to go out drinking

with lots of friends outside the professional world. I don’t really do any of those things much anymore.

Travis: A lot of people don’t understand what you are going through. Right?




Rand: I mean cry me a river right? Like here comes the 22 million dollars.

Travis: Yeah, not in a bad way but I think at times whenever you want to, for me I know I yearn to be

in a circle of likeminded entrepreneurs. It’s not necessarily that it’s a negative thing. But I like to you

know, I eat, breathe, and sleep business because I love it, and so I like to have deep conversations

with people that can throw that ball of communication with me, and so that is more of what I mean. It’s

hard to find those people in your backyard. So a lot of times you have to travel and have organized

meetings to get together with these like-minded people.

Rand: Yeah. That’s actually one of the things I do love about. The investment pro founder, a group of

founder CEOs they got an occasional get together. I’ve got one with the other founder CEOs in Seattle

tonight.

Travis: Hey let me, great information and thanks for sharing the personal aspect of things. Let’s get this

back to our guests, our listeners. What do you think, how can a business owner today doing based on

what you know and your specialty, what do you think is the best way to get results and start bringing

the constant flow of customers in? Any low hanging fruit that you would suggest to small business

owners?

Rand: Unfortunately there is nothing universal it’s very specific to every different kind of business. What

you’re doing, who your customer target is, all that kind of good stuff. What I would say is that there is a

process that you can follow that for some reason not all businesses do follow on the web. And it is to

say “You want to make an investment in online marketing or free channels of customer acquisition and

so figure out who your customers are and who are the people who influence potential customers. That

could be PRESS, it could be bloggers, it could be people who are active on social media sites, say

Twitter and Facebook and Google Plus. It could be review types of sites. If you’re a local business,

often times Yelp, or Urban Spoon, or Google local is very influential in sending or keeping business

away those kind of things. If you get that list of who the customer target is and the influences and get

the list of channels of where they are and are not. I want you to think broadly about that. Don’t just go to

the places where competitors are. Go to the places where the competitors aren’t. Maybe it’s the case

that there’s a lot of people asking legal questions on Quora and there are no other lawyers on Quora.

And you can become the top rated person who answers legal questions on Quora. Amazing, it’s

fantastic, you can get terrific business from that and then I would think about how do I attract those

people? Is it things that going to reach them very well, a podcast that we are doing now. Is it a video?

Is it blogging? Is it, speaking of lawyers, there’s one site that I absolutely love. A lawyer in New York

who does comic illustrations of legal situations and how to solve them. This is so much fun. I send them

around the office sometimes. Figure out not just what’s going to work, so what you are passionate

about and good at. Or what people are in your network so you can say “Hey, you know what, well

actually we can do video really well. I got an HD camera, I got into editing, I am going to do that, or I




have someone on staffs who is a very passionate illustrator and I want to do some info graphics, do

some visual media stuff, great! Photography, whatever it is and then leverage that content in ways that

are relevant to your potential audience and put them on the sites and in the channels where your

audience and those influences are participating. That’s really the key process to doing very, very well in

this field. I mean you’ll find the little tips and tricks like, “Oh yeah, if I’m using Google Plus and it’s a very

powerful channel for me, I realize I can go look at Ripples which will show all the people who shared

something after I have shared it publicly and I can find the people who are influential who share

things and I can target them specifically for outreach and make connections with them and then they’ll

share my stuff to a much bigger audience. You’ll figure out those tips and tricks on a per channel basis

as you interact with them.

Travis: And your software. What will that do, say, if we plug that in to our website what will that

do for the small business owner, will that help them with some of that?

Rand: Yeah, rather than giving a full run down, especially for small local business owners we just

acquired a company appointment called Get Listed and they’ll found there under notes to me, puts up a

blog post this morning on the SEOMOZ blog which is just fantastic. It says “How To Use SEO MOZ for

local Optimization Today.”

Travis: We will link to that.

Rand: Yeah, it’s a terrific piece. It kind of goes through every piece of what the software can help with

on that front. And then for broader businesses, if your less focused on local, and you’re doing web

optimization the bigger things that SEOMOZ does is calls your website and tells if there are any errors

or problems, or missed opportunities. You said you want to rank for this keyword, sure, but you don’t

have any pages to target or you need to fix up these things at your page. You have these errors that

mean that search engines can’t reach the right pages on your site. There are tools that tell you of the

people that are linking to you, and all the people who are linking to your competitors that are not linking

to you. We call the web like Google does and find those things and you can say these are great

potential targets for me, and go after those sort of links for opportunities. You can use the software to

track the progress of your rankings, your Twitter account, your Facebook account and all those kind of

things and see, “Hey, I tried these things and how did I do? And here is my growth over time.

Travis: Excellent. Listen I know you’re short on time, let me start wrapping this up here. Let me ask you

a couple of quick questions.

Rand: Lightning round.

Travis: What’s that?




Rand: I said lightning round.

Travis: Yes sir, lightning round. So what book made an impact on you related to business that you

would recommend?

Rand: There’s a couple. I’ll give two that I really like. One is the one that influence me the most that

would be “The Billionaire Who Wasn’t” the story about Chuck Feeney, the founder of Duty Free shops. I

highly recommend that, very inspirational. The other one that I probably recommend is the Psychology

of People and Understanding People Better, and I really like Predictably Irrational from Dan Arielly I

think that’s it.

Travis: I love it. I read a lot of books and I have not read either one of those. I’m going to put those in

my must-read list.

Rand: Oh you got to do it.

Travis: Beyond your own software, what is one of your favorite tools or pieces of technology that you

recently discovered if any, that you would recommend other business owners.

Rand: Whoa! Good question. Let’s see, so I have been liking, a few things lately, well I mean this is

more business related but there’s a software program called the Work Day that’s absolutely fantastic for

operational management if your business is scaling at all. I highly, highly recommend that, it is terrific

software. On social media management I Iike Hoot Suite a lot. I think those guys at the make are doing

a terrific job. If you are doing conversion rate optimization, conversion rate testing, one of the biggest

pain of the butt is trying to get your, if you’re in software engineering, if you attack your web developer

staff to go make all the changes that you need, which I love a company called Unbounce that lets

anyone make those changes themselves right on the pages and then test them, it super cool. I like that

a lot.

Travis: I agree with you. Do you have a famous quote that summarizes your attitude or belief in

business?

Rand: I think, I’ve really liked, there’s a quote but I can’t remember the name of the guy who did it.

There’s a quote that basically says, “When I was a young man, I valued intelligence and as I become

an older man I valued kindness.” I think that something that really resonates of me. I would say I

applied it to business quite a bit. That being kind not just to the people in your world and the people that

you meet, but your potential customers, your partners, your employees, finding people who have

kindness is often better in the long run. Than finding that wiz bang rock star or engineer who is very

hard to work with and constantly giving things a hard time. I’ll take slower progress and a few more

mistakes in exchange for someone who’s kind and empathetic.

http://amzn.to/XZAhWb

http://amzn.to/ToU5EJ

http://www.workday.com/

http://unbounce.com/




Travis: Yeah, that’s brilliant. That reminds me of it’s nice to be important but it’s much more important

to be nice.

Rand: Yes, exactly.

Travis: Rand, I’m blown away with your depth of self awareness, you’re 33?

Rand: 33. Yeah.

Travis: Let me tell you, I’m 47 and you are way beyond your time. Man, congratulations! I’m sure part

of your success, you don’t know this because you lived with yourself but you’ve really come from a

place of wisdom. So whatever you are doing to acquire this brilliant levels of wisdom, keep it up.

Rand: That’s very kind of you, thank you Travis.

Travis: Yeah, you bet. I’m excited to be connected to you. I want to support you . I’m building an

incredible network of wonderful entrepreneurs and we want to support what you’re doing. So I definitely

want to stay in touch with you. How do we connect with you? How does everyone find you?

Rand: Obviously, I ran SEOMOZ so you can check out SEOMOZ I have also a personal blog if you are

interested in the kind of entrepreneurial and psychological side of things that we talked a lot about in

this call. The venture capital stuff, all of that on my personal blog which is Moz.com/rand

Travis: Okay, great.

Rand: If you search for Rand’s Blog I think that’s the first result.

Travis: Excellent. I’ll place those links up there. One of the things I want to remind you guys is I’m

going to put show notes right below Rand’s profile and that way you can go to the books that he

suggested connect with him as well in SEOMOZ. I want to remind you to go to diyob.com “Diamonds in

Your Own Backyard” is basically a short way for you to get there rather than typing out the entire name.

Enter your name and we will send you the 2013 business owner’s guide. It’s From Frustration to 70

Million Dollars. A behind the scenes look at what you need to know to grow your business to incredible

levels of success. When you opt in you become part of the authentic entrepreneur community. Where

we are setting up a network of people tools and resources, people like Rand here that we can refer you

to and I am going to create videos and explain why I refer this person and there are a lot of things that

were really plugged into that can help you fast forward the results of your business. This is basically my

private rolodex and Sandra’s private roller decks that we use and recommend and so again everything

that we do is dedicated to getting you to that shortest path to that next level of success. I guess one

other thing, I have been talking about wrapping up three episodes a week and again I want to tell you

that right now we’re really only going to be able to maintain two. So I don’t want you to be disappointed

http://www.seomoz.org/

http://moz.com/rand/

http://diyob.com/




when 3 episodes are not coming out, so bear with me on that. I want to close the show with telling you

something that I’ve told you over the last several few shows. Now I know you don’t hear very often as

an entrepreneur. Thank you for being a leader. I want to thank you for setting an incredible example of

what it looks like to go after your dreams. Whether you know it or not most people are afraid to go after

their dreams and so most people stay in awe and never say anything to you about how impressed they

are with your ability and courage to take risk overcome your fears go after your dreams and take action.

So I just want to encourage you to keep pouring your heart and soul into this. I promise you it’s well

worth it. We need as many great entrepreneurs as possible. Don’t you agree Rand?

Rand: Absolutely. More entrepreneurs are a great thing especially in technology. I think there’s so

much opportunity here.

End of Interview

Travis: Yeah. There are just so many things, we create the jobs, we create the inspiration, the taxes,

the leadership, all of those things that’s why I think you are so critical to your community and to our

economy. So listen, I want to say take care and I’ll talk to you on the next episode. Have a great day.




How We Can Help You

We know that finding someone that you can trust online today is hard and that so many “so called

gurus” are self-‐appointed and have never really even done what they teach you to do. That’s exactly

why we created the Double Your Profits Business Accelerator. This is an exclusive offer for our fans at

a fraction of its normal cost.

Here's what to expect. We'll Schedule a 'One on One' private session, where we'll take the time to dive

deep into your business and tell you what is missing, so that you can have your best year ever!

We'll do this by performing a S.W.O.T. Analysis. This tells us your Strengths, Weaknesses,

Opportunities and Threats within your business.

This will be an eye opener for YOU, for several reasons, however some of the most common reasons

are.

As the 'Business Owner' it’s difficult to see the big picture of your own business because you’re in the

middle of a daily management.

And you are too emotionally involved to completely impartial.

This is a common problem for EVERY business owner. It doesn’t matter if you are a one-man army, or

an army of 150, the problem is still the same.

Travis Lane Jenkins

Business Mentor-Turn Around Specialist

Radio Host of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show

“Conversations with Self-made Millionaires and High-level Entrepreneurs That Grow Your Business"

http://www.rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com/biz-accelerator

http://theentrepreneursradioshow.com/

The Entrepreneurs Radio Show 028 Rand Fishkin

Small Business & Entrepreneurship

Transcript of The Entrepreneurs Radio Show 028 Rand Fishkin