Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

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.

The free trial is also publicly available as a sponsor link on our meetup page at http://www.hackersandfounders.com.

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.

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...

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'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.

</shameless plug>

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...)

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.