How SparkToro Grew

“Many of my days are also divided between SparkToro and Lost and Founder marketing items – blogging, podcasts, interviews (like this one!), etc. But I’m doing my best to tie those two together so there’s not much lost focus.”

Seolium high

“Starting the SEOmoz blog”

Baremetrics high

“getting asked questions via my social channels, via email, on calls, all that kind of stuff, and wanting to spread whatever knowledge I have or whatever opinions I've got in ways that can be helpful, right?”

Transistor medium

“SparkToro's flywheel has been around content marketing, press+PR, conferences/events, and social media marketing (mostly from my personal accounts)...”

Yetidistro high

“Could I go back to my old ways and pick a slew of tangentially relevant keywords, create content, and try to earn some links? Sure. Would I much rather have 100 people searching for SparkToro each day than 1,000 people clicking my content for unbranded search terms?”

Sparktoro medium

“And so I've started blogging about this on, well, it was first it was another domain, but then it became SEO Moz, and eventually, you know, later Moz. That blog really took off tons of people subscribe to it.”

Practicalfounders high

“With SparkToro, it was almost all PR and social media marketing.”

Buzzsprout high

“For most of social media marketing and the small amount of effort that we put into, uh, search visibility, it's impressions, basically reaching more people.”

Libsyn high

“You’ll learn how to think about off-page SEO in an unreliable, fast-changing algorithm landscape, and why diversifying your presence across blogs, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and short-form video is becoming essential for LLM citations.”

Spotify medium

“you've been blogging very directly about the coronavirus on your company blog. And I think a lot of people are afraid to do it because quite frankly, it's hard to do it right. Whereas you are prolific. Like I said earlier, you've been blogging every single week. Previous to this, I saw a Newspark...”

Transistor medium

“SparkToro's flywheel has been around content marketing, press+PR, conferences/events, and social media marketing (mostly from my personal accounts)...”

Yetidistro high

“Our most successful top-of-funnel marketing has come through what I’d call “influence marketing” (no “r”). That is, we found channels of influence -- podcasts, websites, social accounts, events, webinars, media publications, YouTube channels, etc. -- that already reached marketers and market rese...”

Starter Story high

“Moz served a lot of, I would say, amateur SEOs or founders of their own small internet business companies Yeah, they knew they needed to do SEO but they weren't really sure how to do it. And Moz was sort of a friendly place where they could learn how to do it and then get the tools to do it better.”

Practicalfounders medium

“everyone who was doing SEO was reading our blog. And so we had the audience and that audience first approach was just incredibly powerful, right? Cause they knew us, they liked us, they trusted us. So when we published some software, they were like, oh yeah...”

Buzzsprout high

“Moz was very SEO and content flywheel, right? Like we produce content, we put it on our website, then we try and rank better for that content.”

Libsyn high

“At SuperMarketers, we don’t just give you content - we create powerful inbound growth engines that generate qualified leads without hiring too many people. I’ll share the exact strategies, processes, and automated systems we use with clients to help you turn your ideas into action, faster.”

Spotify medium

“In the first 6 months after our launch last year, we received 113K visits from Google search. ~70% of those (according to Google Search Console) came from branded searches for SparkToro, Spark Toro, Rand Fishkin, or one of our free tools. The last 6 months, search traffic rose to 193K, of which ~...”

Sparktoro high

“And so I've started blogging about this on, well, it was first it was another domain, but then it became SEO Moz, and eventually, you know, later Moz. That blog really took off tons of people subscribe to it. There was a lot of as Google was growing fast, right into 05, 06, 07. There was a lot of...”

Practicalfounders high

“I started publishing on SEOmoz...and we earned quite an audience. And that sent us some consulting business for SEO, which is what the business transitioned into.”

Buzzsprout high

“Adnan Malik, co-founder and CEO, grew organic traffic more than 300% over the last two years. Today, roughly 30% of their traffic comes through LLMs and AI Overviews, up from under 5% a couple years ago. In this episode, Adnan breaks down the exact strategy shift that made it happen. We get into ...”

Spotify medium

“When I'm on podcasts — even when I'm not talking about what SparkToro does in particular — people search it out.”

Lemonpie medium

“it's like, Rand, build up our email list for early access. Talk to all the beta testers, get all the feedback, put it all in the doc, blah, blah, blah.”

Transistor high

“So far, SparkToro's flywheel has been around content marketing, press+PR, conferences/events, and social media marketing (mostly from my personal accounts) all leading back to an email signup.”

Yetidistro high

“Robust email list development”

Sparktoro high

“Sort of testament to all the work we'd done building a network and an email list of people who wanted the product during those 18 months when we were building.”

Practicalfounders high

“So far, SparkToro's flywheel has been around content marketing, press+PR, conferences/events, and social media marketing (mostly from my personal accounts) all leading back to an email signup.”

Yetidistro high

“your first 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 fans should come to you through organic marketing channels, content, SEO, PR, word of mouth.”

Practicalfounders high

“With SparkToro, it was almost all PR and social media marketing.”

Buzzsprout high

“Moz’s success and the idea for the community built around it”

Baremetrics medium

“Social media can certainly be in there, comment marketing, community participation, friends and family, network effects, private communities.”

Practicalfounders high

“Digital PR focuses on contributing to other people’s platforms such as podcasts, webinars, online events, live streams, and YouTube channels.”

Grizzle medium

“We rely on folks hearing about our brand, directly from me doing some marketing thing with an existing source of influence, or indirectly from secondary word-of-mouth. In the first few months after launch, it was almost entirely the former. Today, it’s 80%+ the latter.”

Sparktoro high

“your first 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 fans should come to you through organic marketing channels, content, SEO, PR, word of mouth.”

Practicalfounders high

“You were well-known, you were speaking all over the place, were you on top of the world?”

Practicalfounders medium

“Speaking at events and conferences—whether in-person or virtually—gives you the opportunity to demonstrate your expertise to an audience with direct interest in the topic.”

Grizzle medium

“You’ll learn how to think about off-page SEO in an unreliable, fast-changing algorithm landscape, and why diversifying your presence across blogs, YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, and short-form video is becoming essential for LLM citations.”

Spotify medium

“Every time someone subscribes to SparkToro, I visit their profile, check out their website, and send a personalized welcome note.”

Sparktoro medium

“Many of my days are also divided between SparkToro and Lost and Founder marketing items – blogging, podcasts, interviews (like this one!), etc. But I’m doing my best to tie those two together so there’s not much lost focus.”

Seolium high

“Freemium vs. Free trial (we chose freemium for SparkToro, which I think has been a big win so far)”

Sparktoro high