This SEO and Online Marketing Advice is Worth over $1000 with Rand Fishkin

CEO/founder of Moz – Rand Fishkin

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Is SEO dead? I get the real advice from THE guy on SEO. I asked all the questions you need to know, about what you should do to rank your site, and what’s worth your time to get more traffic to your site!

– Learn step by step what strategies you should use in SEO today

– Why we should even both with SEO since it’s changing so much and hard to keep up with!

– How this interview is worth way more than $1,000 bucks!

Check out Moz.com for more info!

Thanks so much for listening!

Transcript:

Jaime: Welcome to Eventual Millionaire. I'm Jaime Tardy and I'm really excited to have Rand Fishkin on the show. He is the founder of Moz.com, which used to be known as SEOMoz. He is also the founder of Inbound.org. He is the guy who knows everything about inbound marketing, so say I. He is a self-proclaimed startup junky so I'm really excited to have him on the show today. Thanks so much for coming on, Rand.

Rand: My pleasure. Thank you for having me, Jaime.

Jaime: I know your story a little bit but I want everyone else to know your story, about how you started working with you mom's firm and you started just blogging.

Rand: I dropped out of college in 2001 and my mom had been running a marketing business that was old school printmarketing, so a lot of brochures and business cards, logo design, that kind of stuff, and her clients started needing web design so I started building websites for them. Eventually we had people ask "How can I get traffic to my websites?" and since we didn't have any money and neither did they, SEO was the only way to go to earn traffic at time, so I dove into the field of SEO, spent a lot of time on forums and bulletin boards of the era, and I started a blog which was the SEOMoz blog. That was in 2003 and in 2005 we changed the company name to SEOMoz and this year we've just changed it to Moz. That consulting businessturned into an SEO consulting business which, in 2007, turned into a software business and we raised some venture capital, we raised some more last year, so we've got a total of $19 million in funding, there's 135 mozzers today, almost all based in Seattle, Washington, we have a small satellite office in Portland, Oregon as well. We're constantly expanding what we do and how we help people. We've got a subscription software service which I think has a little over 22,000 subscribers now.

Jaime: That's insane. Did you always know that you wanted to be an entrepreneur beforehand?

Rand: Not at all.

Jaime: I love knowing that. Did you just plan on working for your mom? What made you quit college to go and work for your mom?

Rand: This is going to be embarrassing.

Jaime: I love this, go ahead!

Rand: So this girl broke up with me in the fall and, I don't know, I was super depressed and I was fighting with my dad who decided to stop paying for college so I paid for one or two more quarters and then I dropped out.

Jaime: And you were like "Okay, mom, I can work for you." Which probably felt kind of crappy at the moment - "Okay, mom, give me a job." How did you change that to you starting SEOMoz? Did you mom start working for you? How did that work?

Rand: Up until 2007 she was the active president/CEO and I was just the guy who does stuff. Once we got investors they were more interested in having me be the CEO so that changeup happened. I don't want to lie to you or your audience, that was not fun or easy and it hasn't been good on our relationship since. It's a really hard thing.

Jaime: That's so crazy. I work with a lot of people who are either married in business or family business and that's why they bring me in, because they can't deal with it anymore. It's amazing, the dynamic to do that. Anyone who wants to get involved with their family might want to think about it a couple of times beforehand.

Rand: I've talked to a lot of people who've had similar experiences, like did a tech startup with their brother or dad, a family member, a husband, a wife.

Jaime: I've recommended marriage counseling more than I want to admit, and that sucks but it is what it is and unfortunately stuff like that happens because it's hard running your own business. Tell me about how a guy who never wanted to be an entrepreneur turned into one.

Rand: It was a very slow and steady process, so it wasn't one day I was building websites and then I was an entrepreneur, I was building websites and learning and helping people with SEO, and then helping people with SEO but getting really frustrated because Google keeps taking away critical information that I need to do my job, and there were these investors offering to help build this software that could crawl the whole web and index it and build all these metrics so that we can really understand how Google works and help a lot more people. So it was an evolution, there was no cliff or jumping point, which feels strange in retrospect. Did I consciously make this choice or did I fall into this? I don't know, I feel lucky to have fallen into it, I've learned so much and it's been very exciting to work with incredible people, meeting great folks like yourself through the industry, but it was not a wholly conscious decision.

Jaime: It's so funny when you see a need and you're like "We can fix that." As soon as you get that moment, "No one else can really do it the way I want to do it so I might as well do it." When you went to college were you going to college for geeky stuff? I'm a geek, I'm allowed to say that.

Rand: I played massive amounts of video games and watched anime.

Jaime: That counts.

Rand: I guess I went for that too. What did I study? I studied comparative history of ideas and finance, I was a finance major just before I dropped out.

Jaime: That's crazy, I like that you can't remember. It's been so long. So I'm a geek and when I started my blog I was like "I'm going to go all after SEO because I'm a geek and I should know how to do link building and stuff like that." Because when I went to college nobody really talked about SEO, which was 2000 and 2004, but as I started getting into it I didn't want to do link building, I just wanted to grow organically with people liking my stuff and linking to it automatically instead, so as we've progressed, my blog's been around for over three years now, things have changed insanely with SEO, so can you give us an update, especially for the people that aren't as geeky, that are told that SEO's really good, that they can get a lot of free traffic, but things are changing so much they don't really want to put all of their hard earned dollars into it unless they know whether or not it works and what the landscape looks like? Because it seems like it's so volatile that we don't want to jump in.

Rand: The landscape of SEO certainly has some volatility to it, but that comes froma bunch of difference sources. One is Google changing things, one is searchers changing their behavior, and some of those changes come from Google, some of them come from us, and one is the ecosystem of the web evolving and changing and progressing. So if it was 2001 and you really wanted to build the best website out there about mobile devices and the mobile web, well that was not a very tall order, there was not a lot of great stuff out there, if you just did basic coverage and had good pieces covering the phones that were coming out and how the hardware worked, you'd be set. Try that today - there's no way you're going to stand out. Standing out from the crowd in coverage of mobile devices today is 10 times harder and this is true in any field that's growing or interesting or attracts attention or has commercial, monetary value. So it's getting harder and harder to stand out from the crowd because the web has got more sophisticated and advanced, there's more human beings using it and creating content for it, and then there's this shift that comes from searcher demand. Search demand, over time, has only increased, there's never been a negative growth month, or at least two consecutive months of negative growth, and that's not just true in mobile search, it's true in desktop search as well. People say desktop search is being consumed by mobile - it's not! In April, Google's desktop search grew 10%, year over year, from the prior April, which is huge. That's so much growth, and what's driving that is more people gaining access to computers, people who were less sophisticated, the older generations, not being with us anymore, and people who were young getting addicted to this stuff. It's also a massive amount of growth in non-first world countries, you're essentially seeing a huge amount of interest penetration growth all around the world, and you're seeing Google doing some interesting things. Bing does this too, but search suggest, when you're typing it comes up with suggestions, which has meant more and more searches for the engines, which is pretty interesting too, because you can start typing and when they suggest you think "Maybe I want that, maybe the next thing."

Jaime: That's actually how my six year old son, who can't spell very well, can search for stuff, because Google suggests it.

Rand: That's the challenge with spelling - we're all going to become addicted. Just like our generation became addicted to calculators and old folks were like "Back in my day we used a slide rule and we used our long division tables. I was wearing an onion on my belt, it was the style at the time."

Jaime: We should just do a whole interview of you doing impressions, I like this!

Rand: Just going to do my old man impression. I'm getting so much grey in my beard, you can see it.

Jaime: Do you have kids yet, is that why?

Rand: It's all Moz grey hairs. It's been very challenging. And then you see the change in the landscape of what's available - SEOs, who builds websites. If you were to do a search today, where in the country do you live?

Jaime: Maine.

Rand: I'm not sure if you'd see this in Maine, but let's say that you went to visit Boston and you did Boston museums or new restaurants in Boston, you'd actually see this carousel that Google is showing at the top of the results with these little pictures on a black background. If you do a search for flights, say from Vermont to Seattle, and Google's got the little flight indicators and they know all the times from their acquisition of ATA or whatever it was, they're taking over a lot of the search results which means no opportunity for folks to earn that traffic themselves.

Jaime: So what I'm hearing right now is I don't want to get into it, because everything you're saying is tons of competition, things are changing constantly, why would I jump into that? Tell me.

Rand: Well, first off, I would think that growth would make you want to jumpinto it. If desktop search and mobile search are growing so incredibly fast and people are still using search engines as this massive way to find things and navigate the internet, you want to be there. Conductor, which is a firm out of New York, did a great study recently - they looked at 30 very large websites, about 310 million visits over a quarter, and 51% of all the traffic to all those sites came from organic search. You can't ignore half the internet's traffic, it's just too much.

Jaime: That's good to know. That's the way we're going, too - we don't do anything without Googling it, because if I have a questions, I want the answer right this second. So I completely understand but what I'm wondering is there are only so many number ones - I know we have lots of keywords, but there's only so many number ones.

Rand: So let me ask you this question, then when you go and search do you really always click number one?

Jaime: Maybe two, maybe three. If they're really crappy then I'll go lower.

Rand: What we've seen over time is two things - one, the distribution of clicks that one, two, three used to get has fallen and we're seeing more four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, and we're also seeing a lot more searches where the universal results, so that would be the local box, the news snippets that show up, the video, all these different kinds of results, are earning a good bit of that traffic. We're seeing that the standard deviation on the averages is changing a lot, so even if you do a big study and you see 30% of clicks land on number one and 17% for number two and 11% for number three and then it falls into single digits for everything else. However, the distribution, the standard deviation is very high, meaning that it's not the case that everyone goes and clicks number one, people tend to scan, they look, and when they do that you have a big opportunity to be the result that stands out. I think appearing in the top five, six, seven is just fine and I've seen cases where we've had a result that was number three that was getting more traffic than number one and two combined.

Jaime: Because it's there and it stands out.

Rand: This is a reason to invest in having great snippets, a fantastic title that someone wants to click on, a great title for your log post that a searcher might search for but is really fascinating and interesting. A description that does the same, an author profile, your picture next to the search result, which you can do through Google+, which is a huge SEO win for a lot of folks. Google says it increases click through rate on average 15%. 15% just by putting my photo next to it, and if you have a recognizable photo, if you're someone whose face and name people know, an even bigger click through, which suggests that you should do branding and that you should have one photo that you should use across all your social media mediums and on your website so that people have a brand association with you as a person and want to click on your stuff. It's not the old school days of SEO where it's going through forums and trying to get some directories to link to you. No, that crap is way behind us and we're in this new era.

Jaime: Okay, so now that you've convinced me that I should be on the first page of Google, what do I do? How do I do that? Because even if I have nice snippets it's not going to matter, if I'm on page 1000 nobody cares.

Rand: This is true. If you are currently targeting terms and phrases, you've done keyword research, which you can do through the Adwords tool, by the way, you'll have to have an Adwords account soon, so you're going to have to pay in order to do it, which is fine, you can spend $10 a month there and it's okay  - you can do this research and figure out the terms and phrases people are searching for and expand that list and try to find more. You should always start with the content - if you were to search for this, what would you be looking for? What would absolutely delight you? What would make you want to share the page once you'd reached it and e-mail your friends, co-workers and clients' I'd start with that and then I'd build out that content in such a way that it works. Think about the website too - it's got to be usable, it's got to have a great user experience, which means solid design, maybe even exceptional design, meaning it's very easy to navigate, meaning that the content is very accessible and above the fold and it's compelling to scroll down and there's not lots of cock ups and things that will make people abandon the site, and the page loads quickly ' a fast loading website is hugely important, especially for mobile rankings, and responsive design too. Google just made an announcement through one of their representatives, I think it was last week or the week before,that they will start to penalize sites that don't have good mobile user experience and design, meaning either responsive design or a mobile specific site, I would highlyrecommend responsive design, by the way. They will push those sites down in the search results when you're searching on your mobile device. So now we've got the basics, we're assuming the site is accessible and you're targeting the right phrases, now what you really need is two things. Number one, a community, people who care about you, are interested in you and will share the work that you do, primarily through social media, that's the seed from which links and rankings grow at this point, especially for a content based site in the blogging world. Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn.

Jaime: Do you recommend that people who have small businesses start a blog?

Rand: It depends.

Jaime: Like I have a landscaping company, an amazing landscaping company, two brothers, actually my whole family works there, they're super cool and have an amazing company, and they just started blogging. Not from me, I didn't mention blogging,they had already started blogging. They're wondering if it's really worth it, so what do you think about something like that, a landscaping company?

Rand: What I recommend is find the intersection of three things - what you are passionate about and enjoy doing, what you're good at and can do a great job with and what your customers and potential customers and influencers of potential customers will find fascinating, useful, interesting, valuable and share worthy. If you take the Venn diagram of those three things and get the intersection, you'll discover what you should be doing on the way. And that might not be blogging, it might be interviewing people over video, it might be producing some cool graphics, it might be just photography, it might be that the web isn't really for you but you're great in person and so you should go to lots of events and meet people and make connections that way and schedule tons of coffee meetings and build up an old school network in that fashion. Maybe you're fantastic at e-mail and you want to build up an e-mail newsletter. Whatever your passion is that you're good at and your customers and potential customers and influencers will want, that's what you should produce.

Jaime: I hate writing but I should make a blog! Yeah.

Rand: Yeah, don't do that. You're going to suck at it, you're going to hate it, your customers and potential customers are going to hate it.

Jaime: This isn't working, I wonder why? Because everyone hates it.

Rand: Think back to old school marketing if someone hated talking to people, well too bad, you have to do door to door sales. No, send them letters in the mail or write something for the newspaper, do outdoor advertising; you would not go door to door. But if you were great at that, then you would. So the same thing in the digital world.

Jaime: I have a post coming up actually when this comes out it will already be up, I'm doing a July challenge on how to find your mentor. So I had my marketing guy go and get all the keywords and I started putting the keywords in and that sort of stuff, but what should I do now? So we can tell anyone who has decided to blog or video or whatever, most of mine areinterviews, how do we improve that?

Rand: In terms of making content better or making posts better my general advice is if you are not insanely empathetic yourself, like you have a hard time putting yourself into the shoes of other people and perceiving the world as they would or as they do rather than "I'm stuck in my own mind, I think the stuff that I'm producing is great, why don't other people think it's great?" If you can't see the flaws then my next suggestion is use your network and use surveys. I like to build surveys in Survey Monkey and ask people "What do you think of these three headlines? What do you think of this image?" and then send it out to five friends who you can trust, and they're anonymous in the survey so you can trust their feedback. Then you get the feedback and you can see what you're good at and what you suck at and you know what's wrong and you can make it better. I think that's a smart way to go.

Jaime: It is, and it's something that people won't think about. "I wrote the post, now what do I do to make it better? How do I get it out there?" and we don't start with creating the amazing content that is going to be shared. Do you think you have to start with amazing content before it gets shared socially?

Rand: It depends where you're at. If you are a first mover, maybe you're writing very early on, there's not a lot of great content out there about how to hire landscapers or the prices that landscapers charge around the country and a data visualization map of the US showing that it costs a lot more per hour in California, on average, than it does in New Mexico and Arizona, here's the average prices and here's the survey methodology, and you can just make a little crappy map and a list of bullet points with state abbreviations and the average price. Okay, fine, as opposed to "Oh man, I should really contact someone who's great with HTML5 and CSS and make an interactive map where you can rollover and hover on the states." It depends how crowded the field is, who the people are who are sharing. It also depends on the market timing and how unique the content is. Sometimes relatively simplistic interfaces and simplistic content will perform very well because the person who's sharing it is a strong influencer in the space and they have a great network and they're one of the first people to write about it and it doesn't require a lot of complexity. Sometimes you'll put days and weeks into a crazy graphic with a ton of energy and attention and it won't perform very well. This is entrepreneurship in general - you have to be really comfortable with failing a bunch of times before you have success.

Jaime: Darn. Because what I want from you, I want you to tell me a step by step - do this, this, this and this, and it'll work. Come on.

Rand: There's actually a secret code, you just put "Rank me number one Googler" in your meta Google tag and you're done.

Jaime: Now I'm going to sell this interview for $1000, just so you know.

Rand: That's a low price, you are cheating yourself out of a lot of money!

Jaime: Good point! I think what's interesting and what a lot of people don't understand with inbound marketing is that it's, just like you said, like entrepreneurship, and there is no right way - you have a different audience to this person, even if it seems like they're in the same niche, and if you try to copy that it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to work. So what do you do for companies? How do we find out this stuff? We know to survey, we know to get feedback and more information - how do we know if it's good, though? So if I have a post that I put out and it seemed to get more Tweets and sharers but I don't know why.

Rand: This is one of the things that I would suggest you use some analytics for. I use a combination of Google Analytics, Bitly and Moz's own software, Moz Analytics. If you're a professional marketer and you do this for a living, you're deep down in the trenches, Moz Analytics is great. If you're a small business person doing a little bit of marketing on the side, part time, I wouldn't spend $100 a month. I'd go Google Analytics, I'd use Bitlyto do all my social sharing, I'd check out Facebook insights and Twitter's new free analytics and I'd just look to see what were my most successful Tweets, shares, likes, plus ones, I'd make sure you're using Google+, I'd look and see which posts of mine have gotten the most traffic and attention and why, and you just try to reverse it, so go to Google's content section and click on pages and there's a list of all your pages and how they've performed and how much traffic they've got and you can filter by social, let's see which of my posts did best on social. You've got your answer right there in order, number one to number fifty, so you can get a sense of what's working and what's not working, and since this information is public, the number of Facebook likes and plus ones from Google+ and Tweets, it usually sits at the bottom of a blog, it will say you've been Tweeted a thousand times or whatever it is, go and check out your competition - what's the content that worked really well for them? Why? How? Now go and do that. Take that intuition and insight and produce something out of it. There's something really important that I should mention - the first time you do this, if you're starting a new website and you haven't done a lot of social sharing and content production, you should expect that your efforts will fall flat for a long time, and I don't just mean for a few months. I'll give you an example - my wife, Geraldine, started a travel blog, and I wanted to help her with SEO and marketing.

Jaime: And you're the guy.

Rand: And she was like "No way, back off. I want to do this myself, I just want to write for me and if people find it and they love it, that will be great." Fine.

Jaime: "I could help you, but okay."

Rand: For two years she was getting between 50 and 100 visits a day, which is not a lot. She was thinking about giving up on it and then something happened and for six months it was growing steadily, like 150, 200, 250, 275, hovering in the 300-400 range, and then because it was reaching a little bit of a bigger audience some more people heard about it and it was nominated and won Times top 50 blogs of 2011, I think it was. It wasn't just that it was in the top 50, it was the first one on the list, the very top one, so for the next three months as this Times piece got all this attention, Geraldine's site was getting more than 1000 clicks a day from this article and even after the Times article stopped sending traffic, people stuck with the site - they kept coming, kept sharing, because they loved the stuff she was writing. If you are producing content, even if it's quite excellent, you should prepare yourself for a long slog - this is not going to be an overnight success, you're not going to produce something amazing and everyone's going to love it and suddenly your traffic takes off and you're earning lots of links and all that kind of stuff, but over time you will see a benefit if you stick with it, if you have that perseverance. The other thing that's important that I should mention is that, in the SEO field, when it comes to ranking well, yes, a lot of it has to do with your individual pages, but a ton of it has to do with your individual website, meaning that if you have a site that's earned lots of links and shares and impressive attention and use in the past, chances are very good that when you produce a post, that post will perform very well, and that's just the concept of domain authority. I'll give you an example - go and write a post for Wikipedia on a topic that's never been covered, like video interviewing entrepreneurs, and then go and search for "video interviewing entrepreneurs" and Wikipedia will come right up on the first page, even though you just made that page, it hasn't earned any links at all, because Wikipedia is an extremely strong domain so Google just ranks it, it just does well. You can get that same impact over time if your site builds up a fraction of that credibility and authority and so this is kind of a beautiful process because it rewards people who stick with it, produce great stuff consistently and who essentially do a great job of networking and marketing their work as well as producing it, which I think is a pretty good way to go.

Jaime: I love that. The Panda, Penguin update was actually a good thing because I actually ranked higher and everyone else was really disappointed. I was just doing it the normal way and it worked out really well and it helped for me, which was amazing. But I love that you said that it takes a long time, because I blogged for six months and I was totally going to give up, I couldn't last for a year and a half, that's crazy, but telling people that this is a long term thing, because everyone on the internet is "Just do this thing!" Somebody told me yesterday "If you're trying to rank for the keyword and you do videos, Google likes videos better, so you'll automatically rank." I've been trying that for a while. So we're told all these things but persistence is usually not one of them because that's not necessarily what we want to hear, right?

Rand: Right. The video thing, in a way it's a little bit true in that it's much easier to rank in video results because there's less of them, so if there's a search where video is popping up or hasn't popped up yet and you're the first person to produce a great video that gets lots of interaction and shares on YouTube and likes and links, that's going to do well. It will perform well and you won't have to compete with the rest of the people in the normal web search results, which is what's great about universal listings in general. The other great thing about videos being given the opportunity to list in YouTube, I don't know if people know this, but it's the second largest search engine in the world, behind Google, it's considerably larger in the US than Bing, so it gets more searches than Bing does. YouTube - very important for SEO stuff. That whole mythology of overnight success I think is so powerful and compelling and just seems like "If I build it, then they'll come." Forget about it, man, they're not coming.

Jaime: Because then, as entrepreneurs, we get all excited, and then it's "Well I just suck, then." I've talked to a lot of people and they say "It's me, I can't do this. That person can do it but I can't, I must be bad." And it has nothing to do with that, it's the persistence factor, being in there for a long time. Do you think if you'd helped your wife you could have gotten her a lot more traction a lot faster? I hope you say yes, because that's what you do, but tell me more about what you think would have happened.

Rand: It's really interesting to imagine because it's a little bit a roll of the dice. Maybe I could have helped her get a lot more pages rank in Google, but maybe that would have changed her writing style and how she produced content and what she chose to focus on and maybe Time and all the other awards that she's won, like the Guardian put her as one of the top 50 travel sites, and she's had these woman blogger awards and that kind of stuff - would that have happened if she had kept her focus on producing content around keywords and phrases, as opposed to this narrative format that she's opted for? I don't know the answer.

Jaime: So should we do SEO?

Rand: For small businesses, they have to earn customers. Their job is essentially to use the web to find customers, and if you're trying to find customers, especially in local business, SEO is a must have. If somebody searches for a landscaper in Maine, you guys have got to come up, you have to be in there, that's how too many people find stuff now, and you've got to have those good listings and rankings and reviews in Yelp and all those other kind of things, because that's how people, especially in our generation and upcoming generations, figure out what services they want to use. That being said, if you're more of a content producer and less of a small business, maybe SEO is something you do a little bit on the side. Geraldine now does it a little bit on the side - she did this great post on Seven Badass Bavarian Foods That You Must Try, because we spend a lot of time in Bavaria with her dad who lives there, and it ranks number one for Bavarian food. Number one! Awesome. She gets lots of nice traffic from that, so occasionally she'll do something that has some SEO overlap and that's fantastic and works out great but it's not the primary focus so I think you need to choose the marketing channels that are right for you. If you've got a non-profit, SEO's not going to work - people don't search for "Which cause should I donate to?" You really need to be leveraging Facebook and focusing on content that's going to attract people who are going to share and promote you. If you're writing about issues in an area in Mississippi that has a lot of challenges and problems and people are searching around those kinds of topics and they find your blog and they think "Wow, this is a great person and a great story and I should make a donation," great, but that's an indirect route, not a direct route. So it just depends how you're set up and what marketing channels will work for you.

Jaime: It's business 101 - knowing who your customers are and where they're searching for you or where they're not and how they find you.

Rand: Yeah, you can't forget that stuff.

Jaime: Unfortunately what we've been told is that we can bypass marketing 101 and there's so much traffic online, and that's what I just want to make sure that people understand, especially the non-geeky people that think SEO is supposed to be wonderful, so I really like your stance on it. I always ask the same last question - what's one action listeners can take this week to help move them forward towards their goal of $1 million?

Rand: I'm a big believer that financial success is a result of accomplishing a great mission and pursuing a great vision. I wrote a blog post called Vision Based Framework on my personal blog last week and I would urge your readers to check that out. What it essentially says is, as you're considering how you want to operate in this world, think of a long term core purpose for your business, something that you will forever pursue and never accomplish. I'll give you an example, Moz's is help people do better marketing. We can pursue that for centuries and never finish it, it will never be a done task. From that core purpose, that thing that you're so passionate about, that you really want to do, so let's say that you're a landscaper in Maine, right, and your core purpose is to make the world a more beautiful place. Your mission from that might be how are we going to make the world a more beautiful place? We're going to help individual people see the beauty of their own properties, and that's going to be our mission for the next five to ten years, and from that we're going to have a big goal, a big, hairy, audacious goal, something that is out of reach but not out of sight, like we want to service 10,000 customers in the next 10 years, or we're going to win every landscaping award in the country in the next decade, whatever it is. From that you take a list of strategic initiatives, things you're going to do over the next 12 months to move towards that goal, that mission and that core purpose. If you set yourself up in that fashion, if you have that and it's clear to you and every hone else in your organization, it's so powerful, it's such a great reason to get up in the morning versus just making enough money this week.

Jaime: That's huge, and that's probably why you're here on this show, because you're trying to get your message out there even more, as much as you possibly can, and help everybody with their marketing.

Rand: Yeah, I don't know your audience intimately, but my suspicion is there's very few potential Moz customers in there, but that means nothing to me - I want to help people do better marketing and I hope that I can be helpful to not just your audience today but all the people you talk to in the future.

Jaime: Thank you so much, and thank you for having such a mission so that you can come on my show and be introduced to all my people. I love that, I love your mission. Thank you so much for coming on. Tell me where we can find out more information about you and your company, in case anyone wants to check it out.

Rand: If you want to learn more about Moz, it's just Moz.com, or you can follow on Twitter at @Moz. If you're interested in me personally, I have a blog at moz.com/rand.

Jaime: You have some really cool stuff, especially on your Twitter account, so I'll make sure to link to all that stuff. Thank you so much for coming on today, I really appreciate it.

Rand: My pleasure, take care.

Tags: internet marketing, millionaire interview, Online Marketing, Rand Fishkin, SEO, SEO strategy

Categories: All, Business, Business Model, Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Millionaire Interviews

Hi I’m Jaime. Each and every week I bring you the top business advice from the people who know best.

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