It is not every day that you get to introduce one of your heroes who influenced your life

and your career.

I can truly

say that this guest’s whiteboard Friday webinars, help shed light on topics

within my industry and settled arguments within agency between multiple SEO analysts.

I hope you are sitting down because today we are joined by the co-founder of SparkToro and MOZ Rand Fishkin.

Buckle up, this is going to be good.

Resources

LinkedIn:     https://www.linkedin.com/in/randfishkin/ 

Facebook Page:     https://www.facebook.com/rand.fishkin/

Twitter:     https://twitter.com/randfish 

Website:     https://sparktoro.com/

Bio & About:     https://sparktoro.com/team/rand

Book - Lost and Founder – Rand Fishkin (available on Amazon)

Value Drops:

4:00 – Rand talks about one of his worst days ever- his last day at Moz.

4:53 – Rand talks about one of the best days he has ever had.

10:12 – Rand talks about what motivated his toward audience intelligence (audience research).

17:51 – Rand Talks about the gigantic data set that is run in the background, constantly

crawling the web.

21:20 – Rand talks about the misalignment between founders and venture capital firms.

29:36 – Rand talks about his aha moments.

32:30 – Rands gives some recommendations for businesses that are just starting out.

37:58 – Rand gives predictions on marketing trends in 2023

Questions for Rand:

So asked the questions in a free-form way today, so they are not exact, but you get the gist of what I was asking Rand.

1.     What motivated you to create SparkToro?

2.     What lead you to focus in on identifying a business’s audience research?

3.     What were some of the challenges that you faced building the software and server stack to gather audience research data so quickly?

4.     You talked candidly about venture capital and how there can be misalignment between founders and VC firms, and it seems this can happen on many levels.

a.     I love the fact that you are keeping SparkToro investor free.

b.     Can explain to the listeners and any budding founders, the benefits of staying venture capital free?

5.     Can you tell the listeners over your career, what have been some of the aha moments or major breakthroughs you have had, and how they influenced your business at that time?

6.     What are your marketing predictions for 2023 for businesses that want to get more closely aligned with their audience?

7.     What recommendations can you provide for the business owner struggling with marketing, or someone just starting a business?

8.     If you had a chance to tell your younger self how to approach something differently. What would that be?

Check out the full episode on The EMJ Podcast at:

https://emjpodcast.com/rand-fishkin-talks-about-leaving-moz-and-starting-sparktoro

Check out more episodes of The EMJ SEO Podcast.