Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

In 2009, Hubspot decided to coin the term Inbound Marketing in a new way so they can claim the space ("first inbound marketing software"). Since then, they changed the entire Google results (starting with Wikipedia) so that they come up on most queries. The rare times I used Inbound Marketing with traditional marketers, they always meant Market Research.

We've already had decent success with that.

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.