Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups • Hacker News Board

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#31

Post by Jd » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 11:35 AM UTC

iamelgringo wrote: post #27

Jd wrote: post #24

Got an email that if I upvote this item on Hacker News I get two free months of SEOMoz. How much of that sort of stuff happens here? How many of the 127+ points this item has are from incentivized SEO?

Sorry about that confusion. I misworded that email. 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…

Clarification much appreciated. Original email (e.g. request for upvote) probably would have been fine if you hadn't presented the 2 months of SEOMoz as a prize for the upvote.

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#32

Post by dools » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 11:40 AM UTC

This was a really fantastic summary of why you should do inbound marketing and how you can get started delivered in a lively and entertaining fashion.

Congratulations Rand! Looking forward to seeing more from you on the speaking front.

I can personally attest to the value of "mining the social web". When we first launched decal mockups[1] to get some eyeballs amongst designers my only strategy for getting traffic was to post it on HN.

When it slid off the newest page and into oblivion I was really down in the dumps but I just added a stream in hootsuite for the word "mockups", then anytime someone mentioned mockups I posted a link to the site and got 70 people signing up within the first week.

It's a fantastic way to engage with early adopters (although I would warn against automating it - I think possibly it was the fact that each message was personalised that meant I got very few negative reactions - only one that I can remember which was some guy telling me to "diaf" :)

[1] http://www.decalcms.com/mockups

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#33

Post by iamelgringo » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 1:27 PM UTC

Jd wrote: post #31

iamelgringo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry about that confusion. I misworded that email. 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…

Clarification much appreciated. Original email (e.g. request for upvote) probably would have been fine if you hadn't presented the 2 months of SEOMoz as a prize for the upvote.

That wasn't my intent. I was trying to be funny rather than "pay" for the vote.

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#34

Post by chargrilled » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 2:36 PM UTC

secret_target wrote: post #26

chargrilled wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you offer anything over Google's boomerang retargeting? We've already had decent success with that.

Massively wider reach for your ads. My understanding of Google's program is that it runs your ad across its DoubleClick exchange. We run our clients ads across DoubleClick just like them... as well as the rest of the ad networks... plus our publisher partner inventory. Google's DoubleClick inventory is a part of our overall inventory.

I was under the impression that Doubleclick was the largest exchange by some distance.

How much wider reach do you get from going to multiple exchanges? It's maybe time I did some research on moving away from boomerang!

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#35

Post by tptacek » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 5:17 PM UTC

iamelgringo wrote: post #27

Jd wrote: post #24

Got an email that if I upvote this item on Hacker News I get two free months of SEOMoz. How much of that sort of stuff happens here? How many of the 127+ points this item has are from incentivized SEO?

Sorry about that confusion. I misworded that email. 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…

As one of the best contributors to this site, you have way more than earned the benefit of the doubt. Thanks for being so classy about this anyways.

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#36

Post by Matt_Cutts » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 5:18 PM UTC

iamelgringo wrote: post #30

Jd wrote: post #24

Got an email that if I upvote this item on Hacker News I get two free months of SEOMoz. How much of that sort of stuff happens here? How many of the 127+ points this item has are from incentivized SEO?

And, in the spirit of full disclosure, the actual email I sent out to the members of our meetup: 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…

"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? .... And, for helping out with that, you get: Two free months of SEOMoz."

That is pretty poorly worded.

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#37

Post by rgrieselhuber » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 6:02 PM UTC

chalst wrote: post #28

Is this video worth watching? Why? This comments thread contains several comments from people who seem to have got something valuable from this video, but I have not been able to gather what that something is. There also seems to be a lot of SEO fluff here, which should be downvoted.

It's definitely worth watching, IMO, especially if you view SEO as "fluff".

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.

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#38

Post by secret_target » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 6:43 PM UTC

chargrilled wrote: post #34

secret_target wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Massively wider reach for your ads. My understanding of Google's program is that it runs your ad across its DoubleClick exchange. We run our clients ads across DoubleClick just like them... as well as the rest of the ad networks... plus our publisher partner inventory. Google's DoubleClick inventory is a part of our overall inventory.

I was under the impression that Doubleclick was the largest exchange by some distance. How much wider reach do you get from going to multiple exchanges? It's maybe time I did some research on moving away from boomerang!

DoubleClick is very much the largest and awesomest exchange. But there's A LOT of display ads on the web.

The data we have suggests that DoubleClick offers up about 4b daily impressions to retarget against. The overall retargeting ecosphere that folks like us and a few others are retargeting against is in the 10-14b impressions/day range. DoubleClick's massive and have a lot of the best inventory, but it's still just a part of the whole.

NOTE: I'm sure there's other display-heads on HN who might have different data. Either way, Google's exchange is no more than 30-50% of the total exchange inventory out there.

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#39

Post by forcer » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 7:39 PM UTC

scrollbar wrote: post #13

rcavezza wrote: post #5

When asked about paid marketing. Starts around 74:30 "Holy crazy crap does retargeting work." "If you do great inbound, the first money you should spend should be on retargeting... people that were sort of interested but left" "...uses a company called has offers in Seattle - they've been very effective for us". "would not recommend raw display. It will perform poorly for you."

FYI- HasOffers does affiliate marketing for them

We use HasOffers as well and its a great system. After trying lots of other affiliate systems including trying to build one in-house we are finally happy :)

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#40

Post by aaaron » Fri, Dec 02, 2011, 7:42 PM UTC

rcavezza wrote: post #5

When asked about paid marketing. Starts around 74:30 "Holy crazy crap does retargeting work." "If you do great inbound, the first money you should spend should be on retargeting... people that were sort of interested but left" "...uses a company called has offers in Seattle - they've been very effective for us". "would not recommend raw display. It will perform poorly for you."

SEOMoz uses AdRoll (disclosure: i'm founder) for retargeting. It's been a pleasure working closely with the Moz team shaping their campaign...

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...)