Watch this great chat with David Feinleib CEO and Co-Founder, Speechpad!

We’ve been talking about transcriptions, how a good transcription can affect your SEO, how it works behind the scenes and much more (if you’re interested also in “Big Data” and “Quantified Self” keep on watching..).

About David:

Davis is an investor, advisor, and serial entrepreneur.

From 2009 – 2011 he was a General Partner at Mohr Davidow, a venture capital firm with $2B under management. David led the first institutional rounds in RootMusic, the #1 entertainment app on Facebook; doxo, the premier digital filing cabinet; and VirtuOz, the leading virtual customer service company. RootMusic recently closed a $16M follow-on financing; doxo, a $10M round, and VirtuOz a $7M round. He was a Principal at Mohr Davidow from 2006 – 2008.

Prior to joining Mohr Davidow, David started four companies, one of which was acquired by Hewlett Packard, another by Keynote Systems. Before that he was a Technical Evangelist at Microsoft, promoting the then unknown Windows operating system.

In 2011, his love for entrepreneurship took him back to working on his own ventures, while continuing to advise and invest in others. David hold an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BA Summa Cum Laude from Cornell University, where he was a Kodak Scholar. David is an avid triathlete and violinist.

Raw Transcription:

Marco: Hello everyone, Marco Montemagno here, the Tech Alchemist and today with me is David Feinleib, the Co-Founder and CEO of Speechpad. How are you doing?

David: Hey Marco. How are you? Great to be here.

Marco: As I told you, I have the most horrible surname to pronounce. Montemagno is something impossible to pronounce. So, I’ve been asking David before it began how do I pronounce finally-because it sounds like a European surname or you’re from U.S. What’s your . . .

David: Yes, It is from Europe. My great, great, great grandparents moved here, and we’ve been here ever since. That is where it is from.

Marco: All right. So, Dave, today with you I’d like to talk about several topics. I would love to start from this transcription world where Speechpad is doing its business now. For the community following the Tech Alchemist, they know that every time I upload an episode, there is a full transcription. That transcription I’m using it, both in the post and also inside You Tube to get some titling. It’s very, very useful, and there are several reasons I want to talk to you today, Dave, about why transcription is useful.

I’m doing that transcription with SpeechInk, so I’m in conflict. Interest conflict. I love to talk about product and services that I’m using. I’ve been doing interviews with user testing. All the services that worked, I think it’s very good to share that knowledge because other businesses can have the same need. Let’s talk about transcription market first. What are we talking about and why did you start with Speechpad? How is the transcription industry in this moment the state of the art?

David: We started Speechpad because we were experiencing bad transcriptions ourselves, and we wanted to fix that problem. Actually, we were getting these voicemails transcribed, and you would think even that, you could get really high quality machine- based transcriptions for that. But it turns out that it is still quite hard to get a super-high quality transcription, especially when there’s background noise, accents, multiple people speaking, things like that. That’s why we started it.

We looked at the market and it turns out the market is a $20, $30 billion dollar-plus market opportunity. It’s an industry that’s been around for a long time. It’s been quite hard to get transcriptions done easily and quickly over the Internet. That was kind of our premise. A really big market, it was a problem that was very personal to us, and we thought that there was an opportunity to disrupt it with a great Internet-based offering.

We started prototyping in 2009. We spent a quite a while prototyping the software, and then we really started scaling it up about two years ago is when we really put some muscle into it.

Marco: Right. I remember, I don’t know, five years ago, seven years ago, actually I remember when YouTube launched. The funny thing is that I remember the first videos that I’ve been doing, and I needed a transcription, what I was doing was finding a freelance, and then he was transcribing everything. Then, I found someone editing the video to put all the subtitling, and it was, I don’t know, one month to do the job. It was long and painful. When these kind of services, like Speechpad, started to come out, I think you guys solved a huge problem. The feeling of getting a transcriptionist is not so horrible anymore, but is a smooth process where you just upload a video and so on.

Can you explain to us, for people who don’t know Speechpad, how does it work from the beginning to the end?

David: Yeah, absolutely. We use a mix of humans and some computer- based technology to deliver the high-quality transcriptions that we do. Essentially, you can record an audio or video on your iPhone, your Android device, you can record it on your PC. You can record on the phone. However you are recording it, some people also do professional video production, and you know, record things that way.

So, you’ve got your audio or video, you come to our website at speechpad.com. We make it really easy to upload audios and videos in just a wide variety of formats. You upload your files. We take those files and send them out to thousands of transcribers. We literally have an internal system where we have thousands of people working on transcriptions. They do the work, and then it comes back to us. We proofread it, potentially do a little bit of editing, and then that transcript appears in your account and on the website you get an email notifying you that it’s there.

We also, of course, support FTP upload and a web services upload for customers that are really high volume.

Marco: Described like that, it sounds very easy, you know, from my point of view because typically I just upload a video on YouTube, go on Speechpad, copy and paste the URL, then I say, “Yes, Order,” and then I download my transcription one day or one week, it depends. You can choose the timing, right?

David: Exactly. Customers can choose 24 hours, 48 hours. They can choose a one-week turnaround. Obviously, different prices for those different turnaround times.

But I think one of the big things we focused on was, “How can we make it really, really easy. Where it truly is what you are saying.” If you upload your audio or video, as far as the customer is concerned that is all that you have to do. Then, you get a really great transcript back in the timeframe that you requested.

Behind the scenes, we are doing a lot of work obviously. We are spell- checking. We have rules. We are looking at the files. We have audio and video conversion, so that all of our transcribers can play the audio or video, different speeds, things like that depending on what you uploaded.

Again, that is all behind the scenes. We try and make it really just easy for customers. Audio and video in, great text out.

You can upload audio and video in many different formats. There could be MP3s, Wave files, WMA. It can be different video [codecs]. One of the problems of where we saw for the customers was just the variety of audio and video formats that they were working with that are in this space. You’ve got to pick a very specific format to work with.

Whereas with our site, you know, we really focused on making audio and video acquisition. That’s the process of getting the audio and video into the system really easy. So the customer can just take whatever they have and get that into the system, and then we take it from there.

Marco: How could you recruit so many people willing to transcribe? Because if you asked me to transcribe something, I would kill myself. It is one of the most boring things that you can imagine in your life. From my point of view, maybe it’s super fun, but from my point of view it is horrible. So, how could you get so many people transcribing?

David: It turns out that, first of all, many people already know how to do transcription in the world. A lot of them are professional transcribers or they’re paralegals, or folks who have a lot of experience listening to audio and typing really quickly and with high accuracy. At this point, we have such a brand awareness in the market that a lot of people come to us and want to do transcription work for us. Of course, we test them and evaluate their skill set and make sure that they can do the work.

But when we were starting out, what we did was we started on a platform called Amazon Mechanical Turk. Mechanical Turk is this marketplace from Amazon that is intended for doing the small units of work. We started putting transcription work out there and that helped us get our initial base of transcribers. Now of course, we have many people that come to us directly and want to do transcription work, but that’s how we got started.

Marco: How you kick it off. Another curiosity. Sorry, David, I’m very curious about a service that is very smooth from a customer point of view, but I mentioned is very complicated behind the scenes. I would like to understand it a little better how it works. What’s the percentage of the service that is human- powered, and what is the percentage that is automatic algorithm and so on?

David: All of the transcription itself is done by humans. So, you’re always getting a human being who is doing the transcription. Now, we have some other capabilities like time stamping where we insert time codes into the transcripts. We have capabilities for taking the text and outputting it into certain formats. These kinds of things are doing by the machine, if you will.

The actual transcription is done by the human, because humans are great at listening and recognizing audio and turning that into something written. People are really, really good at that. We make it easy for them to do that kind of work, and then we take care of all the other stuff, the conversion of the audio and video into the right format, the checking the rules. A bunch of the other things that are often time consuming. We do that with computers, but the high-quality transcription, that is always done by a person.

Marco: The person doing the transcription obviously gets a cut or gets rate compensation in a percentage way I imagine?

David: The way we do that is the transcribers are compensated for their work. We have an equation. We call it Transcription plus Review equals the final price we are paying. The higher quality the transcription is the less we spend on review. If there are some errors on some of the transcription, we’re spending more on the reviews. Those two things tend to balance each other out, so that we can ensure we are delivering a really, high-quality work product to the customer. That’s kind of how the system works.

So, if you’re a transcriber who is doing a lot of work, one time you might be doing a bunch of transcriptions and another time you are doing a bunch of reviews, but you are reviewing someone else’s work. The system has this really nice equilibrium and this nice market effect, this network effect where the more transcribers we get, the more customers we get. The more customers we get, we build up the transcriber base. We are always building up more and more customers and more and more transcribers, and that gives us this equilibrium, you know, this growth in the market as we call it.

Marco: Another thing that I was curious about, Dave, is the following: sometimes I shoot a video, and I need a very fast transcription. So I go on Speechpad and say that I need it in 24 hours. I’m ready to pay a higher price, but I need it fast, and I get it in 24 hours. I always think, “How the hell can they transcribe 40 minutes, maybe a one-hour video like this so fast and in such a correct way?” How can you handle this? I mean, with different clients, different languages, and different customers?

David: Just the way you think about the Amazon Cloud, let’s say. Amazon Web Services. Letting companies scale their compute requirements on demand. We provide a similar capability for scaling the human work force on demand. We are managing the work force, so we can sort of see, “Okay, here’s how much work there is.” We know there’s more and more. We know there is a spike, so we alert the transcribers that there is more work. They come in, take those jobs and get it done.

Now in the case of long-form video, like what you are talking about, we do sometimes break that into a couple of pieces. Say you have a 60-minute video. We might have two people work on that file at the same time. That way, you know, say in a 12-hour period, we are having two people work in parallel. In theory, someday, we could have 60 people work in parallel on one-minute pieces of audio and get a 60-minute transcription done in the time it takes one person to do one minute of audio. We could theoretically be doing an hour of audio or video in an hour.

Marco: What are the main reasons, in your opinion, David, for companies and for people doing business online to add transcriptions? Because a lot of colleagues or a lot of companies I’m talking with, they really underestimate, in my opinion, the power of transcription. My opinion is clear because I see for SEO reasons, for several reasons. What are your reasons, the most important reasons why transcription should be added in any kind of project?

David: Our biggest and fastest growing vertical is something called Video SEO. The advantage of doing that is that the text from that video is then indexed by Google and Bing and other search engines, and so that increases their rankings and drives more traffic to their websites. The great thing about video, like the video we are doing right now, is it’s very interactive. It’s very dynamic and people love to do it. People love video.

The challenge for the search engines is making this kind of content in a meaningful way. The search engines can’t find this video as easily. So when we provide the customer with the transcription and they put that on their site, it’s really easy for the search engines to index it.

Marco: How do you relate, for instance, YouTube offering now the automatic transcription now? Obviously, [Alda] is all automatic, I guess, is not human also because most of the time it’s totally wrong by the way. How do you relate with that?

David: We love it when people try other solutions like that because customers come back to us and say, “We tried the automated stuff or we tried another solution, and we need the quality that Speechpad delivers.” The real difference in what we provide is that we are always providing high-quality transcriptions, so what you hear and what people are saying, that is actually what you are getting. You are not getting a bunch of other words that people did not say. You are getting a very high-quality work product.

Marco: Tell me again Dave, how can you do the quality control? How can you be so focused on quality control? What do you do to [grant] it?

David: Though this is the way say, eBay has the rankings when you sell an item and you get feedback on that. Think of our transcription rating system the same way. Every time a transcriber does a transcription, we review that transcription, and they get a score, and we make it really easy for the transcriber to see any mistakes they made.

I think the first thing is that helps them improve over time. Secondly, we pay people based on the quality of their work. The better, the fewer the mistakes they make, the more they get paid. Third, this review process results in a score, and so over time, transcribers might be doing hundreds, thousands of transcriptions, and they are building up their score just like you do no eBay or other market places.

Marco: By the way, while you were speaking, I was thinking that an additional advantage and benefit I see in having a very good transcription is that when I upload the good transcription on YouTube, for instance, I get a better translation because then you can use the Google translation tool. If the transcription is horrible, then you have a horrible translation. This is also another interesting point.

Dave, what are your top advices to companies willing to have a transcription done? If any, I mean? What are your takes to help companies having good transcriptions out of their work?

Marco: I think one of the biggest things people can do is set up a regular schedule to do videos. It doesn’t have to be hours and hours of video. It could literally be-we work with a company called SEOmoz, which provides software for SEO. They do something called a Whiteboard Friday. It’s a relatively short piece of audio. They do it every Friday. They share tips and tricks with their customers. That’s a really compelling way for a company to create some content. It’s easy to create. It’s quick to create. Then, the transcription gets done quickly. You put that up on the web, and all of a sudden, you are getting a lot more pages indexed in Google or Bing. I think that’s one really great thing.

The other thing is customers may already have video assets that they can work with. A lot of people have recorded video about their product launch or an interview with their head of engineering or their CTO or a video with a customer they did in the past. That’s all great content. You don’t necessarily have to create new content. You can get that transcribed, then all of a sudden, you are getting a double value from that content you already built in the past.

There is a lot of content customers already have in the form of audio and video that you can get transcribed and start getting ranked for in the search engine.

Marco: This is cool because you can use also all your archives. I never thought about that, so it is very smart. By the way I had Rand Fishkin guest at Tech Alchemist and really appreciate his job.

All right. About format, no problem because you said that you transcribe any kind of format, so it’s no problem to worry about any particular format. Which language Speechpad can transcribe? Only English?

David: We are heavily focused on English. We are starting to do Spanish now. We have a lot of demand from customers to do Spanish. We certainly get a lot of inquiries for French, German, Japanese, Korean, lots of other languages. We are looking at adding those next year.

Marco: All right. I’m waiting for your Chinese version. That would be big fun.

David: We have a lot of customers who request that. What we tend to do, we do run some of that through the system, but to do it in really high volume, we’ll need to scale up the workforce also for those other languages.

Marco: I always thought-a few years ago I had the video translated in six to seven different languages. I couldn’t understand Mandarin, so I had no idea if it was good or bad. This is another…

David: Exactly. Yeah, a lot of people want to do the other languages for translation purposes, or they have video content, and they want to do subtitling, that’s a big category for us. Or closed captioning added to the video, so that is something we’ll spend more and more time on next year.

Marco: One thing I didn’t mention about Speechpad, which I think is very useful, is that when I download the transcription, I get several formats. So I can have it in [inaudible 21:55] I can have the HTML, RTF, so several formats, and it’s useful if I have to use it on different media for subtitling or in a doc Word or something like that.

Right. Dave, a few minutes more. I want to talk about big data with you too. You recently wrote a good post that I suggested to the Tech Alchemist community on Forbes, if I’m not wrong. You are a contributor with the blog on Forbes where you talk about several stuff.

Dave: Yeah, exactly.

Not only Speechpad, but you have a long career as a successful entrepreneur and writer. So guys just go there and watch all the Dave job because otherwise we stay here talking for hours.

How about big data? What’s happening right now?

David: Thanks a lot. If you think about all the-let’s take it in the context of Speechpad, you think about all the audio and video we work with everyday, thousands and thousands of files upload. You can imagine looking at the transcripts for keywords. You could do other analytics on all this audio and video and that can give you some insight.

Let’s take an example, you know, let’s say an insurance company might have tens of thousands of transcripts of recorded statements that they are taking from their clients over the course of a year. Imagine that they then analyze all those tens of thousands of transcripts looking for trends in the words and finding things like left turn is always associated with a certain issue that they know of in their system, a certain accident type or a certain kind of insurance claim or what have you. I’m just giving that as an example.

So that kind of analytics based on these huge data sets is a good example of what is going on in big data. That kind of shows the power of taking lots of data that might not have been in the right format to work with in the past. Audio in its native format is very hard to work with, but once you convert it into text, you can run all these incredible analytics on it to get these business insights that could reduce your business costs or drive more sales or what have you. That’s kind of the power of big data.

For my column, I tend to talk to lots of different startups and different companies in the space, and then I write about things that I see in the space and emerging trends.

Marco: By the way Dave, I always ask the Tech Alchemist guests to suggest their favorite two to three websites or apps that they can’t live without for business, of course. For productivity or for something that you think, “Gosh, I can’t play without that.” And for online digital business, “Absolutely, I recommend to use that kind of app.” Do you have your favorite two or three?

David: Well, I’m going to take a little different angle on that. I’m going to tell you my experience using a Mac. When I was 16, I went to work at a company called Microsoft. I really learned a ton, a ton of stuff.

Marco: I heard about that. Microsoft, I think. Yeah. I heard it.

David: Yeah. And listen, the company is huge and they have all kinds of productivity software. Windows 8 coming out, things like that. I love the recent work that they are doing, but I have to say a little while ago I was like, “I’m going to try and be a Mac user.” The most amazing thing to me is that my presentations look really great. People look at my slide decks, and they go, “Wow, great design work.” I never thought of myself as a designer. I think of myself as a product guy. I think of myself as a technologist. I occasionally do sales with some of our customers, things like that. But I never thought about being a great designer. One of the amazing things for me is I too can produce stuff that looks really good. That’s been really transformative for me. That’s one thing I can’t live without.

The other is not so much an app, but I’m an Ironman. I just did an event called Ironman France in June. If you think about people who are into sports and athletics, we are big data people. We love collecting data about ourselves, about calorie intake, our exercise habits, and how many calories we are burning, and how many feet we climb on the bike course, and all kinds of other data. The great thing for me is I can collect all that data using a couple hundred dollar GPS watch from Garmin, and I’m collecting immense amounts of data about my activities, and I’m uploading them into the Cloud, and I get to see everything about my activities. That’s an amazing thing to me that I can collect such granular data, and then view it and get insights from it. Those are really the two things I can’t live without.

Marco: This is, by the way, is very cool. This trend called Quantitative Self, so the possibility that you have to measure yourself with all the tools, FitBit and so on. The next web conference for people in Europe in December will be [inaudible 27:44] of things and all about this kind of stuff. It’s absolutely interesting.

Can you imagine David, that in the notes for the interview today about you, I was writing down avid triathlete and violinist. This was one thing. An inventor on 15 U.S. patents, that I thought, “Gosh, 15 U.S. patents is a lot, you know.”

David: It’s important to stress co-inventor because whenever you are inventing something it’s a lot of really, a team coming together to turn that invention into reality. It’s one thing to think about, “Hey, let’s build a transcription service that’s going to be really easy.” It’s another thing to make that a reality for a lot of customers. You got to have a lot of people coming together as a team to make that vision into reality.

Marco: Last question and then I’ll let you go. What will happen in the next couple of years in the transcription industry? I mean, these are exploding. I imagine the more videos there are, the more transcriptions there will be. There is any particular trend in this industry?

David: I think that’s right. I think that video is going to be a huge source of growth. First of all, because it’s a lot easier to capture video. We’ve all got a device like this device where it’s easy to capture video. That’s creating a huge growth in the amount of video.

Also, people are putting it online. That is one of the big differences I think. We take for granted that of course I can upload a video and put it on the Internet, but if you think about it, that is a relatively recent change which is not just I could capture it, but that I had enough bandwidth so that I could upload that and put it somewhere where people could get to it. That change is really disruptive in what’s going on. That combined with a bunch of regulatory stuff around requirements for closed captioning to make video accessible, and just the sheer volume of audio and video being put on the net, I think that’s where a lot of the growth is going to come from. As a company, our goal is continuing to scale and provide work for more and more people. There is a lot of unemployment in the country right now, and so we view one of the things that we are doing as creating a place where people can do productive work, get paid for it, have a career path potentially. So that’s where we are going to be all about for the next few years is continuing to scale the business while maintaining high quality.

Marco: Thank you so much, Dave. David Feinleib, CEO and Co-Founder of Speechpad and good luck for everything. Keep in touch.

David: Marco, thanks so much.

Neil Patel is simply one of the smartest guy in the online business and internet marketing world.

In this interview I chatted to him about what you can do to be relevant online, what businesses should do online in 2012, how to be on top of Social Media and tons of other topics.

Enjoy :)

About Neil Patel:

Neil Patel is the co-founder of 2 Internet companies:Crazy Egg and KISSmetrics.

Through his entrepreneurial career he has helped large corporations such as Amazon, AOL, GM, HP and Viacom make more money from the web.

By the age of 21 not only was he named one of the top influencers on the web according to the Wall Street Journal, but he was also named one of the top entrepreneurs in the nation by Entrepreneur Magazine.

He has also been recognized as a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30 by President Obama. Neil has also received Congressional Recognition from the U.S. House of Representatives for his work in the nonprofit sector.

Raw transcription:

Marco: Hello everyone. Marco Montemagno here, the Tech Alchemist and today with me a real privilege for me to have Neil Patel guest at Tech Alchemist. Hi Neil, how are you doing?

Neil: I’m good. Thank you for having me.

Marco: So Neil, I never know how to describe my guests because I had Rand Fishkin, Brad Feld, so many great guys, and I was thinking about how to introduce you properly and I decided to avoid the word legendary because it sounds very old and something of the past, so I would just say if you guys don’t know Neil, just go on Quick Sprout, which is your blog about digital business in general. But I would say you’re very successful with your business KISSmetrics, Crazy Egg. So I would say in my mind, but correct me if I’m wrong, I see you on these two ways, these two main roads, on one side your main business as an entrepreneur, on the other side you are a successful blogger, but also consulting because you have a section of your Quick Sprout where you have consulting opportunities and great testimonials, right?

Neil: Yeah, I focus pretty much all my time on KISSmetrics. Crazy Egg has a self sufficient team, Quick Sprout’s a personal blog, but consulting I do through KISSmetrics, so technically I’m still spending all my time on KISSmetrics.

Marco: All right, excellent. And by the way, you have some great testimonials because I remember when I came on Quick Sprout one of the first times, I saw Michael Arrington, the founder of Tech Crunch and Banhou, I mean, big names, so I think you did a great job of also networking and working great for your customers because having that kind of testimonials is not so easy, I imagine.

Neil: Yeah, it’s difficult to get them, and a lot of people don’t like giving them, but all those people were really kind and they graciously gave me a testimonial.

Marco: Excellent, Neil. I’ll go straight to the point. And the first thing that I would like to understand, and I would love you to help us to understand, is for all the companies running an online business, the main problem so many times is to understand and to figure out what they can do to be successful, which is such a huge topic that you need years to understand these, and tons of money and resources.

But I would like to understand, starting from the analysis, if you follow your-if you have your own framework to analyze a business. So, if a company comes to you and says, look, Neil, we have this website and we’re doing this kind of product or service, where do you start from, I mean, where do you start from to analyze properly a business and what kinds of tips can you give to companies to analyze their own business when they try to figure out how to be successful?

Neil: Sure, so the first thing is you need to make decisions purely based off of data. When people run businesses, they like doing what they want to do, or what other people want to do, or so for and so on. All that matters is what your customers want. Because what your customers want is what’s going to make you money, hopefully, right? If not, you’re in a business that isn’t getting cash flow positive, and you probably shouldn’t continue the business. Assuming you have a good business model, you need to set up analytics. And that’s actually why we created KISSmetrics. So you need to figure out things like your lifetime value of a customer, your churn, your conversion rates, marketing attribution, right? You have to look at cohort analysis, so forth and so on, to figure out what changes should you be making in your business versus what you shouldn’t.

And there’s two points of data that you have to look at: qualitative and quantitative. Quantitative is numbers like analytics, KISSmetrics, Google Analytics, Omniture, the data shows you hopefully what to do. Qualitative is feedback. Think of it as you’re telling me, Neil, you need to change to this, this and this, or I’m not willing to purchase because of this one reason. Analytics can’t always tell you that data. So you need to take customer feedback, which in many cases is qualitative feedback or qualitative data and then quantitative data, combine those two, and figure out what changes you need to make to your business, and then go from there. And then what you do is you test those changes, see what the impact is. Sometimes it’s a positive impact; sometimes it’s a negative, learn from those changes, and then repeat the whole cycle over again.

Marco: So it’s good to recap that the main starting point is always analytics, start from analyzing your data and then go further based on the data that you get.

Neil: That’s correct. And you also have to look at qualitative and quantitative data, both of those two things.

Marco: Right. Any tools that you would recommend? Okay, KISSmetrics but what kind of tools do you recommend, okay everyone uses Google Analytics, but is . . .

Neil: Yeah, Google Analytics is great basic analytics. I think everyone should use it, it’s free. KISSmetrics helps you get into the advanced stuff like lifetime value of a customer, cohort analysis, churn, marketing attribution, stuff like that, tracking people.

And then the other thing that I would do is use either Survey Monkey or Qualaroo. That’ll help you end up getting qualitative data, like what do people think, they’ll actually tell you their opinions. So if you combine both of those data sets, you should have enough to imply what changes you should be making to your business, so then that way you can maximize your work.

Marco: Right, tell me again the name of the second one, Survey Monkey, okay for doing surveys, the second one, Qualaroo.

Neil: Qualaroo. Q-U-A-L-A-R-O-O .com

Marco: All right. And it’s again for doing some kind of surveys, getting feedback, stuff like that. The other interesting part of your job, Neil, in my opinion, is that you often focus not on how to get traffic or to get visitors, which is obviously important, but on the final result. So I really like the idea to focus on revenues, so how can I get revenues, not how can I be on top of Google to get kazillions of traffic, but then I don’t have any conversion. Can you elaborate on this? Because not so many SEO guys, or SEO experts are focused on this topic. They’re more talking about how can I be on top and how can I have a lot of visitors. But I think your angle is much more interesting.

Neil: Yeah, because at the end of the day, if you get rankings and you’re ranking number one for a lot of keywords, and you’re getting ten times more visitors, if you’re not making any more money, what’s the point? It doesn’t matter how many visitors you get. All that matters is how much revenue you make. We’re all in business to make money, whether we like it or not. And if you’re not, well, you’re a very small portion of the people because if you look at the stock market, most people are judged based on their financials.

So you actually need to go out there and figure out what’s making you money. Because if you can find out what key words drive the most revenue, they may not drive the most visitors, but if they can drive the most revenue, nothing else matters. So my goal is-and I think other marketers should be thinking about marketing this way is, especially SEO, don’t focus on rankings. Focus on revenue.

Marco: How do you handle all this changing happening with [Panda], Penguin, SEO, [inaudible 08:23] We’ve been speaking with Rand Fishkin and also Rand say, “Well, sometimes you just flip the coin and try to understand what’s going on.’ So what’s your recipe to handle all this changing that every day is happening now in the SEO world?

Neil: Sure. So my two cents on that is, I don’t look at the changes that they’re making, I still do look at them, but I don’t really try to adapt my strategies to them. I do what’s called focusing on providing value, content marketing, inbound marketing, stuff like that. Write good content, create good products, keep on educating, you’ll naturally get a ton of traffic and links, leverage social media, right.

So I don’t try to necessarily try to get rankings from a specific key word or not. I’m able to do that as well, but more so I focus on writing such great information that people just want to link to you, they want to tweet your stuff, they want to mention you on Facebook, they want to become your fan, right? Once you do all those kind of things, you’ll naturally get so many people coming to your website that a portion of them will end up converting into customers. And that’s a strategy I end up taking.

Marco: All right. You recently wrote a great post by the way about content marketing and so Tech Alchemist community just go there and check that post where you recap the main points. A very silly, but common question, at least in Europe I would say, I don’t know in USA if it’s still like that, the market for small/medium business, is, “Okay, I want to create great content.” Very good, but probably to create great content, I need a team that’s very resource intense. I need a lot of people doing posts and videos and infographics and so on, so it’s very tough to create it.

On the other side if I just buy Facebook advertising or Google AdWords, I get immediate results with visibility. And often it’s very tough to convince that it’s a good investment for long-term [inaudible 10:40] of content marketing. You can really create great content marketing even if you have a small team? Yes or no?

Neil: You definitely can. And you shouldn’t just do one or the other. If you can make paid advertising work for you in a positive fashion, you should do that as well, right? Paid advertising is great. It’s quick. You’ll get to see negative or positive results right away. And if it works out, keep on doing more of it. If it doesn’t, you can fine tune it and try it again or you can just stop all together, whatever your timeframe permits.

But overall, paid marketing is a very small portion, right. If you look at Google, 30% or so of people click on paid ads, maybe a bit less. 70% or so click on free results. So why not focus on both? Do the paid marketing and the long-term play is the free results. It’s the majority of the traffic. If paid marketing is working for you, you know the free will too, it just takes longer. But there’s a much higher ROI and it’s much cheaper in the long run. Why not just do both and say, “Hey, paid marketing is going to work, let’s do it now, free is as well, but let’s start off with a small budget and ramp it up over the next few years.”

Marco: If you’re running with a very small budget, what would you recommend? Try to go on social media? Try to invest just in advertising?

Neil: It really depends on the company, but typically if you have a small budget I wouldn’t recommend paid advertising because paid won’t work on a small budget, or you won’t be able to scale it unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars. I would go with just focusing on the social [inaudible 12:26] content because it doesn’t take that much time and effort, it’s free, you can build up your Twitter profile, Facebook profile, you can monitor Twitter if someone searches on your competitor name, and they’re talking about how they hate your competitor, and they suck and don’t supply results you can hit them up and say, “Hey, come and check us out, right. It’s a cheap, effective solution.”

Marco: What I didn’t see you test so much is with videos. I don’t know if I think about-Rand Fishkin is doing Friday whiteboard, every Friday is there with the whiteboard describing SEO stuff. I didn’t see you doing so much video. There is a reason behind it or just you think it’s not a big thing or the effort is . . .

Neil: Video’s great. It works well for Rand Fishkin, the SEOmoz Whiteboard Fridays are awesome. If you haven’t seen them you should check them out. But my whole problem with video is it requires a lot of time. You have to have a video camera. You have to have editing. You have to shoot it. It’s more preparation and post work than for me to just write a blog post. I love to do videos; I just don’t have the time.

And it works out well for SEOmoz because it’s part of their business. If I do videos tomorrow it’s not necessarily going to make me any more money because videos don’t necessarily drive new customers. Blog posts don’t either, but I just enjoy writing, and it’s quick and easy.

The thing that we do that takes a lot of time at KISSmetrics is webinars. So we’ll teach you about analytics, we’ll go through presentation stuff, and we’ll try to do webinars at least once a week, and they’ll be very detailed and long, maybe an hour, and we’ll have people asking questions and stuff like that. But yeah, videos work great; you just have to put in a lot more time and money into it, right, from getting a proper camera, microphone, maybe a green screen, or whatever it may be, to editing and so forth and so on.

Marco: Are you doing webinar also for list building purpose or just because you consider webinar is a good tool for teaching and marketing, is education, and so it’s good for this?

Neil: Both. It helps us fill the list, it helps drive sign ups and we love educating. We first started to educate-the side effects were our list grew, and we got customers from it so we continue to do more and more now.

Marco: All right. So I just would like to go a little bit deeper now in specific platforms where all the businesses are. They have to be on Facebook and Twitter and so on, just to get your main, best tips. I know that you have tons of posts with 55 Things to Do on Twitter and everything, and they’re great, but I would like to get your help to try to find out the best tips and tools for specific platforms.

I would like to start with Facebook. I’ll give you an example. In Italy, I think it’s one of the largest countries in the world for Facebook as a percentage of population. It’s amazing I don’t know why. Italians only speak on Facebook, it looks like. So all the companies, they basically get on Facebook and sometimes they open a profile instead of a page, but I would say normally a company opens a page on Facebook. Nut then when they open a page, they have no idea how to promote it or what tool to use. Is there any specific tip that you can give to a company that has got a Facebook front page and say, OK, guys, do these three things before anything else.

Neil: Sure, so there’s a few things. One, make sure you mention Facebook on your main website. So link to it from your main website, do an email blast to all your past customers or subscribers, whatever it may be. That way you have an audience to start with.

Two, go out there and post on Facebook on a daily basis, about products, education, whatever it may be. Post stuff that you think would be interesting to your customers. Don’t just sell your product.

Three, get creative with your posts. The post could be an image and a caption underneath. It works out very well. Other people are viewing it those types of post go viral versus just plain text posts.

Four, try doing things like contests to grow your subscription base, give stuff away.

And five, make sure you always engage. Respond to people when they ask questions. Comment. If they complain, make sure you take care of them. As long as you do all of those kind of things on Facebook, those five or six things, you should be fine.

Marco: Any tools that you would absolutely recommend if you run a Facebook front page.

Neil: There’s one called I believe Splash Post. I don’t know if it’s out yet, it helps to collect a lot of emails from Facebook. It’s pretty effective.

Marco: How about Twitter, Neil? You have an excellent following on Twitter. Is it the same approach that you described for Facebook? Do you use the same approach or slightly different?

Neil: Yeah, very similar. Promote it on your website, email it out to your list, put valuable tweets, engage a lot more, so you have to tweet at people, follow people that you respect and engage with them, create lists, try to get on more lists, hit up people who have the lists like direct message them, and see if they can end up adding you to them. But I would just do-if you just do those things, you should be fine.

Marco: Excellent. And another topic that I was curious about. I saw you and I think you were one of the first that I saw online testing with retargeting, and I was wondering if it’s something you would recommend when you’re doing advertising or how was going your experience with retargeting?

Neil: It works out very well, so I think it’s worth spending money on.

Marco: Okay. Is there a minimum budget that you suggest for it?

Neil: No, you can start off at a hundred bucks a month and then go from there.

Marco: All right. Excellent. Retargeter.com I think was one company that you were suggesting.

Neil: That’s correct, I use retargeter.com.

Marco: So, just a couple minutes more, and then I’ll let you go. I know you’re super busy. But by the way, where are you now, San Francisco?

Neil: I am in Seattle right now.

Marco: Oh, Seattle! So you’re there with Jeff Bezos and Microsoft and everyone there. For an internet marketer, so if I think about a company and they try to promote themselves, again, there is any tool kit, any specific tools that you would recommend to all internet marketers? Because you say, “Hey, you absolutely have to use this one in 2012 to be successful.” The most recent ones that you are testing and you’re very happy with, are there any in particular?

Neil: Yeah, actually I just did a blog post about it. It’s called 10 Mission Critical Tools That Every Online Marketer Ought To Use or something like that, or 10 Mission Critical Tools For Every Modern Online Marketer, and I’ll go through the ten tools that I recommend people use.

Yeah, my top three are IFTTT because it lets you do statements like if then, if that then this. And pretty much you can do stuff like, hey, if my competition posts something, text me or email me. If I do a blog post, make sure it automatically goes out to Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, so forth so on.

I’d say my number two tool is KISSmetrics so that way you can track the lifetime value of your customer, churn rate, so forth and so on, because if you’re not tracking those metrics, you’re not measuring your business based off of revenue and profit. All that matters is making those numbers go up to the right, and KISSmetrics tells you why your numbers are going down or up and it tells you what’s causing it and gives you actual insights that you can end up taking.

The third one would be HootSuite and HootSuite lets you easily manage all your social profiles. So it’s a pain in the butt these days to manage them all, but with HootSuite it does it in a really easy fashion like you can schedule your tweets, your postings on Facebook, so forth and so on, but it makes life really easy to manage all your social profiles.

Marco: I’m interested in how politicians are using now the internet social media stuff. And I’ve been watching Obama and Romney really going crazy with all the kinds of social media tools that they could use. I was curious about your opinion about how they’re working online, they’re working good, they’re working bad. What’s your opinion from your point of view from an Internet marketing point of view?

Neil: Yeah, it’s working out good. It’s easier to get the message across these days because of all the social profiles out there. So I think it’s great that they’re able to communicate with people, they have a team that’s managing it. And the best part about the whole social web is it lets them know what’s happening or let’s people know who are interested in the candidates what’s happening in real time versus waiting for them to come on TV and do the debate or whatever.

So I think it’s great and the way they’re using it is they’re telling everyone to follow them on Twitter, on Facebook, MySpace, whatever social sites that are out there that they want to use. And they’re sharing not just what their views are on politics but they’re sharing facts about their everyday lives so that way you can get to know them a bit better, relate to them and hopefully vote for them, which is what they’re trying to do.

Marco: Last question, Neil and then I’ll let you go, I promise. What’s happening next in Internet marketing because probably everyone says, okay, now it’s coming, I don’t know Pinterest and then new tools, new platforms. Do you see any particular trend or wave that is coming in Internet marketing in the next six months, one year, or still let’s move on the same platforms, and we’re fine like that?

Neil: I think it’s the same platforms. I think the biggest change that you’re going to see is, search is going to be more localized, and there’s going to be more of a merge between social media and SEO. It’s going to become more of the same thing. [Say you want] content marketing, it’s all part of the marketing strategy and bound SEO to social media about searches are going to take more of those other factors into play when they’re ranking websites which is going to make it harder to gain through search engines.

Marco: Neil, thank you so much. Neil Patel at KISSmetrics and Quick Sprout. Guys, go just to check all the great job Neil is doing and good luck and keep in touch forever. Thank you.

Neil: Yup. Thank you for having me.

How can you be on top of Google with all this Penguin, Panda and next Google animals?

What will happen to SEO?

How to build a great brand with Social Media?

How could you use Inbound Marketing to succeed?

So many topics in this interview with Rand Fishkin Founder and CEO of SEOmoz…just enjoy!

About Rand Fishkin:

Rand is the CEO of SEO software company; SEOmoz.

He co-authored the Art of SEO from O’Reilly Media, co-founded Inbound.org, and was named on PSBJ’s 40 Under 40 List and BusinessWeek’s 30 Best Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30.

Rand is an addict of all things content & social on the web, from his multiple blogs to Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn,FourSquare and even a bit of Pinterest.

In his minuscule spare time, Rand enjoys the company of his amazing wife, whose serendipitous travel blog chronicles their journeys.

Raw Transcription:

Marco: Hello, everyone. Marco Montemagno, here, The Tech Alchemist. Today with me, I would say really a great person before then a great entrepreneur, Rand Fishkin. How are you, Rand?

Rand: Doing great. Thank you for having me, Marco.

Marco: So, Rand, I was thinking about how can I introduce Rand in a way that I can really transfer to the readers and The Tech Alchemist community how I perceived your job in a way that I gave a clear picture of you. So, I was thinking about a few things that I would like to say before to begin our chat, okay? If I say stupid things, or wrong things you just say, “No. This is not like that.”

Rand: I’ll jump in, all right.

Marco: All right? Okay. The first thing, if I think about Rand Fishkin, Founder of SEOmoz, a successful company, I would say is the de facto standard for SEO, really good things. Got funded also recently we’ve been talking here with Brad Feld. I don’t remember the amount of funding collected until this moment.

Rand: $18 million.

Marco: All right, and based in Seattle, I would say.

Rand: Yes.

Marco: All right, so this is the first – it was the easiest thing, okay? The second thing that I was thinking is I really love the way that you talk about, I wouldn’t say SEO, the way that you talk and evangelize how to create an online identity in a good way, in a positive way, in a way that it works both professionally and personal.

So, with your blog, with your video, your Friday videos where you explain stuff, so this, I think, is a really cool and unique way that you’re doing, for a long time. Because I mean, I remember the first videos several years ago, probably.

Rand: Yeah.

Marco: Yeah. So this, I would say, is the second part of your character. Then I go, Rand, into a little bit unknown things about your character. But I think that they are cool. The first one is that you, for me, you’re an amazing speaker and people maybe don’t focus on it because maybe they read your content and these kinds of things. But, guys, if you have ten minutes, 20 minutes, go to have a look at Rand Talk.

I think this is really a cool and important thing because you can educate people about a difficult subject. So, this is something I really appreciate. Then the fourth, then I finish. I stop here and I start with the tough questions, Rand. I’ve been organizing an event, several times, several years ago, I think, a couple of years ago and I was inviting Rand, okay?

When you were coming there, you were very professional, very serious. So, I thought, “Okay, guys. Good. Probably he will be a boring speaker.” I never told you this, but I was thinking in the beginning. Then you started to speak and you were amazing. So, I thought, “Gosh, this guy, really, he knows how to catch attention of people even if he’s talking about a difficult topic.”

Then, it was a party of the event and I thought, “Ah, American, very professional, I don’t know if he’s the right person for the party.” But when you went on the stage and you were dancing, you were great. So, the fourth thing is that you’re also a great dancer.

Rand: Yeah. I forgot about that night. That was a good night.

Marco: You were the king of the dancing. So, I really fell in love with your professional approach and your life approach, really – work hard. Play hard. From that moment on I always thought, “Rand, really, number one for me.” Yeah, that’s it. So, do you think it’s the right picture or not?

Rand: I think you’ve got it down cold. So, I have a question for you, then.

Marco: All right.

Rand: When do I get to come back and dance in Italy?

Marco: Yeah, absolutely. We need to do a comeback for some dance or something.

Rand: Yeah.

Marco: I say, probably you’re coming in Europe, or in London.

Rand: Yeah. I’m going to be in London, I think, two weeks from now for SearchLove, just Distilled SearchLove.

Marco: All right.

Rand: I was going to be in Helsinki as well, speaking at an event in Finland but unfortunately I had to cancel due to some stuff here.

Marco: Okay, perfect.

Rand: Hopefully, yeah, I’m looking forward to coming – I am going to be in Italy next June, I think late May, early June.

Marco: Okay.

Rand: So, if you have anything going then, you should let me know.

Marco: Yeah. We’ll meet again, definitely. So, Rand, I want to go straight to the point and tell you the pain that we feel, all the business people feel in this moment. That is, so many things are changing every two milliseconds and if I start from Google, for instance, every company, every business tries to figure out how they can be visible. How they can be on top of Google without getting mad, because Penguin, Panda, and changing the algorithm every two seconds.

So, the first thing that I would like you to help us to understand is what’s happening? I mean, is Google going crazy? All the changing that they are doing are for the good, for the bad? What a business should do to survive in this situation from a general point of view?

Rand: Yeah, so Google is making pretty active changes but they’ve been making active changes all along. The difference between a lot of the changes that they’ve made in the last 12, 18 months versus what you saw for the last three or four years before that is that recently they’ve been focusing on, I would say eliminating a lot of manipulative tactics that happen in the SEO world.

So, for a long time, from 2006 or ’07, I’d say, until about 2011, really Google was taking not very much action against a lot of forms of what many people thought were web spam. Buying links, manipulating the link-grab, putting low quality, thin content on your site, having a keyword variation on every page, all these different kinds of things.

You don’t need to know the specifics just that the broad picture is Google wasn’t really taking action against these folks. Then the last 18 months we’ve seen them take a lot of action and because of that the problem is that what the SEO world started to believe over those four years is that, “Hey, these practices are okay. I can get away with them.” When you can get away with them they start to become almost like, not a best practice, but an industry standard.

So, now when Google is hitting people hard with things like Panda and Penguin updates, like their exact match domain penalization that they did recently, those kinds of things take people who thought they were good at SEO and kick them 100 spots back in the results. So, they start to really panic. That’s where you get that sense of panic and those blog posts with 100 comments on them, people angry at Google, that kind of thing.

Marco: What do you think is a good move from Google, so it will clean a little bit of the space?

Rand: It’s a good move. It just came so late that they had already created a bad expectation. So, it’s the right thing to do. It’s just the right thing to do four years ago.

Marco: All right, I stay on a vision level just to begin to understand better what’s happening. We saw Facebook just got 1 billion users, almost, and I heard Mark Zuckerberg at the last TechCrunch disrupt only talking about mobile and search, will come with search and so on. So, obviously, if they start to really enable search among all their billion users they will give big competition to Google. So, what’s the situation now?

I mean, if you should recommend to companies, how to balance their online presence, they have only to focus on Google, to be on top of Google? They have to think about Facebook? They have to think about Google Plus? Where would you focus if you would recommend?

Rand: So, this is just like advertising in the real world. You go to a gelato shop in Seattle and you say, “Well, where are you going to advertise?” They’re going to say, “Well, I’m going to advertise in communities that are close to my restaurant. I’m going to advertise in places where people are likely to see the ad and the people who will see the ad would be likely to come to my gelatoria,” right?

So, maybe I’ll buy some stuff on the side of a bus. Maybe I’ll buy some outdoor advertising on a park bench. Maybe I’ll buy a billboard. Maybe I’ll buy some advertising in the local newspaper. But I wouldn’t buy it in a national newspaper. I probably wouldn’t buy a TV ad because it’ll reach too broad an audience and won’t target the people who are just in this neighborhood. People aren’t going to travel from miles away to go to the gelato shop.

Apply that to the online world. Where are your customers, who are your customers, and how should you best reach them? What are the affordable channels for you to reach them and what are you good at? That’s really what it comes down to. So, a lot of people’s customers are on Facebook, if you’re in the consumer world.

But if you’re in the B2B world, people don’t share B2B content on Facebook. That’s not what people click Like on. people go, “Ooh, wow, a corrugated aluminum producer? Like.” It never happens, right? But, they might indeed tweet something that shares some stats about roofing. They might indeed go and find you through a Google search, and so you really want to be doing SEO and probably paid search as well.

They might reach your website from some other means, through an email link, through a link from another website, through tech and trade journals, through conferences and events, and so you want to be at all of those places. This is the classic marketing problem of placing yourself where your customers are.

Marco: Well, what do you think, Rand? You recently wrote about content marketing and inbound marketing?

Rand: Yeah, so content marketing is sort of one of the channels of inbound marketing. All inbound marketing means, inbound just means channels you don’t pay for. You earn versus buy, right? So, paid search is buy it. Retargeting is buy it. Display ads are buy it. Park benches are buy it, right? Then, blogging is earn it. That’s a form of content marketing. Email marketing, that’s earn it. SEO is earn it. Social media, that’s earn it. So, it’s just a way to describe those.

Marco: Is it correct if I say that there is a shift from the classic SEO strategy of getting links, tons of links from everywhere to a more strategic approach also online and try to build your identity, I would say, also in a more ethic way, in a way that you…

Rand: Yeah. I agree with you. So, Google has essentially taken a lot of action against manipulative links. Penguin is the most robust example but there are plenty of others, and they sort of said, “Don’t build a website. We, Google, are not interested in ranking your website. But if you build a brand on the internet, we would like to rank your brand,” right?

So, what they don’t want to see is, “Oh, well I really want to rank for discount online shoes, so I’m going to build discount- online-shoes.info.” That’s not a brand. That’s not a brand. Google doesn’t want to rank that. Just because you went and found a bunch of directories, and social media sites and profiles, and you’ve bought a bunch of student webpages and put links to discountonlineshoes.net doesn’t mean that you are a brand who deserves to be ranked, and that was classic SEO.

That’s what a ton of SEO people did for a very long time. What Google is saying is “We like brands like Zappos and Endless and DSW.com, and all these types of folks. Those are brands. ” If you build a brand, and it is well-recognized, and people are talking about you, and there are social signals and user and usage data signals that they get from Google Chrome, Google, Analytics, your Android phone, all that kind of stuff, then, “Yes, we want to rank you.”

So it’s becoming much less of a, “Here are all the ranking factors and signals, and let’s try to manipulate those,” and much more of a, “I’d better build something amazing that people really enjoy and like, and then do a good job of making it accessible to Google.”

Rand: Right. I love the idea that you have to build a brand and you don’t have to build a website or a mobile app, because the problem that I see every day is that in the end, companies say, “Okay, but to build a brand maybe I have to, I don’t know, create videos, a Facebook fan page,” so I have so many things to do that for a small company, maybe, you don’t have people that are able to create all that kind of stuff.

How do you solve this problem, because if you buy it in a Google Adwords or Facebook advertising, you put some money in, you push a button and then it goes by itself? To build a brand, it is a big effort, I think.

Rand: I agree. It is a big effort. But I would place this next to anything else that happens in life, in human existence, that when you put a lot of concerted effort in, and you bother to learn the ropes and you go through the pain of the learning process, and you learn from your mistakes and you continue investing, you get better at it.

Any sports that you’ve ever played, if you play football, if you play tennis, if you play a musical instrument, if you’re learning to play the guitar, you know that you have to learn the ins and outs. Learn the chord changes, learn how to get that physical muscle memory in your fingers to make those chords sound right, make the transition sound right. The online world is no different, right?

So, you need to go spend some time on Facebook. See what Facebook pages in your niche, in your world, in your industry are doing well. What kind of content are they posting? I’m going to spend a few hours digging into that. Then I’m going to experiment. I’m going to try putting some of that kind of stuff on my Facebook page. I’m going to learn from Facebook Insights. Maybe I’m going to buy a little bit of advertising. Maybe I won’t even, maybe I’ll just start organically and see what happens over time.

I’ll do the same thing with Twitter. I’m going to do the same thing with SEO. There are one-person companies that have built incredible brands on the internet, incredible brands. One of the biggest online dating sites, which is, by the way, one of the one of the most competitive fields on the web – PlentyofFish, is built by Markus Frind and he’s one guy in Vancouver. He says he doesn’t even work that much.

Marco: He solved also his dating problem.

Rand: Yeah, he solved his dating problem. So, you think about the people who build amazing brands, it does not take a huge team. It doesn’t take some magical formula that nobody knows except for a few gurus. No. It’s like anything else. It takes time. It takes effort. But there are so many wonderful resources now on the web to learn these things. If you’re willing to expend the energy, you can become great at it.

Marco: I have a couple of questions, Rand, about your experience with two platforms, where I think you really are becoming a master of those two platforms. One is SlideShare. For you guys, just go on SlideShare and check Rand’s presentations. Well, I think they’re really good. They are very well done, both technically and also from the presentation point of view. What’s your experience with that? I mean, is SlideShare a channel that you try to explore and you would recommend to use it, and how?

Rand: So, SlideShare is one, it’s like those channels I was talking about where you find where your users are. I know for a fact lots of marketers, which are the people I’m trying to reach – I want to reach professional marketers and say, “Hey, if you guys do SEO and social media marketing and content marketing, all the inbound channels, then SEOmoz’s software is for you.” So, I know that marketers are on SlideShare.

If your audience is also on SlideShare, so a lot of professionals in the creative field, advertising, digital, obviously marketing, design, if those types of folks are on SlideShare, then yes. Certainly it pays. Anytime you’re giving a presentation, a talk at a conference or an event for whatever you’re doing, whatever kind of business you are, if you’re speaking and you make a slide presentation and it’s of high quality, you should put it on SlideShare before you give the talk.

Then when you get on stage, you tell people, “You can download my slides at SlideShare at this URL.” I usually make a custom Bitly URL, so I’ll have bit.ly/futureofSEO. Then people type in bit.ly/futureofSEO and they go to the SlideShare page, and then they start tweeting it and sharing it. All those shares make it go to the front page of SlideShare if it gets enough views fast enough. Then lots more people see it on the front page of SlideShare and it gets featured.

It’s like I’m pushing a boulder up a hill, and then when I get on stage, you push it over the edge and that SlideShare goes popular.

Marco: Another channel that you’re using in a great way, in my opinion, is how you create videos and these Friday whiteboards where you explain with this whiteboard, very well-colored now. It’s a great way to engage users. What are your tips about it? Also, because I saw that, I think at SEOmoz you’ve been using Wistia probably, to upload videos.

Rand: Yes.

Marco: Wistia, for you guys, is a platform where you can upload videos like Viddler, and you can get a lot of metrics about where people stop to watch your video and stuff. So, what’s your experience with video, which I think is much more complex to be produced? It’s not like you write a post and it’s done.

Rand: Yeah, so video, I think, when you want to do video you need to do it right. So, in the early days of the internet, 2002, 2001, people’s expectations for video was pretty low. Even in the early days of YouTube, 2003, ’04, which we started doing Whiteboard Friday in 2005, people’s expectations for the quality of what a small business could produce was pretty low.

Today, great cameras are relatively inexpensive. There are a lot more people with video expertise, video production, and editing expertise. So, users have a much higher expectation of what’s going to be in the video. You can see Whiteboard Friday today is much more professional than it was three or four years ago. What I’d say about video, we do two things.

So, we have a YouTube channel where we put videos, including the new Whiteboard Fridays online and we also put some other kinds of video on there. So, oftentimes if I give a presentation, I’ll sort of do a faux presentation in front of the whiteboard, and then I’ll project the presentation onto the whiteboard, that kind of thing. That works pretty well. We put those on YouTube, and that’s to build up a channel.

YouTube itself is actually the second most popular search engine in the world behind Google. It gets more searches than Microsoft, or Bing, or Yahoo, or any of those. So, YouTube is a very, very powerful platform if you can put the right kind of material on there, and the right kind of material on YouTube, how-to works extremely well. Funny stuff works really well. Informative stuff works really well. We use Wistia actually for something else.

So, we use Wistia to put this content on our own site because it enables self-controlled embedding. So, for example, when you embed a YouTube video on somebody else’s site, it points back to YouTube. But if you embed a Wistia video that we’ve created onto your website, it’ll actually point back to where we tell it to point back to, which is our website.

So, we get the traffic. We get to control the experience, which is great. Then we also get, as you mentioned, a lot more fancy metrics. It automatically sends XML video sitemaps to Google so you get the little video box in the results next to your listing. So it does lots of cool things.

Marco: So you upload the same video both on Wistia and on YouTube?

Rand: Right.

Marco: All right. Another thing, blogging, I mean, SEOmoz blog is amazing, I think. Really, so many posts from both SEOmoz team and guest posts by the users, by the community, so much interesting stuff, a lot of comments, a lot of people really going deep in how to be visible online. How do you consider blogging, I mean, comparing it five years ago? Is blogging dead as a lot of people say? It’s still great and good and alive and kicking? What’s your opinion about it?

Rand: So, what’s interesting is that there are fewer active blogs today than there were, say, about four years ago. Not many fewer, but a little bit fewer, so you’ve sort of seen a peak of number of active blogs. But blog readership has grown about 2x in the last four years. So this means more people reading fewer blogs says to me, big opportunity for bloggers – big, big opportunity for bloggers and it’s just a wonderful thing. For us, our traffic on the blog, it’s grown every year tremendously.

I think right now we get about 2 million visits to the site, and 60%, 70% of that is to the blog, so it’s really, really remarkable. We have 120,000 subscribers to the blog every day. It really is a great way to reach people to influence, have thought leadership, and to do good things like SEO as well.

Marco: Right. Tools, if you have to recommend three tools that every company in the world should use to be visible online, to be on top of obviously their top? I know that is a silly question, because it depends by the platform and it depends by so many variables. But in your opinion, something that you should say, “Hey, you absolutely have to use at least these three tools for your activity, for your online positioning,” what would you recommend?

Rand: Let’s see. My number one is going to be Google Analytics, because you can’t improve what you can’t measure, and you have to be measuring. You have to be measuring which sources are sending you traffic and how valuable that traffic is, what it’s doing on your website, which pages are failing, and which ones are working. The other one I’m probably going to say is – well, it’s kind of a choice.

So if you’re looking for a free tool, I would use Google Webmaster Tools, which does a good job of sort of showing you errors and problems on your website. It is free. It’s just at google.com/webmasters, and it will give you some pretty good information in there. The paid version of that would be SEOmoz. So, SEOmoz lets you kind of track your rankings. It shows you a lot more detail around what it’s crawling and the errors it’ll message to you. It’ll help you optimize pages, that kind of thing.

Google Webmaster Tools provides almost a little bit of that but not quite. SEOmoz is sort of what we wish Google gave us. Then the third one I’m going to say is, if you are thinking about building a content site, particularly a blog or an article or news or anything like that, I’d probably recommend that you use WordPress. WordPress just does such a great job as a content management system and there are so many plugins that let you do all the detailed level stuff.

You can plug in Google Analytics. You can plug in Discuss, which is a great commenting system. You can plug in Zemanta, which is a great content recommendation system. There’s a huge library of things you can do. WordPress is fast. It’s SEO friendly. There’s lots of good advice out there for WordPress bloggers, great themes, tons of developers. So, those would probably be my top three. I could give you 20, though.

Marco: A couple of things more, then I’ll let you go. I know you’re super busy. Mobile, everyone talks about mobile. In Italy we’re bad with mobile. We have three mobiles each, so it’s an exploding market, obviously. One big question is, okay, if I have a mobile app and I think about SEO, how can I have my mobile app more visible on top of the App store or Google Play?

Is there any specific tip that you can give, that you can provide for people or a company who maybe, they have a mobile app but they don’t know how to scale the ranking?

Rand: Yeah. Okay, so the mobile app world is very, very different from the web world. Most of the apps that get downloaded don’t get downloaded through search. But if they do get downloaded through search it’s not a search for anything generic, right? So people don’t search for, “app that lets me check in at local businesses”. They search for Foursquare. They don’t search for, “app that lets me send 140 character messages to my friend”. They search for Twitter.

So, really the search is not unbranded like it is on the web. On the web people do perform those kinds of searches. They’ll say, “Oh, I’m looking for local restaurants in Seattle,” and those types of searches happen a lot on mobile devices. But they happen on the web, not in the App store. So ranking in the app store doesn’t mean the same thing as ranking in a web search.

So, I’d be very careful about thinking, “Oh, I don’t rank very well for the keyword that I thought I was supposed to target.” Don’t worry about keywords in the App store. What you are worried about are downloads and you’re worried about ratings. You want to get lots of good ratings from people and that means building a very, very slick app and usually it means building marketing channels not in the App store themselves, meaning on the web.

So that means you want to get a powerful Twitter account and lots of people liking your page on Facebook and lots of people maybe posting images of things in your app to Pinterest, and maybe making the homepage of Reddit gaming, if you have a gaming app. Those kinds of things that drive classic demand and branding on the web, that’s really what you’re looking for.

Marco: All right, that’s very interesting because, actually, I think most of the businesses, they think the same way, web and mobile, so that they use the same approach. What do you think will happen in two years’ time? I mean, in this world, Google will be the most dominant player? Facebook will become the most dominant player? If you can open your magic sphere, what will happen? Where would you suggest to invest for being on the right trend, and on the right direction?

Rand: Again, I’d go back to saying that some channels are going to be right for some businesses. Sometimes Google is all wrong for a business. I’ve worked with lots of start-ups that make a software product and I say, “Well, is anyone searching for this?” They say, “No. It doesn’t exist yet.” I say, “Well, then don’t do SEO. That’s not going to help you. You can rank for newfangled thing-a-my-jig all you want but nobody’s searching for it yet.” So, I would say go to the channels where it makes sense.

In terms of who’s going to be dominant, I think Facebook and Twitter and a few of these other ones. I don’t see Tumblr going anywhere but up. I think Pinterest is going to continue to grow. It will be a niche social network but it’ll continue to grow. Foursquare is going to continue to be big. They add users all the time. They’re growing engagement all the time.

For local it’s very big. Yelp is a huge network that’s continuing to grow internationally for local business, particularly for finding local businesses. There are tons of people who don’t even go to Google anymore they just pop open Yelp on their mobile device. So, you need to be on the right platform. I don’t see one of these companies dominating all the others. What I see is a very diverse world on the web and in the mobile world.

Marco: Is there some new start-up that you would say, “Hey, let’s keep an eye on those guys because they’re good,” path, or I don’t know? Is there any platform that you would day, “This is a good one”?

Rand: I think path is an interesting one. I haven’t seen them quite break into the mainstream yet, but they could be. Foursquare is a little like that. They’re kind of trailing, but they could get somewhere. It wouldn’t surprise me if we have something new in the… Well, I know technically they’re big, but I think Google Plus is actually going to be a very, very big and interesting social network on the scale of a LinkedIn or a Twitter, maybe not a Facebook, but in that couple hundred million active users, and very, very powerful for influencing SEO.

So, if you’re not on Google Plus today and you want to rank well on Google, get on there. Even if none of your friends are on there, even if you feel like it’s a ghost town and, oh, there’s nobody there, get there early. You don’t want to be late to the game on a platform that could change your business.

Marco: That’s interesting. I think a lot of companies are totally underestimating now Google Plus. I think in Europe, I don’t know the numbers, but I don’t think they’re big numbers in many countries at the moment, at least.

Rand: Which is why it’s a great time to adopt early.

Marco: Yes. Hey, Rand, last question. I was curious. You recently wrote about, in Italia, I would say with my horrible English accent, I would call it Crow [sic], CRO about conversion.

Rand: Conversion rate optimization.

Marco: Yeah. How do you say CRO?

Rand: Oh, it’s just like SEO. It’s CRO, for conversion Rate Optimization.

Marco: I was really interested in it. Just in 30 seconds, but if you have tips for companies willing to improve their conversion rate, and then obviously my suggestion is go to check your presentation about CRO because it’s very, very interesting how you’ve been using it on SEOmoz, so very interesting. But what would you recommend about improving conversion on a landing page, typically a website?

Rand: So, my biggest tip for conversion is, imagine that you’ve got two circles, right? SO, circle one over here is what the user is looking for, and this circle over here is what the webpage provides. You want the overlap to be perfect. You want the webpage to provide exactly what the user is looking for. That’s actually very rare.

You visit a lot of webpages where you think, “I think what they’re trying to do is very different from what I want to do.” If you line up those two things, that’s when you get great conversion activity. That means looking at the keywords that are sending traffic. It means asking smart questions to people who are visiting your website.

The best thing that you can do for conversion rate optimization, in terms of figuring out how to align those things, is to talk to your users, ask them smart questions. “Why did you come to the website?” “What were you hoping to find?” Ask the people who bought, “Why did you buy? Why do you keep buying from me?” Ask the people who didn’t buy, “What made you come in the first place and why didn’t you buy?”

Figure out what those objections are and then start to address those. It’s very simple and yet so many people don’t take advantage of it. That presentation, by the way that you’re talking about, it’s at bit.ly/bigpicturecro. I’m actually a huge fan of a tool called Unbounce. It allows you to create webpages and landing pages and make changes to them without being a web developer or a software engineer.

That’s really, really handy for a lot of marketers who are probably like, “I don’t want to write HTML code, and try to figure out the CSS and layout, and that kind of thing.” You can make a lot of changes and start testing right away. But the problem is, you won’t know what to test or how to test until you talk to your users.

Marco: All right. Rand, I really, really went long but I want to thank you so much for being here today.

Rand: Oh, my pleasure.

Marco: Good luck for everything. I’m waiting for you when you’re coming in Europe.

Rand: Awesome, look forward to it.

Marco: Great. Thank you so much. Bye, Rand.