Wow talking with Brad Feld it’s simply a…privilege!

In this interview Brad shares his vision about tons of interesting business topics and gives tips and advises to be successful in your business.

Enjoy…

About Brad Feld:

Brad is one of the managing directors at Foundry Group, a venture capital firm that invests in early stage software / Internet companies throughout the United States. He is also the co-founder of TechStars, a mentor-driven accelerator, author of several books and blogs, and a marathon runner. Brad has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987.

Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures, a company that helped launch and operate software companies. Brad is also a co-founder of TechStars. Brad currently serves on the board of directors of BigDoor, Cheezburger,Fitbit, FullContact, Gnip, MakerBot, MobileDay, Modular Robotics, Oblong,Orbotix, SEOMoz, Standing Cloud, and Yesware for Foundry Group. Previously, Brad was an executive at AmeriData Technologies after it acquired Feld Technologies, a firm he founded in 1987 that specialized in custom software applications.

Raw Transcription:

Hello, everyone. Marco Montemagno here, founder of Tech Alchemist, and today I’m so happy to have your great guest, and a person that I really appreciate a lot, even if it’s the first time that we meet here today in chat. It’s Brad Feld. Hi, Brad. Thanks for joining.

Brad Feld: Hey, Marco.

Marco: All right. If you don’t know who Brad Feld is, just go and Google it, because it’ll be too long. Basically, Brad, I would say the best five things in my mind that come up when I think about you. TechStars founder, Foundry Group co-founder, and author, several books. “Start a Business” I think is out right now, probably at the end of the month.

Brad: [inaudible 01:04], yes.

Marco: Also ‘Start-up Life’ is coming out in 2013, about life in the start-up world. Marathon runner, this is a personal thing, but I was really enjoying it. I think you have also on your website your marathon timing, right? The time you did?

You also wrote a post recently about Paul Ryan and marathon times and politicians do not match. This was also really cool. I like it. Because you have to know, and I’ll start with the questions, but I was really intrigued by TechStars and by your activity.

Once I was reading “Do More Faster,” which is the book you wrote with David Cohen, the other founder of TechStars. I discovered that there is a table tennis championship for TechStars, and I was a table tennis professional player, number 250 in the world. I thought, “Gosh, that’s amazing. These guys, they do something cool.” I was even more in love.

Brad: Some day you and David need to play, because he is by far the best…

Marco: The best player.

Brad: … table tennis player, yes.

Marco: The best player. That’s cool, that’s cool. Brad, I have several things that I want to talk with you today. Basically, when I thought about inviting you, I thought OK. We live, everyone who is doing business, start-ups or entrepreneurs, but also freelance and people who want to do stuff online, we have so many billions of things changing and new things and so on.

I thought, we need a set of rules, and who better than Brad Feld can help us to get a set of rules about several topics? I would like to talk about investing, promotion, entrepreneurships, are several topics that I really would like to join.

The first thing is, you are out with this book, “Start a Business,” and I thought that was amazing, the job that you did in Boulder. Which is not Silicon Valley. In Europe, we think of Silicon Valley, but when TechStars came out and Boulder started to be an important city for start-ups, everyone thought, “Where is Boulder?” It was something strange.

You created a kind of framework I think, a thesis in your last book. I would like to understand a little bit better, if you can elaborate on this. I think it’s interesting, an analystic view about business, and it’s not only your business but how to build an ecosystem. I would like to start from here.

Brad: Sure. I wrote the newest book which came out, it’s called “Start-up Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City.” It’s built on the premise that you can build a long term, sustainable, vibrant, entrepreneurial ecosystem anywhere in the world.

I have been a long term believer that pretty much any city can sustain start-up activity and start-up culture, that you don’t have to be in a place like Silicon Valley to be able to create something significant.

Throughout the United States there’s a bunch of cities that you identify with start-up activity. Boston, New York, Seattle. Boulder was a good example, because there was always a lot of start-up activity in Boulder, but it’s a relatively small place. It’s only 100,000 people.

I spent the last 15 years working with a bunch of other entrepreneurs here in Boulder, doing lots of start-up stuff. A couple of years ago I started reflecting on what had happened, and what had caused us to create something that’s so magical here in Boulder.

That led to what I’m calling the ‘Boulder thesis’, which is the core of the “Start-up Communities” book. I have a framework, and within the book we explore the framework in depth. The framework is very straightforward, it’s four specific principles. My view is if you want to create a long term, vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem, you have to do the following four principles.

The first is that the start-up community has to be led by entrepreneurs. There are lots of different people that contribute to the start-up community activity, but the leaders have to be entrepreneurs.

The second is that these entrepreneurs have to take a very long term view, at least 20 years. The idea is that you’re committing over a very long period of time to work on developing and growing your start-up community.

The third is that you have to be inclusive of anyone who wants to engage in the start-up community in any way. Start-up communities, to be successful long term, have to be organisms that grow and expand over time, not ones where people are playing a zero sum game. Anybody who wants to engage, whether they’re another entrepreneur or someone moving to town that wants to work for a start-up, or somebody from a large company or government that wants to engage and help the start-up community, you have to be inclusive of all of that.

Then the last is that you have to have a series of activities and events that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack. What I mean by that is if you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, first time entrepreneur, multi-time entrepreneur, service provider like a lawyer, an accountant, a venture capitalist, investor, angel investor, university, there has to be stuff to cause all of those different participants in the entrepreneurial stack to be able to engage.

This is not cocktail parties and award ceremonies, but it’s real stuff where you’re doing work on a continual basis. Start-up weekend, accelerators like TechStars, monthly new tech meetups, weekly open coffee clubs, weeklong start-up weeks. These kinds of activities that are substantive, that allow people to work on this notion of start-ups together.

If you take those four principles and you look at the start-up communities that have really developed over time, over a long period of time and have sustained, they all have some combination of those four things front and center.

Marco: Do you think, I’ll just give you an example. I’ve been moderating, three days ago it was a huge event in Italy, TechCrunch Europe, that was in Italy. 1,300 people, really amazing. It was an ecosystem I would say. Mostly [inaudible 07:33] was an ecosystem. It wasn’t something impossible, only one year ago or a couple of years ago it was something impossible.

I would say that what you’re doing with TechStars or Y-Combinator has got a big impact all over the world. A lot of ecosystems start to grow. Do you think that this is something that will have a substantial impact on traditional business, or will be something just limited to the tech/web, digital space?

Brad: I think it’s having a profound impact on business in general. In the book I talk early on about the difference between hierarchies and networks. If you think about the rule that we operate in today, much of the industrial era from the early 1900s through the late 1900s into the early 2000s were driven off of hierarchical models.

Government runs off of a hierarchy, there’s a boss, the President or the Prime Minister. There’s a hierarchy below that person, and there’s a line of control. Military is a hierarchy. It’s very clear who’s in charge and who’s the boss and who’s the boss of the boss.

Marco: A control system.

Brad: Right. Think about a hierarchy. Most big business works in a hierarchy. You have a president, you have vice presidents, you have directors and on and on and on down the organization.

Start-up companies generally function in a network. Very early on, entrepreneurs tend to know each other across companies. A start-up community by definition is a network because you don’t have a single leader, there’s no president of the Boulder start-up community. There’s no vice president of membership and vice president of education and vice president of finance. There’s just a bunch of entrepreneurs doing stuff.

There’s this network that is intermingled. As a society, we’re getting very used to this idea of a network. Your interaction with me is an example of it. I don’t know you, you don’t really know me, but you have a lot of information about me, you reached out to me. I said, “Absolutely, be happy to spend a little bit of time with you.”

There is no gatekeeper. You didn’t have to apply to get me on your podcast, on the videocast. You didn’t have to ask permission. That dynamic I think is now really radically changing, this notion of hierarchy drifting into network.

I think that we’ve also conditioned ourselves as individuals to be very comfortable with the notion of a network. If you think about social networking, whether it be Facebook or LinkedIn or Twitter, the linkage between people is something computers are really enabling in a different way. Crossing time and space, we’re in different countries, we’re in different time zones. Much, much easier.

That construct I think is changing the way we work as a society. On top of it, if you look at job growth and job creation, almost all the new job creation is coming from start-up companies. Most big, large companies are contracting. Some of them grow through merger and acquisition, but the real vector of growth is from start-up activity. I think that network philosophy and how that impacts people and companies is pervasive.

Marco: That’s very interesting. Last week I was watching this (inaudible 10:55 TED video about how it’s changing also for politicians and Github model applied to politicians, I think it’s very, very interesting.

I’ll ask a last question about this topic, and then I’ll go to investing. I was very interested, and obviously I still have to get the book. The interesting thing is also the timeframe. You say 20 years, and this is also very interesting for me.

I got an interview with Jeff Bezos a couple of years ago, and I remember that I was shocked when they said OK, we entered Italy, and Amazon opened on the Italian market. I said, “How can you compete with these leaders,” they have a really strong position and everything. He said, “Well, I will just wait 20 years. I have no problem in waiting.” I thought wow, that’s a long view, a long vision. Timeframe is so important.

Brad: I think it is, for a couple of reasons. One is most companies anyway take a long time to develop from scratch. Every now and then you hear of a company that has huge success in two or three years, but the vast majority of start-ups are ten, 15, 20 year journeys with lots of ups and downs.

On top of that, if you look at the normal rhythms of society, government runs in two to four year cycles, university runs in a one year cycle and big business runs in a quarterly cycle. Start-ups and start-up communities can’t focus on that short term cycle, because you’re playing something that’s a very long term game.

I would say it’s generational. You have to really commit for an entire generation, which is about 20 years from today, and actually assert that you really should be committing every year to another 20 years. If you look at Silicon Valley, it’s not a ten year old phenomenon. It’s a 50, 60, 70 year old phenomenon.

Building a start-up community and having it grow is something that has to survive the macroeconomic cycles, has to survive the cycles of government, has to survive the cycles of the one big company in town as they grow up and shrink, grow up and shrink.

Entrepreneurs don’t need to think about that shorter term cycle. They need to be playing a very long term game, like the one that Jeff Bezos described. It’s especially true in creating a durable and sustainable entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Marco: During this process obviously there are a lot of failures. By the way, for the people watching this video, if you haven’t seen Brad talk at TED at Boulder, I think it was 2010, a couple of years ago probably, that talk. It was an image I really love, was ‘Welcome to Fail,’ like ‘Welcome to the Town of Fail.’

You were talking about mastering failure and so on. Everyone talked about the importance of learning by failures, but actually you failed a lot during this process. What are your tips? OK, you fail, but it’s never great. The failing is not so good. In your experience, what can you do to learn and go on?

Brad: It sucks to fail, but that’s part of the experience. I encourage people to accept the reality that part of what happens in your life is lots of failure, and part of what happens in the entrepreneur’s journey is lots of failure.

The great entrepreneurs know how to learn from a moment of failure and extract from the failure new knowledge, new experience, new information. Pick themselves up and go forward. Even if you look at a successful business, from a start-up to great success, there’s a lot of failure along the way.

It’s not the case that you start here and end here and it’s a straight line. It’s a line that looks like this. As long as that line is sloping up over time, you’re OK.

I think the other thing I tell people is not to be embarrassed by failure. I’ve had lots of things that I failed about, I’m public about them. I learned from them. Sometimes I repeat the same mistake more than once, and sometimes it takes you a couple of times to get it. That’s part of the experience of trying new things.

If you’re ashamed of it, if you’re hesitant about it, if you hide it, you don’t really embrace the [inaudible 15:30] progress of what you’re trying to do. In the context of start-up communities we talk about it a lot. We encourage people to just try stuff. If it doesn’t work or if nobody shows up or if you do it and it’s not that interesting, stop. Didn’t work, try something else.

Don’t, ‘well, it didn’t quite work, but I think it’s really important to get it right so I’m going to fix it.’ It might be, but make sure you’re still committed to that idea. Because if you’re not and you’re just trying to struggle through it to try to get it to something successful, unless you believe it, don’t waste your time on it.

Marco: Another topic is obviously is investing, funding and the VC Board. For people who are not inside a start-up world, maybe traditional businesses used to go to the bank, ask for money, and they have to give back the money. For people who are not in a start-up business, just remember that the Venture Capitalist, an Angel Board is an explosive world.

I think Foundry Group just closed a $225 million funding. By the way, congrats, Brad. It’s very interesting. I think there’s also crowd funding, or I see Funders’ Club coming out from Y-Combinator. Different ways of getting funding for your business.

I’m trying to understand, Brad. Who do you invest on this moment? Who are you looking for? Who would you give your money too? What are your guidelines or tips to say, “OK, if I’m looking for funding, if I really need funding, probably these are the rules to follow” in your opinion?

Brad: Sure. Foundry Group, I had three partners. The four of us had a very specific lens that we looked through when we invest in companies. We are early stage software/Internet investors. We’re focused on companies within a set of themes of ours. If you go to foundrygroup.com/themes, you can see the themes.

If a company is outside of our themes, we don’t spend time with them. If it’s inside our themes, we go very, very deep with both the product and the people. Our determination is whether we want to be long term partners with people around the product or the technology that’s being created.

We also limit ourselves to only investing in companies in the U.S., and that’s a function of experience that I’ve had in the late 90s, where I made about half a dozen investments in Europe, and it was just really hard. The geography, time and space, culture, it was too difficult not being local.

I really felt like while we could invest all around the U.S., we were having a difficult time, or it would be difficult for us to be very good at investing in different geographies. The other, as I said, we’re early stage investors. If a company’s raised more than about $3 million, it’s probably too late for us, we’re not a good target to invest. We define this category of things pretty carefully.

What I encourage entrepreneurs to do is, don’t view venture capitalists as a single archetype. There’s lots of different types of venture capitalists, and what’s important to know is understand the strategy that the particular firm you’re approaching uses. If what you’re doing doesn’t match the strategy, don’t waste your time, because the chance of you getting financing from that group is extremely low.

Look for firms that do strategy and the type of things they invest in match what you’re doing. If you can get in their box of what they like to invest in, then you have an interesting conversation.

Marco: I also guess that it’s not only the money. If I was a U.S. company and I go attending TechStars, probably I’m looking for more than money, mentorship, networks and all this kind of stuff.

Brad: I separate clearly between Foundry Group and TechStars. I described what we look for at Foundry Group. At TechStars, we have 100 companies a year that go through different TechStars programs in the U.S. Boston, New York, Boulder, Seattle, and San Antonio. Then there’s a number of other accelerators like TechStars all around the world that are part of something called the Global Accelerator Network.

They’re not owned and operated by TechStars, but they’re affiliated and they share best practices. In the context of TechStars, those 100 or so companies a year that go through TechStars, we like to say that we’re focused on people, people, people, and then idea. The only reason we have idea in there is to emphasize how important the people are.

We’re interested in the idea. It’s not that any idea works, but we really care about the people in that context.

Marco: Everyone thinks if they have to start a business, I think the recurring problem that comes to me is “Oh, I have a great idea, but I don’t want to say my idea, I don’t want to tell my idea, otherwise someone will steal.” Everyone focuses on how important an idea. But today if you talk with investors or if you hear what the experts say, finally people are the most important asset and resource, I guess.

Brad: Absolutely.

Marco: Innovation. I heard you talking about Eric Von Hippel, your professor at MIT once. You say that he was teaching to consider that innovation is created by users. I fell in love with this mantra, and I thought wow, yeah, that’s exactly the way to follow.

Can you help us to understand better for a business that has to innovate to survive, because to survive in this era where every three milliseconds something changes, you have to keep on innovating. What’s your advice? What can you do? Because you have a business that has got some kind of vision and resources so you can change everything every two seconds. Otherwise it’s difficult to run your business. How can you adapt in this kind of situation?

Brad: Eric Von Hippel was about 30 or 40 years ahead of his time, because his notion and the statement that he made that innovation comes from users was an idea he had in the 1970s that has evolved over the last 40 years.

It’s a really powerful construct, and if you think about innovation today, the vast majority of innovation does come from users. Constructs like open source software, or constructs like “The Lean Start-up” that Eric Reese [SP] popularized, is really a very clear sense of a feedback loop that comes from putting your idea and your innovation out early, getting people involved in using it and giving you feedback, and then incorporating that feedback directly into the next iteration of the product. Those iteration loops are very tight, very short duration.

I think it’s incredibly important. The best way to develop software is not to sit in a cave for a year and build a bunch of stuff and then spring it on the world, but instead constantly be putting stuff out there and getting feedback from the people who’re using it every day, which will help you understand better what you should be spending your time on.

I think Eric Reese does an amazing job in the book ‘Building a Start-up’ for helping create a framework for how to do that. There’s a whole discipline that’s now been created from that. But I think that construct is really what Eric was talking about in the 1970s. It wasn’t that there’s these big R&D labs where people are sitting, working on figuring out what the users might need.

Now, it’s interesting, there’s the counter-example which is, yes, but isn’t Apple successful because of the brilliance of one man, in this case Steve Jobs, who figured out what everybody wanted and that’s exactly what they got? I think there’s a lot of subtlety to it, because in fact the brilliance of it was him both thinking ahead of where everybody was but also synthesizing as a user what was needed.

If you think about the notion of user driven innovation, an individual within a company can be the user. It’s not just the case that you have to have somebody outside that’s doing it. There’s a lot of subtlety to it, but it’s a very powerful construct when you step back and say, “OK. How can I get input into what I’m doing to make it more valuable? How can I observe what people are doing with my product so I understand what’s working and what’s not working?”

Marco: Right. Every Eric Reese, Steve Blank, there is a huge movement I would say now to divulge all these concepts very, very . . .

Brad: The linkage between Eric Reese and Steve Blank is that Eric was Steve’s student. Steve came out with this notion of customer-driven development, and Eric evolved it, put it to practice and evolved it and then codified it. The two of them continue to work going forward in terms of making this construct clearer and clearer, both in a formal sense as well as a practitioner sense.

Marco: Excellent. Promotion. Just five minutes more, Brad. I know that you’re super-busy and then I’ll let you go. Promotion. I was interested and intrigued in this topic, because I really don’t like traditional marketing, and I think a lot of businesses still, in 2012, they keep on doing traditional press release and marketing, the old fashioned.

I heard you talking about different kinds of marketing and delighting your users. I loved also this phrase. I would like you to give us also maybe some examples of companies. You invest in so many companies, so many start- ups, so maybe you could give us some example of marketing going the right way without sucking at it.

Brad: Yeah. I think a great example is also a company called GNIP. The CEO, Chris Moody, wrote a guest post on feld.com a while ago about thought leadership as the essential way to do marketing. I thought it was really right on the money, which is this notion, and it was very insightful, because Chris played it back to me as the way that I was essentially marketing a lot of the things that I care about.

He was very much right, which is that instead of creating a message and trying to shove that message down people’s throats, or creating some, thing, and then promoting, promoting, promoting, the better thing to do is just lead with progressive thinking. Lead with your ideas. Be articulate about what you’re doing. Stay on those. Actually do what the ideas are and link them together.

If you think about “Start-up Communities” and the “Boulder thesis”, this is cut out of my experience, but it’s very easily applicable. If you look at GNIP as a company, they’re very, very clear about what they’re doing as a business, and they’re constantly pushing the edge intellectually about what’s going on with real time social data and how companies can use and work with it.

They’re not promoting a bunch of stuff that doesn’t exist. In fact, they have a whole bunch of products that they’re not even promoting, because what they’re trying to do is make sure that the potential customer universe understands the importance of what they do. The importance, the relevance of different aspects of the kinds of things GNIP can enable.

They spend a lot of time on thought leadership. Big Boulder, which was a conference GNIP had, where basically they brought a bunch of their customers and a bunch of their partners to Boulder, was an unbelievable experience. Because instead of it being a trade show for GNIP’s products, it was a conversation over 48 hours that engaged about 200 people that were working hard at this problem.

I think that kind of activity is so much more valuable, and frankly as humans it’s so much more stimulating. There’s only so much buy this, do that, love this, care about that that any of us can take. When it’s a chance to actually engage in real thoughts it’s pretty fun.

Marco: It’s cool. I think organizing an event is a cool way of becoming authoritative in your topic. As you were speaking I was thinking about Le Web [SP], Lloyd Lemur [SP]. I know he sold Seismic but in [India] he organized the largest event in Europe. In this way he created a great network and he was building up from there.

Brad: That’s another great example. He provides incredible thought leadership, he stimulates the community to come together, and then he facilitates additional discussion that drives thought leadership. Rather than “Hi, look at me, I have a trade show for start-ups in Europe, come.” OK, whatever. Maybe that would be interesting, but it’s so much more interesting to be with a bunch of compelling people that you’re spending your time with.

Marco: Absolutely. Another example is Rand Fishkin. I think you invested in SEOmoz. Rand is a good friend of mine, he’s also been in Italy. They are really a strong community. I saw they’re organizing this Moz conference. Events can be good, and try to apply a different approach.

Yeah? Sorry.

Brad: I think that’s another great example. Rand and SEOmoz are intermingled. Rand spends an enormous amount of time running around helping people understand what it is that SEOmoz can do, but not to sell you the product, but to help you be much more effective at what you’re doing in the context of your own web marketing and web development.

Then of course SEOmoz is a tool that you can use for that. But the Moz community is incredible in terms of information and connectivity. That’s another really good example of an entrepreneur who’s just internalized.

Marco: Yes. Also this Whiteboard Friday where they explain every Friday, they teach, so they do a lot of education. Excellent.

How about you, Brad? You have a huge following on Twitter, for instance. You have to also promote your books and so on. You have so many things to do. I saw the list of social media that you are on, tons. How do you handle all this? What kind of advice can you give to people or businesses who have to handle their online identity today? Every two seconds a new social network appears.

Brad: I’ve been playing around with it since the mid-2000s, 2004, 2005, when I started blogging. I can’t remember the exact date, but it was in the end of 2004, beginning of 2005 timeframe.

I have always viewed this as just living what I’m using. I started doing it because I’m investing in these technologies, and I didn’t believe I could be a credible investor in these technologies unless I was actively using them. I tend to use them well ahead of when we invest in the companies, and I’m very immersed in the companies of which the technology we use.

For me it’s not a concentrated effort, like I need to go manage my social media presence. I just do what I do. I do it in a very open way. I integrated all of these activities into the work.

My job’s very simple. Our investors give us money, and our job is to give them back a lot more money.

Marco: That sounds very simple. Very simple.

Brad: It’s very simple, so as long as the things I’m doing are adding to that, the potential of us generating economic returns for our investors, it’s a good use of time. Part of that is understanding the technology, engaging in technology. Some of that is promoting the kinds of stuff we do and the companies we do.

I can do it in this way of thought leadership that provides authenticity, rather than say, “Hey, buy my thing.” I’m sure I default into ‘buy my thing’ sometimes. I’m not by any means perfect in how I do it, but I try to weave it all together so people see how it can actually be used in the context of your life and your arc as a business or an entrepreneur, rather than just pumping out messages all the time.

Marco: Right. Last question, Brad. Three tools that you would kindly recommend to everyone who has to do some kind of business online. You say, “Gosh, you need to use at least these three tools because they are fundamental. They are mandatory to succeed in your business.”

Brad: I would say, when I think about the tools, I would break it into categories. One category is I’ve worked extremely hard to tune how I interact with messaging, namely email. I’ve always wanted to be a rapid responder and a complete responder. I use Gmail. I use a product called Yesware [SP] that we are investors in, that’s a Gmail plugin.

Marco: Tell me again the name?

Brad: Yesware. Yesware.com is the site. It does a bunch of things, but really, between Gmail and Yesware my ability to automate and manage my email is pretty dramatic. I’d say that’s one category.

A company that I’m particularly excited about that’s starting to grow very quickly is a company called Mobile Day. I do a lot of conference calls, I travel constantly, so I use my cell phone almost all the time for this stuff. If you’ve ever done a conference call on a cell phone, you have to dial in a bunch of numbers and code until your head explodes. You’re driving down the road, and you’re trying to look up the number. It just sucks.

What Mobile Day has done is it’s an app that’s a one click into any conference call. You literally just use your existing conference call infrastructure, and Mobile Day, whether you’re the moderator or somebody else is the moderator, it doesn’t matter what the conference call service is. It replaces the calendar for all the conference call activity.

That’s one that’s become indispensable to me of late. It’s another company that we’re investors in.

Then I’d say I’ve always been very heavy around WordPress and WordPress related stuff for content creation. What I’ve come to is, I think there’s a couple of different approaches to it, but figuring out a single approach and then setting up your infrastructure so there’s no barrier to you creating content I think is very important.

In my case I’ve done it with WordPress. If you go to any of the sites you see a bunch of similar stuff, whether you’re on Ask the VC or feld.com or Foundry Group or Start-up Rev. Now with Start-up Revolution, which is a new site, startuprev.com, around the books, you’re starting to see some things. We have what we’re calling a “Hub”, which is from a company called Social Engine, that if it works we’ll roll it out to the other sites.

Some of it is experimenting constantly, but within a framework that’s not changing. In our case the framework that we chose was WordPress. Those would be the three approaches.

Marco: Right. I really have to let you go. When you were talking, I have so many things to ask you, Brad. I would stay here five hours, but OK, it will be next time. You’re also investing in 3D printing that I’m very curious about. I saw the price is about $2,000 or something like that, so it’s not for consumers, but it’s already a good price. Do you think 3D printing will be something that absolutely will spread? Of course you think, but why?

Brad: I think 3D printers are very analogous to laser printers in the 1980s. In 1984, if you bought a laser printer, you paid $2,000, $3,000 for a desktop laser printer. I actually had one in 1994, one of the early HP Laserjets.

If you look at the evolution of that, yes, now you can buy for $200.00 a printer that’s a hundred times better than that one that I could buy 20 years ago, or almost 30 years ago now, for $3,000. 3D printer’s on the same kind of curve, but it’s going to accelerate much faster.

When I got a laser printer, people said to me, “Why do you need a laser printer?” Four years later, end of the 1980s, once desktop publishing had started to become ubiquitous, everybody needed a laser printer. I think we’re in that same kind of zone with 3D printing, which is there will be a couple of software applications that become the “Oh, everybody has to have this now.” I think we’re very close to it, but we’re within that narrow time band.

Marco: I think that will happen. Right. Well, thank you so much.

Brad: Marco, my pleasure, this was fun. Holler anytime.

Marco: Absolutely. Check “Start-up Communities” and “Start-up Life” in January 2013, I think it’s coming out, the book.

Brad: “Start-up Life” will be out in January, yes.

Marco: All right. Thank you so much.

Brad: Thanks.

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.