Rand Fishkin - Growing An Audience Without Facebook Or Google

With SparkToro, what we're trying to do is show people where their audiences pay attention so that they can go reach them directly through those sources. So you go to SparkToro and you're like, okay, I want to reach landscape designers in California. What podcasts do they Listen to? What YouTube channels are they subscribing to? What websites do they visit? Who do they follow on social accounts so that you can go do whatever kind of advertising you want, right? It could be through the Google Ad Display network, it could be through Facebook, it could be through Instagram, could be direct one on one. Like, you find this great podcast, you reach out to the host, you sponsor it. I love that kind of marketing. I love that kind of advertising. And I'm hopeful that over time, SparkToro can help form more of that knowledge for people and fill that gap of, hey, if I'm willing to do the work and, like, actually go out and find it, instead of throwing money at these platforms, can I get a better roi?

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and float Shark with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf. Joe Fear.

Hey, hey, hey. It's Joe.

All right, so in this episode, we're going to be hanging out with a new friend of ours, and his name is Rand Fishkin. He is an absolute badass, and especially in the data space, and you'll hear why. So in a. In a previous lifetime for Rand, he actually was the CEO and the co founder of SEOmoz, or now it's referred to as Moz. It's huge in the SEO space and all the tools and resource community. He was the one that got that thing going. He's now left that and he started a new venture and it's called SparkToro.

Now.

This thing is rad. It's quickly becoming one of our favorite pieces of software to do a lot of research. And I'm talking research on which podcast to go on, what topics resonate with specific audiences, what content to create around a specific audience. It's super cool. You can literally plug in your URL or your social media handle or someone else's right there in a SparkToro, and it'll kick out all this research using data from a variety of platforms. So it'll tell you exactly who are the people that are listening to your podcast or you're checking out your website, or maybe it's a competitor website or a podcast you want to go on, who's listening to their show. It gives you a lot of intel, literally at a click of a button. And what's really cool. And you'll hear us talk a lot about Sparktura here in the episode. So I'm going to leave it at this is there is a free option if you want to give it a shot. I believe it's 10 uses a month for free. So it's 10 searches per month and it resets at the top of the month. You can go give it a spin over@sparktoro.com that's s p a r k t o r o dot com.

Go check it out. I mean, this.

You'll hear a lot of implications and reasons why you want to do it in this episode. But I just wanted to let you know there' free option. Of course you can pay for more searches, but check it out for free. It's definitely worth it. And I think you'll. You'll fall in love with all that data that you have access to really easily and really quickly. And also in this episode, I think you're really going to get the fact that there's something interesting happening in Google and Facebook on their platforms. And if you're running ads specifically, you're probably noticing higher costs and maybe not as good conversions and, you know, less options, less things to actually do so you can control your ads.

Well, we break a lot of that.

Down from Rand and his perspective. You know, he writes these amazing pieces. We actually link a lot of that stuff into the show notes. So definitely check those out. But you'll just see why it's important to really diversify from just Facebook and Google. If you're relying on those. I would definitely, you know, heed a warning and listen to this episode. Listen to Rand. I mean, the guy's a veteran in this space, so he's seeing it from a whole new perspective. So that's what. That's really what he gives us here. And that's why you hear me in the episode later kind of blank out a couple times, because that was my brain exploding and during all these light bulb moments and I couldn't really get my words out. You'll hear more in the banter section at the very end of this episode. Matt and I are going to riff for probably another while and we talk about the implications of what we just learned and how we're going to apply it and really what to look out for.

If you're.

If you're in on this episode and you're already interested, make sure to stay till the very end of this one where we break things down even further from our perspective. And lastly, make sure. To get the action guides of this episode, we take notes on every single podcast episode we make. So they are free for you right now. If you go to flowchart group.com, that's flowchart group.com they are free for two weeks of this episode going live. So if you're a little past that, you're not out of luck. There is a way you can get into the vault of all the different pass notes. It's super cheap, it's only 15 bucks a month, but either way, go to flowchart group.com and if you're. If you're looking for this episode within two weeks, it's there for free. If it's a little after, you'll still get the opportunity to get the notes. But make sure you go to flowchart group.com, enter your email address, because what it is, it's taking you to our Facebook group, our community there where we're hanging out. Other folks in our and the listeners and also some guests are hanging out inside of there. But in addition, if you plug in your email address, we'll make sure you get the action guides as well. Cool, cool, cool. So that's everything I got here. Let's go head over to the interview and chat with Mr. Rand Fishkin.

Hey, Rand. All right, we are live. How you doing? Good.

Good to be here. Joe and Matt, thanks for having me.

Yeah, man. I love the look of your place here too. It feels like you're in a cabin in the woods somewhere.

You are. I'm kind of in a cabin. Not in the woods, but in, you know, out back of my office in Seattle. This little.

I dig it. Oh, that's cool.

Little shed, which I have to use a space heater to stay warm in the winter.

But funny, I'm about to convert a shed in my backyard for an office too. This whole COVID lockdown thing, it's really tough to work with screaming kids and whatnot.

Many of us can relate.

It's great to have the separation between the house and the shed. My wife.

Is a writer. She works from home. So to have our own workspaces, just ideal.

Yeah, man. So little tangent there right in the beginning, but I love it. So you got introduced to us by Lisa Byer. I gotta give a shout out because she's just. She's amazing. So you did an amazing episode over there. And we probably will touch on some pretty similar stuff because I think it's super important and how to. There's so many people that seem reliant on you know, the big platforms out there, so the Facebooks, Google's probably those two specifically. So I think it'd be a fascinating conversation to chat about what the issues are around those two from your perspective, but also how to leverage them and some other cool things. I know you have an amazing tool, SparkToro, that, that taps into those but also other sites. So I think, yeah, it just, let's, let's go there. I don't know how to start specifically other than a little backstory on. Yeah, because you're deep in content marketing and SEO, so love to hear that whole problem.

No, no, happy to fill in. Sort of my perspective on the like, I think duopoly advertising problem and then sort of online advertising marketing space in general. Right. So my perspective, yeah, I started a company called Moz, which a lot of folks in the SEO and web marketing space will be familiar with. Was the CEO of that company for a long time, stepped down and left a couple years ago to start this new one, SparkToro, which is market research, audience intelligence space.

One of the big concerns that I was having in the SEO world was basically that Google has been doing this and in the social media world, Facebook's been doing it too. Both companies have felt like they're hitting a growth plateau in terms of new users they can get on the platform for like, you know, for the first, whatever, 15 years of the Internet, they could essentially grow by just getting more users, but now they're so big and powerful that each incremental new user is essentially like someone that they have to get online from. You know, generally speaking, more rural, poorer parts of the world. There's just not a lot of people left. You know, all the billions of people outside of China are using.

Google and Facebook already. Right. And so now their incentive for growth is essentially to enter new markets and fields and to prevent what was happening, which was.

People getting organic content on Facebook, clicking on organic links in Google. Now the incentive is Google kind of going, hey, what if instead of letting people click on TripAdvisor and Kayak and Orbitz and Skyscanner, we made our own Google flights and put that at the top of the results. And what if we did that in health and what if we did that in finance and what if we did that in mortgages and what if we do it in weather and what if we do it in traffic and travel and maps? And.

Nowadays you see this big problem, and I've written about it on sparktor a little bit, this sort of zero click search problem where you can Produce a whole bunch of content, rank for it. And Google doesn't send you any traffic because it's sort of a world where they want to promote the ads and Google properties and very little else. Now, granted, there's still a ton of traffic to be had in SEO. I don't mean to suggest that it's completely gone. It's not. It's just that this is the trend, Right. The trend is going the opposite way that it went the last, you know, the prior 15 years. Facebook, same story, right? Like, we all, in the mid-2000s were like, yeah, like us on Facebook. And then we'll build up this big brain. I'm sure you all, like, went to the restaurants. I've been to tons of restaurants in San Diego. And like, the menu still says like us on Facebook.

What's that gonna do for you these days?

Exactly. What is that gonna do for you, Joe? Like, you go and like, whatever it is, you know, what's that fried chicken place in Little Italy? That's so good.

Oh, the crack shack.

Crack shack. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

People like their Facebook page. And the average Facebook page organic reach is currently 0.09%.

Very, very. Yeah, it's really going to help you out there.

So great. One in 10,000 people who likes their Facebook page is going to see their update. What is what. And this is like, 10 years ago, we were complaining when it was falling under 10 and 11%.

Like, I have to pay them.

Now I have to pay for ads.

A thousand times worse. And we're kind of like, well, what are you going to. Facebook needs their money.

Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, you're right. It's a whole different game being played right now because, yeah, there's not really many people left on the planet to get on this platform. Interesting.

Basically, in rich countries and even sort of moderately wealthy countries, Google and Facebook have 90% plus penetration. Right. Like, they're just so used that those that they have to find different revenue streams. And unfortunately, they've chosen to use their monopoly power in one sector to unfairly compete in a bunch of others. And then the frustrating side is ad world too, right? So Google, one of the biggest frustrations that happened recently was back in September, right, in Google, paid search accounts. For years, Google has pulled organic keyword data. They'll just say, not provided. When they send you a visitor from a store search, they'll say, not keyword, not provided. And they claim it's for privacy reasons, but it's obviously not. Because if you pay them with Google Ads, they'll send you, they'll tell you what the keyword is. So there's that disgusting hypocrisy, but it's been around so long like marketers have kind of forgotten to complain about it. The new disgusting hypocrisy is Google in September pulled about 27% of all the keyword data that sends you ad traffic as well. And so now they're hiding which terms and phrases actually sent you traffic. And unfortunately it's the ones in the, in a lot of the ones in the long tail, which means that you can't add those keywords, see those keywords, and then add them to your Google account as negative keyword matches so that your ads don't get shown for those terms and phrases. And what does this mean? This means that everybody is bidding on more keywords than they really want to. They're showing up for irrelevant terms and phrases that, you know, don't send them high conversion converting traffic. So they're paying Google this sort of extra tax. They're bidding up the price of the Google Ad ecosystem and their quality scores are suffering because, you know, they're showing for irrelevant stuff and they're not getting the high click through rates, they're not getting conversion rates.

That is a crap situation.

Right?

Just terrible to be in Facebook, same story. You know, Facebook essentially used the Cambridge Analytica scandal as like a way to pull back on all this data that they would show you in your Google, in your, in your Facebook ad account and when you're buying Facebook ads and like which pages you can bid against and which hashtags and terms and phrases and topics, a lot of that's hidden. If you know what to search for or what to type in, you can still find those, you know, topics to advertise against or pages to advertise against. But how do you know which ones to do? And so of course Facebook gets the same phenomenon where a bunch of people just bid on the same default topics and pages that Facebook's put in there and interests.

So everybody's ad prices are driven up, ROI is going down, value is going down. But Facebook and Google can kind of play the. Oh yeah, where are you going to go exactly? Well, what are you going to do about it?

Yeah, he's got to keep paying me, pay me more.

What, you're going to go advertise on Snapchat and Bing.

It's true. That's an interesting, I mean it's, it's. Yeah, they have this walled garden for a reason, right? I mean they literally control the rules.

And at the same time, Facebook is out there saying that Apple is trying to hurt small businesses.

I mean, look, I'm no Apple fanboy, but my God, the just the craven hypocrisy and obvious.

Just sludge and lies in that whole like, oh, let's buy a New York Times ad.

I think the backlash was pretty fast and direct, which I'm glad to see. But so part of it is, hey, let's make people aware of this problem. Let's have these conversations as marketers. Let's make sure that we're doing as much ad auditing as we possibly can and data collection and, and using as much information to make our accounts as smart as they can possibly be. And there's a lot of professionals who specialize in that. That's great. That's not actually my world, even though I obviously endorse that and think that's a really good idea. With SparkToro, what we're trying to do is.

Show people where their audiences pay attention so that they can go reach them directly through those sources. So you go to SparkToro and you're like, okay, I want to reach whatever landscape designers in California, what podcasts do they listen to, what YouTube channels are they subscribing to, what websites do they visit, who do they follow on social accounts so that you can go do whatever kind of advertising you want. Right? It could be through the Google Ad Display network, it could be through Facebook, it could be through Instagram, could be direct one on one. Like, you find this great podcast, you reach out to the host, you sponsor it, or you get an introduction to the podcast host from Lisa Byer, and she's like, hey, you should have so and so on your show. Awesome. I love that kind of marketing. I love that kind of advertising. And I'm hopeful that over time, SparkToro can help form more of that knowledge for people and fill that gap of, hey, if I'm willing to do the work and actually go out and find it instead of throwing money at these platforms, can I get a better ROI through that sort of direct relationship? Affiliate world is obviously super into this. They're already savvily using things like similar web or.

Buzzsumo or something like that to find like, oh, these are the websites and places that attract the right audience. Can I get an affiliate relationship going with them?

That kind of thing? No, I think it's absolutely fascinating and I tested it out quite a bit. SparkToro with the podcast stuff with a keyword and I'm just Kind of curious what kind of podcast, because that's one of the most common questions we get is like, how do you know which shows to go on and should I guess? And I'm like, well, this is a pretty dang good solution to shortcut all of that. And you can get many options, not just podcasts. I think it's fascinating because you're basically aggregating all the data from this web of content or all these different platforms out there that are kind of mining all that data, it seems like. And you're just making it very simple to leverage various platforms, maybe even those platforms even further in a unique way. But it takes kind of like, it's almost like a creative way of thinking a little bit. It's almost like a paradigm. Totally.

Right. Like a lot of people who come to SparkToro, I think, have this sort of classic impression of how a keyword tool is going to work, right? And they think of it like SEO. So instead of my audience describes themselves as landscape designers, they're like, okay, I want to find people or landscape architecture. I'm looking for people who want landscaping. And it's like, no, no, no.

That'S not like the way to think about the audience. Research inside SparkToro. Like, you need to describe the people that you're going after or give some hashtag that they use or some social account that they follow, or some word or phrase that they talk about online on their public social profiles. And then, yeah, the way that we collect data is.

Especially it's informed by how we saw some really smart agencies and in house firms do it, which was essentially they'd take a list of their customers. So they'd say like, oh yeah, we've got like whatever, 10,000 of our customers who've bought from us, we have their email addresses.

We can take those email addresses and upload them to Clearbit or full contact, an API like that, and get back their Twitter accounts and their LinkedIn pages and their Facebook pages. And then if those social accounts are public, we can go crawl them and see what words and phrases these people use to describe themselves, where do they say they're located and what hashtags are they using, who are they following, and. And all that kind of stuff, right? And then they use that data to inform their marketing. They'd be like, okay, of our 10,000 customers who bought from us in the last year, you know, we found 3700 public social profile matches. And here's what those people pay attention to. Boom, look at that. 19% of them. Listen to this podcast or whatever that like, let's go advertise there.

Brilliant.

So smart. And also, oh my God, they spent like 50 grand and three engineers for six months to like build that, all that infrastructure out. So Casey, my co founder and I saw that and we're like, yeah, everybody.

Yeah, thank you for building that. Because it's. Yeah. I mean, just sponsorships like you said. I love the whole idea of going direct with someone and you know, this is the affiliate marketer in us. In us, the collaborators that, you know, we're always trying to figure out how can we collaborate with. Well, this is a fast track way to listen to your audience in some form, or maybe it's not your audience and you're breaking into a new niche. Well, cool. Look at what they're talking about, the hashtags they're using and all that. And now you have this kind of macro and maybe micro picture of that whole industry before even getting into it, but now you can just jump right into it with a lot of data. Yeah.

I mean, on the affiliate side, I.

Think.

A big part of the challenge. I just got a pitch for a partnership today, right? So someone reached out and they were like, hey, we have this network of websites that we work with and we do a revenue share and would Spark Toro wanna be a part of this. Right? And I'm like, yeah, that's cool. That's a, you know, it's an interesting idea. But I'm looking at the website, you know, network of websites that they've got and I'm like, I don't know if these are attracting like my audience. So the cool part was I, you know, took one of the sites, plugged it into SparkToro and was like, okay, tell me about the people who visit and share and link to and follow this website and their social account. And I was like, this is not, these are not our customers. Right. So I don't think this is going to be a good, like relationship. It's going to be very low conversion rate or very low click through rate even. So doesn't make sense. But maybe there's other, you know, sites in the network where I'd go, oh yeah, I really want to be on that one and we make something happen. But that affinity between audience captured and people you want to reach seems like a really constant challenge in any type of affiliate world. Right. Because otherwise you don't want it to be a low affinity relationship or it's like wasted space.

Well, yeah. And we recently chatted with Pat Flynn and he has this whole book about super fans called Superfans. So it's. If you have these fans, I mean, this tool seems like Spark Tour seems like it allows you to shortcut your way and start talking at least to those types of people. So you can kind of not have to talk to the masses. You're getting a lot more honed in on the specific audience that's probably going to convert a little better with a lot more ease and buy your stuff on the back end. Yeah, I do.

I'm curious just for my own sake, Insanity. Have you folks been discussing a lot about the death of third party cookies? Like, we haven't yet.

Somebody actually brought that to my attention on Facebook and said you should bring on an expert on the cookies and how that all works and talk to them about it. And so we've been putting feelers out there to try to find who that expert would be, but we haven't. Is that something that you've been talking a lot about that maybe we can chat about with you a little bit?

I mean, a little bit. I am not. I'm not a super expert on this, but I think, I think her name is. Is it Shoshana? She. Yeah, Shoshana Wodinski. So she writes for Wired and a few other publications. Oh, Gizmodo here. I can chat you her here. This is actually awesome, awesome.

Thank you.

So she basically. I don't know if you saw this weird thing over the holidays. Did you see that ad with the assless.

Pajamas?

I've heard about it. I didn't get to see the.

I never saw that.

Yeah, it's like, you know, they have like the butt flap on like the classic log cabin.

Whatever.

Yeah, yeah, right. Like I don't know, like a mountain man and a Bugs Bunny cartoon from the 50s. Except it's on, you know, like a very. Whatever attractive person this time. And so this ad was really interesting cause it like appeared on a few websites, including a very popular viral L article in December. And then it was like following people around the Internet just like crazy over the holidays. And so what Shoshana, I think had intuited from her research was that this butt flat pajama ad was not really trying to get you to buy the pajamas. That was not the goal. The goal was to collect data on as many devices as as it possibly could. And it was via these.

Very weird, suspicious looking, mostly Chinese and Taiwanese connected networks, ad networks that.

Are essentially doing some form of browser fingerprinting. They're trying to identify your device with all of its different qualities and then store that data and every website that you visited and pages that you visit and that kind of thing so that it can tie your device to your activity with the goal of, in the future selling that data to advertisers or maybe geopolitical players. Unclear.

Who knows? Yeah. What motivation?

Very, very mysterious and weird. Interesting but fascinating. Totally fascinating. And then there's also this like, well, is that the future of how advertising gets done?

Right? Like, is it based on behavior that's fingerprinted by networks that operate outside of like California privacy laws and outside of GDPR and all this kind of stuff? And then like, okay, for those of us who are in like content world or affiliate world, like, what does this mean? Do we have to like go through these really sketchy, potentially politically affiliated.

I don't know, you don't want to get caught up in this whole thing of privacy and that. Yeah. And that just sounds like it's going to be messy and bad. But who knows? I mean, yeah, it's a whole, and maybe it's a whole paradigm different paradigm way of thinking that we have to approach how to attract relevant people to the art. I don't know. It's a very good question.

I mean, one of those like.

The unintended consequences of good intentions. Good intention. Firefox is like, hey, third party cookies. There's a lot of privacy issues with those. Let's block those. Not realizing, like, wait a minute, what will that lead to? How will that impact ad world and privacy world and now Safari? So Apple of course is going to do this as well. And that was Facebook's big complaint with them was that I think basically you pull up the Facebook.

App on your Apple device and you would have to like, it would automatically opt you out of Facebook's data collection of those third party cookies and you would have to opt in. And so Facebook was pissed about this and Apple was like, no, we're not going to budge, yada yada.

So it's definitely, I mean I would think the opt in action is probably going to be a big component of a lot of whatever the fingerprinting or tracking is going to look like in the future. Maybe. But yeah, maybe there's a whole thinking of there. It's like, okay, how do we get someone to agree to that? Then.

Someone'S going to crack the code. But I think we have to talk to your friend from a marketing standpoint.

So I don't know Shoshana personally, but I am friends friendly with Nandini Jami, who's one of the co founders of Sleeping Giants. And now check my ads. And she and Shoshana are connected, so I'd be happy to reach out, make a connection. I would love to listen to that podcast myself. I want to know what the heck is going on. I read her articles and was still like, what?

Why? How?

Who? For what reason?

All the questions are happening. We'll start with our article. But yeah, if you can make that happen. Thank you. Yeah, we'll make an amazing, amazing episode for all of us to indulge in.

I mean, all of this, to me, kind of sounds like a good strategy would be to focus on email list building. Right? Because that's what you have control of. And stop thinking of it in terms of trying to pixel as many people as possible, because that's just becoming less valuable.

Yeah, it's becoming less valuable. It's becoming more risk.

Exposure, both on legal side and privacy and scandal side.

I am 100% with you, Matt. I cannot understand the years that we've spent getting people to be like.

Subscribe to my Twitter, subscribe to my Facebook, subscribe to my LinkedIn, subscribe to my TikTok, subscribe to my YouTube. I understand that those are places where you can earn attention, but to my mind, that's the secondary goal. And the primary goal is get people to your website and your email list, right? Because that's the one channel you always get to own and control. And email open rates, you know, what are we, 0.09%, like, Facebook page exposure? Email open rates are still like 21% on average, right?

Yeah.

Hasn't changed in two decades.

And it can only get better through segmentation and giving more of what the people want. So it's like. And that's kind of the next evolution. It's kind of this whole thing of. I used to be partners with a guy named Amish Shah years and years ago, but he was. He was big in the platforms. Like, he knew how to leverage a platform and take it into a space. Like, basically the email list, something you can control. That was just kind of baked in my mind is always like, okay, there's a bunch of platforms out there. And like you said, Rand, like, yes, you can have a following on there. And that's great. You know, that's kind of where it maybe starts. But don't leave them there. Like, figure out how to pull them off somehow and take control of the folks that are actually attaching to you. That's. That's same with the podcast here. First call to Action.

Facebook group. But also you're gonna get added to the email list if you choose email. Yeah, I mean, you gotta. So, so big, gotta have control.

So what other I would honestly like, you know, it's not that Facebook doesn't get engagement. It absolutely does. Right. And Facebook groups can get a lot of engagement, a lot of discussion. You know, you're sort of in the stream with everyone else. But if it were me, I'd take. If it was the Choice between like 100 new Facebook likes and one email address. I'll take that one email.

Oh, for sure. Go tell that to the crack shack in San Diego.

Yeah, they want the Facebook, like, I'll.

Send them this video.

I'm just saying, like, you get the chicken sandwich in your email and yeah, maybe, you know, whatever, you're not going to click on it. Maybe you're not going to click, but I guarantee you will see it versus.

Oh yeah, that showing up in someone's stream. It's just not going to happen. I think Instagram is the. So this is data from rival iq, which does a really nice, like, you know, their software that operates across a bunch of social platforms on behalf of brands. Right. So they have all this data about brands, web pages or social pages and how they perform. And every year they release a report that's like, here's the average engagement that like social brands, brands got on social. And I think last year it was the 0.09% for Facebook. I want to say it was 0.05% for Twitter. So really, really low for.

Public company Twitter pages, Twitter accounts. And these are averages or median. So some people are doing really well with Twitter or Facebook or whatever. But Instagram was the highest average performing at 2.2%.

It's not that. That's not no reach. That is something I understand why small businesses, especially ones that are good at visuals, are thinking Instagram. I just say anytime you are investing in Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, Medium, Quora, I don't care what it is. Why not also put that on your own website? Why not also make sure that like the call to action is back to your site and onto your email list, you've really got nothing to lose. Right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, so the next thing I want to talk about is sort of a little bit of a pivot from what we're talking about, but coming back around to like SparkToro. So you can go on SparkToro and you can essentially upload an email list and it'll sort of tell you the affinities of the people on your list you could find. Okay.

This audience listens to these podcasts, these blog posts, these magazines, that sort of thing. Once you grab that data, do you have any best practices for actually getting in touch with the people who run the podcast, the blog, the magazine? Like, what sort of advice would you give people after they get this data?

Yeah, yeah, great question, great question. So first off, just one quick thing. You can upload a custom audience to SparkToro, but not email addresses.

Gotcha.

Okay.

It's gotta be the social accounts. So again, we recommend people use Clearbit or full Contact. They've jumped through all the, like, California privacy laws around connecting those up. We have not done that.

Smart.

We don't deal with the email address, you know, privacy data, all that kind of stuff.

Gotcha.

Thanks for clarifying.

We do support. So if you, you know, if you send a list of email addresses through Clearbit, through full contact, get the social URLs and upload that to us, we will do that. Custom analysis or the super simple way to do this in SparkToro is just to take your brand's social handle and analyze.

That makes sense.

Oftentimes this is not to dissuade anyone from buying the more expensive package where you can do the custom upload thing, but you can a lot of times just run whatever it is rackshack into SparkToro as like my audience follows the social account Rackshack. And then that will be really, really similar to uploading a thousand social URLs from your email list.

Gotcha.

Both are possible when you do that and you sort of get these analyses or when you analyze an audience and you're like, aha, those are the podcasts I want to reach out to. Those are YouTube channels I want to talk to. That's the publication I want to reach. I want to sponsor that website. I want to pitch a guest editorial for this content site, et cetera, et cetera. I do have a couple pieces of advice there. So one is.

That cold outreach is really difficult to get answers. I mean, you guys know this, right? Like you reach out to hello people@wired.com I would like to write article about SEO affiliate marketing for you.

Deal8.

Report, spam, delete, block address.

I mean, we see it on the flip side just having this podcast with people reaching out to be on the show too. So we have a whole list of what not to do with the outreach we're trying to get on our show.

Exactly. Perfect. So for those pitches, my two bits of advice are one.

Don'T cold outreach without first engaging on social media.

For example, you have a few conversations on Instagram and Twitter and LinkedIn, and you promote that person, that journalist's work from Wired. And then you send them an email and it's like, hey, it was fun chatting about that piece you wrote last week or a couple weeks ago. And I'm Rand. I'm Randfish on Twitter. You probably saw me in your feed.

You will almost always get a response. I'm not saying it'll always be positive. I'm not saying you're always going to. But you'll break through because you've formed that connection somewhere else first. So that is piece of advice one. Piece of advice two, get an intro. Right. We were talking about Lisa introducing us. There is no better way to make sure that you get a response and a connection than an intro, I would say.

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's whatever. If cold outreach works 1 out of 100 times, a social connection first maybe works 10 out of 100 times. And a warm intro from someone who's known to both parties is like 70 out of 100.

Yeah, at least. And that's from our experience, too. Yeah.

Yeah. Just huge.

Those are good tips.

And I'm kind of curious with all the data, too, that you have at SparkToro. I'm sure there's probably some ways to build content on the back of that. Are there any suggestions on how that would look like? Maybe your own content and also some guest content as well.

One of the really nice things that you can do, and some of the folks.

Some of the folks who actually invite people to try and participate in their podcast. So we have a few podcasters who use SparkToro to find their guests because essentially their goal is, I want to reach this audience with my podcast or my video series, my content series. Let me invite on the people who already reach that group because they will bring that audience with them. And so one of the ways that I'm trying to remember was it lemon pie.

One of those guys was using Spartoro. And essentially the pitch was, hey, we are already followed by 18% of your audience. Right. So there's a lot of affinity that already exists here. Let's do something together.

I think that's actually a great pitch, right? To say, hey, Smashing magazine. I saw that. Whatever. 10% of the people who follow you on social have the title.

Creative director. I'm a creative director at this company. That's the audience that I speak to. And write for. I think I could do a really good guest piece for you.

Yeah, right.

And now it's sort of like, oh, okay, I see you're bringing data to this conversation about why we have audience affinity with the topic you're bringing. To me, it's an easier sell.

I'll just say that I've never seen a single pitch to us with data like that in there. And if it were, I would be very intrigued. I'd be like, a, where'd you get this data? I want to learn more. And B, yeah, why not? You've done your homework somehow at least.

I mean, I think this is, you know, the way to stand out from the crowd is to work harder and smarter than them. And the crowd right now, for better or worse, is not doing this stuff.

It's a lot of push button happening, especially on the pitch side of things, too. We won't name any software names that allow this to be very easy, but there's a lot of them, unfortunately for a lot of people.

I'm just thinking the content in general should be a lot. I mean, in. In what I was thinking, actually, when you said the data point, that's perfect way to probably get sponsors and pitch, you know, start putting out their pitches to folks to get a sponsorship. At least on your podcast you could probably. I don't know, I'm just kind of thinking of all that data. I don't have a perfect actually statement right now because I'm like, when I hear all of this, my brain goes wild when I'm like, okay, Rand, you just gave us a freaking bucket of information and data. It's like, how can we creatively use this thing now? That's where my brain goes, like, it lights up. And probably tonight I'll have like 50 questions for you. But, Matt, I'm going to defer to you on.

I look forward to the Friday night deluge.

No, I won't hurt you with that, but I'll give it to Matt.

It's going to be a fascinating night. Anyway, I don't know if you have seen, like, the Internet is melting down right now because.

No, I've not.

Facebook and Twitter both announced they're going to permanently and Trump.

Oh, I saw that. Yeah, I saw that.

Like, I don't know, maybe five minutes after we started our conversations.

Oh, really?

I was like, why? What's going on? Like, every, you know, all my tabs.

Are like, oh, geez.

Oh, yeah, fascinating.

We're in our safe place here for now.

I mean, as long as I'M not on a flight back from Washington D.C. today. I'm happy.

It's true.

Well, how else?

I'm getting curious on the advertising side because I know we. We touched on. You wrote this article. I mean, at the time of this episode, what, a couple days ago? A few days ago. So, you know, there's Facebook and Google Ads. I mean, we use both of them. You're in there a lot more than I do. So you see the data are there. What are your thoughts around that and how these are changing with everything you describe with Facebook and Google and you know how they're kind of raising rates on every. Like, are there certain ways to advertise on there that you would suggest or.

Yeah, I mean, look, I think plenty of people can earn decent ROI on those platforms. I don't mean to suggest that that's not possible, but.

I think the vast majority of advertisers are unsophisticated, right? Small and medium businesses. Some agencies who are incented because they get a percent of ad spend, some folks who are either some combination of new to the platform or just.

Sort.

Of follow Google and Facebook's suggested path. I mean, Matt, I'm sure you've seen this. I hadn't been in Facebook ads for a little while. I went back in there maybe a couple months ago and was like, oh, what is this? The recommendation for what you should do is so broad and untargeted and.

Just really struck me as very abusive of a.

Of an advertiser who might not have a lot of money and needs to earn roi. And like, if you don't know what you're doing and how things sort of used to operate and how they should. How you can still like, tweak the system if you know enough to get it to work for you. I feel really bad for those folks, right? And they're the ones who need the, you know, who need it the worst. Like the big companies, the big agencies, they're going to be fine. They've got the dollars to blow anyway. So that bothers me a lot. And then I think. I'm not sure exactly what to call this problem. I've heard some people describe it as the ad slurry, which is essentially like you take. So like a meat slurry, right, Would be, oh, there's a bunch of good parts of the cow and then a bunch of like, older cow parts and, you know, worse cow parts. And we're just, you know, what, it's ground beef. That's what it is.

We made it a Product.

Yeah, we turned it into a product. And look, I mean, thankfully, you know, USDA agricultural requirements have meant that ground beef, with the exception of Taco Bell. Pretty good, right? Pretty good. Baseline, like, decent. You're gonna survive. But in the ad slurry world.

It'S very, very odd, right, Because Google will take. YouTube advertising is a great example of this, right? So you advertise on YouTube and you basically have to opt out of everything that you don't want rather than opting in to things that you do want. And so Google can.

Send your YouTube ads to misinformation and disinformation and conspiracy theory rabbit holes and like flat Earther madness and, you know, whatever. Like people who are against al dente pasta. Who. You know that.

Well, you're a pasta guy, so. Yeah, I know, I know.

Unacceptable. Like, what are we talking? You're advertising on a channel that's recommending that you make spongy pasta. Like, get out of here.

Give me that little, little texture there. Come on, I need some crunch.

Yeah, exactly, right. Italiano.

It is very frustrating for an advertiser to be facing that sort of. Like, my ads go in plenty of good places, some pretty bad places and some really terrible places that I don't want them to be at all. And I don't have fine tuned controls. In fact, I don't even see the bad places that my ad is in until they've been there and then I can go, you know, opt out of them. Unless I'm savvy enough to like, work with an auditing firm who's assembled a list of bad places already for me, you know, from all their other campaigns and like, put it all together.

Money.

That's the slurry. Yeah, right, that's. It's the slurry. They're throwing good and bad together. You're getting mystery meat in terms of where your advertising's happening. You know, your ad shows up in the Google Display Network, on the Washington Post and the New York Times and Wired.com, great, great, great, great, great. And then it shows up on like, let's go storm the Capitol on Tuesday. Oh, gosh, I don't.

What if my target audience is there?

Yeah, that's funny.

Someone said on the day as we're recording this week, right, there was like the, you know, all these, all these websites and places where folks were talking about like, hey, we're gonna get in our gear and go storm the Capitol. And some wise folks on Twitter were pointing out that like, oh, calm and BMW and Airbnb were sponsoring those posts, those videos, those channels, those websites unknowingly.

Know they were right.

It's not like it's sort of their fault for not auditing their ads. But also, is Google showing them that data proactively? Hell no. Right?

And think about, like, for a small business owner who I know Facebook right now, or at least at the beginning of COVID they were like going hard on sign up for facebook or business.facebook.com and I think you and I saw it were like, that's not good.

They're fishing in that bar.

They're trying to grow that pond out stock full of fish. So they can do exactly what they're saying right now because they have control. And these businesses, like, I don't know, crack shack, we'll just use them as an example. I hope they, they have a solid agency or someone to help them out. But like, most of them don't. They don't know the slurry and what they're getting into.

Yeah, I mean, it's not as bad on Facebook, but Facebook, they've got the, you know, there's like a checkbox where it's automatically going to all placements. Right. And you could go in and really you should go in there and select the placements you want it on. But by default, somebody who's just setting up an ad, they're going to get their ad just put everywhere. Facebook will allow it.

Right.

And a lot of times that might be like in the middle of somebody's text message conversation on Facebook or smack dab in the middle of a longer video that they're trying to watch. And those videos don't really get people to take action because they're not in a place where people are going to want to take action from them. So you really have to go in and sort of select your placements. But if you're just getting in there for the first time, setting up your first ad, Facebook is not going to do very right by you.

Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I think there's, if I saw correctly, I can't remember if it was an email or just a notification in the ad center on Facebook, but they notify you if you've previously checked that box when they update because they want you to check the just let us show you everywhere. Right. And so they keep nudging Google. Same thing on both display and YouTube. They keep nudging the. Hey, you should let us programmatically control it because your ads might not be being seen by as many people as they could be.

So that slurry problem is really messy to be fair. Facebook and Google, not great about this at all. Those third parties that make up the other 30ish, 35% of the display ad market are even worse. They are so much worse.

In terms of what platforms are we talking? Like the outbrains of the world and Outbrain and Taboola.

Not great by any means. There's a whole bunch of third parties. Was one of them.

God Okada or. No, no, no, sorry. What is this? Citrus. The Citrus ads platform. I saw some people like talking about what was showing up in there and I was like, oh man, that sounds real weird. And they're in like they're on. They're mostly focused on like the, the.

Whatchamacallit grocery world. Very strange. Right, which one? Call it. There's a few that are quite good because they're just incredibly direct.

Right.

So there's a few ad exchanges. I think Buy Sell Ads is one.

Yes. Yeah, they've been around for a while I think.

Yeah, they've been around for a long time. And Buy Sell Ads as I understand it is basically there's no like personalization and cookie system. You basically say, do you want to appear on this site? Well then go through Buy Sell Ads and your sponsorship will appear on that site. And like here's how much it costs. I like that model.

I know it's like old school again.

It'S kind of like the affiliate marketing model where you, you reach out to someone directly. You say, hey, I think we've got a real audience affinity here. Let's do some business development. It's kind of, I mean it's a little bit 1950s advertising in terms of sophistication, but it works.

That's the thing. If you use it top of funnel, if we're using those kind of terms, like, hey, you can build an audience off of that and then do your follow up magical stuff after that. But again within your control ideally.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Buystyle ads definitely has its own issues as well because you get people on that site who will, they'll sell advertising on a website and then they buy junk traffic to their website so they can ramp up their CPMs.

But there's always a way. There's always a way.

But at least you get to see the website and then be like, is this the website I want to be on?

And yeah, you can do some due diligence before you buy ads and prevent that, but there are a lot of bad actors on there as well.

Yeah.

Do you do you folks use similar web for some of that, like analysis?

A little bit here and there, yeah. On certain occasions we don't use it enough though, I guess.

Like one of the things that, you know, one of the things that people use SparkToro for, which I sort of also like similar web for, is the, you know, people who visit X also visit.

That's good.

And so SimilarWeb, even in the free version. Right. You can just like go in and type in, you know, whatever.

You know.

Outdoor climbing.com and it's like, oh yeah, let's Outside Online is in there and like Rock Climbing magazine is well visited and so is REI or Patagonia or whatever it is. Right. And like I like that ability to just see where else is that traffic going.

Yep. And it's kind of like for an affiliate product for in our case, it's typically a marketing software is what we'll promote so we can plug in a competitor or maybe that software itself. If there's enough traffic or people talking about it, then you can get all sorts of interesting data. I'm sure. And this is where my brain's going to go wild tonight.

Later. I'll tell you later.

It's sort of like in the search marketing world. Right. A lot of folks will use something like Moz, my old company or Ahrefs or Semrush or something like that and they'll like plug in a keyword phrase that they know is sending them good traffic that's through Google paid search or whatever and then try and find other words and phrases that that audience also uses or that are also related so that they can target similar sorts of folks. And I think that methodology is really smart.

Right.

I think that's a great way to go.

It's also, it's sort of the anti slurry. Like it's the very targeted approach.

Yeah. And I feel like if you have your best foot forward that way and like we said, if you have a marketing engine behind that somehow that you can control, then it's probably the best way you can approach kind of the situation right now online and really just speak to that target avatar from day one. Ideally. Yeah. Well, to wrap it up. I know. I don't know if we have enough time for this. I was going to ask you, I'm like, is there anything in 2021 in SEO world, so on the organic side that you would say like, all right, pay attention to this. Or maybe there's an article you can direct us to that.

Oh yeah, I haven't written it yet, but I have a prediction that I think the last couple years and the next couple years there's going to be a lot less.

A lot less of Google's ranking algorithm using links themselves to rank stuff and a lot more of them using.

Inferred connections. Inferred links. So essentially. Oh well. Rand fishkin from SparkToro went on Matt and Joe's podcast and talked about this thing. And there's no followable link that Google's crawler can see between the two. But the mention of SparkToro and around the words of market research and audience intelligence tells Google that maybe they should rank SparkToro's website higher for these sorts of terms and phrases. And if that connection happens lots and lots, they get the inference of a connection between the content. And the more authoritative and important and well listened to the podcast is, the more that counts. So I think we're going to see a lot less of the, like, I don't know what to call that old school, pure domain authority link, equity page rank, that kind of stuff. And a lot more of a. An inferred intelligent connection that the search engine forms between phrases, concepts, brands and entities and then websites.

That makes sense.

That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

It just seems like.

That'S how machine learning works. Machine learning is designed to optimize to an outcome and it'll take any input it can find that optimizes better to that outcome. I think that's the outcome that predicts these signals.

Yeah, I mean it makes sense because it'll sort of help the sort of gaming of the system that everybody's done for so long with SEO. And I mean, theoretically, I'm sure people will find new ways to game the new systems. And with that in mind, what advice would you give people, assuming that that is the direction things are going? How should people adjust their content to take that into account?

Yeah, I would be thinking about big investments in digital pr. Right. So if you have a brand and you can get that brand talked about in places where your customers pay attention, you can get the brand connection to be seen by Google and you can kind of not care about the link and still get the value of the link in the rankings. And at the same time you're speaking directly to your customers and potential customers. So you're probably driving up conversion rates and bringing people to your site. And at the same time you are also getting brand awareness, which means that when people search. Right. We know this from research, when people search for whatever, some random thing. When I search for Climbing shoes. If I see rei, and that's a brand that I know that I like and I trust them and whatever. I heard the founder talking about their great mission on this podcast house listening to, and they were on the YouTube channel, and I saw this nice press piece about the New York Times. I'm going to be more likely to click them regardless of if they're in position one. And the other thing we know about Google's behavior right now is if you're position four or five and more people start clicking on you than are clicking on the people above you, you will quickly rise. Like, Google will be like, whoa, whoa, what's going on here? The people all like Rei. All right, put them at the top.

Yeah, it's interesting. And I like this. I'm just seeing, like, this kind of map. I mean, there's a guy we actually connected with, and he runs this emoji, kind of his intelligence, where it, like, pairs up. If you plug in a keyword, kind of like SparkToro, it'll tell you what kind of emojis and hashtags. And it's using data science called hello Wolfie, if you're curious. Gosh, I feel like it's pretty interesting.

Uses some other stuff, too, right?

Well, if you go to Wolfie, AI, it actually shows this. This interesting map, and it's all for show. He was telling us, essentially, Arjun is the founder's name. But that's what I'm picturing happening in the background of Google. Maybe is this, like, personalized search engine rank or, you know, rankings, depending on whatever you're searching. But it's like you said, it's this web of things, and it's like Google crawling things like podcasts, which I've heard is happening, but I don't think they've really put the data out. But that could be feeding that. That web kind of in the background. It's got to happen. If it's happening in all these other industries, why wouldn't it happen in Google and everywhere else? Absolutely. Interesting perspective. Something to think on. Dang it, Rand. Not going to sleep tonight. Your fault.

That just happens on podcasts. Happens all the time.

That's why it feels like a hangover. After we're done with these, we're like, it was so fun, but got to pay the consequences sometimes. All right, so we'll get you out of here, man. Enough of me talking SparkToro.

I know you can get some free.

Usages out of it, so tell the folks about that. So it wasn't like we Were just.

Sure. Yeah. So the vast majority of folks who use SparkToro just use the Forever Free account, which is 10 searches a month you can run, see if it's valuable for you, do a bunch of research, probably find a lot of these opportunities without paying a thing. All you got to do is just run a search. It'll ask you for your email address, you confirm that, it'll give you the data, and then it refreshes every month. So, yeah, have at it. Stab at it. We're a very new company we launched in April of last year. It's just me and a co founder, my co founder, Casey. So we'd love to hear from folks who are trying it out and whether they found it valuable and what they used it for. That sort of stuff is super useful for us. And you can drop me a line anytime. Randparktoro.com Very cool.

And you've got the book Lost and Founder as well, so we should check that out.

There it is. Yeah.

Anywhere else you'd want to point people after listening to this episode?

Sure. Yeah. So if you want to learn more about that.

Conversation we were having about the online advertising and the ad slurry and all of that on the SparkToro blog, I just wrote a piece that's gotten some good attention called the.

State of Online Advertising. Something rotten in the State of Online Advertising. And that's the sparktoro.com blog.

Very cool.

And we'll make sure it's linked up as well.

For sure. All right, Rand. Appreciate it, man. It's an interesting conversation. Yeah.

Fascinating talking with you guys. I really appreciate you having me and please let me know if I can make some introductions to some other interesting folks on this front.

Appreciate it, my man. All right. Have a great one. All right.

You do.

Take care.

All right, Matt, the post recording has started.

Yeah.

We were already 20 minutes into our debrief.

I know, it's kind of funny. We hit stop after talking with Rand and then when and Talked for another 15 minutes about, like, some of our big takeaways and, like, thoughts from this show and went, wait, this is the part we're supposed to be recording, isn't it?

So let's recap some of this stuff because we can riff on this again. You don't need your notepad. Put that thing down.

Oh, don't tell me what to do.

Well, what we were talking about, Matt and I, were this episode was. And this is where I, you know, I kind of stumbled a little bit to find my words because my brain was like, you know, it was a big perspective change on many fronts, and from a guy who's deep in there, you know, in the research, but also hands on the data.

Yeah.

And that's what I think is most fascinating. That's what we were just riffing on.

Yeah. I mean, as he was explaining this tool, there was times where I was just kind of sitting here going, shit, I could use it for this, and I can use it for this, and I can use it for this, and I can use it for this. And I know you and I, while we were on this call, like, our wheels were starting to spin on, like, this Spark Toro tool. And before we hit record, before we even talked to Rand, you and I were sitting out front, like, reviewing our notes and what we wanted to go over on this thing. And I was going, you know, there's always a fine line between this becoming just like a giant promotion for the person's product and being, you know, valuable content for the listener. And I was very kind of. Whenever we bring on somebody that's like, a software developer or they've got a new course coming out or a new book coming out, I'm just like, is this going to be a giant sales pitch for their thing?

It's even worse when we really like the tool because the. Then we just keep bringing it up. It's funny because the podcast guests, and Rand included, never wants to pitch their stuff. So if you hear that, it's usually us.

Yeah, yeah. For real. I'd say there's maybe been, like, one or two guests ever who you could tell got on and were like, shamelessly like, I am just going to pitch my shit.

Right.

But most guests who have software and stuff, when we talk to them before the call, they're like, if my software comes up in conversation, cool. If it doesn't, cool, I don't care. And Rand was very much like that, definitely.

But, you know, I was very concerned that we would get on here and start going, oh, and you can do this with it. You could do this with it. You could do this with it, and it would just sound like he was selling it and we were selling it. But at the end of the day.

You could use it for free.

It's frigging free.

So all the advice that was given on this podcast and all the tactics we talked about, you don't need to pay for the damn tool to go do it.

Yeah, go get it. Yeah, go test it out. And some of the stuff that Matt and I were just talking about. So I want to Try to rewind what we were just talking about because I think it was super cool. So perspective changes across the board. I think that's. That was a big topic. I think right before that we were talking about SparkToro a little bit more about. Yeah. Using it to get on other podcasts. Yeah. You know, you can easily just plug in whatever you want to plug in. Really. There's multiple things. And then search the podcast, what they're listening to.

Well, go to Bam.

Now you can work down the list and see.

So you plug in like your social media following. Right. So like we've got a following on Facebook, a following on Instagram. Right.

It.

We could go in, plug in one of these social media accounts. It will look at all the people that are following us and say people that follow you, they read this magazine, they listen to these podcasts, they read these blogs. It basically will tell you all of the places that they hang out and all of the publications they read and all the content that they consume in that world. And now they just made you that tool, just made you a list of, okay, these are the podcasts I should try to get on. These are the publications I should try to contribute articles to. These are the blogs I should try to guest post on.

Right.

And then when you reverse that from a podcaster standpoint. Right. We can go and see. These are the influencers that those people follow. These are the, these are the podcasters they follow. These are the publications they follow. Well, now we also got a list of ideal guests to bring on our show because we now know who our audience is paying attention to. Let's bring those people over and say, look, you're paying attention to this person, so let us help you pay more attention to this person.

This actually makes my mind feel a little better. And probably I had this realization recently and I told you is that like a lot of the. Every single person we select is very. It's specific. It's not like we're willy nilly bringing people on the show because we do get pitched on you and I.

Even sort of, just to add to that point, you and I even sometimes debate on the guests where I'm just like, I don't think that's a good fit. You're like, well, they're a good fit because of this. And we literally have like debates and conversations over which guests should be allowed to come on and which one shouldn't. So we're not just, eh, they seem cool, let's bring them, you know.

Exactly. And the thing, yeah, it was A couple of weeks ago, a couple Fridays ago, and I told you about this recently, I was like, it's actually a lot of weight on our shoulders. In a good way. I like it. But I didn't realize it really is.

Yeah.

Each person we bring onto this podcast is now going to deliver a perspective and strategies like Rand did here and now you as the listener are probably gonna take some of this. At least it's in your mind now. So you're thinking about it and you're gonna do an action that's gonna affect your life, your family's lives, your customer's life, those customers families and maybe their customers lives. And I, I don't know, this all like. And of course you can do like your product that you might have has the same triple trickle effect. Everybody has this ripple effect. But then I started thinking about our podcast and like this one action. If we're thinking the one thing going back to that book, the one thing is picking the best guest for you who's listening. Because we have a fricking duty to stand by you. Because if we were just willy nilly bringing the random pitch that was automatically sent to us and be like, oh, Bob looks pretty cool. He has a great book on self help.

He's a heart based leader, Joe.

I mean, nothing against, I don't know what that means, but that is a trauma.

How many damn pitches do we get where they say they're a heart based leader?

I mean, I'm gonna. I think we've said it on this outro before. It's like, last time I checked, my heart is feeling fairly in the middle of my chest. I think yours is too. I lead a decent life. I'm a heart based leader, bro.

There you go.

I hope you are too listening. But the point matter is like, damn, there's a big responsibility that we have in this podcast right here. And even you listening, you have a big responsibility, whatever you're a leader in. And this tool SparkToro will make that even easier for us and probably make it a lot more effective as an end result for everyone. After that selection of the guest, that was an interesting. In my head I was like, whoa, no.

And future pacing a little bit. We've got some just insane guests lined up that are probably names that a lot of people may not have heard of, but they're the ones that are operating underground that are doing insane things but maybe aren't so public about the insane things they're doing. People, for instance, that we've met on Clubhouse at Wolf o' Fear.

Shameless plug.

Shameless plug. No, but I want to go back to the discussion with Rand.

Yeah. Well, the perspective changes now. Right. Because we were talking a lot about the platforms, remember, like, Google and the whole web thing.

Yeah.

And then we were talking about Facebook and how they're. It kind of feels like pandering a little bit to small business owners on tv.

Yeah, that's what we were talking about. We were talking about the TV ads that we've been seeing lately. Yeah. By Facebook, But I mean, just other companies in general, too, where it feels like they're sort of pandering to the emotions more so than they are. Like, yeah, like, I see those ads and I don't feel like, oh, they're on my side. No, I see those ads and go, those guys are fucking pandering to us. Trying to, like, you know, pull on our emotions so that we bond with their company more. Fuck you for trying that. I don't know, like, it just makes me feel, like, icky when I see those kinds of things.

Well, that's literally what they're doing. Because they know business owners. A lot of them are in a very tough spot. Probably the toughest spot you've been in your whole life. Yeah. And now you see this ad from a trusted platform, Facebook. Oh, yeah. Maybe I should run Facebook ads@business facebook.com. okay, cool. Get in there. That's fine. Run some ads. Good luck. You're probably going to have to burn thousands of dollars to figure it out. And then, like Rand was saying, now you're going to have to be confined within their garden, their walled garden, and pay their Facebook tax and their ad slurry. And you're not going to know what you're looking at in this big dashboard, most likely, unless you hire an agency or go through a course. And that course is probably not really going to teach you how to think and think of ads. And they're probably gonna say, click this button.

And Google is redacting more and more of this information. Google is pulling it away from the end user's eyeballs. So a lot of the information we used to have access to, we don't. Right. Our whole, like, PAG traffic strategy, a lot of the strategy is through using negative keywords, finding the keywords people are searching, finding the keywords that people are searching that aren't buyer intent and negative ing out. Negative. Is that a word? Negative Ing out. Those keywords was a big part of our traffic strategy. And, you know, from. In our account, we're still able to do that. But it does seem like they're giving us less and less information and data, and it's only a matter of time before I feel like where Google and Facebook want to go is they want to get to a point where you could plug in a URL to your website and they'll go and just create ads and figure out where the ads should be positioned for you.

Well, there's already third party, bunch of them that are already starting to at least create the ad copy for you based on all this data. Kind of like SparkToro does for, you know, giving you the data.

Yeah. I almost feel sorry for some of those companies because.

If you're building it with, you know, if you're bootstrapping that kind of technology that does that for you, that creates these automated ads and automated copy for you. Well, Google has infinitely more money and infinitely more engineers. Facebook has infinitely more money and infinitely more engineers. You're going to get knocked off. Yeah, it's going to happen. Facebook and Google sell it, trying to get more autonomous with their ads. They're trying to get to a point where you plug in your website and they go, cool, we're gonna go calculate what ad is gonna work best. We're gonna go build some split tests for you and we're gonna hone in on the advertisement that works the best for you.

Right.

That's where it's going to eventually be. So all of these companies that are building it and bootstrapping the technology themselves, you know, that's awesome. The best I think you can hope for though, is to get acquired by a Google or a Facebook.

That's what I would do. And I think Rand would suggest that too in his book, the hold on Lost and Founder. Yeah, that's it. Lost and Founder. I'm like, I know I'm going to screw it up, so I'm not going to say it until I read it. Yeah. Lost and Founder. One of his chapters I read is like actually it says right here. Yeah. Should you sell your startup early? Yes, probably. Yeah. So, yeah, advice to any company that's building a Facebook or Google add on type thing or, you know, optimize. I mean, not saying this is perfect suggestion, but like, I don't know, be aware of this at least.

Yeah, Yeah. I always love it when the titles of a chapter basically gives me the answer to what that chapter.

I was thinking that too. I'm like, that's actually very clear. I like it though. It makes it easy to jump right to what you need.

Yeah, yeah. And then you know, and the reason I bring that up is like, I think with Facebook right now, and this is something else we were talking before we hit record with Facebook and Google right now, there's a pretty expensive learning curve to use those platforms. Right. Like, the first time you use Facebook, if you've never run an ad before, the first time you get in there, your first ads probably going to lose money. Like, you have to be extremely lucky for your first ad to not lose money. Same with Google Ads. Google, they, they. They give away $100 coupons to get people on Google because they know you're just going to give that hundred dollars back to them. They're not spending that money really. Like, they're giving you a hundred dollars and you're going to go lose that hundred dollars on their platform.

That's what we were saying. It's like when you go to Vegas. Vegas, and they give you like, hey, you get 50 free spins and this cool. And this alcoholic beverage, all you can drink. It's like, you know, they're. They know you're gonna, they're gonna earn a profit, most likely off of you. Yeah. Or get you, as a, you know, getting your hook somehow. So assuming that they're just taking a little play from Vegas there, who knows? But you're right. I mean, the whole thing is the learning curve and the ads and it's like, like, yeah, honestly, they don't know what they're getting into. A lot of business owners don't.

Yeah. And I mean, you know, flip side of the coin, devil's advocate a little bit here. If you look at it from Facebook and Google's perspective, I personally don't believe that they're going, hey, let's make this muddy and convoluted and confusing for people so that they'll spend more money with us. I don't actually believe that's their intention. I believe their intention is to get to that point where the decision making is more on their algorithms than it is on you. So by taking away these features from you, they're sort of like slowly dismantling the existing system.

Yeah, everything's going that way, isn't it? It's the whole automated. It's machine learning. I mean, look at Tesla. Tesla is an example. It's like they'll just. You don't have to drive your car anymore. You're going to take things away, all the manual things, and then essentially. Yeah. Make it a little bit more push button, I guess.

Yeah. Well, I think the order in which they're taking Things away from you is very convenient for them. They are taking things away in an order that's probably helped them become more profitable.

Taking the manual stuff away, right?

Yeah. But over time, that's, I think their end goal. Their end goal is to get to a point where it's just like, here's my URL, go run some ads for me and let their algorithms figure it out. I think that's what they're trying to.

Do so well and based off of like, if the search results are kind of like what Rand is saying with you have this machine learning thing in the background, maybe giving you custom relevant search results to what you specifically should be looking for, which I know they kind of do already, but like super locked in on all content pieces, then maybe the ads will be even more effective with that. We'll see. Maybe this is just the learning phase, like where they're just kind of transitioning into that.

Yeah, it'll be interesting to see where it goes. Because I mean, like he was saying, organic SEO is just getting harder and harder and harder because Google's gonna to pull the results up onto the front page. So people don't even need to click into your resource to get the answer to the questions anymore. We saw that with one of our ThriveCart promotions. We actually had a promotion called we were ranking for thrivecart pricing as one of our promotions and we had a whole article about their pricing and then we compared it to the pricing of other competitors and things like that. And that article was ranking, it was like the second article down right below thrivecart's main article. But over time, what happened was Google just put the answer from our article on the front page of Google. So if you go and type in ThriveCart pricing, it'll pull up the price of ThriveCart right on the main screen of Google and it'll say from the article that we made. So it'll link to our article. But nobody has a reason to click into the article anymore.

No, they'll probably just look at the price and be like, oh no. Or oh yes, cool. I'm gonna click this link right above there that says thrivecart.

Yeah.

Anyway, well, it's, it's a big perspective change. It's interesting and I was going to say actually, and I didn't find a perfect link here, but I think it's, it's interesting with Clubhouse because you mentioned Clubhouse and it's just part of our shameless plug is you should be on Clubhouse. Follow us. But it's interesting that Clubhouse doesn't seem to have a lot of these algorithm things. I mean, they have an algorithm, I'm sure, but it seems a lot more natural. And it seems like it's like almost like this little platform that was probably built like 15 years ago or should have been or 10 years ago that doesn't have all this wacky technology happening. It's just kind of an organic feeling place that's serendipitous, that doesn't feel icky.

I hope they don't screw it up.

I hope.

We're going to have another conversation on our January therapy session. It's going to be the last episode of this month and we're going to deep dive into Clubhouse, but we'll leave it there. That'll be one of the things I want to talk about is how they could screw up the platform that way. If they do those things, I have my predictions on record.

Yeah, don't put those predictions on Clubhouse because there's no record.

Yeah, that's true. But yeah, if you're on Clubhouse, follow O Fear, follow ATT Wolf. We're hanging out on there all the time and just answering questions and sharing tips on podcasting and affiliate marketing.

It's fun.

All that good stuff.

Stuff, good place to connect. And we can hang out too. I was hanging out with.

Bray. No, it was one of our listeners actually, last night with Angela Cisco too. So it's kind of cool.

I actually got pinged on that one, but I was watching tv.

I know. I was about to go to bed and then Angela pinged me. I was like, yeah, let's do it.

Let's just say I wasn't in the best headspace to be on.

Ah, okay.

On Clubhouse at the moment.

Yeah. Okay. You're a little loopy.

I was, I was tired. I was mid process of my nightly wind down routine. I'll just, I'll leave it there.

Okay, cool. Yeah, I won't ask any questions. All right, so let's wrap this puppy up. All the action guides, all the takeaways that you really need to know, or at least the ones that you know that you probably would have taken notes on. We got those taken care of for you. So if you go to flowchart group.com, that's flowchartgroup.com it's a Facebook group. Redirects you over there. But there's an opportunity to plug in your email address and for free, we will send those notes to you within two weeks of this episode dropping. You'll get these notes if you're a little late. You'll get some other notes.

Was that D's notes with a D.

Yeah, I like it. D's notes. Can't say we're saying action guides. Oh, yeah, we're trying to rebrand. Eh.

It doesn't sound as cool, but I mean, they're notes. At the end of the day, they're notes, but they're all the actionable steps from the process. But some episodes they're not. There isn't really action steps. It's just insights. And so there's more notes in that scene.

I guess so. Huh. Who knows?

But just we use the words interchangeable. We stopped using companion, though. We've been good about that.

Yeah, I mean, that's. Yeah.

Action guided notes. But notes is really what it is.

I'm kind of happy the companion word was dying out. Oh, it's my little companion over here to my episode. It's so cute. But now, action guide. I'm just like, scoot it. I don't know.

I don't know what you're talking about anymore.

This is the end of a podcast day. This is what happens, happens. So let's wrap her up.

Let's wrap her up. So Easy Webinar. If you don't have it yet. What?

What?

No, I'm just in shock. No, you've got to go get Easy Webinar. It's got live webinar capabilities, automated hybrid. They're adding in new features constantly. I believe you can do like streaming to various platforms.

So you watched your kids use it for school streaming, Live streaming?

Yeah, my kids, well, my kids do homeschool, but every month they have like a check in with like a teacher consultant kind of thing. And they were using Easy webinar for their. Their student teacher check in thing.

There's applications across the board. So no matter what kind of business you are, even if you're just doing affiliate stuff and that is all good, you can use webinars and that's the tool for you. That's what we would recommend. They do every type of webinar you can think of and probably more than you've ever thought of too. So go to easywebinar.com hustle and you will get a fatty discount. And yeah, you'll see it's a little custom page made for the show. So read all about it over there.

Read all about it.

Easywebinar.com hustle and share this episode.

If you've got friends that are doing Facebook ads or Google Ads or trying to figure out how to drive traffic, and it's all so confusing to them, and they're trying to figure it out. You got to send them this episode because this episode, I think, kind of demystifies a lot of the sort of complexities in those worlds. So share it, because if you share it, we will love you forever.

Should we share it with Crack Shack?

We will share it with Crack Shack.

I think they'll find some value in this. Maybe.

And it'll prove that you don't beat up puppies.

Oh, yeah, it does prove that. Huh. Interesting. Cool. Well, we'll have the listeners.

There's a correlation between people who don't share and people who beat up puppies.

Are the stats in sparktora? Possibly. Okay, I'll go look.

If you don't share, we know who you are.

We'll find the data.

That wasn't a threat. Although it did kind of sound like a threat.

All right, I'm going to leave now. I don't feel safe here. Bye, y'. All. Thank you for listening.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliff's Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice, simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to, and give us your email address, and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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