RHS 036 - Rand Fishkin on the Opportunity That Exists Where Capitalism Meets Humanity

Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Today, I am joined by someone who, it's hard for me to express the gravity of the impact this individual has had on the course of my career. As many of you who've listened to this show or followed along with my work know, very early on in my career—2010, 2011, even back as far as 2009—content marketing and a focus on storytelling, delivering value, and the technical aspects of SEO and building websites changed the course of my career. The reason I'm sitting here in this chair, the reason Rogue Risk, my agency, exists, all the parts between this moment and 2009—if it wasn't for my adoption of what was then just called blogging, but essentially is content marketing in our current vernacular—Rand Fishkin played a large part in the development of my expertise and skills in that space.

Ryan Hanley: I didn't know Rand personally. Frankly, the conversation we just had is the first time we've ever spoken in person, 10 or 11 years from when I first started engaging with his content. But the work he did originally at SEO Moz, which then became Moz, and now he's transitioned, published a bestselling book, *Lost and Founder*, and is now a co-founder of a company called SparkToro—his work has just always been there. From his Whiteboard Friday videos to the in-depth articles, and even in this interview, it's not just his work but the people he brought into the space that he put on blast. The platform he originally built allowed others to come behind him and build upon it and do even more.

Ryan Hanley: He is a cornerstone figure in my own career, and we have a dynamic conversation. We go a lot of different places in this interview, and it is an absolute treasure. By far one of my favorite interviews I've ever done, because I had no idea where it was going to go. I think what you get out of this interview is the cross-section of humanity and capitalism and the opportunity that exists in that space. I will treasure the conversation because I think it was important, and I just enjoyed the shit out of it.

Ryan Hanley: So with that, I want to get on directly. No sponsor. The only thing I'm going to ask you is if you like this episode, just subscribe, tell a friend, whatever. Listen to more episodes because there's lots of good stuff in here. So with that, let's get to Rand and this absolutely tremendous conversation.

[Interview begins]

Ryan Hanley: I really enjoy it. I do a lot of interviews with people inside the space. But when I get to bring someone like yourself who is infinitely talented in something that isn't insurance and share your expertise, that cross-pollination yields enormous dividends for them because they hear the same voices over and over. It's not a huge community—only about 500,000 people in the industry. When you take that cross-cut and think of how many actually share what they're doing, this is very valuable to them. I had Ann Handley on in September or October, and people went bananas. Rightly so. She's tremendous. But just to hear this voice from outside the space—I wouldn't overthink that side of it. Not that you would, but I just want you to know that.

Rand Fishkin: Okay, great. Well, I'm glad to hear it for sure.

Ryan Hanley: Cool. So we'll get right into it. I'm really excited to have you on. We did the little intro talk before we started recording here. I walked downstairs to my office where I record these, and I'm sure you get this a lot, but I have to say it so I can release the stress of our conversation. I'm trying very hard not to just pepper you with super nerdy content marketing questions because I've followed you for so long. I was a subscriber from way, way long ago. I fell in love first with your voice, and I want to ask you a ton of questions about that. I know you've heard this many times, but I think it's very deserving. You are one of the jewels of marketing leadership, entrepreneur—whatever you're talking in. You really are. I just wanted to say thank you for all the work that you've done.

Rand Fishkin: Oh my gosh, that is so kind, Ryan. Honestly, not all of that has been intentional. A lot of it's been stumbling through and just trying to be helpful to other people, but it's always great to hear that it's resonated.

Ryan Hanley: For those of you who've ever followed my career, I can pin a lot of the content marketing work and success I had back in my early days as an agent to literally mimicking and listening and putting into practice many of the things that Rand and the people he brought to the audience—not just you, but your team—did. What SEO Moz and the work that you did and the people you highlighted brought to small business owners and professionals like myself who were trying to get our message out into the world—it really has had an impact. I'm sure you are aware of that, but I would be doing your work a disservice if I didn't let you know that a large part of content marketing changed the course of my career, and you played a significant role in that.

Rand Fishkin: Well, thank you. I'm thrilled to hear it.

Ryan Hanley: Okay. So now that the ego stroking is over, and I released that pent-up stress of needing to say those things to you, we can actually get into some content and talk through some of this stuff. The very first place I want to go is what I think is your superpower, just watching from the outside. It is the ability to mix a very technical topic—whether it's SEO, content marketing, evaluating something happening in that industry or another, or even your book, *Lost and Founder*—where you mash up the ability to deliver technical value with personal transparency in a way that really draws someone in. My question for you is, is that a skill? Is there an innate sense that it's just part of who you are, or was it developed through the work? How did you get to that point, if you even think that's a fair critique?

Rand Fishkin: No, I think that's a good assessment. One of the things I've always seen over the course of my career—and it's certainly something I got better at, a skill I've invested in with conscious effort—is teaching people and sharing my experiences in a way that's compelling and earns attention. Part of that in my early 20s, to be totally frank, Ryan, was about filling a personal need to be paid attention to. When you're just getting started in work and in life as an adult, you're like, "Look at me, look at me, look at me." I had that. I describe it sometimes as a hole in my chest that could only be filled by the praise of other people on the internet. In the early days of the internet, that was blogging, getting people to comment on my posts, getting nice emails about what I'd write. If I got one or two of those, it fueled my ego for the next day, and then I'd try to get more and more.

Rand Fishkin: Over the course of a decade—from 2001, maybe even 1999 when I started writing on the web, into the early days of Moz as a software company in 2007, 2008, 2009—that worked. It eventually turned into a great content marketing practice. I didn't even call it content marketing back in the day. It was just me looking for attention. I think storytelling is a super powerful skill. It is absolutely something that marketers who want to reach other people should invest in. The more compelling you can make your stories, the more attention you can attract.

Ryan Hanley: Do you think that feeling ever goes away? I completely share that sense with you, especially early on. One question I've asked myself is, does that feeling go away, or do we just get better at managing it?

Rand Fishkin: That's a great question. Certainly, with age and experience comes a maturity that recognizes it's not everything. I don't know whether you'd call that getting better at managing it, or just starting to internalize the idea that what other people think about you and how much other people think about you is not the most important thing in the world. I think that's why folks further on in their careers of all kinds have a little less of that desperate energy you see in young celebrities, young politicians, young stars in their fields. It seems to be a reality of humanity.

Rand Fishkin: It's why, when you look at cohorts of social media behavior from young folks—10, 15 years ago, everyone was looking at Facebook saying, "Young people are never going to use email. They're just going to be on Facebook." Now everyone says that about WhatsApp or TikTok. As you watch those cohorts move through, as they get into their later years, it turns out that once people hit 25, no matter which generation they're part of, they start getting on email more. They stop using certain forms of social media as much. Curious indeed.

Ryan Hanley: I find it very interesting that we've stopped using the word "millennials." Thank God. It's so nice, isn't it? In the insurance industry, you couldn't get away from it. It was like you couldn't hit publish on the interweb without injecting the word somewhere in that piece of content. Microsoft Clippy would pop in: "Did you need to use 'millennial' more often in your copy?" I remember standing on stage and going, "It's not millennials. They're 24. They don't know what they're doing." Do you remember what you were like at 24? I could barely keep myself alive at 24.

Rand Fishkin: Young men are just the worst. I don't know what we were thinking. But I will say, one of the problems I have with generational divide lines and markers is that while there are statistical correlations with behavior across decades and trends, the sharp dividing lines we concocted in the media starting with the baby boomer generation simply makes no sense. I've never seen an analysis of people born in 1980 versus 1981 and how they are remarkably different from one another. Yet there's this huge dividing line that the media concocted and that we all use. I find that misleading at best. I think it's very unwise to use that.

Rand Fishkin: I think it's also very unwise to attribute to generations or age what can be better explained by other phenomena. For example, you and your listeners operate in the insurance industry, so you have a good sense for the financial capabilities and biases of groups of people. One of the biases you see in folks born in the 1980s into the 1990s is that as their generation graduated high school or college, the work opportunities, while still available, were at a far lower number compared to the cost of living in most of the United States. They simply don't have as much disposable income as their parents' generation did. This gets media attention like, "Oh, those millennials don't like home ownership or buying cars or having children." In fact, their behavior when they have the same finances as their parents' generation had compared to cost of living is remarkably similar. It's just that the U.S. economy basically rewarded a very small number of people with a huge amount of wealth, and nearly everyone else suffered and did not do as well as a generation 20 or 30 years before. That behavior is explainable with data, but instead we rely on these lazy media tropes. I really hate that. I think it's bad for business.

Ryan Hanley: I hope everyone listening takes that to heart. I'm going to give one supplemental factor: who expected the baby boomers to continue on for another 20 years in leadership positions, retaining wealth that had normally been generationally transitioned down? I couldn't agree with you more. One thing often pushed around the insurance industry is loyalty—that people jump from carrier to carrier, provider to provider, agent to agent, and there's a distrust of big business. To the same idea you said, if you had to live through the 2000 stock market crash as a child and watch your parents' careers or fortunes be obliterated, then go through 2007, 2008, then live through hyperinflation and everything going on in our economy today and the massive move of jobs overseas—how would you be loyal to large enterprises? Would you naturally just say, "Oh yeah, they have my back"? It makes no sense. And then we say, "Oh, it's the internet," but it has nothing to do with the internet and everything to do with the cultural ramifications of the last 20 years of our economy.

Rand Fishkin: I think that has interesting political implications, interesting cultural implications, but also really interesting business implications. If you successfully identify these trends, and if you can mentally remove yourself from "I don't believe it because it doesn't fit with the political reality I want to believe in," and instead focus on the reality of how financial success has been distributed across the United States—post-World War II, you had a very large middle class. For several generations, that wealth kept growing and getting distributed more and more up until essentially the 1980s, when that distribution stopped going to a broad middle class. Folks who are low-wage earners start to grow. The middle class starts to stagnate. Even the upper echelon, the top 9% of the top 10%, stagnates in terms of wealth growth. It's essentially the 1%, and really the 0.1% and the 0.01%, where almost all of the economic gains from the last 35 or 40 years have gone.

Rand Fishkin: If you're recognizing that as a business, you can be very wise about how to play your products and how to do your marketing. You can target your products by paying attention to how much people can afford, what they worry about and don't, what they care about and don't, who has wealth and doesn't, who can afford your products and doesn't, where to reach those people, and how to market to them. That tends to have a lot more success than burying your head in the sand and hoping everyone's going to behave the same way their parents did.

Ryan Hanley: How I usually attack these types of issues—because I don't know that I'm smart enough to understand the cultural ramifications of all the factors that go into decision making—but I know that mass market marketing, mass media marketing, tends to do silly things. So I watch what they do and then do the opposite. When I see everyone going, "Millennials are unloyal and all they care about is price and the product means nothing to them," what I say to myself is that sounds like someone who really wants a good product at a competitive price and wants to work with someone who's going to take care of them. It sounds like someone who just wants to be petted on the head and told, "Everything's going to be okay. You're not going to get hosed." That's how I tend to engage people. To me, that action—jumping from provider to provider or carrier to carrier—does not necessarily signal that that's exactly the experience they want.

Rand Fishkin: I think there's two ways to play that. You can lean very heavily against the trend and say, "We are going to provide a premium product that has relationships at its core, looks for the most relationship-driven customers, identifies those based on their behavior and where we reach them," and get that share of the market, even if it's smaller than it used to be. Or you can go the other direction and say, "Let's remove the hands-on touch, the heavy relationship aspect. Let's have a much more cost-efficient product by digitizing almost everything we do, removing a lot of need for customer service, salespeople, and people costs, and then make that product really compelling for folks who are not relationship-driven but are price-driven and looking for the best value." You can see the U.S. economy bifurcating in sector after sector on these two vectors. You get more high-touch, relationship-driven at the higher end and more mass-market, self-service at the lower end. Companies that have done this well have done extraordinarily well over the last 20 years. What I hear you saying, and I would agree, is that either option is not necessarily right or wrong. Where you get in trouble is if you try to have one foot in one bucket and one foot in the other.

Ryan Hanley: This is the core of product and marketing strategy. You want a strategy that makes sense all the way through—how the product is designed, how it's sold and marketed, how it's served and serviced, how the customer is targeted. If that strategy doesn't make sense all the way through—if you're going to serve it in a self-service way but it's a premium product—that's not the expectation the premium customer has. Premium customers expect relationships, sales, high touch, extreme customer service. A good way to look at it is like the credit card and banking industry. There's your American Express Platinum customers, and then there's your Visa from your local credit union. Both are doing well. It's the in-between stuff that gets really messy.

Ryan Hanley: For you guys listening, where I see insurance—both carriers, large and small, and agents—getting in trouble is that we're stuck in a transition period. It's an incredibly traditional business. You can still be 90% paper and be highly successful. You could not start a business that way today and be successful, but you can maintain and even grow an agency using very old-school tools. The problem is the next wave. The millennial agent who is trying to find their place is struggling because the industry is set up for larger, well-established—in some cases 100 or 120-year-old—agencies that are paper-based and completely okay with telling clients it's going to take them a month to turn around a proposal. I don't want to say there's anything wrong with that because they're doing business. But if an upstart were to make that same value pitch to a customer, they would have no shot. They would go out of business. So they're pushing to make their value proposition digital, but the industry's not ready. We still have conversations about basic API connections. We literally have conferences about basic API connections and whether or not we should have them. A lot of people are stuck in the middle between being taught traditional but trying to go digital, and their value proposition gets lost. What kind of advice would you give, hearing that?

Rand Fishkin: It does not surprise me. I think there are huge swaths of the economy and tons of industries that are similar. My advice would generally be that if you are one of the folks who embraces change early and can provide the product that your customers need—whether at the top end of the market or the bottom end—if you can serve your customers better than your competition and market it in the right way to those right folks, you're going to have a competitive advantage. That is what you should be seeking.

Ryan Hanley: I want to shift our conversation a little bit. I really just have one question on this particular topic, and then I want to talk about SparkToro. I saw you sent out a tweet a couple of weeks ago. It was basically: "If you hire me to speak, I'm going to come with my opinion slash politics or whatever." I don't necessarily know if you meant actual politics or just your general perception on the world—that's not really the point. What I was so interested in, and this is my impetus for this question, is coming off of yesterday or the day before, a very good friend of mine, Marcus Sheridan, gave the closing keynote at Social Media Marketing World. He was crying on stage, very vulnerable, and was 100% himself. That's who he is. My perception of you is that you're very much who you are. I'm interested in your development of that because I effort to be the same way as often as I can. I think it's a struggle for all of us to always be exactly who we are. I'm interested in the pushback you get on that, your experience. I think in some ways our politics are different, but your openness with exactly who you are is something I want to encourage in everybody, whether working in your local communities. My industry in particular gets caught in feeling like we have to be a certain way because of a perception of us. I'm constantly trying to encourage people to be exactly who they want to be and allow others to come to them who are interested in that, agree, disagree, or relate. Does that make sense?

Rand Fishkin: It makes sense. I talk about this first from the strategy side. I was not strategic about this in the early part of my career. I was very transparent about who I was and how things were going. But I think I was what you might term "asleep" in terms of awareness about the broader world—how institutions, government policy, law, and power impacted everything around me. Why was it that when I went to college, I could work a $4.85 an hour job and pay for my tuition and my rent, and then only three years later, that was totally impossible? And five years later, it was impossible to the tune of five times as much to go to the same state college? I didn't pay attention. It wasn't on my radar.

Rand Fishkin: When I went to pitch venture capitalists in Silicon Valley and would drive around to these offices trying to raise millions of dollars for my company, I didn't think about how horrible it would have been if I were a woman. A lot of these meetings were, "Hey, let's go to this bar and I'll meet you this night," or "Come over to my house and let's chat about it." If you or I are invited to some 40 or 50-year-old dude's house to have a glass of wine and chat about our business, we don't have to think twice. We're like, "Hell yeah, put me in coach. Let me go wine and dine this guy and get him to invest." But if I were a 29-year-old woman, what is that like? Do I even get that invitation? Is that dude like, "I don't want to have any impropriety, so better if I don't invite her"? Or do you get that invitation but it means something else? Or do you get that invitation and it means the same thing, but you have to spend tons of cognitive processing to try and figure that out? I didn't think about the unfairness or the changes in the world or how who I was and who I wasn't affected me. It just wasn't part of me. I didn't talk about that stuff.

Rand Fishkin: Over the course of the last decade or so, I've become aware of that. I have a more diverse friend group. Lots of folks in my personal and professional networks have been through all sorts of experiences—in the political field, financial services, venture capital, startups, raising money as entrepreneurs. I can see how that stuff changes. In my early days at Moz, I refused to be quiet about how search engines worked, despite the fact that Google and Microsoft didn't like what I was publishing. I was like, "Screw you guys. I'm going to tell it how it is. I'm going to show people what works in SEO." That's how I built the Moz brand. Nowadays, when I see injustice or unfairness or how things work in a field, I want to share that too. I'm just unwilling to be quiet about it. I think I've always had this predilection for transparency. It's just that now I'm not asleep on this other stuff. I'm awake, my eyes are open, and so I share what I see.

Ryan Hanley: I like the idea of not being asleep. One of the major issues inside the insurance industry is diversity. We live in a white bread world here. When I used to put on a conference called Elevate, I would say to my team, "I can't have any more white guys on stage. I need a different voice. If they're a white guy, they need to come from a place where we haven't heard that story 20 times." I need something different. Not because—I always fight the idea of diversity for diversity's sake, but—

Rand Fishkin: Can I ask why that is?

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. I fight the idea of diversity for diversity's sake.

Rand Fishkin: No, no. And here I have—and I would be super interested in your thing, but I don't want to diminish the person who I put on stage because anyone could ever say the only reason they're on that stage is because they're not a white guy.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: So I have found two things to be true. I did the same thing at MozCon. For folks who are listening who might not know, Moz is this company that I started. It used to be called SEO Moz, started with a blog, became an SEO software company. Now it's a $55 million a year revenue business with a couple hundred employees in Seattle and Vancouver. It's made a few acquisitions along the way. I stepped down as CEO and left the company a couple of years ago.

During the course of that company's history, we built up this conference called MozCon. It happened in Seattle every year, grew to about 1,600 to 1,700 attendees. Not dissimilar from your Elevate event. Over the course of two or three days, we had somewhere between 20 and 35 speakers depending on the year. Early on, it was all—well, almost all—white dudes speaking.

Then I started paying attention to other voices. Reading stuff online, making friends in other communities, and hearing from folks like, "Yeah, there's no representation." I remember distinctly hanging out with a friend of mine—I won't say who it was—but a Black guy. He said, "Yeah man, when I got into this field, I thought these conferences were pretty cool and I learned a lot, but I guess speaking is not for me because I don't see anybody like me up on stage. It's all you guys. It's all you white guys. So there's no room for me."

Then he saw Will Reynolds, who is a Black guy and a tremendous, awesome guy. He spoke at MozCon. My friend said, "I saw him and I was like, 'Oh shit, that could be me. I could do this too.'" That had a powerful impact on me. I thought, "Oh my god, if I don't, as the organizer, put diverse people on this stage, this will never get better. This problem will never fix itself until I fix it. This is my obligation now. I have the power. I get to choose who goes on the MozCon stage. That means I have the responsibility to make sure that the next generation has fair opportunity because the fundamental core truth is talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not."

Ryan Hanley: We are wholeheartedly agreed on that. I guess when I said—so I agree you have responsibility as the organizer. Maybe the way that I positioned it wasn't what I actually meant.

Rand Fishkin: No, no, I get where you're coming from. I have heard many times exactly what you heard. Which is, "The only reason that person is on stage is because you needed more women speakers." Or, "That talk didn't resonate with me." So rather than saying, "That was a shitty talk," they say, "Oh, woman speaker." I have heard that before.

What I can tell you from my experience is those people who think in that way are not going to change their minds because of an awesome talk. Not quickly anyway. Maybe slowly over time, over years and decades and generations, those attitudes change. But those voices, to me, they just don't get to have an impact.

Ryan Hanley: I have a different opinion on that part of what you're saying. Not the part where the person shouldn't be up there, but the part where I think the steadfastness of positions that people are currently in is as much an exposure and a construct of their social circles. When you can break someone out of their social circles and show them a world of people where exactly what you're describing exists, I think those minds can change a heck of a lot faster.

I think the problem is not putting them—not finding situations to inject them into those places. Because oftentimes that person feels like just as much of an outsider. Look, I'm not going to try to play like some fat white guy with tons of money who has been discriminated against. That is certainly not my position. But the understanding is, as much as you try to get people to the middle, everyone feels like an outsider. Inside all of us individually, we all feel like tiny little people.

Rand Fishkin: Yes, imposter syndrome is universal.

Ryan Hanley: Yes. Which is a wonderful thing because I think it can help give you empathy, depending on how you process it. It can help give you empathy for everyone else. You can have empathy for my friend who is Black and said, "Gosh, I don't see anyone like me up on stage." And you can have empathy by thinking, "Oh my God, that could be me." I can imagine myself going to an event where it is all Black women speakers and I'm one of the few white people in the room. It just feels weird. It feels so awkward. I'm uncomfortable. I don't know why I'm uncomfortable. It's just like, "I don't fit in here. This isn't me. How do I become part of this world when this world clearly has lots of opportunity for me?"

If you reflect on that awkwardness, you can then realize how important it is to have faces like yours, representation like yours, up on stage. That might not be purely tied to identity. It might be tied to being someone in a wheelchair. You go to conferences and think, "How am I going to get up the fricking stairs? How can I participate in that?" If conferences don't use accessible spaces and if they don't invite folks like that up on stage who are also in those conditions, you can't see yourself there.

Rand Fishkin: The other part of it is you're missing the best of the best if you do that.

Ryan Hanley: Oh my God. That was always my point when I was putting on Elevate. I literally could do this blindfolded because all I want is the max value. If you're telling me that whatever we have to do to re-rig a stage to get a person, whatever they look like or their background or their sexuality, who gives a shit? This is the thing I've never understood about an exclusionary mentality. You are purposefully choosing a lower—providing less value in exchange for being exclusionary. I've never understood that mentality. It makes no sense.

Rand Fishkin: Well, I think that's the core of racism and sexism and bias. You want an in-group who is like you to be the ones in power so that even if you as part of that in-group are not as good, you still get opportunity.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: You're artificially inflating your market value.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, exactly. I mean, what else is institutionalized racism, sexism, stereotyping, bias, if not those things?

Rand Fishkin: But I will say this. One of the things we had to realize when we were building MozCon—I remember having conversations about this with other organizers of other events in technology and entrepreneurship and marketing—was that your scores suffer. We did what most conferences do. We had the audience score speakers. They could go online to do that or they'd get a survey at the end. Your speaker scores will technically suffer. You have to be aware.

We saw this somewhere in the 20 to 30% range. Women were almost always lower. A woman could deliver the same talk that a man delivered, with the same quality, the same content, and it would be scored on average 20% to 30% lower by the audience.

Ryan Hanley: That's why I always put those speaker score things in my round filing cabinet that goes out the back door. I put them out because I know the audience wants to be placated. Anyone who came to Elevate, this is exactly what would happen because I don't trust you guys. I would watch all the presentations and I didn't care what anyone thought. I knew whoever the person was, I knew if they were bringing it. That's all I really cared about. Everyone's going to miss a point or not hit a joke or a story isn't going to be exactly what they wanted. I knew whether they were bringing it or not. So I would send out the surveys, the surveys would come back, and I would slide them right across the desk and put them right into the trash.

Rand Fishkin: Here's what we found though. That was true in 2008, 2009, 2010. But fast forward six, seven years later, those numbers got to be more like two, three, five percent.

Ryan Hanley: Because the audience changes.

Rand Fishkin: Well, maybe this doesn't happen in the marketing industry. I'm super glad that those are the numbers because that makes me feel happy as a human, as a citizen of the United States.

Ryan Hanley: But what I found was there's just so much—not even white guy on white guy—bias baked in because he's from Montana and "what do people from Montana know?" Or "I couldn't understand his Alabama accent" or "people from the North are pricks." It's stupid stuff.

Rand Fishkin: Oh, you know, we did find—I will say this—the English accent, those crush.

Ryan Hanley: Oh yeah, well they're just smarter than us. Americans just love it. They're like, "Oh, he's so smart. Listen to that accent."

Rand Fishkin: But no, the more diversity that we put on stage year after year, the more diversity was expected. This is also awesome. For those of you who are thinking about how this has a positive business impact for me, we sold more tickets. Over time, our average speaker scores rose. The average collective score that everyone was given, regardless of the fact that in the early days there was this scoring deficit—I was never able to look at it across racial or other kinds of diversity, but I could look at it on gender diversity because we had a 50-50 policy. We joined this 50-50 project early in MozCon's history.

Ryan Hanley: I remember when you did that.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. A commitment to always have a 50-50 split between men and women on stage. That led to more ticket sales. We found that it led to more women buying tickets. No surprise. If you see people like you on stage who are going to be headlining, you are more likely to want to go to the event. I know that HubSpot had the same thing with Inbound. It's one of the ways that they grew that event to, what is it now, 30,000 attendees in Boston in the fall.

Ryan Hanley: As an event planner, that just makes me want to curl up into a ball.

Rand Fishkin: They have a whole team who works on it all year round. But yeah, I think you have to be willing to make that sacrifice early on. Recognize that there's a mentality in the United States that says, "I don't want to have to put my finger on the scale to tip it unfairly in one way or another." But when there's historical injustice and historical bias, that's what you have to do in order to get to a fair place. Over time, the scales balance themselves out.

I had this amazing experience recently. I did an event for entrepreneurs, invited a bunch of folks, and failed to pay attention to diversity. When I looked at it, I was like, "Oh my God, we have 14 women and 15 men. Multiple Black women, multiple women of color from other groups, multiple men from diverse backgrounds." I thought, "Oh my gosh, this is so cool. I didn't even have to think about it. It just happened." How cool is that?

Ryan Hanley: Yeah.

Rand Fishkin: That is where you eventually get to. That's where we all ideally want to be, where we're not selecting based on these other traits. But sometimes you got to tilt the scales. I don't want to monopolize the conversation with just this. I know there's other stuff.

Ryan Hanley: No, I find it fascinating. In every aspect of our lives, we can pull out pieces. Frankly, I'm just glad that we found a topic that you're incredibly passionate about. I love it.

Rand Fishkin: That's my job.

Ryan Hanley: One of the things that, going back to your early question about transparency and authenticity, one of the things I have found is that by having conversations like this—which I think for many Americans, for many white dudes, it's uncomfortable. This shit is uncomfortable to talk about. It might even be uncomfortable to listen to. I don't know if some of your listeners are like, "Yeah, this is a little tough to process." I have found that when you dig deep into those uncomfortable conversations, there is incredible value.

When other people are not talking about something, when other people are thinking about something but not talking about it, there is huge amounts of marketing value, content marketing value. People pay attention. It busts through the noise of our usual day-to-day lives and how many Mike Bloomberg ads we're bombarded with. That's all I see now. My mailbox is just filled with Bloomberg ads on YouTube.

Rand Fishkin: Not for long, probably.

Ryan Hanley: My YouTube ads. But it breaks through that barrier. That's another piece of advice. If you know that there are subjects, topics, areas, people that are not being covered in your space, that is a pretty killer way to get an audience.

Rand Fishkin: Yeah, I agree. I want you to feel incredibly comfortable with what you've shared so far because this is a major issue in our industry. This has been a bugaboo of mine. I've tried to use this platform in particular to put as many non-white guys on as possible. We got enough white guys. I love white guys, but we got enough. I want more different people because you find interesting shit out. I know what most white guys know. I'm in that group.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah, right.

Rand Fishkin: I want to know what other people know.

Ryan Hanley: Yeah. Diversity of background often dictates diversity of experience. When you get diversity of experience, you get diversity of perspective, which is so valuable in learning. It's so valuable in a room.

And I know we're running short on time, but this is the thing that drives me nuts. Take a pure capitalistic standpoint on this. Purely capitalistic. If you're racist, sexist, if you're a homophobe, if you're biased against anybody, all you've done is decided to take a market segment out. Cut that out completely. You now can't talk to that group. You've insulated yourself into a group of people who maybe they're repeat purchasers, maybe they're not. Frankly, you've created negative energy in your space and you've created a whole structure of value creators that could potentially be part of your organization who now won't work for you.

If you just want to take all the actual humanity out of the topic, from a capitalistic perspective, to live in 2020 with this type of mentality is bananas to me. It's absolutely bananas.

Rand Fishkin: It's definitely giving your competition an advantage.

Ryan Hanley: Yes. Then layer in actual humanity and everything you've talked about before. But we have just a tiny few minutes together. I actually pitched you on coming on the show because you have a tremendous new tool out that I want to give you the 30 seconds on how I'm using it to put it in context. I'd love you to just talk a little bit about it before we sign off here. That is SparkToro. Everyone who is listening, go to SparkToro.com.

What this is—I'll share with all the agents how I'm using this tool. As I launch my insurance agency, Rogue Risk, one of the market segments that I'm going after is fitness professionals. SparkToro has allowed me to target people who have "fitness" in their profile. It gives me what YouTube channels they're following, what podcasts they're listening to, what other channels they're following. Now I can start to use those from a research perspective and from a targeted YouTube ads perspective to some of these channels that I know a lot of people who I want to go after are watching. I can find ways to add what I'm trying to do for their business into that marketing mix. There's no other single point that I could derive all that information from. I've found SparkToro to be an incredibly valuable tool, especially in the research phase of launching this business. I wanted to give that caveat so people knew what I was talking about. Rand, any additions you want to add?

Rand Fishkin: Yeah. The idea behind this was my sense is the duopoly of Facebook and Google are really expensive. It's hard to show ROI. You spend a ton of money with Facebook advertising, a ton of money with Google search ads. Frankly, where I was seeing a ton of marketers have success was when they looked at alternative channels. "Let me go pitch this podcast to see if I can be a guest on it, or go pitch this event to see if I can be a speaker, or go get a booth at this event, or sponsor this website, pitch a guest post." All these different kinds of tactics. "Let me try and sponsor that podcast or advertise on this. Maybe I can do some influencer marketing." Whatever it is.

But that is so hard if you don't already know what your audience pays attention to. Anytime you're going after a new market segment, what you should be able to do is say, "Go give me all the profiles of people who have public social and web accounts who say that they're an architect in their bio. Then give me a bunch of information about them." There was just no tool to do that. It didn't exist. That's impossible. What would you have to do? You'd have to go survey a thousand architects and try to get them to tell you which podcasts they listen to, which YouTube channels they subscribe to, which social accounts they follow, what websites they visit and share. That takes months of work and it's crazy expensive.

Casey and I, my co-founder, basically decided to build this thing. We crawl tens of millions of web and social profiles—well, billions actually. We aggregate them up. I think we have around 70 to 80 million profiles in our database. You can search those. You can search for "architect in New York." We have, I don't know, 1,700 architects who are in New York in our profile database. We can tell you that 22% of them listen to, share, or follow this particular podcast. 21% follow this other one. 19% follow this next one. 16% follow that one. On down the list.

For a lot of our early customers and beta users, and Ryan, I know you're one of our early customers—first hundred customers, which is awesome—that's been super useful for them to be able to do that market research at the snap of a finger.

Ryan Hanley: Well, man, I want to be respectful of your time and we're over. We just got into so many other topics. I would highly encourage everyone who's listening. SparkToro is a tool that is going to separate many, especially my friends in the industry. If you're doing program business, if you're writing super regionally or nationally on a particular program, a particular industry or a line of business, finding some of the podcasts, some of the YouTube channels that you could partner with and do some targeted advertising into those spaces—that is where I'm extracting incredible value. Being able to find real thought leaders in that space, partner with them, craft a message. There does not exist another platform which pools all this data into one place. It's well worth a look.

Rand, I appreciate you as a person. I appreciate the work you do. I very much appreciate you taking so much time out of your day to share with my audience.

Rand Fishkin: It is my pleasure. Thank you for having me, Ryan. Really appreciate it.

Ryan Hanley: Thank you. Thank you.