Drawing your audience in with well-crafted content
Everyone wants to go viral.
(I’m doing air fingers, I know you can’t see them, but believe me.)
Whether it’s for dancing on TikTok to a new catchy tune or for the perfect Twitter snipe, or a beautifully crafted blog post.
We all dream of the traffic tsunami and the potential that has to lead to cold hard sales.
But is it just a happy accident, or an artful strategy?
Today I am giggly with girlish glee to have Rand Fishkin, the co-founder, and CEO of audience research startup SparkToro, on the show.
He’s going to explain how going viral is much more nuanced than you might think.
And that if you put in the work, you can draw in the masses to your brand with well-crafted content that not only gets attention but warms the wiggly bits of your customers too.
Tune in to learn:
- What viral content is, and how it can be used in your marketing plan
- Which content formats are best for going viral
- Rand’s powerfully simple formula for creating viral content:
- How to hook people in
- How to keep them on the line
- How to sink deep into your audience’s brain
- Rand’s top tip for success with content marketing
Listen to the podcast
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If you like what you’re hearing on The Recipe for SEO Success Show, support the show by taking a few seconds to leave a rating and/or comment on iTunes, SoundCloud, Spotify, or Stitcher. Thanks!
And big thanks to Kate Crocker from the United Kingdom for their lovely review:
“So much amazing information.
This is the only SEO podcast you’ll ever need, from leading guru of SEO goodness, Kate Toon.
There’s a huge amount of reliable, best practice information to help you navigate the way through the fascinating world of SEO. It’s an essential tool in your SEO kit.”
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About Rand Fishkin
He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through his writing, speaking, startups, and his book, Lost and Founder.
When Rand’s not working, he’s usually cooking a fancy meal for the love of his life, author Geraldine DeRuiter.
If you bribe him with great pasta or great cocktails, he’ll spill big tech’s dark secrets.
Fun fact: Rand is currently designing a video game.
Connect with Rand
Useful Resources
- Bros., Lecce: We Eat at The Worst Michelin Starred Restaurant, Ever – Geraldine’s Restaurant post
- Is This a Twitter Thread or a Blog Post? – Rand’s Blog post
- Buzzsumo
Behind the scenes with Rand and Kate
Transcript
Kate Toon:
Today I’m giggly with girlish glee to have Rand Fishkin, the co-founder and CEO of audience research startup, SparkToro, on the show. He’s going to explain how going viral is much more nuanced than you might think, and that if you put in the work, you can draw in the masses to your brand with well-crafted content that not only gets attention but warms the wiggly bits of your customers too.
Kate Toon:
Hello, my name is Kate Toon. I’m the head chef at the Recipe for SEO Success, an online teaching hub for all things search engine optimization and digital marketing. And today, I’m talking with Rand Fishkin. Hello, Rand.
Rand Fishkin:
Hi, Kate. How are you?
Kate Toon:
Oh, very well. It’s lovely to have you on. Rand was the first ever guest on the show. And for those of you who don’t know the story, I didn’t actually have a show, I just wanted to speak to Rand Fishkin, so I pretended I had a podcast. And from there, the Recipe for SEO Success was born, and now we’re up to about a million downloads and Rand’s been on the show several times. So, there you go, you started something. You’re forever starting up things. What do you like?
Rand Fishkin:
It’s like Tom Hanks being back on SNL.
Kate Toon:
There you go. This is it.
Rand Fishkin:
Except I’m not famous, but you are.
Kate Toon:
Well, you are in our world, so let’s take it, let’s take that. And look, we were talking before the show that obviously you are free from the reins of SEO now, you’ve broken out. And today we’re not talking about SEO, so if you tuned in for that, bad luck, turn it off, go and listen to someone else’s podcast. We’re talking about-
Rand Fishkin:
It’s true.
Kate Toon:
Yep.
Rand Fishkin:
Kate, when I got let go/left Moz, I had to sign something saying that I would … It was a non-compete saying I wouldn’t do stuff in SEO world …
Kate Toon:
Oh, there you go.
Rand Fishkin:
… For a number of years. Yep. And then when Moz got acquired last year, I had to sign another one. So I had just gotten out of whatever … You can do SEO things jail for a few months, and then I had to sign another one saying I won’t do it for a few more years.
Kate Toon:
You need a get out of jail free card. Do you miss it? Because I know you still talk about all elements of marketing, but do you miss being such an SEO beast?
Rand Fishkin:
I miss the people. I miss a lot of the lovely social connections that folks like you and I made when we got to hang out in person, and those sorts of things. But no, I think my sense is that I’ve done enough of what I needed to in SEO, and also that you don’t need more middle aged white dudes with beards in SEO. There’s really quite a lot of them.
Kate Toon:
I admit, there are rather a few, aren’t there? Let’s say. I mean, I have considered often growing a beard just to be more part of the club, and it’s happening, but that’s just menopause I think. Anyway, we’re not talking about menopause today, we’re talking about going viral.
Rand Fishkin:
I mean, we could.
Kate Toon:
We could.
Rand Fishkin:
It’s our podcast. We get to choose.
Kate Toon:
Well, yeah, I might have a hot flush. I nearly had a hot flush trying to record that intro. Try saying audience research startup SparkToro fast, that’s your challenge for today. But I’m going to introduce you, I should have done that before we started talking. In case you don’t know who Rand Fishkin is, he is the co-founder and CEO of audience research startup … I still can’t say it, SparkToro. He’s a dedicate … Ugh. Oh my God. I’m flabbergasted. He’s dedicate-
Rand Fishkin:
Or, I’m a digital marketing person. Oh, did you know also … I bet your intro, Kate, does not include the fact that I am now the creative director for a soon to be announced video game project.
Kate Toon:
I was just about to get that. I was going to talk about the pasta and the cocktails, and that you have a way more famous wife than you, who is very cool.
Rand Fishkin:
She’s so famous now.
Kate Toon:
I know. It must be embarrassing for you, really, to be her-
Rand Fishkin:
It is embarrassing. She had a call today with a casting director for some upcoming TV show, and they’re looking for hosts for a travel thing, and she turned them down because she thought the guy was kind of a …
Kate Toon:
A little bit?
Rand Fishkin:
A little aggressive.
Kate Toon:
A little aggressive, yeah. Well, now you’re someone else’s wife rather than her being your creature.
Rand Fishkin:
Okay, I don’t buy into this second wave feminism stuff, but …
Kate Toon:
Oh, whatever. He’s also a-
Rand Fishkin:
I’m absolutely … I’m a post modern feminist, so I think that women and men can hold all roles of all kinds happily.
Kate Toon:
I agree. I do all the gardening, and my ex-husband who I … Why am I getting into this?
Rand Fishkin:
This is the stuff people care about.
Kate Toon:
I was trying to read your bio. He wrote a book called Lost and Founder, which is on my bed, next to Geraldine’s book, which I think is kind of-
Rand Fishkin:
She’s talking about me, not her ex-husband right now.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, he didn’t write a book. What’s your video game about? Let’s just talk about that.
Rand Fishkin:
It is about foraging and cooking in a magical version of Italy.
Kate Toon:
Cool. Is there little characters like Super Mario? Super Rand and Super Geraldine. You have a little hat?
Rand Fishkin:
It’s a little closer to Zelda than Mario.
Kate Toon:
Oh, I like Zelda.
Rand Fishkin:
But yes, there’s definitely lots of little Italian characters.
Kate Toon:
It’d be cool if you could get a bit of Tomb Raider in there as well. I really like Tomb Raider, the grunting. Do you remember? She did a lot of grunting? I don’t know.
Rand Fishkin:
I mean, speaking of not-so-feminist video games, I have a feeling that Tomb Raider doesn’t quite pass the …
Kate Toon:
It doesn’t.
Rand Fishkin:
… The bar.
Kate Toon:
Probably these days. It was a while ago. I must admit, I was young.
Rand Fishkin:
I’ve heard that there have been reboots that are a little more in that direction. Which, I mean, I think this is an interesting challenge for, I think, a lot of companies, is that if you are lost in the past, you may find that your products and services only appeal to a very specific audience.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, the weird thing is I’ve noticed, because my son’s a big gamer now. He’s 12 now, which is terrifying. And he plays Fortnite and a few other ones, judge me if you wish. But him and his friends always choose the female characters to play, because he just says they’re taller and they have better outfits, which I think is awesome.
Rand Fishkin:
This is one of the things that I think is so unfair about being a man, at least in the United States. I think there’s something like one men’s clothing store or maybe it’s one men’s clothing brand for every 17 women’s? So, you just don’t have the fashion choices and options. Granted, society has a whole lot of challenging problems for women in fashion and clothing and how they dress and look too, but I like fashion and I got to go to other countries if I want to step it up.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Get a bit of online stuff going on. For those of you who don’t know, Rand is wearing a kilt and a boob tube during this podcast, because you know-
Rand Fishkin:
What was the second thing I’m wearing?
Kate Toon:
A boob tube.
Kate Toon:
Don’t you know what a boob tube is?
Rand Fishkin:
Boob tube? I thought that was an expression for a television set.
Kate Toon:
No, it’s like a tube which contains your boobs. I can’t believe you-
Rand Fishkin:
Oh, okay. All right. So sort of like a wraparound …
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Well, you would call it crop top, maybe a crop top? I don’t know what you would personally call it.
Rand Fishkin:
Crop top.
Kate Toon:
Is it a crop top? Yeah, maybe.
Rand Fishkin:
I’m not sure that I personally have a word for that, but I’m sure that other Americans have good words for this.
Kate Toon:
No, I was just thinking that this could be another thing that we do, we could do moob tubes. You know that men have male boobs? We could do moob tubes, I think they’d be super comfortable. Look, I hope this podcast’s going to go viral because it’s so random. Did you see what a great segue that was back into the topic?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, yeah. I strongly suspect that with an introduction like this, we are keeping listeners riveted at the edge of their seats.
Kate Toon:
We sure are. Should we try and talk about what we’re meant to talk about? Let’s do it.
Rand Fishkin:
I would love that too.
Kate Toon:
What exactly does it mean for content to go viral? I mean, it’s a bit of a buzz phrase, isn’t it? Is it more than three people looking at your post?
Rand Fishkin:
Well, so I think that virality just means that it is … Now that we’re all very familiar with how viruses spread, it simply means that there is some degree of spread beyond you or your brand pushing the message, pushing the content out there. So meaning I share something with my audience, and then my audience picks it up and runs with it and helps spread it to other people in much the same way that viruses are spread. The frustration and challenge for me is I have a whole bunch of issues with the phrasing and the concept.
Rand Fishkin:
One is, I think that the value of virality is dramatically overrated. So, having a million people visit a blog post might be far less helpful for your business than having 20 people visit your product page.
Kate Toon:
Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
That’s a strange thing, right? Because I think that the internet, especially social media and the rankings, the ratings, the like counts, the share counts, they have trained us to believe that visits and engagement are somehow valuable of their own accord, and this simply isn’t the case. I also-
Kate Toon:
It’s that huge dopamine thing as well, of just being a popular human, which can completely throw you off. Like, “I’ve done well, look at all these people patting my bottom.” The fact that I’m essentially being a bit of a busy fool here, not making any money, is a different matter.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. I think that there can be reasonable business goals that tie to broad, top level awareness. But very frequently, what I see is marketers conflating the concept of, “Hey, let’s produce viral or viral potential content, and then we’re going to measure through our analytics how many sales or leads we got through our content.” And those things are just not connected at all. If your goal is, “we want top level branding, exclusively, all we want is people to associate our brand name with something that’s familiar to them, they haven’t heard of us before, we want them to have heard of us one or two times,” great. Viral content is probably a reasonable goal to go after, as long as you can carefully tie your brand to that virality.
Rand Fishkin:
Again, what one of the other problems that people have is very frequently you’ll see, and I’ve experienced this plenty myself, viral pieces of content that get associated not with the brand, but just the concept overall.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Oh yeah, this is it. I mean, I’ve had two pieces of content that went vaguely viral. One was a meme about cookies, and it had movie stars retweeting it, but it was utterly useless. It wasn’t anything about me being a copywriter. And another was a post that I wrote about stupid things that people do on Facebook, which was on my sites, and I was able to internal link to lots of things and serve my own ads. And that one, I could see a deeper connection between me and the content and the conversion. But we’re talking about the metrics. So if we’re saying that likes aren’t really the thing, and shares aren’t, what are the metrics that we need to consider when we’re going viral? Which ones count and which ones don’t count?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. I think this again goes back to the goals that you have. So, for example, I think that it is very reasonable to say, “Hey, I am in a B2B profession, and for my future career and for my business and for my newsletter and all these kinds of things that might benefit me now and in the future, it would be extremely valuable if I were to get a lot of more new followers on Twitter and LinkedIn.” Which are very good B2B channels, lots of engagement on both of those from those audiences. Well, a set of even minorly viral content on both of those is likely to bring you exactly what you want. Lots of new followers, lots of new people who’ve seen your content, people who associate you with having shared something useful to them in the past, and might be more tempted to follow you or sign up for your email newsletter, whatever it is. That is a great … I have a business goal and I have tied my viral and content and social goals to that business goal directly and I can see the impact.
Rand Fishkin:
If however, you make the mistake of something like, “Hey, I am working in a company and we’re selling science fiction books, and I wrote a viral blog post about dumb things people do on Facebook.” Are many of them going to be science fiction fans? Probably not. Even if they are, what are the odds that they see that, and then recognise that my brand is associated with sci-fi books and then go to some book page and then buy a book from a source or subscribe to our email newsletter? Very low again. So, the core concept here is just tying those business goals and outcomes to some reasonable thing that you’re doing with virality, viral content.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Another thought is … We’ve had one of our Instagram people came on, a lady called Cherie Clonan and she talked about the train, the algorithm, that if you do have this piece of viral content, while it, in and of itself, may not generate, tick off business goals, it gets you in front of so many people that the next thing you post will be served to more people. So say you post something dumb, get a lot of likes, and then the next thing is more business related, and the people who saw the dumb thing are more inclined to see this. So you kind of can have a viral or a popular, non-popular, a popular, non-popular. Do you subscribe to that? Do you think that works?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. Actually, Kate, I wrote a blog post about this last week called Should this Be A Blog Post or A Tweet Thread?
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I saw that. Yes, yes. That’s kind of why I asked the question. Yeah.
Rand Fishkin:
And the core concept behind this is basically that if you want to optimise for virality, native platform content is going to perform better. So, native video on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, what have you, is going to work far better than a YouTube link. It is almost certainly the case that if you take a blog post and you boil it down to seven or eight tweets, and you put them in a thread, that’ll perform better. If you take a few paragraph summary of it and you post that to LinkedIn, that’ll perform better than the LinkedIn. And the frustrating part of course, is it is very difficult to directly monetize or turn into email subscribers, or whatever, be able to do remarketing or advertising or cookie dropping or whatever it is that you’re going to do on your own site on any of those platforms.
Rand Fishkin:
And so, I do exactly what you do. And so does Amanda, who’s SparkToro’s VP of marketing. She does a lot of viral content on social media, native, it is often not directly tied to SparkToro’s business goals, but it earns her a lot of engagement, a lot of new followers, a lot of email subscribers, and then she leverages all of that new found attention and subscriptions, and people paying attention to her, to drive traffic to SparkToro later on via another post or a follow up or a piece of content that ties to the viral tweet, et cetera.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Because I mean, I guess, generally viral content that has a big salesy call to action at the bottom doesn’t work. So you have to kind of disassociate that. But one of the things I remember you saying at one of the conferences I saw you at was that you’d rather have one person on your email list than a thousand followers on Instagram. So at the end of the day, we’re always trying to lure them away from the platform at some point. We’re maybe not doing it in the viral post, but we do it in the next post. Yes?
Rand Fishkin:
Yes, that’s absolutely right, and I think that still holds up. You can get value from social followers, it’s not to say that you can’t, but the value of an email address in your contact list, someone who’s said, “I like what you are making, and I want to subscribe to you directly,” it’s just vastly, vastly, higher. I think email open rates have been stable for almost 20 years now, hovering between 20 and 25%. And that’s not open rates for a personal email, which are much higher. That’s open rates for newsletters and promotions and those kinds of things. If you can get a 20% open rate from an email newsletter, and you’re getting a 0.02% view rate, not engagement, but view rate, on Facebook or Twitter, you can see why I’m saying it’s kind of a thousand to one.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. No, I love that. I requote that all the time and pretend that I made that quote up, just so you know.
Rand Fishkin:
Actually, I stole it from you several years before you said it. It’s just a time continuum problem.
Kate Toon:
Okay, awesome. Yeah, fantastic. We can all share it. We can have it. So, I mean, you’re saying here that there kind of is a strategy, and we’re going to talk about a few steps that can help inform and make it a bit more nuanced than just throwing something against the wall and see if it sticks. Because to be honest, that seems to be a lot of it. It’s hit or miss. It’s like an agency coming to say to you, “I can guarantee you number one rankings,” “I can guarantee you this post is going to go viral.” It’s a combination of elements, isn’t it? And that velocity at the beginning. Do you think that it’s … I guess you’re going to tell me yes, but do you think it’s something you can plan for or is it pot luck? And then you make the most of the ones that work?
Rand Fishkin:
Let’s see. So, the folks I think who are best in the world at consistently creating viral content still have a hit rate of less than 10%. Of 10 pieces that they produce that they have high confidence will do extraordinarily well on the public web, one in 10, oftentimes less than that, do. And that is true whether we’re talking about content agencies or individuals in content creation roles. And I think that percentage is actually pretty amazing. If you can get to a point where one in 10 of your pieces is hitting hundreds of thousands to millions of people, and getting that kind of viewership, that’s extraordinary, not to be discounted.
Rand Fishkin:
However, let’s also look at the average, the norms, which I think are that for everyone who is trying to produce viral content, it’s a little bit like the millions of people in the greater Los Angeles area who are trying to become professional actors. The odds are so ludicrously against you that you’d be better playing roulette at a casino. And as a result, I think that for 99% of businesses, the right thing to do is not to design and plan for virality, but to design and plan for is this something that will resonate with my audience and the people that I can reach? And how could I best promote it step by step, person by person, source of influence by source of influence, over long periods of time? And rather than going to the roulette wheel at the casino, I am investing in the long term stock market. I’m putting money into a mutual fund. And I think that the correlation between those two kinds of gambling actually works really well.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, you used to talk a lot about amplifying content. You invest time in creating the content, but you do it with who’s going to amplify this content in mind. And you can be slightly contrived about that, you can have your six degrees of Kevin Bacon, your close circle who you know will like and share it. And you say, “Hey,” something I do a lot in my Facebook groups is say, “I’m going to write a post about this. Are you all interested?” And then when it goes live, it gets that immediate swell, which the algorithm seems to pick up on, and then off it starts petering out. So, I think there are some steps you can do to manufacture virality. What do you think are the steps, if you were to take it in this kind of cynical way, how could you give yourself the best chance of going viral or winning the roulette?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. Yeah. So, I think that it starts with the design of the content itself. You are attempting to position your content in a way that elicits the right kind of emotional response that is likely to generate a, “Hey, you should see this too.” And there are a variety of emotions that do this well. The video of the baby hippopotamus being fed, it triggers a kind of emotion, a sort of soft spot that we all have in our hearts, and gets its traction that way. This is not going to work very well with most B2B content. There are a million other types of ways you can position content, but I think that it pays to understand your field very well, it pays to understand those people and publications and sources of influence that can spread the content you’re creating, and it then pays to have a, what I’d call, just sort of a hell of a headline.
Rand Fishkin:
I talk about this model quite a bit for content both on your own website and in your newsletter, and on all your publication channels, social and otherwise, of hook, line, and sinker. It’s easy to say, it’s easy to remember, people have heard the phrase before. Basically what it means is that the headline creates a compelling hook that elicits emotion, and then the line draws you in. So, the very first image that you see, the subheader, the first paragraph or two, whatever it is, the first 10, 15 seconds of a video, the first few seconds of a podcast, they draw you in. They should be a line that keeps you reading, keeps you engaged.
Rand Fishkin:
And then the sinker is some sort of element that is usually eliciting surprise or reinforcement of existing beliefs, or just a deep emotional resonance. And usually you get to that somewhere between halfway to two thirds of the piece’s completion, whether that’s a video or a social post. If we’re talking about a tweet, it could be character 120. It’s that sort of thing. But the fundamental concept behind it is just that you’re designing the content in a way that you give yourself the best odds of doing this. And in viral content, the work that you create is the product, and that is a huge percent of the opportunity that you’ve got. You can see this all the time through social media, that publications and people who have never gone viral before stumble on the formula. You don’t have to have a big audience in order to have a viral piece.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, for me as a copywriter, it begs of some kind of conversion copywriting ideas around you start with a problem, you agitate that problem, you provide the solution. With this it could be problem agitates story. I think story works really well in viral content.
Rand Fishkin:
Even data works wonderfully well, narrative.
Kate Toon:
Narrative. And AIDA. The other one, Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. And the action isn’t necessarily, “Come buy our thing.” It could be, “How do you feel?” “Has this happened to you?” Or, “What do you think?” Even just a simple question at the end of viral content is … I dramatically notice the difference when I write a whole post on Instagram and nothing happens, and I just add, what do you think at the end. And it gives people permission to come back. And it’s so silly. I often have to go back to my post and just write that in, because I am writing it to get … I’m not just trying to pump out my view from a plinth. I do want to know what people are saying. I want them to come back to me. So yeah, I love that there’s a marriage there. Similar to conversion copywriting, that there’s a structure. I like that.
Kate Toon:
But the emotion, I think, is the biggest thing. And when it comes to that, there’s different strategies. You can play on people’s desires, their preconceived beliefs, their fears. And unfortunately, the fear one works very well. People are terrified of not having, and that’s a bigger deal to them than having. FOMO is bigger than JOMO, joy of missing out. I mean, we don’t want to be playing into the worst, most negative parts, but do you find that negative posts works for more virality than positives? Snarky works better than sweet?
Rand Fishkin:
It’s audience dependent. Audience dependent, topic dependent, and …
Kate Toon:
Channel dependent, I guess. Twitter loves some snark.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. So, as an example, it’s extremely rare to see negative content on Instagram do well. The channel’s just not built for it. It’s not made for that type of work for some reason. Visual and photography and art and illustration and all those kinds of things, it just doesn’t tend to do well. On Twitter, however, negative content can do extraordinarily well on many news and politics related things, things that trigger fear, anger, apprehension, surprise. These are the emotional responses that tend to get shares, especially if they conform to a preexisting belief. So, I have some negative association with some group and this post shows that group doing this negative thing that I have always believed them to be guilty of. And so, sharing is guaranteed.
Rand Fishkin:
And then, depending on the groups that we’re talking about, there’s millions of highly invested parties and trillions of dollars that are pouring into amplifying that. And what’s called brigading those sorts of things. Can businesses play on this? Not so much. Most businesses, unless they’re in specifically the news field, should probably stay away from that. They’re more likely to get harmed than helped.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I mean, I noticed on LinkedIn, I mean, LinkedIn obviously used to be as dry as a Weetabix. You probably don’t know what Weetabix is. Do you have Weetabix?
Rand Fishkin:
We have Weetabix. Oh yeah.
Kate Toon:
No boobtube, but you do have weetabix
Rand Fishkin:
My grandmother’s house in New Jersey, I had Weetabix in the morning. Hated it as a 12 year old.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, okay, good. So, LinkedIn’s super dry, and I find LinkedIn hilarious, so I am very snarky on LinkedIn and very sarcastic. Because the stories are always like, “I was living in a bin and then I decided to manufacture this hedgehog jumper, and look at me now,” and there’s someone doing, “Oh, I’m so surprised that I was featured in this article,” even though we all know you paid to be featured. So, LinkedIn is a funny one, because that’s where a lot of B2B people play, but I don’t think you necessarily need to be political or even witty. You can be knowing. Like if you’re an accountant, you can be like, “Oh, this time of year, end of year tax, it’s a real pain in the bum, isn’t it?” And I mean, of course it’s not the most witty or original content, but you’re going to get lots of other … Probably your peers more than your customers going, “Gosh, yes. I’m struggling too.” And showing a little bit of vulnerability can really help with viral content as well. It doesn’t all have to be witty dancing reels and baby hippos. It can be here’s a struggle I’m having, are you having this struggle? That seems to work well for me. It’s always a struggle.
Rand Fishkin:
So often what tends to -There’s a variety of formulas that work really well, but the LinkedIn … I don’t know, people kind of call it the struggle porn thing. It’s sort of hustle porn meets struggle porn.
Kate Toon:
Hustle porn, yep.
Rand Fishkin:
And I find that you can do that in a relatively ethical and still useful way. So in your accountant example, you might say, “Last month I did the taxes for someone who made six figures in cryptocurrency investing, and I messed it up, and they were going to get a huge tax penalty if I had submitted it. I feel like I’m not the only one, let me walk you through how the United States’ new tax code is treating crypto investments.” Well, you’ve done a bunch of the … I mean personally, Kate, I kind of hate the whole crypto trend, but I do admit that many, many people are making money with it and have made money with it, and many people are confused about the tax code around it, and accountants are struggling with this. And when we talked to our tax accountant she’s like, “Okay, you don’t own any NFTs, you don’t own any crypto.” Right? All that kind of stuff. Because it’s a big challenge for a lot of people. And because it’s relatively new and popular, there’s a lot more attention going to it. And so the algorithm is going to bias it up, and lots of people who are interested are going to buy- You get the idea, right? So you can play that, whatever hustle porn, struggle porn, game, in useful, valuable ways that are authentic and still have high potential.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I think you don’t have to tell all your sad stories online, you kind of have to mix it up. But I love hustle porn. I’m going to take that one. So I love your structure-
Rand Fishkin:
I do not love hustle porn.
Kate Toon:
No, I don’t, really. You can spot it a mile away on LinkedIn now, and sometimes they’re hilarious. So I love hook, line, and sinker. I think that’s fantastic, and we talked about different structures and playing on different types of emotion. But once they’ve read the article, they’ve watched the baby hippo in the video, how do you get it to sink into their brain? How do you get them to take action? We haven’t got a call to action, how do you get them to do something?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, I think that this is where we go back to the very start in our business goal. So when we’ve structured the content, if it is the baby hippo, it better be the case that our only goal was I want this to be one of the seven times you’ve heard of our brand in the next 90 days. And that’s my entire goal. All I want is for you to see … Whatever it is. I want you to remember the name SparkToro, and to think, “Oh yeah, that colourful S logo. Okay.” I have some association with that. And then maybe next time they come, they’ll associate it with audience research or whatever it is. The next time, right. The goal of a lot of marketing, especially the top of the funnel, is create an association in the mind of your potential customer between the problem that you solve and your company. That’s it. That’s the entire playbook. And you can do that with viral content that has almost no call to action whatsoever. The only thing I wanted you to do was engage with it.
Rand Fishkin:
Geraldine, my wife, who you were talking about recently, who’s a humorist and James Beard award winning writer and blah, blah, blah. She wrote a blog post. It was a restaurant review of a bad experience we had at a very expensive restaurant in the south of Italy. She didn’t write about the 40 experiences that we had that were all amazing, but that particular … I’m the one who chose the restaurant, and so I feel very guilty about this, Kate. But that blog post got two million visits, crashed her site a bunch of times, was shared by tonnes of notable people. And I think the food critic for the New York Times called Geraldine the best living food writer. It was ridiculous. It’s all just crazy, crazy stuff that happened. But there was no call to action. I mean, other than probably you shouldn’t go spend 1,200 euros at this restaurant. That’s the call to action. Don’t go here, it’s not good. The value, however, came in all of the follow up things that happened. So in people’s mind, Geraldine cemented her position, especially after the previous viral piece, that she is this very high quality, humorous writer about food and travel, and maybe they should buy her next book.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. I bet she was thanking you for choosing that funny restaurant afterwards. I mean, gosh, you’ll get to choose them all from now on. I love that. So you’re trying to create an association, and there’s a whole part of Google’s algorithm which is all around that expertise, authority, and the trust. And for me, often what I post is not even necessarily to create an association. It’s to make people like you a little bit, trust you, find you … Because a lot of the posts I share are little daft stories about what’s happening in my day, and I see people following them, liking them. And I’m not sure that at first they know what I do. They just like the post. And then later on I slowly seed in, oh yeah, I’m a copywriter, whatever. It’s very gentle. It’s like going up to someone at a networking event, immediately shoving your business card in their face and saying, “I’m an accountant.” Or telling them a funny story, and then they actually say, “Hey, what do you do?”
Rand Fishkin:
What do you do? Yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, that’s what you want.
Rand Fishkin:
A million times better. So it’s this sort of drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, before you jump in the pool.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, exactly.
Rand Fishkin:
And I think that’s exactly the way you want to play a lot of these things, which is why it’s not a bad thing that nine out of 10 or 99 out of a hundred of the pieces of content that you’ll create won’t be viral. It is fine. That is okay. In fact, I think it is much easier to reach a million people by having a thousand posts or 10,000 posts than it is to reach a million people with one post, and I think it’s more effective too.
Kate Toon:
It’s long tail viralness. I keep bringing it back to SEO. I can’t help it.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah. No, this is the marketing flywheel. So you’re slowly turning the flywheel. I produce something, I amplify it, I earn an audience, I bring people back, I get more engagement, I hopefully help my algorithmic and subscriber success, and then I do it again and again and again. And over time it looks like, gosh, how did Whiteboard Friday become such a hit? Or how did SparkToro become successful? Or how did Kate Toon’s podcast get a million downloads? And it wasn’t one episode, it was not one big viral smashing success. It was turning the flywheel over and over again, hopefully getting easier over time and getting better at it.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. Someone came on my course the other day, and they’d been following me for 10 years. 10 years. And she said, “Eventually you just wore me down. And I just thought I’m just going to buy something.” And I was like, “That’s brilliant.” It was like slow torture, until she’s just like, “Oh God, I’ll just buy your thing.” So yeah, that’s a way.
Kate Toon:
Hey look, before we come to our final tip, we’ve got a question from Ros Smith, who’s a member of my Digital Masterchefs group. She has a great business called Backyard Chickens. I think chickens could be super viral. She said, “Is it better to produce something mainstream to go viral, but not necessarily bring targeted traffic, or something niche that fits more with your brand, but will get less overall traffic?” So, is it good to do mainstream, more traffic, or niche and less traffic?
Rand Fishkin:
I think it depends on the type of business that you are. If you are serving a very large market, so if you say, “Oh, I am targeting women in the United States between 25 and 40 years old.” Okay, wow. That audience is massive. You should go after the broadest possible impact approach. On the flip side, if you’re selling backyard chickens, I don’t think most consumers, most businesses, most anyone are your audience at all. I would very much go for niche. I would try and get a hundred visitors, I would never go after a million. I just don’t think that’s what you do for your business. It’s fun, and maybe interesting in the way that TikTok videos are interesting, but yeah …
Rand Fishkin:
Kate, I mean, here’s a great example. A TikTok influencer, someone who’s in the marketing universe. I don’t know her personally, but she’s very well followed, she has hundreds of thousands … I don’t remember. 800,000 some odd followers on TikTok, and she did a video all about SparkToro. It was a good video. I watched it, I thought she did a great job. She basically is like, “Oh, here’s the secret to this thing.” And then she jumps into the tool and she walks through how to get this data. And it was watched half a million times? It was incredible. It seems like a huge viral success. It is probably the biggest piece of viral content that’s ever been specifically about SparkToro’s tool.
Rand Fishkin:
And it was basically a nightmare for Casey and I, because what happened was hundreds of thousands of people from TikTok, people who wanted to be marketers, came to our site, signed up with fake email addresses, like fuckyousparktoro@gmail.com, and then were just blasting the site with traffic. Virtually none of them … I think we had something in the range of 20,000 extra signups, and we basically closed down new signups for a little while to get through this spam brigade, because not a single person signed up for a paid account. It was just a support and technical nightmare.
Rand Fishkin:
So, what ended up happening is we were backyard chickens, and we targeted everyone. Accidentally. We went too broad. Not intentionally, but still, problem, right? This viral content thing can be … You can do exactly what you think is the best thing ever, and sometimes it just doesn’t bring the right audience. The TikTok marketing audience is not our audience. I think it might be great for another more influencer centric platform, but they’re not what SparkToro is looking for. And so, this mismatch created kind of a bad time.
Kate Toon:
Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, I think with Ros, people who have chickens like seeing chickens. There’s a slight second degree of Kevin Bacon, where people might think they want a chicken, but they’re not sure, so then you have to show them really cute chickens. But yeah, I think I would go niche. And I think that’s the problem, a lot of brands come to me or they came to me when I was copywriter, and their target audience was anybody with a pulse and a credit card. And it’s like, well, that’s going to cause you issues long term, because you’re not going to be able to serve those people, so I think niche might be best for you. But thank you Ros for your question, and we look forward to seeing your chickens.
Kate Toon:
Well look, we’re going to finish up. Although I could talk to you all day, you obviously have better things to do, including your computer game. So look, one final tip. Let’s sum up this advice. I want to go viral, Rand, how do I do it? One final tip for me.
Rand Fishkin:
One final tip. Okay. If you want the very easiest path to go viral, my strongest suggestion is that you look in fields that are similar to your own, but not directly competitive. If you’re in backyard chickens, I might look at other things in farming and agriculture and whatever, growing flowers in your backyard. I might look at things that have gone viral in the world of …
Kate Toon:
Guinea pigs?
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah, yeah. Pigs and cows. Other stuff, I might look at home improvement stuff, I might look at ecological stuff that’s got … So sort of adjacent fields, but not exactly your field. And I would look in things like Google News, I would look in … What do you call it? Google Discover, if you have that. Or I think iPhone, Apple has a competitor there, Apple News. And I would probably look in a tool like BuzzSumo for posts that might contain those words that have done very well on Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn and Reddit. You can search Reddit directly. I would look for those, and then I would find five or six formulas that work consistently well in these similar and adjacent fields, and then I would take the formula, try and boil it down to its essence, copy the formula, and apply it to your own content. This is not foolproof, but it is probably the best way I can give you to shorthand, shortcut getting to a viral piece of content.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. So piggybacking ideas that have worked in similar industries, and then either replicating them or turning them completely on their head. I often find taking something that’s been successful and doing, not a pastiche, necessarily, but doing a different interpretation.
Rand Fishkin:
A shuffle, yeah.
Kate Toon:
Yes. If you want to see something ridiculous, I did my first dancing reel. I am ashamed of it, but one of the things that all entrepreneur types do when they open their membership is they do a wall of post-it notes with the name of the people who’ve signed up. It’s a thing, Rand. It’s a thing.
Rand Fishkin:
Yeah.
Kate Toon:
So instead of doing that, I stuck them to my body and danced around my office. It’s mortifying, but you got to try these things. And its slipped down the feed now, no one will ever see it again. So, it worked quite well.
Rand Fishkin:
You know what I like? So what I like about the approach of being yourself and being a human being is I feel like it does two things for you. One, it attracts the kind of people that you want to attract. People who are like, “I love the humility and doesn’t take herself too seriously and is willing to poke fun at this industry.” I mean, these are all things that resonate with me, which is why I’m married to Geraldine, and friends with you. We’re in a world together. But even better, or at least just as good, it helps push away the people you don’t want. The hustle porn, “I take myself really seriously” bros who have that on their wall and are insulted by you dance around.
Kate Toon:
I mean, it’s people who wear pencil skirts. That’s my non audience. There’s a venn diagram of people who wear pencil skirts, people who don’t wear pencil skirts. That’s my people.
Rand Fishkin:
So, I think that there’s actually a lot of value in taking a strong position, in being a human being that is relatable and identifiable, that’s not trying to appeal to everyone with a pulse, that is very specific. The value there is you will build for yourself an audience that cares about you, the human being, and wants to help you, the human being, and is much more likely to subscribe and engage and follow and amplify all the things that you do in the future.
Kate Toon:
Yep. Well, that was a beautiful end quote. Thank you, you’re a pro. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. It’s always a pleasure. You do know I’ll probably be harassing you in a couple of years from now, and asking you to do it all over again.
Rand Fishkin:
I hope you do. I mean, I hope that we get to visit before then. I think this pandemic-
Kate Toon:
Nearly over, maybe.
Rand Fishkin:
If we’re very lucky, might be winding down a little bit.
Kate Toon:
Yeah. You did threaten to come to Australia, so I do think that should happen at some point.
Rand Fishkin:
Someday. I’m dying to go. I just spent a few weeks in Costa Rica, and I was very much reminded of my time in Australia. We spent some time in the tropical rainforest up in Queensland, and it was just incredible. So yes, have to come back for a visit. Likewise, you should make your way to Seattle in either July or August. Every other month kind of sucks here, but those two are great.
Kate Toon:
I’d love to. Gosh, I can’t wait to travel again. I’m so excited when it all kicks up again. Well, look, thank you again. Give my love to Geraldine.
Rand Fishkin:
I will do. And thank you for having me, Kate. Great to be here.
Kate Toon:
Thanks a lot, Rand.
Kate Toon:
So there you go, just another lovely episode with Rand. Gosh, what a smart guy, I love talking to him. I do get a bit kind of giggly because he was like the first person I ever followed in SEO, and he has always been so kind to me and to the show. So thank you very much Rand, and sorry to the listeners if I sounded a bit like a giggling teenager.
Kate Toon:
We’re going to finish the show with a shout out to one of our lovely listeners, Kate Crocker. Amazing legal copywriter. If you want to find her, Google her. She’s written, “So much amazing information. This is the only SEO podcast you’ll ever need from our leading guru of SEO goodness, Kate Toon.” Thank you very much, Kate. All Kates are awesome.
Kate Toon:
So, I’m going to finish off there. If you like the show, please don’t forget to leave five-star rating view on iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you heard it. You’ll help others find the show and learn more about the lovely world of SEO and digital marketing. You can head to the show notes where I am going to include a link to Geraldine’s blog. It is amazing. And to some of Rand’s recent posts where he talked about should this be a Twitter post or a blog post. All of his content is fab, so check it out. And until next time, happy SEO-ing. Okay, bye!
