Find the Right Audience

As the CEO of Sparktoro, Rand Fishkin challenges conventional thinking about market research. His message: focusing solely on current customers leaves money on the table.

Through real examples from businesses like dental equipment manufacturers, Fishkin shows how audience patterns reveal unexpected opportunities. While most
companies chase broad social media exposure or search ads, deeper research often uncovers small but powerful channels their ideal audience already trusts.

The conversation explores Fishkin's "modern binder" concept - a digital version of how 1960s Madison Avenue agencies tracked media consumption. Today's fragmented landscape makes this harder but more valuable. Tools like SparkToro help map where potential customers spend time online.

Fishkin shares a surprising insight about timing: most organizations only need to refresh their audience research every six months to a year, unless changing markets or objectives. The key is having resources ready to act on what you learn.

Through stories of successful implementations, Fishkin demonstrates how small, targeted outreach often outperforms broad campaigns. One agency found tremendous success reaching niche newsletter audiences that larger competitors overlooked.

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If you're doing customer research, you will only ever understand the people who have already bought from you. You'll have this massive blind spot of people who might be perfect customers for us, but we've never talked to them. - Rand Fishkin

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

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Find Hidden Sales Channels: See how uncovering smaller, targeted outlets brings better returns than chasing mainstream platforms.

Save Marketing Budget: Learn when and how often to conduct research, preventing waste on unnecessary studies.

Spot Market Shifts: Understand how tracking broader audiences helps anticipate changes before competitors notice.

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Checkout Rand's amazing book!

Learn more about SparkToro!

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More About Today's Guest, Rand Fishkin

SparkToro cofounder, author of Lost and Founder, husband to @theeverywhereist, feminist, pasta-based life form

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Rand began his career in 2000 as a web designer at his mother's marketing firm after dropping out of the University of Washington. In 2004, he launched the SEOmoz blog which quickly evolved into Moz, a leading resource for search marketers. By 2014, as CEO, he had expanded Moz to over 130 employees, $30M+ in revenue, and an annual traffic of 30M+ visitors. Rand co-founded Inbound.org and later embarked on a new venture with SparkToro in 2018. He's authored and contributed to several notable publications, and despite his vast professional achievements, he holds his marriage to Geraldine DeRuiter and mentions in her book, "All Over the Place," closest to his heart.

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Key Takeaways

• Look Beyond Buyers - Study whole audiences, not just current customers. Understanding potential buyers reveals fresh opportunities others miss.

• Act on Insights - Only conduct research when ready to use findings. Having resources to implement changes matters more than constant data gathering.

• Start Small But Focused - Target specific channels where ideal audiences gather. Small, focused efforts often work better than broad campaigns.

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A Transcription of The Talk

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Mark Drager: So Rand, every guest and this isn't a lie, every guest we've had on the podcast when we're talking about how to sell more, they will say you got to know your customers, you are the master. I'm going to say you are the master people know you because they know you from all of your past and SEO, your past with Moz. Now with SparkToro, you like literally lead a community of people who spend all day every day as marketers as salespeople trying to crack this code. How do we learn more about our customers? Help us understand this challenge we all have.

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Rand Fishkin: I'm happy to do that. I also want to clarify something right at the outset, Mark, which is SparkToro, and what I do, focuses on something called audience research, which absolutely includes customer research but is not limited to it. And these two different groups, and the understanding that people have or don't have of them, is actually a huge thing that kills a lot of their research. So if your goal is, "I want to attract more customers to my business, I want to influence people who might become customers to actually take the leap and try our product or adopt what we're doing or join our conference or event or donate to our nonprofit, whatever it is, you are trying to reach an audience of people, not all of whom are customers. And if you're doing customer research, you will only ever understand the people who have already bought from you, who've already adopted the thing that you're doing. And you will have this massive, ugly, glaring blind spot that no one will talk about in your organization of people who might be perfect customers for us. But we've never talked to them. And we don't know anything about them. And we're not sure why they didn't become customers. So I am a proponent of customer research, absolutely. But also audience research. Because if you understand your audience, you can craft products that solve their problems, and potentially increase the number of customers you might get and the happiness that those customers might have.

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Mark Drager: Oh, my goodness, we used to do this thing where we would try to break down with our clients. And we would say, "Okay, who are the people who no matter what you do, will never move forward with you. And let's just ignore those people, please, please, let's just ignore these people, they're never gonna move forward with you. Now let's look at the people who will move forward with you just because you're in the right place at the right time, or they love you or they have an affinity to you, or you fit the perfect thing. Those are hopefully your repeat customers. Those are the people giving you referrals. Those are the people that your business is built on. But while it's nice to get more of those people, what about all these people in the middle, the messy middle, the people on the fence, the people who are indifferent, the people who don't know the people who don't care, they're unaware, I've never heard anyone articulated the way that you just have, which is we spend a lot of time focused on the people who buy, but we know why they buy. And we just need to do more of it. But there's a huge opportunity in attracting more of the people who don't buy.

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Rand Fishkin: Right, generally speaking, this is quite true.

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Mark Drager: I mean, there's some organizations who they just want to replicate the few buyers that they already have, they don't care about broadening their customer base. And that's fine. But I would say for the majority of organizations, especially organizations that are not purely one to one sales driven, they have like a marketing function that is very much go out and attract a community of people to our content, and our email newsletter and our videos and our podcasting and our events. And come see us speak on stages. And you know, subscribe to our product updates, email or try the free version of our tool before you try the paid one. All of those groups that are not purely, "Hey, we're doing outreach, we're trying to find sales targets, we're just trying to get SQL and then convert them to buyers." Those people really, really should care about audience research, in addition to and sometimes even beyond customer research.

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Rand Fishkin: So how should we then approach audience research, and I will, I will be totally transparent with my audience. Rand is the CEO and co-founder of SparkToro, a company that helps people do this. And we use this in our agency. So I'm asking these kind of leading questions. But I've also been lucky enough sometimes to email you directly, which is something I love about you that I can email you and be like, "Hey, I'm running into this issue with this market research." And like, I don't know, I'm not saying you do this for everyone. I don't know. But but you literally, I do. I do it for everybody. Okay, great. You wrote back eight minutes later with like, "Oh, Mark, here's, here's the best way to approach this. And I was like, This is amazing. But how should we? I mean, again, you've built a company on audience research, how should we be looking at it? How should we be doing it? How should we approach this?

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I'm going to do something that no venture-backed CEO would ever do. And that is say, most people don't need audience research all the time. You really don't. You only need it sometimes. And I would argue you should only do it when you actually have the resources to solve the problems that you will discover from doing it.

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Mark Drager: You don't want to pull a grenade pin out, throw the grenade and blow everything up and then not figure out how to put it back together again.

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Rand Fishkin: I mean, and I also don't want people paying for our product or anybody else's unless they are actually going to do something positive for their company with the work that they do. Right? Like, it's just, it's mind-boggling to me how many businesses are sort of like, you know, I was talking to a friend of mine about like Netflix and Hulu, and Amazon Prime and Max and all these subscriptions, right? And I'm a subscriber to all of these services because I can't find every show that I want to watch on every single one. And I'm sure they all know this, right? But you know, it'd be so nice, Mark, can you imagine this, imagine this, Hulu sends you an email, and they say, "Hey, you didn't watch anything on our network last month, last billing period. So we're going to give you a credit to next month's, you would never quit, you would be like, Oh, my God, I who's the greatest, or Netflix or whoever, right? Whoever did that for you, you would think that is such a kind thought that they could give you half your money back, they could give you a $4 credit. And you would be over the moon for that. I think all businesses should work this way. And so even though I'm going to talk about SparkToro, what I want you to do is only use the paid, I mean, you can use the free version to your heart's content, right, because it doesn't cost you anything, but only use the paid version of our tool or any other tool or you know, work with a survey firm or hire a customer research expert, all things I'm sure we're going to talk about. And I would only do those things, if the problem is pernicious enough and pervasive enough that you really desperately need to solve it, it sits at like the top of your organization's priorities. And you have the resources to take the information that you learn, right, let's say, let's say you go to SparkToro, you do a bunch of research about your customers, your audience, and you find that they pay attention to these 10 YouTube channels, and these 50 websites and these 30 social accounts, and they have these demographics, and they talk about these things online, if you're not going to actually change your marketing, if you're not going to go and buy some Google ads on those YouTube channels, or reach out to those YouTubers and see if you can be a guest or do some, you know, content marketing team up Co-Op with some of those websites or buy ads on their site. If you're not going to do any of those things. Why bother? Why bother learning? So if it's a big problem, go do it. Fantastic. If it's not, I would I would put it lower on your priorities. Let's get to it when you get to it. And also, I think audience research. This is also something you never hear from venture-backed SEO. I think it's something most companies should do every six months to a year and some companies can get away with every two years. Oh, really doesn't change all that often.

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Mark Drager: Well, here's what I say, you need to do this work anytime you change objective or audience. Yes, yes. Oh, absolutely. I think it happens more frequently than most people even think. They go, "Oh, I'm gonna be in this region versus another region. I'm gonna go from maybe, you know, midsize companies to larger companies. I'm gonna go to C-suite. I'm gonna go to this version, or this vertical, like, like, the whole, let's test things out happens, I believe, quite frequently and my perspective, and now I own a branding agency as well. But my perspective is that is that if you're gonna change objectives or you're gonna change audience, you need to go back to strategy. And that includes research.

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Rand Fishkin: I completely agree with that. Here's my piece of example. Someone we were helping out was doing. They make machinery for dental and orthodontist offices, right. You might turn it like, "Okay, a little bit of a boring segment, but they spend a lot of money, right."

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ark Drager: Oh, my goodness, I love these B2B companies so much.

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Rand Fishkin: But I'm going to tell you right now, we looked, and we were like, "Wow, you know, the sources of influence for dentists and orthodontists, at least in the United States, haven't changed much in the last three or four years. If you had sort of successfully done good audience research, done, you know, run a good survey, done some interviews, taking that data, gotten some data at scale with something like SparkToro, and you would put together a marketing and promotion and strategy plan in 2020. I know the pandemic changed everything. But the one thing it didn't change is which YouTube channels, websites, podcasts, social media influencers, dentists and orthodontists follow, right. It's like, there's like these 20 industry publications that are quite popular. There's a few events, there's a few email newsletters, and there has not been a lot new, I would probably do that research again, maybe this year or next year. But I wouldn't coach that person, you know, that dental office equipment marketer to go like, "Hey, every quarter, you should really be refreshing this." No, you don't need to.

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Mark Drager: So let's break down if we can help me almost visualize if there's an approach or funnel are a way for us to think about where do we start? What kind of questions are we asking? What are we doing to go out to the market? And then how do we scrub it? Let's say, you know, I have a process that I that I try to hold to, which is discover. I try to collect as much as I can without ever questioning it or judging it. And then we distill. We ask ourselves what the objective is, and we only highlight the things that actually overlay with this objective. And then we define. We use the information to then define what it is that we're hearing or seeing or what we can do with it. But I've had to come up with this on my own after wasting a lot of time on a lot of things.

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Rand Fishkin: I like this. It's an interesting approach, Mark. So you're discovered distill, define, and interesting that I think that the part that I have often struggled with a little bit is that discover bit right at the top. I historically have liked to apply audience research and customer research to when I have a problem to solve, give me the information that I need to do it most successfully. Rather than I like your approach, especially from an agency standpoint, I like your approach of let's learn everything that we can because we don't necessarily know what might be useful to answer these questions down here. And we might find affinities that we never thought of. So very clever. Yeah. And the will.

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Mark Drager: And the only reason for that is because it's almost like it, you know, you wrote this great book, "Lost and Founder," if your editor asked you to make sure that the first draft was published ready, like it would be, I wouldn't say impossible, but it would be a huge challenge, because you almost don't know what you don't know. And so when you're swimming around in the Discover phase, and you can get lost in this too, like you have to be careful, because we're chasing rabbit holes where we're going down things and I keep pursuing things until I'm like, Okay, it's like a choose your own adventure, you know, you flip ahead, page 73, then you go this place, you go to this place, you realize you've just been crushed in the cave, because you're dead. If you read, choose your own adventures, like me, we chase every rabbit hole until it feels like it ends or it's continually looping back. And we're just rediscovering stuff we've already discovered. And and so it's a very messy approach. But how do you help us visualize this? Or did I just answer the question?

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Rand Fishkin: No, no. So I would say, at least with SparkToro, and a lot of the work that I do in audience research, it is about that, once you've done your, I mean, certainly you can play around and do lots of discovery stuff. But I think we're much more in the distill and define stages. And that is essentially like I have this group of people that I know I want to reach interior designers in Los Angeles, or CMOS at, you know, SAS companies, or, Oh, I know, I want to reach people who play Dungeons and Dragons and read, choose your own adventure books, right. And so I will find, define those audiences, put them into Spark tomorrow, and then get a bunch of information back about who they are, what they talk about what they pay attention to. And that will take me to my next step of that defining this is the right audience or a right audience segment to go after, with this messaging, at this time in these places. And I think the big, the big thing that this helps businesses and organizations avoid is the just throw all your money at Facebook and Google, which, which I think is a terrible way to do marketing. It the only reason it's so common and pervasive is because it scales with very little friction, it is super easy to put your credit card into Google ads into Facebook ads, Instagram, YouTube, whatever, and just spend that money. And then they will give you a nice report saying that all your conversions came from those places, even if they didn't,

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Mark Drager: Yeah, yeah, I won't. I won't even get into attribution because attribution models are a nightmare. But so with this, though, it seems like you've almost skipped over a step or almost like mental gymnastics, we have to do which is you said, Okay, we're looking for interior designers in LA, we're looking for, you know, a CMO of a SaaS company, or whatever it might be. These are all roles. And moving from roles,

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Rand Fishkin: Especially interested in D&D, right. So like, it could be someone who talks about a subject online, it could be someone who searches for something, it could be someone who visits a particular website, right, you could plug in a either a competitor's website or like use a, here's a popular source of influence that I already know about my industry, I'm going to see what their audiences like, I'm going to put it in a social account that I know people follow or hashtag I know they use, right all those kinds of things. And you could reasonably I think, before you ever get started with SparkToro style searches, you could reasonably put together a list of here's who we think our audience is. And from that audience, here's who we think might become customers. And then you can individually research those groups and try to understand, try to figure out where they are, where you can reach them, what message is going to resonate, all those kinds of things.

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Mark Drager: That's a perfect tip, because I was gonna say, I think I think it's a challenge often for people to move from roles to interests, or move from roles to where people are, it's easy for us to imagine, you know, an accountant at a small independent firm, going to work each day and every day, but what they're doing and where they're going and what they're interested in is a lot harder, and that's when it starts to become the interest category, which is something you would help out with. Now. The other thing and you mentioned this early on off the top right, don't don't do this, if you're only gonna find it interesting, but it's very easy for us to pull a lot of interesting information that that doesn't actually help us with our decision. and it doesn't help us at all with moving forward with stuff. So once we've done some of this research, in your experience, how do we go through and separate that? Okay, that's cool. With the like, okay, we can actually make a strategic decision based off of this, this key piece of insight we just got.

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Rand Fishkin: So this is why I like starting from a place of these are the actions we want to take to solve the problem that we have. Now give me the information that will help me solve that problem. For example, if you say what we need is more top of funnel, we need more people aware of our brand coming to our website, when they first are learning about the problem of you know, I don't know wanting to find agents for their book or wanting to hire an interior designer, or an interior designer who wants to find software to manage their projects or what you know what, like any of these any use case that you could you could reasonably imagine that your business might do you say, alright, we are going to invest in some advertising, some PR, some content, right, some distribution of channels, and tactics and spend. Now let's go figure out which potential customers look best to us. They look similar to people who've been really happy with our product, they look similar to people who have a high conversion rate, we haven't reached them, yet they're available in these places. What we're going to do with this data is decide which channels to invest in, we're probably only going to pick two or three, right? Because we you know, we're whatever small or midsize firm, or we're a huge agency, we have a ton of resources from our client, we're going to invest in every channel and tactic that comes up on the list that we think has any potential at all right? And we're just going to assign those out, then you do the research to figure out which ones were how, with what, right because marketing is not it's not rocket science, like it is tell the right messages in the right places to the right people at the right time. Out. Ah, the big job that audience research has in customer research shoe is what message which people wear and when that's it. That's the whole thing. So here's, here's my, like analogy, sort of story analogy. So let's imagine we're back in 1960. And we walk into Don Draper's offices, right? From Mad Men, ad agency times, right kind of heyday of the ad agency world in New York on Madison Avenue. And you remember, I think, I don't know if you watch the show, Mark. But there was one scene where they had a client, I think it was one of the car companies.

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Mark Drager: I think they were going up to Jaguar at one point.

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Rand Fishkin: Yeah, maybe it might have been like a, you know, British car company, right? So the client comes in and they say like, Hey, this is our type of consumer, right? They describe if it's the Jaguar audiences, you know, wealthier generally older Americans, probably more male leaning. And one of the associates grabs the binder, there's, there's a literal binder, right, that all the ad agencies had. And it's essentially came from large scale surveys of, you know, a million Americans, 2 million Americans and they would all report their gender and age and edited it out. And then they would see which magazine subscriptions they had and which newspapers they got and what areas of the country they lived in. So they could see which billboard ads they could see on the highway outside their houses on their way to work etc. Right? So all this thing he grabs the binder and he's like, this is where you need to be right if to reach this segment. It's these six magazines I don't know what it was, you know, Time Life magazine or something, right? National Geographic, Car and Driver like we're going to be in those places. And we're going to advertise on these channels on these shows case closed the where and when was so easy that they spent the whole show and most of the ad agency time on what message what's the message we're going to tell because it's so easy to figure out what people pay attention to because there's only a few sources of influence in the whole country. You know what there isn't in 2023 a binder

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Mark Drager: a sharp shortage and there's no shortage of places that people's eyeballs and years ago either

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Rand Fishkin: Yeah. So I think when Casey and I were making Sparta we were like we should just make the binder it's just gonna be harder to search right like you can't you can't just flip it open to like this demographic and this age this this gender, you're gonna have to do more right like you got to give us more data. We you can build the binder like if you index the millions and millions of sources of influence on the internet and then you analyze all their audiences and you see what they pay attention to and who subscribes to one who follows one who tweets about what and posts on LinkedIn about what and uses which hashtag and visits which website etc, etc. You can do it it's a it's a pain in the butt. We're not perfect at it. I think there's only like four companies even trying it's like US audience helix it at AI and Brandwatch those are the only four people I've ever heard mentioned like oh, we try and find the sources of influence people like based on your searches like let's remake that binder. Let's let's solve those two so that you can go spend some time on now what message is going to resonate with your customer?

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Mark Drager: This is super powerful though if you have I've I don't know if that's the right word. But like, if you are the type of person who wants more sales, more revenue, you want to grow your company, and you're willing to try things. I say that because there's so many people who want it, but they're just not willing to try anything or to test anything, or to do anything they want more without spending any money or any investment or what have you. But let's say

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Rand Fishkin: Or they want only sources of influence that have perfect attribution, right? They're only willing, there's so many companies who are only willing to make those investments, if you can show me which conversions had a touch point from that channel that you invested in. And so you know, what the channels are always going to be, they're always going to be advertising because the ad players all have an incentive to make that tracking really perfect. To show you where you were, you know, where the customer has touched along the journey, as opposed to PR, you're never going to know, word of mouth, you will never know going on other people's podcasts, you will never know. You know, I don't know when this episode will be published, Mark, but probably soon after it's published. Some people will go and they'll go to SparkToro. And they'll like, you know, sign up for the free version. And we'll try some searches. We'll see a little spike. And we'll be like, Huh, I wonder if that was the How To Sell More podcast with Mark? Maybe, maybe it was?

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Mark Drager: we did this thing with Adobe, once we did this partnership with Adobe, where they profiled their agency. And the one week on Facebook, we had a 43,000% in traffic. So I took a screenshot I was like, I'm pretty sure it's from that Adobe, that global Adobe thing that we did, and then it quickly went back to normal afterwards.

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Rand Fishkin: It can go the other way too. About a year and a half ago, I was in Los Angeles. This film studio asked me to come and do an interview about my years at Moz and what I was building with SparkToro. It was like, "Oh, I got Mark." It was like six hours in a beautiful studio with a crew, a huge crew. I had a makeup person putting stuff all over me, making sure those bags under my eyes didn't exist, all that stuff. They dressed me up, everything. I sat down and got interviewed for what felt like forever. It was a very emotionally exhausting experience. I met the whole crew. Great. A year and a half later, the video came out, just a few months ago. I can try and find it. I can't remember exactly what it's called. But I was looking recently. It's got like 600,000 views on Facebook, just an enormous crowd of people. Most of their videos get, you know, a quarter million to a million views on this channel. I was like, "Oh my god, I guess that was great." But we could not see a visible bump from anyone going to SparkToro, and the people who were watching it, my suspicion is they just weren't our crowd. They were not the kind of people who do that. So you can get lots of visibility exposure, top of funnel, and that will not translate to potential customers if they're not the right audience. And this is why you do customer audience research to figure out, will this audience look like my customers?

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Mark Drager: Now I recall, and I don't remember the agency or even the company name, maybe you do. But I recall from one of your monthly Office Hours type presentations, I believe that there was an agency that used SparkToro research to find all of these really small newsletters or email lists or niches, and then approached them. Maybe they bought placement, or maybe they did some kind of swap or something. But you know, these smaller lists, let's say someone has maybe 4,000 or 10,000, or 25,000, which is a very small list in most industries. If they have access to your customers and your audience, and you reach out to them. I know another company, another agency that has grown massively off of Instagram shout-outs. They find independent Instagram accounts that seem to have their audience, and they literally DM them. And for like $100 a placement, they will get a shout-out, which allows these advertisers to also go around all of the rules around Facebook advertising and claims because it's not an ad; it's a paid placement as a shout-out. And so you might look at these things and go, "Oh, this newsletter, we have to go find each one." The shout-outs, we have to go find each one. They're so small, there's so many, but the opportunities could be massive if you make the most of these small communities.

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Rand Fishkin: This is the entire experience of entrepreneurship. I think for anyone who's done it, it's like, "Oh my gosh, there's so much opportunity if I am willing to do things that most people think of as tiresome and boring and frustrating and difficult and, oh, how's it going to scale?" And doing things that don't scale? I hate to quote Silicon Valley classic wisdom, but I think this is one of the few pieces that they really get right: doing things that don't scale early on in either a business or in a new initiative to get a new group of customers is a phenomenal way to go about it. Being willing to do that manual outreach, that manual placement, that manual discovery process, and building a big ol' list, stuck in Google Sheets or Excel. And then I'm contacting each person.

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The example that angers me the most, Mark, is someone who has spent a year or two of their life writing a book. And a book is a hard thing to write, a really hard thing to write. A high-quality book is, you know, what did Oscar Wilde say? Like, you just sit down at your desk, open a vein, and bleed. And I think that's absolutely true, right? It's brutal. I watched Geraldine, my wife, you know, wrote a book last year, it's coming out in March. And it's a brutally intense process. And then they're like, "A book done, okay. Let's see what the publisher does for PR." And I just want to grab their shirt and be like, "No, you did all this work, and it's just gonna go to waste."

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An author recently emailed me, a friend, and he was like, "Rand, I really appreciate your help editing my book, and you read through it, I left all these comments, we went back and forth, you wrote to me," and he said, "I sold 15 copies the first week. It breaks my heart, like, it really breaks my heart." And here's all that my friend had to do. My friend has quite a network, he has built up a network over the last quarter-century of working in this field. He's in the sort of marketing, tech startup business world. This is the simplest, easiest thing you could do: have 100 people that he knows who are the kind of people who might buy his book, and also probably talk to the kinds of people who buy his book, make that list, and then email each one of them and say, "Hey, send me your address. I would love to send you a copy of my book. And when I do for launch day, it would mean the world to me if you could just take a picture of yourself with it. You don't have to say you can say anything you want, good, bad, I don't care. Take a picture of yourself with the book and share it on a couple of your social channels. That's all. That's all I want, right? Would you please do me this favor?" And I guarantee every single person that you email like that, who you actually know, they'll say, "Yes." They'll be like, "Yeah, here's my address." Nobody says no to that, right? Because it's such an easy ask. I do it all the time for people. I love to help out friends, right? And guess what? I guarantee every one of those would sell 15 copies, right? It's not because a book is not a high, like, purchase barrier, like, people buy books, even if they're not going to read them, they buy them, right? And that would distribute it, and that'll get it on the radar of a bunch of other people who might invite you on their show to talk about the book, and who might read the book, and then be like, "Gosh, you know, I'd really love to do a webinar with that person. I want to invite them to speak at my event, I want to put them on my YouTube channel. I'm going to talk about that book on my book talk. Whatever, all those things." And this, I don't know. Anyway, I could rant about this forever. And we have another topic.

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Mark Drager: It's such good advice. But I want to wrap up this episode because your time is tight. I would love it if you can give us your one tip or strategy on how to sell more.

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Rand Fishkin: You mean beyond that one?

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Mark Drager: Yeah, beyond that great one you just did.

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Rand Fishkin: That's my one. The other one that I think is a superpower is to go into your analytics, especially your Google Analytics, if you have it from last year, like your old one before they switched to the new GA four, and look for a source, any website that's like a smaller site, not a big media site, or you know, Google or Facebook or YouTube or something like that. Look for a small niche site that sent you a reasonable number of visits. And some of those visits actually converted to your email list or your product, bought your product, signed up for your service, whatever. And plug that website into something like SparkToro or SimilarWeb, right? SimilarWeb is also free, not specifically for audience research, but it does a great job of this. And see the other sources that people who visit that site also visit. Make a small, targeted investment in just building out a little list. I don't care if it's even 10 sites or 15 sites, and then ask yourself the question with each one: What could I do that would make this site, this source of influence, this person, the owner of this market or this blogger who writes here, the content creator, the newsletter owner, what would make them feature my thing? Why would they do that? What could I do that would make them feature my thing? If you come up with the answers to those questions for those sources, you will have a fantastic organic content partnership, advertising, marketing plan.