This guide is based on Mixergy’s interview with Rand Fishkin.
After building an online community with over 300,000 members, Rand Fishkin went on to create Inbound.org, a community-curated marketing news site that recorded 12,836 visits during its launch weekend. It was all done using community building tactics, so we invited him to teach you how to do it.
Rand is the CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz, which develops search engine optimization software and hosts an active SEO community.
Here are the actionable highlights from the interview.
Rand and co-founder Dharmesh Shah felt the need for an inbound marketing news site but noticed there wasn’t one, so they created it and made exposing more people to it their cause.
The users Rand invited to join Inbound’s beta launch eventually became the community’s seed group.
Rand writes keyword-relevant content on Inbound, which he then shares on Google+.
Rand’s friend Mariam, who founded Minted, discovered that Pinterest was the portal most commonly used by her audience.
Rand cited Noah’s Dad, which features content about raising a child with Down’s syndrome that can’t be found anywhere else on the web.
Rand says SEOmoz gets increased traffic with referrals from Search Engine Land, WebmasterWorld, and The Next Web.
Rand set it up so that SEOmoz users get an alert if a 404 error is detected on one of their web pages.
Rand linked Inbound’s registration system with Twitter so new users can sign up in just two clicks and used big arrow buttons to make it easy for people to vote on content.
Watch the full interview now
Written by Hazel Chua, based on production notes by Jeremy Weisz