Rand Fishkin

Rand Fishkin (born July 10, 1979) is an American entrepreneur, digital marketing expert, business consultant, speaker, angel investor, and author. Fishkin co-founded Moz and SparkToro, an SEO software business and an audience intelligence and market research tool. He is best known for founding SeoMoz.com, which was one of the early authentic sources to provide transparent information on how search engine works and later rebranded into Moz.com, as SEO software that transformed SEO industry and has become an industry standard for measuring SEO efforts by most of companies and individuals. Fishkin currently serves as CEO of SparkToro, a software that offers audience research software for targeted marketing.
Fishkin has established himself as a leader in the SEO industry, and his WhiteBoard Friday Series, a video series about SEO, became popular among SEO industry experts. He has authored three books: The Art of SEO; SEOMOZ- Guide to Inbound Marketing; and Lost and Founder. He is also an active speaker for conferences addressing audiences on the topics of digital marketing and entrepreneurship.
Rand Fishkin has invested in Teamsportz, an AI platform that analyses the performance of sportspeople to help them improve. He has also invested in dot.LA, a media company in Los Angeles, CA. During his career, he has worked with companies and individuals as a digital marketing consultant and mostly gained recognition for helping entrepreneurs and people do better digital marketing through his blogs and digital content.
According to Affiliate Bay, as of August 2022, the networth of Rand Fishkin is $20 million.
==Early life and education==
Fishkin was born on 10 July 1979, in Seattle, Washington. In his childhood, he had a dysfunctional home life primarily due to his father's anger issues. Fishkin's behavior had an impact on that and due to this he started thinking a little differently and developed a different approach to looking at the problems, which helped him to find great success in teaching. He attended Newport High School in 1993. After that, he enrolled at the University of Washington to pursue a degree in finance. However, he dropped out in 2001, two classes away from completing his degree, to start his first venture.
==Career==
Fishkin dropped out of college to join his mother’s marketing firm and worked as a web designer. He worked at the company for five years, managing the designing, development, and marketing for various clients in the healthcare, communication, financial services, software, and telecom industry.
In 2003, he founded his first venture SEOmoz, a blog that later turned into a consulting firm and finally developed into a software as a service (SaaS) business based in Seattle, Washington. The blog initially established itself as a resource for search engine optimization, when search engine technologies were not transparent. Later turned the company's business into a search engine optimization and marketing company to help businesses gain traction and a better search presence. 
In 2007, he became the chief executive officer of the company and raised funds for SeoMoz.com. In 2014, he stepped down from the role of CEO and promoted the company’s COO, Sarah Bird to the position and continues to serve as a member of the board of directors, founder, and shareholder of the company.
In 2011, Fishkin co-founded Inbound.org, a platform that hosts knowledge, experience, and valuable content for marketers. In February 2014, he stepped down from his position as CEO of SEOmoz and took a non-executive role at Wizard of Moz. Later in the year, Fishkin sold his share in the company to Hubspot. He continues to engage with the company to help and offer his knowledge and services as an informal contributor.
In February 2018, Fishkin announced that he is leaving Moz to find a new company, SparkToro. He co-founded SparkToro in the audience research and market research space to help marketers, product builders, PR representatives, and entrepreneurs. The company aims to help its clients with a tool that promotes audience and market research at ease. It saves the time and cost associated with conducting market surveys and manual research. Fishkin currently serves as the CEO of SparkToro.
SparkToro was launched in April 2022. The company's software crawls public data of social accounts and assembles them into a database to share the targeted data of the audience about their subscription and social followings that marketers are looking to create for their digital marketing strategies. Fishkin's blog post on SparkToro about performance marketing gained a lot of attention, which shares how performance marketing teams are exploiting any company's organic traffic and clients.
===Other work===
Apart from his entrepreneurial career, Fishkin is known as the co-author of two books: The Art of SEO, and SEOMOZ- Guide to Inbound Marketing. He also independently authored his first book in 2018, titled “Lost and Founder”, which is an unaltered guide to the start-up world. Being an expert at SEO, Fishkin also films a video series, WhiteBoard Friday, sharing useful content on verticals of SEO. When launched, the series wasn't initially much successful for the initial 12 months. It organically started gaining subscribers slowly, after a few years, the series gained huge popularity amongst SEO professionals and marketers. WhiteBoard Friday later helped Moz.com gain new clients and as well as subscribers. In an interview with SharpSpring, Fishkin shared that any video series is good for investment in the long run and probably won't help in the short run, as it doesn't attract a lot of content audiences initially.
Fishkin has been associated with several start-up organizations like BackStage Capital, LegUp, TeamSportz, TechStars Seattle, and TinySeed Accelerator.
Fishkin has also been featured in the Seattle Times, Puget Sound Business Journal, BusinessWeek, Newsweek, The Next Web, and other publications. He is also a frequent contributor to business magazines, including the Huffington Post, Forbes, and Entrepreneur media.
Due to his expertise, Fishkin has the status of an online celebrity and has built a long following on his social accounts. As of September 2022, he has 467K followers on Twitter, 10.9K on Instagram, and 35K on Facebook.
==Bibliography==
===Author===
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===As a co-author===
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==Personal life==
Rand currently lives in Seattle. He got married to Geraldine DeRuiter in 2008. Fishkin loves cooking and has often shared that he is fond of pasta.
==In the media==
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==References==
==External links==
* SparkToro
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Category:American entrepreneurs
Category:American company founders
Category:American motivational speakers
Category:American authors