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"I don't care about my rankings." As one of the pioneers who popularized SEO and with Moz being one of the oldests SEO software companies, this statement from Rand Fishkin, founder of Moz and co-founder of SparkToro made my eyebrows raise. But why did Rand make such a surprising remark?

Rand's insights are valuable, as evidenced by the following key points from the episode:

There is an abundance of content these days that creation is simply not enough. To stand out and capture attention, you have to do more than invest in the quality or quantity of your content. This is where tactics like positioning, having a PoV, and making common enemies come into play.

Yes, you should invest in distributing content, but it’s not going to be a success unless the content itself is great. Formulaic crap doesn't do all that well.

People mostly share content that reinforces their opinions or beliefs. So, create opinionated content to earn amplification.

And the big one: “I don’t care about my rankings.” These days, Rand doesn’t worry about SEO again. Instead, in Sparktoro, they focus on impacting people, and doing that through other channels they can own and control, mostly outside of search channels. He advises marketers not to rely on any single channel or source e.g. Google.

I first heard about the concept of episodic content in this episode. According to Crowd content, “episodic content is content published by marketers and site owners as a series of multiple posts that build on each other.” The keyword here is “build on each other.”

Rand employs this strategy in Sparktoro with their Office Hours series (I’ve attended a few of those myself), which has about 14,000 people tuning in these days. And there are people who would stumble on older episodes, enjoy them, subscribe to be alerted of new ones, and the whole thing builds up like that.

Another example of episodic content is The Cutting Room by Tommy Walker. There are almost 40 episodes at the time of writing. You can watch these previous episodes, and subscribe to the channel to know about newer episodes.

In essence, brands should commit to creating episodic content as it helps in building a return audience and establishing brand authority.

The rule of one in copywriting states that your copy should focus on only one big idea, one reader, one promise, and one CTA. A modified version of that rule in content marketing is to focus on one reader. Don’t try to appeal to everyone in your content. It should however repel people that are not a good fit. That way, only your target audience will be attracted, and hopefully convert.

Finally, smaller companies should revel in their advantage as they can take the risks the bigger guys cannot. So go ahead and do the crazy marketing tactics. Carve out a market sector by finding your audience, focusing on them, and increasing them gradually.

The above is just a glimpse into the juiciness of this episode with Rand Fiskin and doesn’t do it justice.

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Short: Big Ball of Mud