Why Referrals Matter

February 10th, 2010

I was just reading a post by Aaron Wall (of SEOBook.com) about how successful people, especially in the Internet Marketing arena, seem to become jerks as they become successful.

It’s SEOBook, so obviously it’s a great post, but it got me thinking about another topic that comes up a lot: Untouchable Marketing’s Marketing.

It’s a pretty common joke around the UM offices that this company has never had to avail itself of its own services. Sure, we show up for searches like “denver web marketing consultant” and we’ve done the minimum due-diligence on optimizing our site, but the point is that exactly 0 of our current clients came to us via the contact form on our website.

So how did we get enough business to sustain the company? 100% referrals.

Why Referrals Are So Great

In Million Dollar Consulting, Alan Weiss talks about peer-to-peer referrals being the ‘Platinum Standard’ of marketing for a consulting firm, and I couldn’t agree more (he also mentions that you should carry a nice pen, which is something that I do not agree with, as the Pilot G2 is the finest pen ever invented).

The standard explanation for why referrals are great is that there is no better way to convince someone that you can deliver what you say, than to have his friends convince him for you.

However, I think referrals are great for another reason: screening.

In the world of business (as you can read in Aaron’s article referenced above) there are people who want the universe for a nickel. They will bargain, argue, and tear apart every single line item in a proposal. In the end, they aren’t happy with the results.

By getting a referral from a mutually-trusted acquaintance, you end up screening potential clients ahead of time. It’s unlikely that the small-minded “deal-makers” who want to nickel and dime you to death would be friends with your better clients. Their personalities are incompatible.

Personal referrals protect both the client and the consultant, and that is why I always recommend that you find a Web Marketing Consultant the same way you would find a good Lawyer or Accountant; because if they have resorted to spending money on advertising, then they need your business.

Keep in mind that the consulting world is very different from most other industries. If you have a repeatable process that would apply and show results for 90% of your clients (think software like Quickbooks, or an office cleaning service) then you really just want to get the word out to every applicable lead that you can. And that is why there is a vast market for what we do.

Tags for This Post: denver web, nickel and dime, personal referrals, marketing consultant, due diligence, alan weiss, pilot g2

Benford’s Law and Click-Through Rates on SERPs

February 4th, 2010

The other day, as I perused the latest “nerd news” from news.ycombinator.com I came across a very interesting blog post that captured my attention. It was a summary of the properties of Benford’s Law.

By way of brief introduction, Frank Benford first became aware of this property while working at General Electric, when he noticed that pages of a book containing logarithmic tables showed much more wear on the page for the number 1, than they did for other numbers.

After considerable research, he found that any man-made data has a tendency for the leading digit of each number to be a 1 around 30% of the time, and a 9 only about 4% of the time. This is true with tax returns, baseball stats, and just about any other data you can name. This is very odd, because one would assume that the numbers 1-9 follow a normal distribution (and they do, when generated randomly).

This article stuck in my mind, and somewhere over the last couple days it connected with something else that had been bothering me.

Benford and Search

By now, you probably know about the research that was done on the AOL Study Data that gave us a baseline for click-through rates on search results. This study showed that the number 1 result on a page gets clicked on about 35% of the time. The graph looks something like this:

AOL data CTR

Although this data has been very useful, what has always bugged me about it is that the study was only performed on the first 10 results, and so the only way to extrapolate a formula would be to graph the results, add a trendline, and use the equation of the trendline to predict other values greater than 10.

But take a look at this graph of numbers following Benford’s law (which has a known equation):

Frank Benford's Discovery_1265314649134

Eerily similar isn’t it? Putting the numbers side by side really makes it obvious that there is an interesting correlation between Benford’s law and SERPs behavior.

Result # % of total traffic Benford’s
1 35.64% 30.10%
2 17.82% 17.61%
3 11.88% 12.49%
4 8.91% 9.69%
5 7.13% 7.92%
6 5.94% 6.69%
7 5.09% 5.80%
8 4.45% 5.12%
9 3.96% 4.58%
10 3.56% 4.14%

Hammering Out the Details

First I took the equation for Benford’s Law and fed it the inputs of all numbers from 1 to 100. Unfortunately, beginning at #11, the numbers depart from what my gut feeling is on the actual click-through for pages beyond 1.

For example, the equation tells us we could expect a ranking at #11 to receive roughly a 3% CTR. Obviously, this seems high for the first result on the second page. But what if we assume that a similar number of people will click on the 10th result as will click on the ‘Next Page’ button?

Point of Clarification: The original algorithm provides for a 4.14% CTR on the 10th result. Assuming that another 4.14% of people will scroll down the page and click on ‘Next Page’ we use that percentage as the total amount for the next page.

Download an XLS file with the comparison and formulas.

By applying the same equation to the percentage of people who are predicted to click on #10, we see that roughly 1.14% of searchers will be predicted to click on #11. That seems reasonable, doesn’t it? I would say about 1 out of 100 times I will hit the second page of results and click on one of the listings.

Using this formula, it is predicted that searchers will basically not go past result #110, which is a pretty good prediction based on everything I’ve ever seen about search.

It’s All Voodoo

Of course, much of this is just arbitrary tinkering with numbers. But there is a great body of evidence that says that Benford’s law has applications to any human system of data.

Because search engines are merely aggregating data and applying a formula for ranking, it makes sense that it may be subject to some of the same underlying laws as the stock market, baseball stats, and other masses of human data.

Tags for This Post: trendline, aol study, nerd news, couple days, frank benford

Google Website Optimizer Causes 22% Decrease in Conversion?

January 22nd, 2010

Ever since my good friend and agency-world refugee Luke Van Deman introduced me to www.abtests.com I’ve been following it closely, checking their feed every day for new insights.

Opening their RSS the other day I saw an interesting test: a 22.5% improvement over control.

trudne.pl

The difference between the two pages? Absolutely nothing, except that the test page had Google Website Optimizer code on it.

Now, the whole story hasn’t come out on this yet, and I’m sure there are more tests in the works to confirm the results, but it is important to remember compounding/confounding factors can still play a role, even in tests where the control and experiment are (nearly) identical.

My first step would be to time the average load time of the Google scripts that load the experimental code and see if it adds materially to the load time of the page itself.

This could easily be done via Pingdom tools, or Google’s Webmaster Tools (screenshot below). Either way, load time plays a huge role in user experience.

Webmaster Tools - Site performance_1264177696679

Tags for This Post: new insights, load time, world refugee, van deman, google

Nexus One is Robbing You (Maybe)

January 12th, 2010

Just saw a thread at WMW about Nexus One ads usurping paid advertisers on AdSense Publishers’ sites (via this post about the Nexus One sales page at PPCBlog). If you want to get rid of them you can block google.com.

But That Reminds Me…

Are you an AdWords advertiser? Listen up.

In the ‘Campaign Settings’ menu of AdWords there is an innocuous-sounding set of options titled “Networks, Devices, and extensions”. There are two subcategories within this menu: ‘Networks’ and ‘Devices’.

‘Networks’ is arguably one of the (if not the ) most important settings you can change on your campaigns. But it would take up an entire blog post of its own.

‘Devices’, on the other hand, has been a quiet and uneventful addition to the menu.

But with the release of Nexus One and the wave of new ’superphone’ users sure to follow, it is important to think about what ‘Devices’ you want your ads to show on.

Think about your product or service. Would someone really be using their phone to search for you? If not, disable the Mobile Phones option.

They would? Great, would they be able to complete a meaningful action by visiting your site from their phone (call you, purchase something, download something)? If not, disable this option until they can.

If visitors would be searching for you, and could complete a meaningful transaction with your site, then I would recommend you create mobile-optimized landing pages for those ads. Turn off Mobile Devices in your primary campaign, and make a separate campaign that targets mobile users.

-1 – 1 Is -2

It is important to remember in the AdWords world that every unprofitable click costs you not just the price of that click, but a (potentially) profitable click later on when your budget can’t support another click.

Remember, AdWords decides to show your ad based on whether or not you can afford another click. So if your site is no use to mobile users, you’re only hurting profitable campaigns by leaving it turned on.

Tags for This Post: mobile users, meaningful action, subcategories, nexus, mobile devices, campaign settings, wmw, google, settings menu

Always Remember Google is a Business

January 8th, 2010

Search has become such an inherent part of life in developed countries. It’s so ingrained that it is now considered rude to ask a question of someone that you could’ve “Googled.”

But it is important to remember that all the major search engines, no matter whether they began as a business venture or a labor of love, are beholden to the objectives of their shareholders or private owners.

An Illustrative Google Bias

The goal of this blog is not to point out every internet meme that we come across, but this one is particularly relevant to the point of this post.

Go to google (with Javascript enabled) and begin typing “Christianity is”. Notice the list of suggestions that appear.

googleChristianity

Now try “Judaism is”.

googleJudaism

And finally, try “Islam is”.

googleIslam

(No guarantees this will last, but as of now you can see for yourself that Google provides no suggestions).

Do you find it interesting that Google is choosing to show suggested searches that might be considered controversial for Christianity and Judaism (not to mention Buddhism, Hinduism, and I dunno… Wicca?), but not for Islam?

But how far can this go?

Some people have been targeted for perceived anti-Islamic sentiment, so naturally people and businesses will be inclined to take steps to protect themselves.

But what if Google launched a product which was competing with another popular product. Would they censor search recommendations for their product while leaving negative or controversial topics in the search suggestions for the competing product?

Let’s see what Google suggests we search for regarding Apple’s iPhone:

googleiPhone

Interesting: disabled, frozen, locked up… not exactly complimentary. Sure, maybe those are based on the most popular searches, after all, we turn to Google for help, right?

So given the mediocre launch of the Nexus One, there should be some interesting suggestions based on popular searches, right?

googleNexusOne

Wow, no suggestions? This was a well-anticipated launch. Let’s get some real-time results from Twitter to see what the buzz is:

twitterNexusOne

(By the way, about 50% of the Tweets on the entire page are disparaging to the Nexus in some way).

Could Google be holding back on search suggestions for the same reason they don’t want to create the perception that they harbor anti-Islamic sentiment?

Google is a Business, too.

Keep that in mind.

Tags for This Post: controversial topics, private owners, iphone, major search engines, search recommendations

Google Copies Untouchable Marketing Business Strategies

December 19th, 2009

You might think Google and a Web Marketing Consultancy specializing in SEO would be on opposite sides of a line dividing an industry. But both companies are partaking in a business strategy that may become prevalent over the next couple years.

What do Goo.gl and umktg.com have in common?

On October 12th we launched UMKTG.com, a URL-shortening service made specifically for use on Untouchable Marketing’s projects. Why?

We noticed when sending client emails that while we may be able to answer a question, or explain a concept in just a few hundred characters, any reference we made to a Google results page took up hundreds of characters. And anyone who’s ever sent a business email knows that if you want your message heard, concision is key.

So being able to take a search string like: http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=url+shorteners&aq=f&aqi=g10&oq=&fp=52e8f388e5caca67 and turn it into http://umktg.com/URLShorteners is quite useful.

There’s also a bit of power that comes along with owning a URL shortener. If I gave you the above link, I could see if, when, and how many times you viewed the link.

Google knows this too, so 2 months later, on December 14th, they launched Goo.gl. So far, it’s only for their internal projects and products, but eventually they will launch it as a full public service.

What Else Can You Do With Your Own Shortener?

Make money. If you had a widely-used URL shortener you could sell banners and pop-ups on the page that redirects visitors.

In fact, if you had a good amount of ad-data to query against, you could probably crawl the destination page to determine the topic, and then show a related ad to the visitor. Now, who would have the ability to host a fast URL-shortener, crawl pages to determine their topic, and also have ad-inventory to match against… hmmm…

Want to Try It Yourself?

If you think you’d like your own URL shortener, I can recommend BrokenScript. It’s a very easy to customize script, and as you can see, not too hard to put your own look on it.

Tags for This Post: google results, pop ups, business email, www google com, client emails

Hansel and Google

November 30th, 2009

I want to draw your attention to a very subtle-change in Google SERPs: breadcrumbs.

Google has been indirectly advocating their use for quite a while now because they provide a better user experience, and an easy navigational path for their bots.

I have been urging clients to use them for several years because they provide an easy way to add keyword-rich backlinks to every page on your site, no matter how deep a given page is within a site. They also help to establish a hierarchy of content, which really helps to get search visitors to the right page from the right search.

SERPs breadcrumbs for search of 'peppermint stick old fashioned recipe'

As you can see in the screenshot above, Google has decided that breadcrumbs are so important, that they may begin using them in their regular Search Results. Certainly, this is a more human-friendly method of communicating hierarchy than filepaths.

But what effect does it have on Click-through? It remains to be seen. However, if you haven’t drunk the Kool-aid of using breadcrumbs on your website, I would suggest that now might be a good time to experiment.

Tags for This Post: google serps, subtle change, breadcrumbs, kool aid, backlinks, google, user experience

Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings

November 13th, 2009

Long Post Alert

This turned into a rather long post, so it’s probably a good thing I did it on a Friday.
However, this is a very important issue, so set aside some time to read through the whole thing.

I was reading a summary of topics that were presented at PubCon written by Rand Fishkin over at SEOMOz. One in particular caught my eye as I have been giving this very advice to clients for most of 2009: “Web Page Load Time can Positively Influence Rankings.”

It makes sense, doesn’t it? Google’s success is based on focusing on three key areas: user experience, monetization, and branding. Often, these principles may seem to be at odds, but it is the struggle that produces innovation. A tripod couldn’t stand if the legs weren’t pushing against each other right?

In this case, Google is focusing on user experience to feed branding, and may be sacrificing short-term revenue. In this case they may giving less focus to websites showing their content network ads and greater focus to established businesses that can afford to concentrate on optimizing load times.

The Most Important Issue in Load Times

One of my favorite anecdotes from my web career comes from a few years back when I was interviewing for a graphic designer position. A well-meaning fellow came to us with experience in ColdFusion and PaintShopPro (we were a .Net and Illustrator department at the time).

After running through our list of general questions we started asking the more existential ones, like “What is the most challenging thing you’ve ever had to do for a client?” The answer we got is hilarious to me, even today.

After a short explanation that “the web” ran on connections between machines, he launched into a short dissertation on the hex-code color system. Eventually we learned that, in his view, optimizing load times was best accomplished by taking a color which was used throughout the website (say “purple”) and gently dialing the hex codes closer to white, each time saving himself a bit of bandwidth usage (in theory).

Not only does this not make any sense from a design standpoint, it’s also fundamentally flawed from a tech-standpoint as well. But it does illustrate the desperation which plagues some designers in reducing their memory footprint.

Unfortunately, in the modern search landscape, kb-size means less and less. When you consider the cost of bandwidth (especially from Google’s perspective, who is amassing one of the largest fiber-optics collections in the world) the difference between downloading a 500kb page and a 5kb page is so small that it doesn’t matter, let alone the difference between 20kb and 18kb.

The most notorious factor now affecting this aspect of search rankings is one level deeper: it’s your server.

An Example of Server Response vs. Rankings

In 2008 I acquired a domain which had been abandoned by its previous owner. I set up a blog on that domain which stuck with the topics of the previous owner, and put in place a system which gave me 100s of pages of new content each week. By the end of 2008 the site was approximately 6,000 pages large, but with only a couple hundred pages actually indexed by Google.

During that time, the site was hosted on a shared platform. With approximately 3,000 other websites on the server, the load would sometimes spike to levels where the site was inaccessible, at least by the standards of the modern user.

As You Can See…

It’s almost a misnomer to say that your search rankings are positively influenced by load times. If anything, your rankings are negatively influenced, and anyone who doesn’t optimize their webserver is leaving money on the table.

I don’t have the exact numbers, but I would guess from experience that the site probably only had an 85% uptime (determined by pinging the site in 15 minute intervals). In March of 2009, I moved the site to a dedicated server.

The Not-so-Instantaneous Effects

When the site was re-launched on the dedicated server, I noticed an uptick in the number of pages indexed for the rest of March. Looking back, I would guess that these pages were considered “questionable” by the GoogleBot due to their unpredictable load times, and were suddenly being served very close to 100% of the time.

For the next month or so, nothing much happened. I believe Google was giving the site some time, the change in IP address probably tripped something on their end to wait and see what else happened.

Around May the site picked up momentum in leaps and bounds. In the space of a month I watched the number of pages indexed at Google jump from just under 1,000 all the way to the low 6,000s by the end of June. The site now stands at just over 14,000 pages indexed, which is roughly 75% of the total pages available.

Traffic similarly skyrocketed, from around 12,000 pageviews early in the year to a record 182,000 pageviews in August.

Caveats

Of course, it’s difficult to isolate the compounding variables in any SEO experiment, especially when you don’t know you’re experimenting in the first place.

There are a number of other factors that could have influenced the growth of this particular site: the fact that it now has a dedicated IP, or, since it is a blog, additional links in to popular posts. But I believe the predominant factor is the increased uptime.

Checking Server Response, and Why Load Time isn’t the Whole Game

There are many services out there that can help you monitor server performance, one of the most famous is PingDom. I’ve also used BasicState, which is a free service that sends you alerts and summaries when your server is unreachable.

It’s important to see how often your server is unreachable, not just how long it takes to load a page. You have to remember that for all the collective intelligence at Google, the menial tasks are still performed by robots.

Let’s say your site has 1,000 links coming in to it from other sites. And let’s pretend Googlebots follow those links at a rate of 10 per day, and that any given Googlebot will wait 10 seconds for your page to load before reporting that the site is gone and moving on. For simplicity’s sake, let’s also assume that all Googlebots communicate back to an Aggregator of some kind which stores data about your website.

On Day One, 10 Googlebots come by (or the same Googlebot 10 times, however you prefer to think of it). Your server is only capable of responding 8/10 times. Maybe one time it didn’t respond within 10 seconds, and one time it was actually down.

Remember, Googlebot is stupid. In the first case, Googlebot calls Aggregator and says, “The site is slow,”. In the second case, where the site is giving him a 404 error, he reads it as “Not Found” and decides the page is gone. He calls Aggregator and says “I got to this page via a link from someothersite.com and the page is gone.”

Aggregator sits back and watches this happen for 10 days. At the end of that cycle, he finds that Googlebot has reported 100 broken links (because the site was down when it got there) and 10% of the time the page did not load within the allotted time.

Aggregator compares this information to the limits set by Google Engineers, and data collected from other websites of this type. He then removes 100 links from your site’s profile (they go to “Not found” pages right?), and then places the site further down in the results, beneath websites that are better at responding to users.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is that your website is an investment. If it’s worth it for you to spend time and money on an SEO strategy, then it’s worth your time and money to make sure you’re running on a strong server.

All too often, I see people get started by having their nephew build them a website. Eventually they realize they need to upgrade and hire a competent web-dev. Next they know they want more people on the page so they hire an SEO, who tweaks titles and builds links.

Nowhere in that entire chain did anyone think to upgrade the server. Servers are thought to be an issue for IT and Security, not Marketing. But in the world of Web Marketing, the underlying structure is just as important as the message.

To put it another way: would you print your next direct mail piece on the inkjet in the office? Or have it printed in full color on glossy cardstock?

Tags for This Post: Alert, response time, search engine robots, server, google results, seo, Long, Post

Where Does Misinformation Come From?

November 10th, 2009

I was doing some reading on one of my favorite forums the other day, and a discussion had broken out about Google’s sandbox, whether or not it existed, and what its actual effects might be. I identified three competing theories about the Sandbox-phenomenon, but I only really agreed with one of them.

Beyond just the issue of the sandbox (another post in itself), it got me thinking about where misinformation comes from in the SEO world. How do people end up with such wild information about everything related to SEO?

Telephone Game

One of the most obvious sources of misinformation in any industry is mis-translation, either through laziness, error, or lack of comprehension.

For instance if, in a client meeting, I made the statement: “Your Google PageRank will only change roughly once every three months, and is largely dependent on the rank of other sites linking to you,” someone at the meeting may misunderstand what I said.

Later, they may repeat to someone else that “Where you rank on Google pages only changes once every three months.” Although PageRank and search-ranking are two totally different concepts, someone may now be infected with the misinformation that one has the properties of the other.

Extrapolation of Results

This might be more commonly known as the “knowing enough to be dangerous” effect. Generally, this type of misinformation comes from someone who has done something of little significance, and applies to some greater situation. I believe this to be especially common in the web marketing world because most people keep their exact niches/industries a secret in order to prevent competition.

For example, a web designer in South Dakota designs a web page for a cosmetic surgeon in the local area. He reads a bit about SEO, and so he optimizes the site, maybe gets a few links, and helps the doctor submit his site to Google Local. Voila! Withing a couple weeks of the site being up it ranks for “south dakota plastic surgeon” and bunch of other great terms.

Meanwhile, in San Diego, an SEO firm is feverishly building links for their new, local cosmetic surgery client. Despite getting awesome links from authority sites, perfecting their on-page optimization, and having a rock-solid web server, they can’t seem to get to the top of the page.

The designer and a member of the SEO firm meet on a forum after the desperate SEO posts a question: “We’ve done x, y and z for this local cosmetic surgeon’s site and can’t get it to the top. Can anyone think of something we haven’t?”

The South Dakota designer chimes in, “I just ranked a similar site in my local area for basically the same terms. I’d recommend taking a look at…”

“Thanks,” says the SEO, “we’ve done all that. Any other ideas?”

“You’re probably penalized,” replies the designer. “You should resubmit and look into the different penalties.”

Notice that the two never compared market sizes or competition. There was simply an extrapolation of “well, he did it, we must be doing something wrong.”

I can tell you right now that the market for cosmetic surgeons in San Diego is at least three times as competitive as the one in South Dakota, and probably more like 5-10x. Months later, that same SEO might try to “help” someone else by telling them about the penalty they received.

Compounding/Confounding Variables

I’ve seen this written both ways, and I believe they are equally correct, although they describe different parts of the same phenomenon.

“Compounding” refers to the multiplied affects of two or more variables affecting the outcome in their own way (could be the same, in which case your result is increased, or different, in which case it is sandbagged).

“Confounding” pretty much refers to what happens when you look at the results. In the case where two variables affect the outcome in equal, but opposite directions you would see no result. Totally confounding.

Given the massive number of variables in any SEO situation (from server setup, to domain entries, to site architecture, to content structure, to off-page factors, and search engine algorithm changes) it is easy to assign some outcome to one variable, when it was actually caused by another.

For example, take the case of the PPC manager who writes some new ad copy. She starts with her original ad:
Campaign Management_1257876204893

And then writes some new copy:
Campaign Management_1257876257569

“Interesting,” she thinks to herself, “that new ad copy makes a very definitive arrow pointing right, I wonder what that will do to click-through rates.”

She has just introduced a compounding variable. Later, when the new ad outperforms her old ad she may attribute the success to the geometric properties. But look at the ad, it’s just better all around.

Isolating those types of variables is difficult, but can be done. Besides, is it more likely that the ad improved because it uses both ‘clients’ and ‘customers’ and has more pleasing flow, or because the copy points to the right? I would say the former, but we could now test for the latter as well.

When receiving advice or information on web marketing, I would urge you to consider the source and parse for any of the above. Too many mistakes are made because the source of information is unreliable.

Tags for This Post: telephone game, game one, cosmetic surgeon, search ranking, different concepts, google pages, lack of comprehension

Web Marketing Education

November 6th, 2009

1257548945_applications-educationI’ve been wanting to talk a bit about the education behind web marketing, but now seems especially timely as I am participating in the launch of a course to educate non-profits, and small & local businesses on how they can take advantage of search marketing.

So What Makes a Web Marketer?

As with any fledgling industry web marketing is full of pioneers. The most common backgrounds I see are traditional marketers gone tech-y, web designers gone marketers, and then the “wildcards.” I would classify my own experience in the latter category.

There are, I believe, three main categories of contributing factors to my success in this industry: programming, network-admin, and finance.

Programming

I began programming when I was about 10 years old. My father often programmed astronomy-related algorithms to determine what constellations or planets would be visible in the night sky over our house. Eventually, I found out what BASIC was and started writing my own programs. In school we used to write scripts to display “Formatting Hard Drive C:\” with a slowly increasing percentage. It drove teachers nuts.

Eventually I moved on to Pascal, C++, HTML, CSS, and PHP (maybe Ruby someday soon, too). It’s amazing how much a knowledge of programming languages can contribute to SEO success. HTML and CSS are obvious, as knowing their capabilities is a great way to accomplish certain goals. But knowing how server-side languages work has allowed me have great relationships with the developers at the companies I have worked with. Marketing managers also appreciate working with someone who can help them translate their web goals into actionable items for their developers.

Network Administration

During my high-school career, I managed to exhaust all of the available options for programming classes. Through a relationship with another nearby vocational school, I was able to take a professional-level course which resulted in my A+ and (more importantly) Cisco CCNA certifications.

Although I no longer keep these certifications current, they (and specifically the CCNA curriculum) provided me with a solid foundation in the inner-workings of the hardware that powers the internet. While many people are confused by DNS propagation, IP addresses, or the differences between Apache and IIS, I have a solid knowledge of what makes the web go around.

Also, I know the vulnerabilities of Cisco 2600 routers, and can strip a CAT5-E with my teeth and build a patch cable in under 2 minutes.

Finance

Odd as it may sound, my college degree in finance has also been of great service to my career in web marketing. Although I never intended to take the Series 7 and get into trading securities, I have always been interested in finance principles, specifically in stock markets and real estate.

The massive amount of data manipulation needed to understand how financial markets work has been remarkably helpful in helping me build and interpret keyword research studies, or analytics data. I have also used this knowledge to develop methods for calculating the click-through rates of the Top 10 search results.

The Sum Total

So what’s it all worth? Allow me to illustrate with an anecdote.

Recently, a company I had been working with for a year downsized and my contact left without telling me who I should be contacting going forward, and without letting anyone in the company know who I was.

Eventually, my clients’ replacements reached out to me to find out what it is I do, and how it can help them. I could tell from the tone of our first phone call that they were highly skeptical, but they decided to give me a shot.

Last week, they invited UntouchableMarketing to their office to speak with the heads of their marketing and sales teams about PPC, SEO, and the usability and design of their site.

At the end of the meeting, one of the members of their team stood up and said, “I thought this would just be a re-hash of everything I already knew. I’m glad to say I was totally wrong. Thank you.”

The moral of the story is that all of that knowledge is useless without the ability to condense it and translate it to make it fit for business organizations to act on.

And that’s where LocalIgnition comes in…

In just a couple weeks, myself and two colleagues: Luke (a user-experience and design genius) and Scott (a master of KPIs and Operations Management) will be putting on a small pre-launch class on the topic of web marketing for non-profits, and small & local businesses.

I say this class will be pre-launch because it is Denver-only, and will only be 2 hours long. The full course will be 5 weeks, with videos and write-ups for each module, Q&A conference calls, email support, and much more.

If you’ll be in Denver, we’d love to have you join us at the Deproduction studios on November 18th.

If you’re interested in the full course, check out the LocalIgnition website and join our mailing list.

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