I’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.

Tags for This Post: marketing managers, web marketer, developers network, industry programming, fledgling industry, programming classes, web goals, traditional marketers

Tags: developers network, fledgling industry, industry programming, marketing managers, programming classes, traditional marketers, web goals, web marketer

This entry was posted on Friday, November 6th, 2009 at 4:11 pm and is filed under Business, Services Offered, Strategy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.