Live Lessons - Search Engine Marketing, Inc.

Hi, I'm Mike Moran. I'm the co-author along with Bill Hunt of Search Engine Marketing Incorporated, which is in its second edition now, and we're just releasing a video series that covers that book. And my background is a 30-year veteran at IBM. I retired from IBM in 2008 as a distinguished engineer, which is kind of an executive-level technical position. And part of my time there at IBM, I spent running IBM's website, the technology and the user experience areas of the website. And I was one of the people, along with my co-author Bill Hunt, who actually introduced the search marketing program at IBM in 2001, and that was the basis for our book. And since then, I've had a career in public speaking as well as having written another book called Do It Wrong Quickly, which is about broader internet marketing subjects. And I'm also the Chief Strategist at Converseon, which is a leading digital marketing agency that specializes in social consulting and social media monitoring. And social media activation and campaigns. So even though I retired from IBM, I don't feel retired. I still feel pretty busy. So the learning series videos that we just created based on the book Search Engine Marketing Incorporated The target market for that is anyone with a neck. All right, maybe not. All right, not anyone with a neck, but anyone with a neck who wants to understand search marketing. Those people we want. A lot of times you'll see that there are series that are pitched at people who are experts or other series that might be pitched at newbies. What we tried to do both in the book and in the video series is we try to make sure that we go as deep as you need to go. Yeah. In the technical information, it's really important that you do understand as much of the information as possible, but we try to do it in such a way that it's accessible. You don't have to have a background in order to come to it. You can start out maybe not knowing all that much and feel like you kind of don't have even a leg to stand on with this stuff, but what we did in the book and what we do in the video series is we take it step by step. And we also We try to use terminology that everybody will understand. I mean, one of the things we did in the book was to produce a glossary that has a definition of just about anything you can think of related to internet marketing, and we take the same kind of approach in the video series. It's not— it doesn't make sense to be using all sorts of technical terms so that you have to watch the thing along with a thesaurus. What we really want to do is to help you understand step by step how it works. Right. What are the most important things that you have to do, and then what are the things you do after that? And so you can decide how slowly or how quickly you go through the series. The early parts of the series are much simpler for a beginner, but after you've watched them, then you'll be able to get into the material in the later part of the series. And if you already know a lot about search marketing, but you just want to bone up, you might just want to purchase the latter parts of the series. Maybe you already understand the basics, and so you want to understand the deeper stuff, and so you can buy the entire series Or you can just buy the parts of the series that really make sense for you. I think one of the things that really distinguishes this video series is that it's about business. It's not just about search. It's not just about technology, right? I mean, search marketing is much more about marketing than it is about search. And so even though you do need to understand all of the technology, you do need to understand all the different ways that search engines work, it's really important that you have those kinds of details when you're trying to execute your program. It's even more important to understand what your purpose is for search. Why are you doing this? What is your website about? What would make this program a success when you look back on it? Those things are even more important than the technical details, because if you don't understand those, it doesn't matter how efficient you are at doing all the technical things. It won't make any difference because you won't know what you're doing it for. You'll never know when to stop. You'll never know when it's good enough and you should go work on something else. But if you do understand why you're doing this for your business, then all of a sudden, Even if the technology may not have been the easiest thing for you, you'll be so motivated that you're going to figure out how to do it, whether it's you are the one doing it or you get someone else to help you do it who might be more proficient at those things. But you're going to know why you're in it, and you're going to know that you have to keep slogging away until you finally get somewhere. And so the business part to us is just as important as the technical part. And I think a lot of— people who talk about search marketing, they're so busy telling you about the technical details that they forget the real purpose behind it. I think what I'm really hoping for is that you'll, you'll come away feeling a sense of confidence. So rather than being overwhelmed, you're gonna feel like even though there's a lot to know and you might not feel like an expert, that you at least know where to start, that you at least say, for me, for what I need to do, I think I know what, what the first place is to go. The second thing that I hope you'll get out of it is that you'll understand how to keep score. So when you do things, you'll know if they worked or not. And so you'll know if that was good or bad. You'll know if there's something that you tried that perhaps was a really good idea and now you should try it in 3 other parts of your site, or there's something else you tried that, that one didn't work, so you might need to try again a different way, or you might need to say to yourself, well, I think maybe that wasn't the idea, let's move on to something else. And I think the last thing that I'd like you to get out of it Is that you understand that you're working inside a larger organization, that even if you're a small business, if— unless you're a one-man show, there are other people that you're gonna have to work with. There are other people that are gonna have to do things. You're gonna be able to explain to them why they need to do these things. If you're in a large organization, you'll be able to organize yourself so that the entire organization is now understanding what has to be done. Each person in each different role will know what they need to do, and you'll be able to check up to make sure they're doing it. So whether you're in a large company or a small company, you're usually part of a bigger team, even if it's just you having to explain to the boss why this is important. And so all of those things to me are the key takeaways that I hope you get out of this video, and I think that's what makes it different. From another series that you might decide to look at. Thank you.