Internet Marketing Degree - Do I Need One?

Hey, I am interested in learning more about Internet marketing so I can do it for a living. Is there a certain training program that you could recommend. I am looking at Marketing Motive, but unsure if this will make me marketable. I have noticed a lot of IM jobs want you to have a bachelors and I will go back to college if I need to but would rather get it done quicker is possible. I do manage my own site and it is doing well but feel I really need to learn a lot more before I do it for someone else. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Brian Johnson, Buffaloz Photography Training

Brian's question goes to the core of an important issue. Do you need a degree to be a great Internet Marketer? I can answer in a single word - NO! I will go further. You can't under any circumstances learn to be an Internet marketer sitting in a classroom. I have 12  years of Internet marketing experience and that plus $4.00 gets coffee at Starbucks. This is not to say my experience managing multimillion dollar ecommerce sites is worth NOTHING, but just about. 

I left my position as a Director of Ecommerce in March 2010 to ride a bicycle across America. Arrogantly I figured my skills were so in demand I could take a year off. This logic is flawed on so many fronts it is sad, but the most critical error is THINGS CHANGE. In Internet marketing things change a LOT in no time at all. What I knew when I left my job in March 2010 ticked down to almost zero by the time my ride was over. I had to learn THE NEW. There is always new. Internet marketing reinvents itself constantly.

Upon return I had to learn how social and search are becoming the same idea. I had to pick up on Real Time after attending Content Marketing World in Cleveland (on one of my last dimes since I was BROKE after Martin's Ride To Cure Cancer) and I had to chisel new tactics. My standbys such as viral marketing had, in my absence, become too common. This need to standout is another reason Internet marketing can't be taught in a classroom. Classrooms are about doing what others agree is the thing to do. Internet marketing is about finding ways to create uniqueness. Conventions, those things such as shopping carts and email subscription forms, have their place but I'm a big believer in "Blue Ocean Strategy" - creating new value so compelling customers tell five friends.

Where Can You Learn Internet Marketing
Brian assumes Internet marketing is something different or more complicated than the three sites he has created and is already managing. It isn't. Internet marketing turns on several key ideas including:

• Reputation Economy - What OTHERS think of YOU and your offerings
• Thank You Economy - Give until it hurts and give some more
• Content Marketing - Like Brian's photography tips this is what you give until it hurts
• UGC - User Generated Content because YOU can't create all the content you need
• Analytics and Web Metrics - (PPC and SEO) What is converting and why in the modeled universe
• Web Site Design
• Email Marketing & Social Media Marketing - what is creating advocacy and social shares
• Five Other Things (Serving and Tech, Video Marketing, Curation, Retargeting, Mobile)

Modeling & KPI's
See the problem? No way ANYONE knows everything an Internet marketer needs to know. Here is how I explained it to the last President I worked for:

I know 25% of what I need to know. I can model another 25% based on trending data and twelve years of experience. Finally I create a SWAG (Sophisticated, Wild, Ass, Guess) that gains 5% moving us to 55% so we are above chance. The rest of the 45% I've learned to let happen and watch like a hawk on a wire looking for dinner.

 If you can't learn Internet marketing in a classroom and that is the bad news, the good news is you can learn how to THINK like an Internet marketer. I have a meeting tomorrow with the creator of Content Marketing World and the reason Cleveland is becoming known as the content capital of the world Joe Pulizzi to discuss making our draft of Think Like An Internet Marketer a book complete with a full description of what it means to think like an Internet marketer, practice exercises and every secret we know. The book will provide what no classroom can - an adjustable process capable of helping anyone who wants to Think Like An Internet Marketer.

Important to share two ideas immediately - KPIs and Modeling. Every site has Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can tell the site's daily story in shorthand. I watched 5 KPIs like my life depended on them:

• Unique Traffic
• Conversions (sales in ecommerce or subscriptions and downloads for B2B)
• Unique Traffic / Conversions
• Cart Abandonment (best converting page / worst converting page)
• Heuristics (bounce rate, time on site, pages viewed)

 Tomorrow is Tuesday. If Tuesday's KPI's are trending less than five points of standard deviation (+ or - 5) I made a note for my weekly report and went about my other duties. If any metric trended greater than 5 points from expectations a "deep dive" was necessary. I would spend several days teasing out what was going on. Sometimes there were outliers and anomalies. Sometimes there were problems deep inside the engine that could take months and tens of thousands of dollars to resolve.

My advice is to set up daily Key Performance Indicators, trend them and then deep dive if you see + or - 10% standard deviation (it being the spring soon and Christmas 2012 is a way off so you have some leeway assuming you don't sell flowers or chocolates since Valentine's Day is pretty HOT right about now). A "deep dive" requires getting inside the data, looking for the cliff the data fell off creating the anomaly. Deep dives require going a day (or even an hour or a minute) at a time until you see the outlier condition confirmed no matter how you cut the data.

I like to "database" data with a spreadsheet, tag it and then pivot and eliminate. If I go through this process backwards, forwards and sideways getting the same result in the same place I've found the problem. Problems come from Google, code and Ghost In The Machine. I will never know where some of the anomalies I chased came from. They disappeared into the great, "can't be consistently recreated" Bermuda Triangle between code, serving and use.

Think Like An Internet Marketer Book
I could go on and on, but a couple of quick notes about Brian's Buffaloz's Photography Training site:

• Design - Site is a tad chaotic read Barry Schwartz's book Paradox of Choice to understand why doing less can be more especially online. Also read Don't Make Me Think by Kruger.
• Taxonomy - Navigation is a great place for keywords and keywords are never as general as "contact" or "advertise" think about the powerful difference between those and "Photography Tips" use Google Adwords Keyword tool to learn how many monthly searches are being performed on your top 50 keywords and then choose five of those for your menu (don't have to be the TOP 5 but more traffic is better than less UNLESS you are using a 'long tail' strategy trying to niche your offerings) - Watch for my post on Branding Keywords on Atlantic BT's blog soon to understand how we organize keywords into blue oceans
• Coming Soon - SHOP is a pretty powerful keyword so it will get a lot of clicks even if only curiosity clicks, never say "coming soon" online as it destroys your credibility forever. Put things up when they are ready you gain NOTHING from teasing a store and lose everything
• Hierarchy - Your site communicates in a nonverbal way. Right now yours is saying, "cool stuff here but disorganized and so a lot of work" only 2% of your traffic will be willing to work as hard as you are asking them. Do less and do it fast then watch your metrics to see if you've chosen right. To provide some perspective I made one menu change and it made my last company $1,000,000. I put the most important product we sold on top of the left menu - small things can make all the difference in Internet marketing
• Heroes - We call the largest image on the page a "hero". This is a purposeful name since it conveys how important the top image is to setting the tone for the page. Your hero is tiny and overshadowed by the text / graphic of your logo. Heroes communicate connection and create legitimacy. Your name, while important, shouldn't get out of a box on the upper left since to do so calls too much attention to it, breaks convention and destroys legitimacy. There are times to break with convention name in up left is NOT one of them
• Menus - The more alternative navigation you provide the more confusing it becomes. I would eliminate the cloud since it is too much information without clear hierarchy. If you are going to use a cloud pick NO MORE than 7 keywords. There is a reason we have 7 digit phone numbers. Our short term memory can handle seven digits. Think how impossible our lives would be if our phone numbers were 15 digits. We wouldn't be able to phone home and your cloud has more than 100 options. Here again DO LESS and your users will thank you by spending more time on your site, view more pages, bounce less and, eventually, pay you money
• 2nd Conversion Email Subscriptions - Don't forget to ask people to join your list. Email marketing will become your more valuable marketing communication. Also, your crew will WANT your monthly newsletter full of tips and ideas (I would start with monthly but you can always mail MORE as long as your messages are relevant and not spam, always give your subscribers easy and secure ways to opt out as it is the law and a good idea)

I share these notes NOT to be an all knowing jerk (I'm not), but to share 12 years of Internet marketing experience. The difference between your current "not bad" site and greatness is 10%, but a sizable 10%. This is another important Internet marketing truth. The difference between $1M in revenue and $1,000 in revenue is 10%.

Hope this note has helped clarify that NO you don't need to go to college to be a great Internet marketer. YES you are already doing the right things and Don't Give Up since real Internet marketers never do.

Good luck and look for Think Like An Internet Marketer in the fall.

Martin
Director Marketing
Atlantic BT
Raleigh, NC

SEO And The Amazon Paradox On LinchpinSEO

"Sure," was the answer when my friend, former teammate and one of the best SEOs I know asked if I would write a guest post for LinchpinSEO. Bill always has five things I want to read and ten ideas I want to steal and today is no different. In addition to my guest post on SEO and the Amazon Paradox here are other great LinchpinSEO posts I'm reading and Tweeting before the end of the night:

• SEO And The Amazon Paradox (my guest post)
• How Google Killed Search's Long Tail (Infographic)
• Viral Video Tips
• How Much Does SEO Cost (Infographic)

Bill knows his SEO stuff, is a great teacher and shares easily and often. If you need a great SEO I highly recommend Bill Ross. In fact, you can read how Bill saved my SEO life via my recommendation on Bill's Linkedin. Here are some other helpful links to Bill:

@BillRoss on Twitter

Critical Mass Bill's pretty cool Chicago employer


LinchpinSEO Bill's SEO blog

Critical Mass looks to be a pretty cool Chicago agency. Credit to them for understanding the need for a SEO guru the caliber of Bill Ross. Bill's presence means Critical Mass gets it and, from a quick review of their site, they have considerable skills. Cutting clutter is the not so hidden subtext of SEO And The Amazon Paradox. Looks like Critical Mass knows how to fire up a chainsaw. I know Bill does as he has done so in my favor many, many times :).

Someone suggested championing great agencies and other SEOs is a conflict to my current position as Director Marketing at Atlantic BT in Raleigh. I don't agree. There is going to be enough web development and Internet marketing work to go around in our lifetime. Ecommerce is only 8% of total retail and going up, so our rising Internet marketing tide is going to lift all boats.

Secondly great work is great work. Everyone at Atlantic BT is dedicated to learning from the great work of others. We are confident in our skills and ability to continue to create greatness too. My friends have always helped and vice versa. The fact our paychecks don't have the same name on them any longer means little. We help first and worry about everything else a distant second :). This "help first" ideology forms the basis of our Gift Economy according to Seth Godin (author of Linchpin) and Gary Vaynerchuk (the "wine guy" and author of The Thank You Economy). I know Bill lives by this help first credo otherwise he wouldn't have asked me to write a guest post in the first place.

Thanks Bill. Great to work together again after all these years :).

Martin

Video Marketing Secrets With David Rose At #ABTmeetup

Video Marketing Best Practices At Raleigh Internet Marketing Meetup
Our monthly Internet Marketing Relativity group is growing. About 20 people stopped by Atlantic BT in Raleigh tonight to learn video marketing best practices from David Rose of MagneTVideo.com. Rick, Anthony, Patrick and everyone at Bella Mia Coal Fired Pizza in Cary made sure we ate great food as David shared these online video marketing secrets:

• Video SEO
• Transcripts are key to video SEO
• Use closed caption transcriptions to feed search engine spiders
• YouTube helps achieve great SEO placement but hard to convert from YouTube so think of your YouTube videos more like positive branding
• Never, under any circumstance, drive traffic to YouTube since your traffic will do many things (watching funny cat videos or the latest viral craze), but conversion isn't one of them
• Video Title = key for SEO, followed by tags and a complete transcription

• Video As Core
• Video, like anything else, ins NOT a silver bullet put part of an overall content and marketing strategy
• Video's singular purpose is to promote conversion, anything else is getting off track (and not in a good way)
• Measure customer engagement - how long do customers watch the video and shoot for 90% or above getting all the way through
• One minute or about 145 words is the new online video limit, after that viewership drops off dramatically
• Talking heads can kill viewership, so use B Roll and motion to keep interest throughout the minute or less video
• Talking heads are also hard to pull off since even experienced CEO's can shut down in front of a camera
• Videos enhance landing pages helping focus attention into Call To Action because "heavy lifting" is done by the video (not hundreds of words of text on the page)

• Video ROI and Metrics
• Great questions about how to define video success in a multi-touch world and here is what we came up with...
• Sophisticated systems can allocate time on site, view and conversion via cookies and carries
• Use of multi-touch assignments (of touch value) is cheaper and faster if all parties can agree to value of each touch (what is video's value after SEO, email marketing and social? Who knows but make an assignment and move on)
• Modeled worlds like Internet marketing aren't 2 + 2 = 4 linear worlds, this is not to say video marketing is a "trust me" as I shared specific A/B tests conducted on product pages before and after video from last job. 
• There is a HUGE opportunity for video metrics, David blogs video metrics monthly read his Online Video Statistics For December 2011

Great Internet Marketing Meetup tonight! Thanks to David, MagneTVideo.com and everyone who came, ate great pizza and asked fantastic questions. If you live in Raleigh, Durham, Cary or Chapel Hill and are interested in attending our next Raleigh Internet Marketing Meetup use the link below to join our group and look for an email about our February meetup soon.

Yes, I Want To Join Internet Marketing Relativity MEETUP at Atlantic BT in Raleigh.

Thanks, Martin

Twitter Hashtag: #abtmeetup