I couldn’t be prouder of my MarketMotive conversion certification students. Two semesters ago, one of those volunteer sites, a mobile application provider, increased their conversion rate by over 100% based on the recommendations of one of my students and today I was thrilled to hear about one of our volunteer websites increasing conversion rates by over 50% in just one week.

I need more volunteer websites to work with my students.

In order to achieve their certification, my students must perform a certain number of successful improvements for a website. Some of these students work for very large companies, that don’t make it easy for them to test on, while others their own sites may be too small in traffic and conversions to finish the tests on time. So…

I am looking for a couple of volunteer websites that want to improve their conversion rate that will allow my students under my guidance to analyze their website and set up a few tests. If you have a website, either retail or lead generation, and you have a good amount of traffic and conversions but want more please contact me so we can see if we have a match.

Think of it as money falling from the sky 

We want it simple!

Given a choice, human beings choose simple over complicated virtually every time.

Searching with Google is simple. You type in a few words and Google delivers the most relevant results.

So, what could be simpler than Google pay-per-click advertisements? People search for stuff, you craft a 95-character advertisement with a URL based on that search, you make a bid telling Google how much that searcher is worth to you, searchers click on your ad and go to its URL, and only then does Google get paid. That’s simple!

It’s so simple and powerful that it’s addictive.

Making things simple is hard work. Nobody does a better job of that than Google. That’s why in 2010, Google will sell well over $20 billion in PPC (define) advertisements.

Google’s PPC platform is a marvel of simplicity. The price of that simplicity is high. In reducing the inherent complexity, the opportunity to fine-tune becomes hidden, practically lost. Simplicity is a large part of what makes Google’s business model so great.

If you want it complicated, more powerful, and enhanced through the API to make your PPC efforts more efficient, that’s completely available, as long as you’re prepared to dig.

If you want it simple, then you overpay.

Thus, simplicity acts like a tax.

You could easily be paying 20 to 60 percent of your Google PPC budget to the “secret simple tax.” That was the case for one of our audit clients with a six-figure monthly PPC budget who was overpaying by over 50 percent. That’s right, millions of dollars could have been better invested if they realized that simple simply costs.

The secret simple tax affects small, medium, and large clients.

The secret simple tax affects in-house and agency clients.

The secret simple tax affects everyone who thinks of PPC as simple.

Google’s pay-per-click advertisement platform is not simple. It’s mindnumbingly complex. It’s hard and it’s humbling.

Can you handle the truth?

The truth is that Google’s PPC advertisement platform is simple to use but hard to master.

Our friends include some of the smartest, most up-to-date search marketers on the planet. We picked their brains when we started seeing quality score drastically affect our clients. We all considered ourselves smart, but our ignorance was astonishing. Every obvious question brought up at least seven less obvious follow-up questions. The complexity of the platform is profound, and when you overlay the complexity of a business’ products, services, customers, semantics, competitors, internal politics, and budgets, it makes your head hurt.

It can make you feel like a simpleton.

So, should you throw your hands up in the air, give up, and pay Google’s secret simple tax?

Heck no! Repeat after me: “We won’t pay that stinking tax no more!”

Hopefully you’re prepared to replace unconscious incompetence with conscious incompetence. Don’t worry, that’s a great thing. If you don’t understand why, then learn about the Four Stages Of Competence.

There are seven indications that you may be paying Google’s secret simple tax:

1. You favor audience reach instead of focusing on messaging relevance for every query
2. You favor audience reach instead of targeting, qualifying, and excluding searches
3. You don’t know how Google calculates your Ad Rank or the true impact of Google Quality Score
4. You favor brand messaging instead of focusing on the searcher’s buying intent
5. You organize using keywords instead of Ad Groups
6. You have many keywords but much fewer landing pages
7. You don’t constantly test ads and landing pages

There’s a lot more to say on the subject, I’ve said more here, here, and here. I won’t even start to ask what you’re measuring.

Are you willing to be wrong? Are you willing to question what you’ve been doing? Are you willing to unlearn what you think you know? Are you ready to handle the complexity of the world’s most powerful ad platform?

Or perhaps, I’m overcomplicating it all and you have everything under control.

Jeffrey, my brother and business partner, and I hope that you’re truly as smart as you think you are. We wish every one of our readers the best of luck in all their endeavors.

P.S. If you’d like to calculate your secret simple tax, download a spreadsheet here.

Actually the answer is pretty simple. You haven’t given me sufficient reason to choose you over your competitors. Today’s customer has more choice, more knowledge, and even tabbed browsing to evaluate you and distinguish you from all of your competitors. In the few seconds they’ll invest in your website, if they can’t decide why you might be the solution to their want or need, they’ll close that tab faster than your Flash promotion can ever engage them.

I just returned from SES Toronto. One of the sessions I moderated was the PPC (define) ad and landing page clinic. A common mistake we saw: companies failing to position their value relative to their competitors.

So how do you avoid this mistake?

First, position yourself in your ads. The typical searcher is evaluating your ad compared to three to five others. Then, of course, position yourself on your landing page, but don’t forget every other page on your website. Buyers rarely see only your landing page. Give people a reason why they should choose you.

Don’t use flaccid, sugar-coated copy. If I could have a nickel for every unsubstantiated superlative I see in PPC ads and on websites, my great-great grandchildren would never have to work a day in their lives. No you aren’t amazing, the best, most innovative, number one, etc. At least not until other people say it and you can document it with facts. Two examples from the clinic come to mind. I won’t give the specifics to protect the guilty, but enough that you will get the idea.

The first example was from someone who sells used cars. Their ads sounded exactly like everyone else’s – “search from our extensive collection.” Extensive, according to whom? Is that an extensive three cars or 30,000? So, the first thing we asked the person from this website was – why should anyone buy from you? He replied that they were the biggest. The biggest what? According to? He said they had the largest inventory. That’s a great benefit for someone searching for a used car, but superlatives and hyperbole don’t help your visitors choose. Use specifics. Say something like “search from over 36,000 used vehicles in our collection.” If you could say “search from over 300 Acura TL no older than 2006″ that would be even better. Get it?

Another example was a company that sold leadership training. Their ad sounded just like Charlie Brown’s teacher: Wa wa wa wa wa wa. Every ad on the page sounded exactly the same. When I asked what they do differently and what was their goal, they responded that they were rated number one by a major publication and that their goal was to get people to come and get evaluated. I recommended they change their ad to suggest they were top ranked and that they should register to see if they qualify. They had to be sure that on the landing page they documented their number one ranking. And by telling people they may not qualify, being a bit exclusive could help their positioning.

People are bombarded with sales messages all the time. If you can’t cut through the clutter immediately to offer them something that has obvious value, they’ll be long gone to someone who can.

Nowadays, a lot of prospective customers have very short attention spans and even shorter memories, and they’re jaded.

You must make your value proposition or campaign proposition – strong, simple, quick, and clear – immediately, when prospects first hit your site. If you don’t have a strong value or campaign proposition and don’t state it clearly right upfront, you’re sending your traffic elsewhere instead of drawing them deeper into your own sales funnel.

Need help figuring out how to do that? Write down every possible reason you can find why someone should want to do business with your firm. If you want real results, involve your entire company in a high-energy brainstorming session. If you don’t find at least a few dozen reasons, either you aren’t trying very hard or you have a very boring company. Don’t be afraid to get professional help. Your survival can depend on it. Afterward, review the list and eliminate everything that is also true of your competitors. Nothing should be allowed to remain on the list that can also be claimed by a competitor. Here are some quick guidelines:

1. What is unique about your business or brand vs. your direct competitors?
2. Which of these factors are most important to your prospects?
3. Which of these factors are most difficult for your competitors to imitate?
4. Which of these factors can be most easily understood by your prospects?

Now create a memorable message out of these unique, meaningful qualities about your business or brand. And make sure it’s a message that speaks to the need your prospective customer feels, not some self-centered stuff about you.

You should also watch this video.

Newsletters continue to serve as an effective way for businesses, from retailers to B2B services, to stay in touch with their customers. In my last column, I shared the simple but powerful technique of using point-of-action assurances to convert more visitors into taking the actions you want them to take – such as using the words “we value your privacy” anywhere you want someone to provide you with their e-mail address. Here are some other tips you can use to increase and retain newsletter subscribers:

1. Provide a sample: Add a link that opens up a sample newsletter like CafePress.com. It’s a great way of setting expectations of what your subscribers will receive.
   
2. Acquire subscribers at seducible moments: One of the best times to capture that newsletter opt-in is immediately after your visitor has taken an action they found valuable. Too few retailers use their “Thank You for Ordering” page to acquire subscribers. Instead, many retailers add it as an option in the shopping cart; that adds friction and one more decision in the checkout process that can give visitors pause. By the way, ensure you test variations of this call to action.
3. Offer a bribe: Don’t just ask them to subscribe; give them a valuable reason why. Offer them a free white paper, a super coupon, an exclusive invitation, etc. Make sure you establish the value of this offer as well. Notice how my friend Larry Chase offers you his Social Media Marketing Guide and established a $29.95 value for it.



4. Remember, segmentation and relationships are key: One newsletter rarely fits all. Your visitors have different interests, different threshold requirements for taking action, and different moments in their buying process. You probably shouldn’t send your previous customers the same newsletter you send people who have never bought from you. You must nurture relationships and provide key content and offers at the right times in the visitor life cycle. One easy segmentation for existing customers is to use RFM analysis to send out different offers. You can also offer different newsletters related to different product categories or business roles. You can see how ClickZ offers several different options here. Although, for your business you may want to test capturing the e-mail address first and then offer them the segmentation to a separate newsletter on the next step.
5. Ensure your e-mail preview is engaging: If you want to retain your visitors, you must ensure they open and read your newsletters. An easy approach is to make sure your e-mail template is formatted well for preview in the various e-mail clients. If your e-mail looks like a bunch of empty boxes with red Xs, fewer people will open it and read it. In the one to two seconds that a person scans an e-mail, if she can’t figure out the value she’ll delete it. Compare the two e-mails from my inbox below and decide which one you are more likely to allow the download of images.



6. It’s not all about offers; it’s about great content: Want the secret to keeping thousands of subscribers for years on end? Look for those that have successful mailings. You must think like a publisher, whether you are a retailer or a B2B (define) service or a technology provider. Newsletters like ClickZ, Ralph Wilson’s Web Digest for Marketers, or Larry Chase’s WDFM are newsletters that I’ve maintained my subscriptions to since the mid to late ’90s. Why? Since they focus on providing excellent relevant content, they have changed formats over time and they allow me to get the content in the way I want to get it. I don’t need to remind you of the expression that “content is king.” But keep in mind: If you provide me content related to a topic I am interested in, I am more likely to open your newsletter on a regular basis than if you only send me offers that I will open only when I am in the market for your product.
7. If a subscriber opts out, offer to change frequency: There will come a time when your subscriber has had enough of your mailings. Make it easy for her to unsubscribe, but when she arrives at your unsubscribe page offer her the ability to change the frequency from a weekly mailing to a monthly mailing. Offer her to opt in to a more “select” or segmented newsletter. Give one last chance to stay engaged.

Use these seven simple tips to increase your newsletter subscribers, keep producing valuable content, and find ways to engage people where they are in their buying process and building long-term relationships instead of focusing on your sales and one-off offers. You’ll build a newsletter list to rival your competitors. Remember, the money is always in the list!

My last two columns focused on evaluating the five dimensions that make the 10 design elements of the anatomy of a landing page convert better. A prominent feature found on many landing pages is a form to complete, or at the end of a retail landing experience, forms required to complete a check-out. I haven’t written about designing forms on ClickZ since 2004 or on how to reduce shopping cart abandonment since 2003. (Sorry, as you can see by the 300+ columns I’ve written here, there are many topics to cover under optimization.)

Today, let’s cover seven factors to consider when designing your forms for maximum conversionability and persuadability:

• Size
• Fields
• Labels
• Benefits
• Prominence
• Call to action
• Confidence building

Size

Size does matter sometimes, if you want to see customers take action! How many actual pixels (height and width) does the form take? I have seen forms that ask for very few fields, but because they look long, they intimidate users into a misconception about the amount of time it might take to complete a form. This is also one of the reasons you seldom want to place form fields horizontally next to each other – it makes the form look scary. For example, you never want to have a check-out with the billing information in the right-hand column and the shipping information in the left column. This is also related to how many fields you ask people to complete as well; the more fields, the bigger the form will be. Don’t make your form look like tax or department of motor vehicle forms.

Fields

The type of questions you ask in your form can also make or break its conversionability. If you start asking for a Social Security number, mother’s maiden name, blood type, what they had for breakfast, etc., you can stop a visitor in their tracks. This is the constant battle that marketing faces with sales about what data they need for a lead, while marketing struggles on the quantity versus quality issues related to leads and form completions. The fields you require should always be tested.

Labels

Now, it isn’t just what you ask but how you ask it. How you label a form field can have a tremendous impact on its ability to persuade a visitor to fill in the information. In fact, I remember asking my friend Bernardo de Albergaria, VP and GM, global marketing and eCommerce for Citrix, about his most surprising test while I was recording podcasts for the launch of my “Always Be Testing” book. He recalled how the label on one field for a Go ToMeeting account had such a surprising impact on conversion.

Benefits

Too many companies present their visitors a form without reminding them of why they should complete the form, what are the benefits of completing the form, and what will be the next steps after they complete the form. Check-out processes should show people what items they are ordering (both in text and visually), when the order will arrive, and the total costs early on. One such example is when we added the beautiful gift box that one of our jewelry clients sent with their products in the check-out process – it had an immediate and direct impact to conversion. In lead generation, you could do similar things especially when promoting a white paper or Webinar; merchandize your B2B offering effectively.

Prominence

Make the form jump off the page. Do you make it obvious that you want people to complete it? Adding a bit of color behind the form and a bit of design around the edges, or a simple graphic or icon is often enough to make it more visually prominent. If you are offering a white paper, possibly include the cover of it by the form and remind them of the benefits.

Call to Action

What do they click on when they complete the form? There are several factors that matter here: text versus graphics, shape variations, colors, style variations, icon variations, size variations, legibility, location variations, and wording. You can read about the details about each one of these in this column, “Calling You to Action.”

Confidence Building

Establishing trust and credibility on a Web site should be its own column. However, there are several general ways to build confidence for your visitors; you can leverage others credibility (known third-party endorsements and reviews, trust marks, customer logos ,etc.), leverage the voice of the customer with reviews and testimonials, use point-of-action assurances to ease concerns, doubts, and fears, and do everything else to provide a quality experience.

Are you showing good form? Test and leverage these seven form factors and boost your conversion rate today!

You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you might even kiss your money good bye. Google AdWords is one of the most remarkable advertising vehicles in the history of marketing. No matter how simple 95 characters seems to be, there is no denying the complexity of executing well. Of course, the fact that not all the rules or all the data are presented well doesn’t make it any easier. What amazes me is how most people don’t take full control over what they do control.

My associates and I have been doing several Pay Per Click (PPC) audits for clients the last few weeks and consistently we find companies have many of the same core issues:

1. Account structure – remember that they are called ad groups not keyword groups. Too many companies groups keywords together that don’t belong together; they don’t realize you can’t create an ad that is relevant for each of the keywords in the group and this can become a bigger issue if the right match types aren’t properly used.

2. Keyword, Ad and Landing Page Quality & Relevance – because the structure is off, and companies don’t maintain their campaigns well enough, the ads become irrelevant for the search queries that trigger the ads based on the keywords that were chosen. If the ads are off, I can guarantee that the landing pages are off.

3. Looking at the wrong data – It surprises me how reports are distributed and used. If all members of your team aren’t all looking at the right data you can’t make the right decisions to get the most out of your campaigns.  You can’t be making business optimization decisions if you don’t have the right data and innumeracy leads many ‘data-driven’ executives to bad decisions. They forget that statistics lie and liars use statistics.

Please don’t forget to control what you can.

The first step is understanding the PPC searcher’s buying journey and managing and optimizing the parts you can. Why aren’t you regularly optimizing your PPC campaigns from keyword management, to account structuring, to improved ads to testing and improving your landing pages? Is it lack of knowledge? Lack of resources? Lack of direction?

Why would you want to continue the drama and not enjoy lots of happy endings?

Last time, I shared with you the 10 landing page elements, such as the call to action, that make up the anatomy of a landing page.

Once you have identified your elements, there are five dimensions to evaluate if the elements will work at converting your visitors. The five dimensions are:

• Relevance
• Quality
• Location
• Proximity
• Prominence

Relevance

Everything else about your page can suck (the technical term we use in Brooklyn), as long as you manage to understand your visitor’s intent and meet it with a page that is relevant to their needs, matches their expectations, and explains things in terms they understand for where they are in their buying process.

First: If your visitor came from an advertisement, be sure tomaintain scent between the landing page and the advertisement. If it is a search or PPC (define) ad, then your ad and landing page should match the query the visitor used. And, the offer used should match from ad to landing page. If it is a display ad, the offer, imagery, colors, etc., should match from the ad to landing page.

Each of the 10 landing page elements should be relevant to the visitor’s goal while ensuring they complete the action you want them to. Remove anything on the page that is not relevant to their buying process and anything that does not help them convert. This will also ensure the message’s clarity.

Your message must also speak to the correct persona for their preferred way of gathering information, making decisions, and stage of the buying process.

Quality

The better each of your elements are crafted, the better your results. Your copy should be engaging and easy to read, both from a relevance and visual appeal. Your copy should be skimmable and scannable – visitors won’t waste time reading until they scan the page and make sure it is relevant to them. Your landing page and any graphical elements you use should look professional; that doesn’t necessarily mean it needs to look pretty. Often times, ugly but professional pages convert better; don’t let your graphic designer kill your conversion rate. Even the quality of a voiceover in a demo can make a conversion difference.

Location

Where elements on the page are located can make a huge difference. Try to get the most relevant information and calls to action above the fold. If you have a multiple column page, what elements appear in what column also matter. The order of your elements matters too; this is often the case in copy where I have found that if I take the last paragraph of copy that is on the page and make it the first paragraph, it will usually increase conversion rates.

Proximity

Be conscious of what elements lay next to each other. An example I use is Overstock.com. A graphic next to the internal search box reads “Kids Titles for Learning and Fun” on its movie page. When the two elements are looked at together, visitors think they are related. They ended up thinking that the search box was for searching kids’ movies. As soon as we swapped the graphic to “search over 24,000 movies,” it accounted for a 5 percent increase in revenue. It was that big of a deal. Or as my friends from WiderFunnel will tell you: be careful of adding trust seals next to calls to action; sometimes the visual distraction causes visitors to not take any action.

Prominence

Stand 6 to 10 feet back from your page – what stands out? Is your call to action obvious? Can your visitor tell who you are, why they should trust you, and how you are relevant to their need in just a matter of seconds? Make good use of color, layout, and white space so key elements jump off the page and make the visitor’s eyes flow from one element to the next. Attention heatmaps, like AttentionWizard from fellow ClickZ columnist, Tim Ash, can be used to simulate visitor visual processing and attention to judge element visual prominence, but it can’t account for visitor motivation and your relevance.

These five dimensions of the 10 landing page elements, in conjunction with some testing, can help you have the most effective landing page for converting your visitors to take action. In my next column, I’ll share with you the seven factors of form design that are critical to your conversion rate.

I couldn’t be prouder of my MarketMotive conversion certification students. For example, I had one of my students do a fabulous job critiquing websites at SES New York during a conversion clinic session and many of my students have been doing amazing work increasing conversion rates on their own sites and on several of the sites that volunteered to have our students work with them. In fact, one of those volunteer sites, a mobile application provider, increased their conversion rate by over 100% based on the recommendations of one of my students.

Listen to What They Learned: Live!

After 12 weeks learning “at the knee” of some of the industry’s best and brightest, these Internet marketing students are set to graduate… if they can just earn their faculty’s endorsement.

Four times a year, Market Motive offers intimate, faculty-led web-based courses in Internet marketing from All-star faculty members teach the certification courses: Dave Szetela, Matt Bailey (Fundamentals), Jennifer Laycock (Social Media), John Marshall (Web Analytics), Avinash Kaushik (Web Analytics), Greg Jarboe/Jamie O’Donnell (Online PR and Video marketing), Bryan Eisenberg (Conversion Optimization), Michael Stebbins (Email Marketing) and nailing down PPC Advertising. This time around, final project defenses are open to the public.

Since January, the all-star faculty has been shepherding this semester’s class through the latest in cutting edge trends and tools for SEO, Web Analytics, Social Media and Conversion Optimization.

But receiving a Master Certification from Market Motive requires more from students than just watching streaming videos and passing online quizzes. It also requires hands-on projects that reflect the kind of work they’ll do in the real world.

Those final projects are presented to the faculty in live screen-sharing webinars by students studying SEO, Conversion Optimization, and Social Media. This semester the public is invited to listen in by webinar.

Landing pages have become an important part of the marketer’s toolbox. To create effective landing pages, you should understand the anatomy of a landing page and it should be part of your landing page and optimization framework. After optimizing thousands of landing pages over the years, I want to offer this framework for understanding the 10 key elements of a landing page.

Not all of the following elements always need to be on a page to create an effective landing page. However, there are several elements that are essential to your success.

1. Logo: The visitor needs some way to identify who they are potentially doing business with. A logo won’t make your sale, but a poor one can lose your sale. A professionally designed logo always helps establish some bit of credibility. Most sites have this in the upper left hand part of the page; some have it on the upper right.
2. UVP or UCP: Once the visitor knows who you are, they need to figure out why they should do business with you. You should communicate this in a simple statement that explains your value proposition (UVP) or your campaign proposition (UCP).
3. Headline: The landing page headline should reinforce the scent from the ad that delivered your visitor to the page; that’s persuasive momentum. Your headline can either be designed in a text format or graphical format; it doesn’t really matter. Many marketers use a dynamic system to personalize their landing pages for the ad or keyphrase that attracted the visitor in the first place, to have better continuity (scent) from ad to landing page. Dynamic tools work, but beware.
4. Offer: Direct marketers know that the offer is one of the most critical elements of a well-designed campaign. That is why they spend a lot of time testing their offers. Offers must be clear and concise. A maxim of direct mail is that a confused mind always says “no.” The offer is the deal you’re presenting to your visitor. Don’t get this confused with a “call to action,” which is the action you want the person to take. Sometimes the offer is actually delivered successfully as the headline.
5. Descriptive copy: What supporting copy do you need to explain what you do, what you offer, and how it will benefit your visitor? This is often a list of key features and/or benefits. Don’t overlook formatting. Will the copy be delivered in block text, bullet point, or some combination of the two?
6. Product/service presentation: This is the imagery you use to support your copy and style for your page. This often takes the form of a product image, a product or service tour (photos or video), screen shots, or lifestyle images. A good picture can be worth a thousand words if you can use it to engage your visitor and give them a sense of what owning your product or service will be like. Likewise, poor quality graphics or presentations can confuse or turn visitors away. A great image won’t make your sale, but a poor one can help lose your sale.
7. Calls to action: I break out calls to action into three types: hyperlinks, buttons, or forms. The objective of many landing pages is to get visitors to complete a form. If that is the case, make the form easy to complete on the landing page, and avoid requiring the visitor to take an extra step – and going to a form page – if possible. Other than your offer, this is an important piece to keep testing. Calls to action should stand out (think contrast) and be obvious from the moment a visitor lands on your page. The visitor should always know what is the next step they should take.
8. Confidence building: A visitor will not convert if he doesn’t have confidence or trust in you. There are dozens of factors that affect trust or confidence in your visitors on your pages, and dozens of things you can do to negatively impact trust and credibility. I’ll cover only a few types of things you can add to boost confidence. Basic confidence boosting elements can be the effective use of testimonials or customer reviews, leveraging examples of previous customers, using third-party validators (such as media mentions or reviews, as seen in references, or trust marks), and using point-of-action assurances near your call to action.
9. Link to more information: Many experts believe your landing pages shouldn’t have any additional links other than your main call to action. I believe it depends on several factors, including the complexity of what you sell and the buying stage of your prospect (early stage buyers tend to be in information gathering mode not action taking mode – so let them gather information). Don’t blindly follow “best practices;” use your judgment and test alternatives.
10. Template elements: These elements are usually found in the header or footer of a template. They may be your copyright notice, phone number, live chat, address, privacy or other policies, etc. These are usually not elements of the persuasion process, but many can be supportive. All pages should have easy contact information and privacy policies.

Look at your landing pages and your competitors’ to see if you can identify these essential elements.

In my next column, I’ll explain the five dimensions of landing page element design that impact its effectiveness.

If you would like to see some of these elements in action, you can sign up for an upcoming Webinar I am doing on April 1, 2010 – “Don’t Be April’s Fool: Proven Techniques To Maximize Your Advertising ROI.”

MarketMotive, which offers internet marketing courses online  is allowing each of the faculty to give away one scholarship to it’s certification courses valued at $3500 for the upcoming April 15th semester.  Certification courses include SEO, PPC, Conversion Optimization, Social Media, Online PR, Internet Marketing Fundamentals, and Web Analytics. Our faculty believe in giving back to the community, so in order to give something away as valuable as a certification, we believe someone else should benefit too.

And that is the small catch.

If you would like to win a scholarship to the topic of your choice, pick one charity web site of your choice and submit a [YOUR TOPIC] plan that helps improve the [social media, web presence, measurability or conversion etc.] for the charity. You can choose to publish it on your website and let us know about it, email to us, send it to us as smoke signals, etc.

I will publish the top 3 submissions to the conversion category and together with my readers we’ll pick the scholarship winner by April 5th. We’ll be giving away a second prize as well. Our other faculty members will pick the winners in their respective topics. At the end, the winner gets a certification, each submission would have helped a charity and I will gladly link to each submission published on a blog.

Have any questions? Just ask below.

Rules:  Submitting a plan means contestants agree that their plan may be be posted (with attribution) and/or sent to the charity.  Plans may be edited before being posted at blog owner’s discretion.  Winning plan (s)will be selected at the discretion of MarketMotive faculty chairs.

P.S. If you are planning to be at SES NY, make sure and come say hello to us there.