Blog
By Jon Henshaw
In January I wrote an entry on the services being offered by Internet Marketing Ninjas and Market Motive. At the end of the entry I wrote:
It should be noted that this article was not a true "review" of each service, it was a comparison of their publicly available offerings. I've never had full access to either service. Of course, if any of these services wants to give me free access, I will gladly write an in depth review about my experience.
Well, Market Motive took me up on that offer and gave me free access to their service for a full month. During that month, I was able to interact with with their experts (they call them faculty), watch several instructional videos, participate on their private forum and call in on one of their many monthly conference calls.
Before I get started, I wanted to make one thing very clear, this is NOT a paid review and I don't have any relationships with anyone associated or affiliated with Market Motive. Ahhh, I'm glad I got that off my chest. Quite frankly, I felt like I needed to say that, not because of the dreaded "don't pay for or publish paid reviews — Google imposed Internet law," but because this review is overwhelmingly positive. As you'll discover while reading this review, Market Motive is one of the best and most useful Internet marketing resources I've ever used.
What is Market Motive?
Market Motive was founded by Michael Stebbins, John Marshall and Avinash Kaushik. They wanted to provide a new and efficient way to get Internet marketing knowledge from industry leaders to people who practice Internet marketing for a living. They accomplished this through providing access to industry experts via a private forum, live (and recorded) conference calls and instructional videos. Their content covers the following key areas of Internet marketing:
- Web Analytics
- PPC & Paid Search
- SEO
- Social Media
- Conversion Optimization
- Online Publicity
They've built a team of Internet marketing consultants that cover each area:
Getting Started with the Forum
After you sign up, you'll receive a welcome message encouraging you to introduce yourself to the other members and the "faculty." Clicking on the button that says "Post an introduction here" takes you straight to their forum. At first glance, it didn't look like the forum was heavily used. However, after reading several of the threads, many of the posts were questions that were specific to the member's website. It was nice to see that every question was addressed by one or more of the Market Motive faculty members, which included specialists in my field of Internet marketing (SEO), like Todd Malicoat (aka stuntdubl). It was also nice to see that all users are bound to a strict non-disclosure agreement (NDA), which helps encourage open discussions about personal projects.
I wrote an introductory post, which is encouraged for all new members. That was promptly replied to by one of the faculty members and included a ton of helpful links to get me started. I then perused the forum for interesting discussions and was able to engage with a few members. Although the forum wasn't incredibly active — most likely due to not having a large number of users yet — it still seemed helpful. In most instances, if a discussion wasn't picked up by any of the other members, the faculty still participated.
Internet Marketing Conference Calls
Market Motive offers live conference calls with the faculty. You can leave questions on the forum to be asked during the conference call, and then the moderater(s) will address it.
I chose to participate in the Web Analytics Call with Avinash Kaushik. I asked him about tracking external links that my visitors click on and how I could track them in Google Analytics. The cool thing was that I didn't even have to wait until the conference call. If questions can be easily or quickly answered before the conference call, they'll be answered in the forum (otherwise, they get tabled for the call). Within 15 minutes, Avinash left me a detailed answer to my question, including links to online resources to help me set things up correctly.
When I briefly called in for the Web Analytics conference call, I was surprised to find out how many people participated in it. During the call, members were encouraged to remain on mute until it was their turn to participate.
One of the best things about the conference calls is that they're all recorded and then shared with every member. That ensures that you never miss out on anything, and if you're new to Market Motive, you can go back and listen to any of the previous conference calls. Also, since the questions are posted ahead of time in the forum, if you stumble upon a question that interests you, and the conference has already taken place, you can simply click on it to hear it.
Internet Marketing Videos
Another core feature of Market Motive is video, specifically instructional videos. Similar to what I previously reported, Market Motive's videos are created in presentation format with voiceovers. The videos are similar to a well structured presentation that you would find at any industry conference.
I watched several videos and all of them provided expert advice in a format that was easy to follow and learn from. They have many videos available right now and they appear to add new videos each month, which helps keep the content current and fresh.
Conclusion
When I originally saw the price — $299/month or $2,999 per year — I had a hard time stomaching the price. I was really curious to know how they were going to justify it. However, after I got into the system and started using it, I quickly started to ask myself how they could be charging so little. You basically get access to an ever expanding library of videos, conference calls and private discussion threads and get to interact directly with the faculty on a regular basis. Since it would typically cost $299 for 1-2 hours of consulting, I quickly started to realize what a great deal their service was.
So what's the catch? I don't think there really is a catch, other than to also promote their consultants' "consulting" services. I think they're banking on the fact that their members will eventually need more — more time, more attention to a big project, etc... In which case, they've made it easy to contact and hire one of the Internet marketing consultants for more in depth and private consulting. Makes sense to me.
Another important question is, "who is this service right for?" I think it will fit the needs of the following people:
- Solo Internet marketers (beginner, intermediate and experts that aren't experts in every area)
- Small to medium-sized businesses needing Internet marketing assistance and training
- Businesses with in-house Internet marketing staff
- Anyone who wants to stay on top of the industry, but can't attend the industry conferences
You can learn more about Market Motive at http://marketmotive.com/.
By Jon Henshaw
Excessively long Internet links (URLs) have been with us since the onset of the Internet. College websites are notorious for having long URLs to their content — especially URLs that are difficult to remember or type. Search engines have also played a part in promoting long URLs. For example, search engines like Google reward Web pages that use descriptive URLs — URLs that include related keywords.
For the most part, the "hyperlink" nature of the Internet makes long URLs a nonissue. However, it can quickly become a problem when you decide to email a long URL or publish a long URL on paper. Long URLs that are emailed often break the link and send people to "404 Page Not Found" pages. Also, if you print a long URL in a newsletter, it can be difficult and time consuming to enter into a browser.
Fortunately, there is a solution to this dilemma. It's called the "URL shortener." The need to shorten URLs — and to build a better URL shortener — has created a massive amount of Web services that do just that. One of the oldest and most widely used URL shorteners is TinyURL, but as I just stated, there are many more.
I've compiled the ultimate list of URL shorteners. Keep in mind that URL shortening services use redirects and that using them doesn't guarantee that they'll always work. In fact, many of these services come and go, because of excessive abuse by spammers.
Favorite URL Shortener
Ultimate List of URL Shortener Services
URL shortening isn't the only type of URL redirect service out there. OffTo.net provides what they call a "link cloaker" for affiliates. DecentURL attempts to make URLs, well, decent. While HugeURL takes a tongue-in-cheek approach and creates a gigantic URL — just because they can.
Please leave a comment and list any URL shorteners that I've missed. I'll continue to keep this list up-to-date, so feel free to also bookmark this page.
[2]
By Jon Henshaw
There's been a lot of hype lately about a new search marketing training video service called Internet Marketing Ninjas. There's good reason for the hype — their videos star heavy hitters in the search marketing world, which include:
As interesting as this new video service looks, Internet Marketing Ninjas aren't the first people to do this. Market Motive actually started providing SEO video training earlier last year. Founded by Michael Stebbins, John Marshall and Avinash Kaushik, they started Market Motive to provide consulting and marketing services for mid to large sized businesses that includes web analytics, paid search management, search engine optimization and email marketing management. Although both services appear to offer videos on similar topics, there are differences.
Video Quality
The first difference is quality. Market Motive's videos have an appearance of professionalism that Search Engine Ninjas seems to be missing. Market Motive's videos are created in presentation format with voiceovers. The presentation is similar to a well structured presentation that you would expect to get at an industry conference. Whereas Internet Marketing Ninjas videos are a mixed bag of coffee time with Aaron Wall, Andy Beal in a room with a projector and Christine Churchill in a dim room. Several of their videos do have presentations, but the "watch me talk" format is more distracting than Market Motive's strict presentation format. Overall, from watching Internet Marketing Ninjas' preview videos, it's quite a hodgepodge.
Industry Celebrities
I'm not talking about anyone that's going to show up on TMZ or that my mom would know, I'm talking about names that are hot in the industry right now. Internet Marketing Ninjas has a full roster of names that are hot, while Market Motive doesn't. However, the emphasis here is on the word "celebrity." In the search marketing world, there are high profile names that have created a cult of personality for themselves. I think the "celebrity" value of Internet Marketing Ninjas is one of their best assets. Like any product or service, you want to have brand names — or people in this case — to help sell your service.
In Internet Marketing Ninjas' case, one of their greatest assets is the "easy sell" that you're going to get good information, because they have videos of people that everyone has heard of and therefore trusts. Now, that's not to say that Market Motive doesn't have highly skilled and experienced instructors on their team, because they do. Many of them have experience speaking at the same events as Internet Marketing Ninjas' instructors. In fact, Todd Malicoat is working double-team for both services, but there is no doubt that people who are relatively new to the SEO community are going to be much more aware of Internet Marketing Ninjas' presenter roster than Market Motive's.
SEO Tools
One thing that Market Motive doesn't have are SEO Tools. As an added incentive to subscribing to Internet Marketing Ninjas, they offer use of their now private SEO Tools (most of which came from We Build Pages). Aaron over at TheMadHat puts their added incentive into perspective:
Now most of these tools used to be free so I tried a lot of them, and they work okay. I assume since it's going private they will be maintained a little better (something similar to the SEOmoz Premier tools). That being said, I wouldn't sign up just for the tools. It's nice to have them all in one place, but the majority can be found elsewhere or developed yourself with an intermediate level of coding skills.
Market Motive provides details about many free SEO tools in several of their videos, so I'm not sure how necessary Internet Marketing Ninjas' are. However, it is nice having them all in one place and being part of the overall package.
Pricing
Both services are priced similarly. Market Motive charges $299/mo ($3,588/yr) or $2,999/yr, while Internet Marketing Ninjas has only one option, $2,995/yr. There are pluses and minuses to this pricing. With Market Motive you can pay monthly and bale out after the first month, only losing $299. However, with Internet Marketing Ninjas, you have to pay an upfront annual fee of almost three thousand dollars, but you do get access to private SEO tools. Ultimately, it really depends on who and what you're most interested in and how much money you're willing to risk.
Final Thoughts
These services seem great for those who might be a beginner to intermediate search marketing specialist. I also have no doubt that each service has information that would be useful even to the most experienced search marketing specialist. If I worked at a large company or search marketing agency, I would certainly consider getting a subscription to one or both of these services. I have no doubt that I would learn something new from each of these videos and the information would be very helpful to my less experienced search marketing specialists.
It should be noted that this article was not a true "review" of each service, it was a comparison of their publicly available offerings. I've never had full access to either service. Of course, if any of these services wants to give me free access, I will gladly write an in depth review about my experience.
[3]
By Lee Smith-Bryan
If you're on the Internet all day like myself, then you probably come across hundreds of websites, files, music collections, historical archives, images, etc, that you would like to keep track of. Let me introduce you to Zotero.
Zotero is a free Firefox 2.x add on — compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux — that makes the collection of data effortless. By default, Zotero makes itself accessible from the status bar, but you can also display it above the Web page content at the top of your browser. It can be used to archive almost anything that you come across on the Internet. However, for our purpose at Sitening, we're using it for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes.
Zotero allows you to collect your data and then categorize it, tag it, archive it and link to it. It even has an import/export feature to share your collection with others (and for them to do likewise). I have several sites that I rely on every day and they each serve their own purpose. Some of them are social networking sites like Digg, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon and some of them are bookmarking sites like reddit or technorati.
So, let's say that you have a list of 100+ websites that you know you're going to be visiting frequently. How would you add them to Zotero? Once you have Zotero installed, there are several options that allow you to easily add the data you want.
My preference is to use the add-link option, because it helps me streamline my collection process — tagging it, writing a description and then categorizing it. Those three tasks help me sort through the data with a minimum amount of fuss. To add a link you click on the link icon (circled in blue) and Zotero will automatically add the website you're currently viewing to the Library. Once you start adding links on a regular basis, you'll grow your Library in no time at all. As you see from the image below, the entire Library list is nicely sorted in alphabetical order.
Before you assign any information to your Library entries, it's probably a good idea to assign categories that you're going to be using frequently. For instance, I have six different categories which you can see in the image.
When you click on a Library entry you get the option to assign some information to it. It is here where I think Zotero excels. So lets say I click on my Good for SEO category. My Zotero Library will then display all the websites I have assigned to it.
If I click on one of those entries, I will then be able to assign information to it. I can view the page, see when I added it to my Library, add a note or a description about the site and tag it with any appropriate words that I think best fits the website. I can also relate it to other similar pages, should I wish.
I'm sure I've barely scratched the surface of what Zotero can do, but even if you're remotely interested in archiving or storing the data that you come across on the Internet, I highly recommend it. It's free, easy to use and lives right in your browser where you need it most.
Zotero Article Distribution List for SEO
To help get you started using Zotero — for SEO purposes — you can download and import the article distribution website list we use here at Sitening.
Zotero Import Instructions
- Download the Zotero Article Distribution List
- Open Zotero in Firefox and click on the gear icon and then select import
- Find the file your downloaded and import it
- After you successfully import the file, rename the folder to your liking
Features 
