Online Marketing Blog

Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim has announced the five finalists in the 2007 SEM Scholarship Contest. There were 20 entrants, each tasked with finding ways to attract the most unique visitors to their article hosted at the MP blog using any combination of SEO, PPC, social marketing, word-of-mouth, etc in 4 weeks.  Out of those participants, the following articles made the cut:

• AIDS Clickathon – A Viral Marketing Strategy to Fight the HIV/AIDS Virus in Africa - Paul Steinbrueck
• Have Your Top Competitors Do Some Of Your SEO For You - CK Chung (aka Kid Disco)

The past 2 weeks have been nuts so I’m a bit behind on a few announcements that I’ve been meaning to draw attention to. For example, Andy Beal’s announcement of the second Marketing Pilgrim SEM Scholarship for Spring 2007.

Scholarship prizes worth more than $10,000 will be awarded. This is a great opportunity for budding or even experienced search marketers to show their stuff and win services, consulting and prizes that could serve as a huge boost in their search marketing career. I know TopRank will be watching very closely as we are hiring for 3 positions now and possibly 2 more in Q3.

Spotlight on Search: Interview with Andy Beal

I’ve known Andy Beal via blogging and search marketing conferences for a while now and had the privilege of speaking with him on a SEO Blogger and Reporter panel at the last WebmasterWorld Pubcon in Las Vegas.

While I had great respect for Andy’s accomplishments at building search marketing companies and developing top notch blogs, his performance during the panel was genuinely impressive. His grasp of the big picture and business aspects of search marketing were/are very insightful. My public relations firm has even hired Andy for some consulting on reputation management and I am happy to recommend him.

This morning Andy Beal announced the winner of the SEM Scholarship contest he’s been running the past month:¬† Ben Wills for “The Five Pillars of Social Media Marketing“.

As one of the judges for the scholarship, you might imagine that an article about social media would attract my attention and it did.¬† Ben walks away a $6,000 scholarship prize, which in reality, will be worth far more because of the additional knowledge he’ll gain. One on one consulting with Andy Beal alone, is probably worth the six grand.
Ben is not the only winner in this scholarship promotion, Andy Beal and Marketing Pilgrim walk away with a ton of new inbound links, traffic, subscrbers and industry visibility.  Not that Andy needs any more of that.

It only took 5 years, but Andy Beal has finally come over to the world of WordPress for his blog, MarketingPilgrim. Previously, Andy ran SearchEngineLowdown.com on Google’s Blogger platform, building it up to one of the top SEO blogs on the Internet. Then after going out on his own, started MarketingPilgrim.com using the same tools.

Are you the next big thing in search engine marketing? Then head over to Marketing Pilgrim for Andy Beal’s new Search Engine Marketing Scholarship Contest.

Andy asked me if I would be interested in judging articles submitted and of course I said yes! Other judges include: Rand Fishkin, Mike Grehan, Jennifer Grappon & Gradiva Couzin, Kim Krause Berg, Robin Nobles, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and David Warmuz. You can read the press release, or check out the details below: