Here we are. I hope your time here at PPC Academy was productive and you learned a lot because it’s now time for your final exam. Were you paying attention? Have you bloomed into a search marketing pro with the knowledge and skills to kick major PPC butt, or do you still have things to learn? Below are 35 questions that test the most important concepts you should have learned from this one-year PPC course. If you missed any posts, here’s the course guide. Answers follow the questions. How good are you? 0-5 correct answers: Novice. Go back and read all of these posts again. [...]

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Well, here we are. A year in the books! Thank you for reading this one-year paid search course—I hope you got a lot out of it. I know that it was a great exercise for me to spend time really organizing my thoughts into a structured format. So much of search engine marketing is self-learning via sites like SearchEngineLand.com, attending trade shows and conferences and talking with peers. There are also some great books on the subject, and I urge you to keep learning! In the effort to make this column a better resource for you all, below is a “chapter by chapter” guide of the [...]

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This week, instead of discussing specific paid search tactics, I'd like to take a broader look at how you can become a better professional search engine marketer. In short, there are some ethical ways to conduct yourself as a paid search pro that you should embrace. These aren't necessarily just my own opinions, but rather how I think the search community as a whole feels towards PPC ethics. However, if you want to grow your career (or your business), win and keep good clients, and be a good-standing member of the SEM community, you'll want to keep these "core principles" in the back of your [...]

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Last week, in An SEO FAQ For Paid Search Marketers, we went a bit out of bounds for this column, which is a one-year course for learning PPC. However, I made the case that as a search marketer, you’re still an online marketer and it helps to know a bit more about the other sub-disciplines that are cousins to paid search, such as SEO, email, social media and so on. Overall, I think that it’s safe to say that you’ll be a better search marketer by learning more about the big picture of digital marketing. Today we’ll continue on this trek and talk about display advertising. Whereas p [...]

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Earlier in January in this column’s introductory post, Welcome To PPC Academy, A One-Year Paid Search Course, I said that this would be a column strictly about PPC. Well, if you’ve been reading this year, you know that I lied. The scope expanded to include some of the fringe disciplines including analytics, contextual targeting, placement targeting, etc. Before this column ends, however, it’s important that I also expose you to some of the other pieces of the puzzle so that you are a well-rounded online marketer. One of these other competencies is in search engine optimization (or [...]

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