Welcome to Sensible Digital Marketing

Welcome to Sensible Digital Marketing, a new blog about pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or in other words search engine marketing (SEM). (The two terms are not precisely synonyms, but we’ll get to that in a later post.)

After working as a programmer and database developer for over a decade — I still moonlight at both — I turned four years ago to full-time PPC work. For most of the last four years, I was working in-house for a major online genealogy company, where I took Google AdWords and Bing Ads accounts that were small and unprofitable and made them large and profitable — profitable came first — to the point that I was managing a multi-million dollar annual PPC budget. I also worked on small accounts, off and on, and played with PPC in support of local political campaigns — where candidates somehow still think it’s magic to make an ad with one candidate’s name appear above organic search results for an opponent.

Now I’m working for an excellent web marketing firm, managing numerous client accounts. My full-time employer is not a secret, and you could find the company’s name easily enough at LinkedIn. (Hint: it’s 180Fusion.) However, I don’t expect to mention the company much here. I don’t want readers to think I’m speaking officially for it. This is a personal blog, where I speak only for myself and the mouse in my pocket.

There are some fine PPC/SEM blogs out there already — I’ll list some of my favorites in a future post — but I’m defining a slightly different niche for myself. For the foreseeable future, I won’t often emphasize the latest feature in Google AdWords or Bing Ads, or the proper technique for configuring or managing something in AdWords, Bing, Facebook, or the others.

I’ll be focusing on things businesses — especially business owners — need to know in order to advertise effectively with PPC — or decide whether to try. These topics aren’t ignored elsewhere, but focusing on them seems to be the proverbial road less traveled. Exceptions will happen, and change might happen too, but for now I’m writing more here for people who own and run businesses, and less for PPC specialists.

As you will soon see — and already have seen, respectively — I won’t be able to resist writing about writing, especially writing for digital marketing; and I’m not a gifted graphic designer. (I know some excellent ones, if you need one, but so far actually using one for this site doesn’t fit into its shoestring budget.)

Comments and questions are most welcome, and I’ll approve them for display if they’re on point and civilized — neither of which is always the case on the Web, as you know.

Thanks for reading.