• by David Berkowitz , August 8, 2006

"I received some calls from people threatening to kill us."

That summary of a search engine marketing success story was unlike anything I had ever heard. During a weekend in the nation's heartland, the sixth city I visited in under four weeks and the first trip during that stretch entirely for pleasure, I learned the best benchmark anyone could possibly use to measure his campaign's success. This is one you need to write down: Manage your search engine strategies so well that competitors want to kill you--literally.

This marketer's name must remain hidden to protect both his trade secrets and his life, so I can't share what Web sites he owns or even the exact nature of his profession, which is a traditional métier in the healthcare field. Upon first meeting him, you wouldn't think this middle-aged business owner was a new-media pioneer. His wife, who fielded the threat, probably won't read this column until he prints it out for her, and he has great business instincts, but his day job is in healthcare, not technology. If he ever wanted to switch careers, however, I'd hire him in a heartbeat.

He's good enough that his competitors want to kill him. Just what did he do?

The best way to explain it is to share a game he plays. Some marketers will compete with their competitors. This marketer, though, competes with his search engine marketing firm. He owns more than a few domains related to his business and services, including a growing number of local variations on the top terms (like, for example, seattlecolonoscopies.com--though note the city and service have been changed to protect the marketer). He gives some of the domains to his SEM, keeps some others, and sees which sites can rank highest in the natural search results. For more than a few highly searched terms related to his business, he and his SEM will split ownership of the first and second rankings. The funniest part is that he gets irritated when his SEM holds the No. 1 position, since he's determined to figure out how he can beat it.

In short, he's a marketing madman, but he's my kind of madman.

I asked him if he links all of his properties to each other. He told me, "I do, for the most part, but I don't want to link all of them because then the other guys really get angry." If he has trouble gaining high rankings for some sites, such as when a new domain enters "the sandbox"--that mysterious purgatory for new and overhauled Web sites before they're allowed to appear in natural search results--then he pays for sponsored listings. He's much more excited talking about natural search strategies, since for several terms, he's cornered the market, at times holding at least seven of the top 10 listings.

What's also funny with him is that he's still old-fashioned in some ways. He doesn't bother with blogs, for instance, nor does he get into any other emerging media or technologies. He'd be just as happy pouring more money into traditional media if he could better evaluate their returns, and we spent some time discussing how his magazine ads have done. Yet his business needs search marketing to survive. I asked him how he gets new customers, and he said, without a moment's hesitation, "People search for me online and they find me."

I asked him if he's using pay-per-call, which would seem like a natural fit for his business. Surprisingly, he's not yet. Why? He thought that pay-per-call meant that someone had to call through the Internet with a computer microphone. When I explained to him that pay-per-call offers a number through sponsored listings which people can call from their regular phones, he bought into it immediately.

It's a worthwhile lesson to some of the emerging marketing channels out there that they need to keep pushing education above all else; sales will follow in turn. Granted, I'm floored that this guy's own marketing firm (one that will remain nameless, though it's one I've heard of, not just a local mom-and-pop) never mentioned the opportunity to him.

Our conversation spanned several other topics, such as trademark bidding and monetizing parked domains. I joked to a mutual friend that our madman marketer should go on a speaking tour, hire a publicist to fill the seats, and then compete with the publicist to see who can sell out more events. He's never worked a day as a publicist, but my money would still be on him. If he'll let me, I'll share some other lessons he's learned in future columns; e-mail over any questions you'd want him to answer.

He may be a madman, but he's making his competitors even madder. Are any of your competitors threatening to kill you? If it's not too late to change your 2007 marketing plan, you should set that as goal No. 1.