About Fergusson & Associates

Bill Fergusson, Principal at Fergusson & Associates, is a seasoned direct response marketer who has been building web sites and engaged in Internet marketing for over ten years. Unlike many of his colleagues in search marketing who grew up within the industry, Bill approaches Internet marketing as a branch of direct response marketing, in fact, as the ultimate expression of direct marketing.

Bill no doubt inherited direct response genes because his parents were pioneers in the direct mail industry, and his mother was a direct response copywriter who later became a VP of Marketing.

For the past 25 years, Bill has worked mostly in the financial services and investment management industries as a Vice President of Marketing. The sites that he has developed and marketed have ranged in size from a few dozen pages to several thousand. Most recently he was a VP of Marketing for Managers Investment Group, which had acquired his earlier firm, Fremont Investment Advisers.

Bill is a member of the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO) and was in fact the first person on the planet to complete the extensive search marketing curriculum offered by the SEMPO Institute.

When asked why he devoted several months to an intensive effort to complete the coursework, Bill replied, “I thought that I owed it to my future clients to supplement my online marketing experience with the best training available. More than 30 of the top experts in the country collaborated on developing the SEMPO curriculum, and it was both exciting and a privilege to be able to learn from the top people in this fast-changing field.”

Today Bill is an active volunteer on the SEMPO Institute Committee, which helps prepare course material for the SEMPO Institute. “I am an evangelist for SEMPO,” Bill says, “and serving on the SEMPO Institute Committee is the best way I can think of to stay current with the latest developments in search marketing, and to contribute to the search marketing community.”