2011 is going to be an exciting year for our company. We have big changes planned, including moving the bg Theory blog and the AdWords Seminars to our new training and tool site, CertifiedKnowledge.org.

For our current subscribers, there is information at the bottom of this post that will let you know if you need to do anything to stay subscribed.

For those readers who are not intimately familiar with bg Theory, let me provide some background.

How bg Theory Came to Life

I started my marketing career thirteen years ago when I discovered affiliate marketing. It was a fun time as everything I did was for me. If I made money or lost money, I was the only one responsible. All of my stress was self-imposed. So if I needed a vacation – I just took one.

However, the success I had lead to others asking me to help them with their marketing.  At first I resisted, or was highly selective of who I worked with, but the guaranteed revenue (assuming client’s get results and renew), was nice to supplement the risk of affiliate marketing. Eventually, my clients lead me to starting my first agency in 2001.

I ran that agency for a few years until I decided to join another company, LocalLaunch. I helped grow that company up to not just being another agency, but to also being acquired by RH Donnelley (now DexOne). We weren’t just another Yellow Page acquired agency though, we became one of the few Google and Yahoo resellers in the world.

However, agency life is focused around maximizing returns  for your clients. One of my passions is teaching and empowering others to succeed. That’s why after years of agency life, I decided to form bg Theory and make education our primary focus.

Too Many Sites + Too Many Brands = Resource Draining

bg Theory grew quickly thorugh a variety of means. I wrote a book on AdWords which is selling very well. We work directly with Google to host AdWords Seminars for Success and have had several thousand attendees. We do some custom in-house training for companies. A few months ago, we launched an online training site called Certified Knowledge.

In addition to having a variety of training programs, I also tweet, blog, write for Search Engine Land, moderate at Webmaster World, guest blog, give interviews, speak at a large variety of conferences, host webinars, and I just started a radio show called Marketing Nirvana.

This combination of training and content creation has been successful for us. However, I also think it hurts us from a branding perspective because we are so spread out across the web (which sounds funny as that’s the goal of many companies).

Not only do we have multiple domains with unique branding, but we have created groups, pages, and profiles at the major social media sites for each of these brands. This has also caused not only a resource drain, but some brand confusion among our various followers. To amend these problems, we ultimately made the decision to focus on a single brand name and house everything under a consolidated company nerve center. As I believe strongly in the success of Certified Knowledge, we have chosen that to be our central brand going forward.

I will still be writing for SEL, hanging out at WMW, blogging, tweeting, and speaking at conferences. That part will not change. The part that will is where you will find our content, upcoming seminar registrations, and where we will be spending most of our time.

Changes at Certified Knowledge

When we first started Certified Knowledge, it was purely based around a subscription membership program. Over the past month, we’ve been tweaking the system to allow for both free memberships and paid memberships. Our goal is to create a comprehensive internet marketing training system on one site. We still have a long ways to go; but our AdWords training and tools are a good step in the correct direction.

You might be wondering with all of the VC funded social media sites and large community forums, why would we create a social network? I have bootstrapped everything, and we own 100% of our own company, but we don’t have millions of dollars laying around to build system.

As both a professional in the marketing world, and having a family, I have found it personally difficult to communicate with relevance across the social web. Of course, I wouldn’t start a site just for me, this is a sentiment that I heard echoed quite often.

For example I have a FaceBook account. My grandmother, my wife, my close friends,  my marketing acquaintances, my conference friends, my old high school friends, and yet more people are all on it. It has made FaceBook very difficult to use as my family could care less about marketing and my marketing friends could care less that I’m outside building a snowman with my 20 month old daughter.

LinkedIN has potential, but its lack of integrated support between groups, events, profiles, and followers has made it hard to use as a true social network (I do like LinkedIN overall and hope it succeeds). Twitter, well, is twitter. A following is not a community – it’s an excellent place to communicate (and listen)  – but its not a community.

Our new Certified Knowledge design offers a lot of the social networking tools like Facebook or Twitter (much smaller scale).  However, it is just for marketers. You don’t need to worry what your grandmother thinks about your questions, or if you shouldn’t friend an EXs friend because they might find out. The site is all about marketing. If you’re not a marketer – then you’ll be bored at the site.

The above features are free to anyone.

We also have tools and lessons which are accessible through a monthly subscription.

I hope you take a look at the new site, register for an account, and help us grow a new community that’s created by marketers for marketers.

It’s still new. It’s still rough. It is steadily growing. But most importantly, if you want to find us or our content – it’ll be at Certified Knowledge along with the rest of the bg Theory team.

Your Subscription

If you are subscribed by email, then you will continue to get emails as we post new content. If you are subscribed to our FeedBurner RSS feed, then you will continue to receive new content.

If you are subscribed to the old ewhisper feed or the bgTheory feed, you *should* continue to receive your subscription; but that might depend on your RSS reader as some aren’t great at following redirects. If you’re unsure, feel free to subscribe on our new subscription page.