Eric Richard Ward

Eric Richard Ward is the founder of NetPOST and URLwire, a Knoxville, TN based online communications service and consultancy.

Background

Ward was born and raised in Livingston, New Jersey and Chattanooga, TN. He graduated from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and spent a year in Atlanta, GA before returning to Knoxville, TN, where he worked in advertising, public relations, and marketing. Ward then attended graduate school at UTK's School of Information Sciences. It was while in graduate school that Ward founded NetPOST, a service which helped web sites attract publicity and links, and URLwire, a site announcement service. Ward is frequent speaker at Internet industry conferences including Danny Sullivan's Search Marketing Expo, Search Engine Strategies, the Direct Marketing Association, and is also known as the person Jeff Bezos selected to execute the debut publicity and linking campaign for Amazon.com.

Career

Most recently, Ward teamed with Adgooroo to help create Link Insight, a tool which analyzes web links and generates qualitative competitive analysis of backlink profiles. Ward was featured in the book Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus. In 1995 Ward won the Tenagra Internet Marketing Excellence Award, and soon after began writing for ClickZ. Ward was named one of Web's 100 most influential people by Websight Magazine in 1996. He has been profiled in print publications including The Industry Standard, Business2.0, Entrepreneur, Inc. Magazine, Netguide, Internet WORLD, Advertising Age, and others. He has been written about in business books and academic texts, newsletters and journals, and he contributed a how-to chapter for the book Advertising on the Internet.

Ward, sometimes referred to as "LinkMoses" by those in the online marketing industry, writes the LinkWeek Column for SearchEngineLand.com, and has also written for SearchEngineWatch, WebMarketingToday, Search Marketing Standard, MarketingProfs, and Ad Age BtoB.