Eric Richard Ward

Ward was born in Livingston, New Jersey, and raised there and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He graduated from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and lived briefly in Atlanta, Georgia, before returning to Knoxville, where he worked in advertising, public relations, and marketing. Ward then attended graduate school at UTK's School of Information Sciences.[2]

While attending graduate school in 1994, Ward founded NetPOST, an online strategy service which helped newly launched web sites attract publicity, and URLwire, a site announcement service. Ward was a frequent speaker at Internet industry conferences including Danny Sullivan's Search Marketing Expo, Search Engine Strategies, the Direct Marketing Association, and was also known as the person Jeff Bezos selected to execute the debut publicity and linking campaign for Amazon.com.[3]

Ward was featured in the book Online Marketing Heroes: Interviews with 25 Successful Online Marketing Gurus.[4]

In 1995, Ward won the Tenagra Internet Marketing Excellence Award,[5] and in 2000 began writing for ClickZ.[6] 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,[7] Business2.0, Entrepreneur Magazine,[8] Inc. Magazine,[9] 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.[10] In 2013, Ward authored the book The Ultimate Guide To Link Building for Entrepreneur Press[11]

Ward, sometimes referred to as "LinkMoses" by those in the online marketing industry,[12] wrote the LinkWeek Column for SearchEngineLand.com, and has also written for SearchEngineWatch, WebMarketingToday, Search Marketing Standard, MarketingProfs, and Ad Age BtoB.[13]

Eric Ward died suddenly on Monday, October 16, 2017 as per his obituary.[14] Eric is survived by mother Bonnie Ward of Sun City West, AZ; brother Stephen Ward & family of NJ; wife Melissa and their three children: Noah, Abram & Sophie Belle, all of Knoxville, TN.