There’s been a lot of hype lately about a new search marketing training video service called Internet Marketing Ninjas. There’s good reason for the hype — their videos star heavy hitters in the search marketing world, which include:

• Aaron Wall from SEO Book
• Andy Beal from Marketing Pilgrim
• Bill Slawski from SEO by the Sea
• Jim Gilbert & Christine Churchill from KeyRelevance
• Cameron Olthuis
• Neil Patel from ACS
• Jeremy Schoemaker from ShoeMoney
• Jill Whalen from HighRankings
• Jim Boykin from We Build Pages
• Lee Odden from TopRank
• Todd Malicoat from Stuntdubl
• And more! (or at least they say so on their website)

As interesting as this new video service looks, Internet Marketing Ninjas aren’t the first people to do this. Market Motive actually started providing SEO video training earlier last year. Founded by Michael Stebbins, John Marshall and Avinash Kaushik, they started Market Motive to provide consulting and marketing services for mid to large sized businesses that includes web analytics, paid search management, search engine optimization and email marketing management. Although both services appear to offer videos on similar topics, there are differences.

Video Quality

The first difference is quality. Market Motive’s videos have an appearance of professionalism that Search Engine Ninjas seems to be missing. Market Motive’s videos are created in presentation format with voiceovers. The presentation is similar to a well structured presentation that you would expect to get at an industry conference. Whereas Internet Marketing Ninjas videos are a mixed bag of coffee time with Aaron Wall, Andy Beal in a room with a projector and Christine Churchill in a dim room. Several of their videos do have presentations, but the “watch me talk” format is more distracting than Market Motive’s strict presentation format. Overall, from watching Internet Marketing Ninjas’ preview videos, it’s quite a hodgepodge.

Industry Celebrities

I’m not talking about anyone that’s going to show up on TMZ or that my mom would know, I’m talking about names that are hot in the industry right now. Internet Marketing Ninjas has a full roster of names that are hot, while Market Motive doesn’t. However, the emphasis here is on the word “celebrity.” In the search marketing world, there are high profile names that have created a cult of personality for themselves. I think the “celebrity” value of Internet Marketing Ninjas is one of their best assets. Like any product or service, you want to have brand names — or people in this case — to help sell your service.

In Internet Marketing Ninjas’ case, one of their greatest assets is the “easy sell” that you’re going to get good information, because they have videos of people that everyone has heard of and therefore trusts. Now, that’s not to say that Market Motive doesn’t have highly skilled and experienced instructors on their team, because they do. Many of them have experience speaking at the same events as Internet Marketing Ninjas’ instructors. In fact, Todd Malicoat is working double-team for both services, but there is no doubt that people who are relatively new to the SEO community are going to be much more aware of Internet Marketing Ninjas’ presenter roster than Market Motive’s.

SEO Tools

One thing that Market Motive doesn’t have are SEO Tools. As an added incentive to subscribing to Internet Marketing Ninjas, they offer use of their now private SEO Tools (most of which came from We Build Pages). Aaron over at TheMadHat puts their added incentive into perspective:

Now most of these tools used to be free so I tried a lot of them, and they work okay. I assume since it’s going private they will be maintained a little better (something similar to the SEOmoz Premier tools). That being said, I wouldn’t sign up just for the tools. It’s nice to have them all in one place, but the majority can be found elsewhere or developed yourself with an intermediate level of coding skills.

Market Motive provides details about many free SEO tools in several of their videos, so I’m not sure how necessary Internet Marketing Ninjas’ are. However, it is nice having them all in one place and being part of the overall package.

Pricing

Both services are priced similarly. Market Motive charges $299/mo ($3,588/yr) or $2,999/yr, while Internet Marketing Ninjas has only one option, $2,995/yr. There are pluses and minuses to this pricing. With Market Motive you can pay monthly and bale out after the first month, only losing $299. However, with Internet Marketing Ninjas, you have to pay an upfront annual fee of almost three thousand dollars, but you do get access to private SEO tools. Ultimately, it really depends on who and what you’re most interested in and how much money you’re willing to risk.

Final Thoughts

These services seem great for those who might be a beginner to intermediate search marketing specialist. I also have no doubt that each service has information that would be useful even to the most experienced search marketing specialist. If I worked at a large company or search marketing agency, I would certainly consider getting a subscription to one or both of these services. I have no doubt that I would learn something new from each of these videos and the information would be very helpful to my less experienced search marketing specialists.

It should be noted that this article was not a true “review” of each service, it was a comparison of their publicly available offerings. I’ve never had full access to either service. Of course, if any of these services wants to give me free access, I will gladly write an in depth review about my experience.