Summary
Michel Fortin is a marketing leader and recognized industry authority with 35 years of experience in developing marketing strategies that drive explosive business growth. As a marketing advisor, he has worked with thousands of clients throughout his career spanning 200+ different industries.
Michel is a visionary and pioneer behind some of the most successful marketing campaigns online. He has an uncanny knack for identifying visibility gaps and opportunities, and he provides strategic, innovative advice on how to address them. The result is a significant increase in organic visibility for his clients often leading to transformative business success.
Working with firms ranging from independent professionals and marketing leaders to enterprise-level C-suites, Michel combines traditional and digital marketing techniques, including modern SEO, positioning, branding, content marketing, digital PR, and AI to achieve exceptional levels of awareness and demand.
Michel is also the author of several books and published articles, including Power Positioning: How to Stand Out in a Hypercompetitive World and User-First SEO: A Modern Approach to Growing Your Online Visibility. He currently resides in Ottawa, Canada.
Hi, my name is Michel Fortin. Here’s my story.
When I was a preteen, I browsed bulletin boards using a monochrome computer and an agonizingly slow dial-up modem. It was rudimentary technology back in those pre-Internet days, but my fondest memory was playing the first online multiplayer role-playing game via a local BBS. Little did I know that this was the beginning of my love affair with digital marketing.
In 1988, my first job was in commission-only sales. But I failed miserably due to an intense fear of rejection. When I started using marketing strategies like positioning and copywriting to attract clients to me instead of cold-calling, I succeeded and became the top salesperson for the company.
I later decided to hang my shingle as a marketing consultant. In 1991, my first gig was with a plastic surgeon where I also wrote their marketing pieces, created their ads, produced their TV commercials, and even developed their first website in 1992. With my help, they grew and opened up several new locations.
During the next few years, word got around. Seeing that I was primarily helping doctors succeed, I incorporated in 1995 as “The Success Doctor, Inc.” I launched my own website, which led to working with clients stretching from coast to coast.
In 1997, I became the chief editor of the world’s first digital marketing email newsletter with over 120,000 subscribers. The exposure propelled my career as it led to speaking engagements worldwide in front of as many as 10,000 people. I also published my own newsletter, which grew to 77,000 subscribers.
Since then, I’ve pioneered many game-changing digital marketing strategies, including the first ever million dollars sold online in one day in 2004. I became so busy that I hired freelancers to help me. This led to meeting the person who later became my partner, both in business and in life.
We married in 2006, started a coaching program together, and spoke on stage as a couple. But after she passed away from a long battle with breast cancer in 2015, my heart was no longer in it. So I decided to sell the business to a marketing agency and took on the role of their communications director and SEO manager.
In the years that followed, I worked within several marketing agencies as a director overseeing hundreds of client accounts while helping the agencies with their own SEO. In recent times, I worked as the vice-president of growth marketing with a SaaS company. In each of these roles, I led cross-functional teams and managed multiple marketing departments, including:
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO),
- Branding and Communications,
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM),
- Paid Ads (pay-per-click or PPC),
- Content Creation and Marketing,
- Digital Public Relations (PR),
- Marketing Operations (MOps),
- App Store Optimization (ASO),
- And Social Media Marketing (SMM).
Today, as an independent (freelance) marketing professional consultant, I offer organic visibility, marketing advisory, and training services, where I help clients increase their exposure, build their traffic, and grow their businesses.
Throughout my career, I’ve helped countless businesses achieve record growth. The media often quotes my work, and many events and organizations invite me as a guest expert. Here are some notable accomplishments and career highlights:
- I was instrumental in generating over a billion dollars in career revenue, and in pioneering innovative digital marketing strategies and producing record-breaking sales, such as the first-ever online marketing campaign to sell over a million dollars in a single day (2004).
- I rebuilt entire marketing departments from the ground up, and repositioned a firm’s entire product line, resulting in an increase of 148% in MRR and 233% in new business.
- I improved the SEO and grew the digital presence of a highly popular brand (with 10M+ followers online already), increasing its organic traffic by 244%, search visibility by 79%, and organic leads by 115% YoY in the first year alone.
- I led cross-functional teams (ranging from 10 to 80 people) that developed and deployed marketing campaigns, where I also had profit-and-loss oversight with budgets ranging from $25K to $2M, and with clients ranging from small firms, even tech startups, to multinational enterprises.
- I improved one company’s high-ticket sales by 480%, fuelling their rapid growth, and subsequently piloted their expansion by opening 12 new international offices in two years, where I also hired and trained their marketing teams.
- I launched multiple online businesses; wrote for countless publications; and appeared in hundreds of podcasts and on stages around the globe, such as presenting at conferences in front of audiences ranging from 100 to 10,000 attendees.
My college education was in business administration. But in the second year, I dropped out because I found it boring. In fact, I was diagnosed with ADHD late in life. But back in the 80s, it wasn’t as well known back then, and there weren’t many accommodations for such learning disabilities.
Fortunately, my college experience didn’t abate my love of learning. I took thousands of courses and attended hundreds of class lectures, from marketing and psychology to business and technology. A decade later, I returned to school and even became a faculty member at a community college.
I taught courses in marketing, business, selling, and management. I also developed the college’s curriculum on digital marketing, which was a new and emerging field at the time. I subsequently earned a mini MBA from a CPD-accredited online school, along with multiple professional certifications from Google, Coursera, and many others. Here’s a partial list:
- Business Administration (College)
- CPD-Accredited Mini MBA (Online)
- Business Ethics (Diploma)
- Google Search (Certification)
- Google Analytics (Certification)
- Google Tag Manager (Certification)
- SEO For Ecommerce (Certification)
- Advanced SEO Strategies (Certification)
- Advanced Google Analytics (Certification)
- Marketing Analytics (Certification)
- Data-Driven Storytelling (Certification)
- Secret Security Clearance Level II (Government)
For a complete list of my credentials, download my CV.
I’m in love with digital marketing. After three decades, technology continues to fascinate me. I love learning how to harness it to help my clients gain more exposure and attract more buyers. Since AI is exploding, I’m writing and speaking a lot about its implications in the world of marketing.
I’m passionate about visibility. My advisory work specializes in helping my clients build a stronger presence and generate greater visibility and demand for their businesses. It incorporates a mix of traditional and digital strategies, including SEO, positioning, awareness, content, and digital PR, even AI.
I’m a dual-brained marketer. I’m both creative and curious. The artist in me loves to innovate and strategize while the analyst loves to audit and research. My work is perfect for that reason, as digital marketing is just as idea-driven as it is data-driven.
I’m aware of today’s limitations. In today’s increasingly privacy-conscious and litigious world that’s growing more and more competitive, regulations are making audiences more difficult to reach. I worked in highly legislated industries, so I’m intimately familiar with the many compliance issues and marketing challenges my clients have to deal with.
I’m drawing from vast experience. I was marketing online before the Internet was a thing. Over the last three decades, I’ve helped myriad businesses grow from bootstrapped startups to thriving behemoths. As the Internet grew, my clients grew, too, and my experience grew along with them.
Since developing my first client website in 1992, I’ve devoted my career to digital marketing. Above all, I love solving problems. Someone once called me a “Marketing MacGuyver” because I have an uncanny knack for seeing things others miss. It’s the reason why others hire me for brainstorming, bouncing ideas off of me, or troubleshooting their stickiest challenges.
While it may seem like I have a certain marketing intuition, I’m simply resourceful and intrinsically curious. I believe it’s my resourcefulness that’s the fuel behind my work, including some of the most wildly successful campaigns of my career. It’s also the reason why many have called me a visionary, as I often predict marketing trends before they become popular:
- In 2005, I wrote “The Death of The Salesletter.” It was a treatise about the increasing importance of the user experience in online sales, including the usefulness of multistep marketing (i.e., marketing funnels), leading to the decline of long-scrolling, text-heavy sales messages and the rise of video-driven ones. Incidentally, I wrote this before YouTube launched — and the rest, as they say, is history.
- Since 2012, I’ve been teaching what I call user-first SEO. The premise is that search engines are sophisticated. They have evolved to learn, interpret, and understand a user’s intent and context (let alone introducing AI into the mix). And as such, there’s no longer a need to write for “ranking” in search engines. In fact, shortly thereafter, Google recently released a new algorithm called “The Helpful Content Update” to penalize poor, engine-first content.
I occasionally struggle with focus and time management. I was diagnosed with ADHD late in life, but I’ve dealt with it since I was a child. Being resourceful may also stem from — or was the result of — my ADHD, because it forced me to become pretty adept at developing coping skills and finding workarounds.
For example, I’ve designed several systems to help me prioritize my work and stay on track. One of them is based on timeboxing. It’s a popular time management method that avoids to-do lists (I often end up forgetting them, anyway) and instead recommends to schedule tasks directly into a calendar, or to reserve blocks of time to tackle several tasks at once.
I also use an online daily planner and scheduling software that uses AI to automatically reserve blocks of time, schedule events, and prioritize tasks for me based on my work behaviour. It’s also ADHD-friendly as it adds time buffers in-between meetings or when travelling to appointments to allow me to decompress and prepare for the following item on my calendar.
My schedule is filling up quite fast, but I’m open to a few more opportunities right now. If you’re interested in reaching out, use this online form. Some of these opportunities include:
- Consulting work and ongoing advisory engagements.
- Coaching calls to give you guidance or a quick win.
- Public speaking at conferences or industry events.
- Being a guest on your podcast, show, or live stream.
- Being a guest lecturer at your school or college.
Unfortunately, there are certain things I’ll refuse to do, and I ask that you refrain from contacting me about them, such as:
- Free advice or pro bono work.*
- Speculative or contingency work of any kind.
- Writing for your publication or blog.
- Partnership or joint-venture opportunities.
- Full-time assistance with anything.
* I might accept some limited commitments working with organizations or for causes in areas that are deeply meaningful to me, such as cancer research, mental health, women’s issues, and learning disabilities.
I’m a big fan of behavioural assessments, not because of what they reveal but because they offer insights into, and language for, my set of competencies, shortcomings, and frustrations. They provide a deeper understanding of my working style, so I know where I shine and where I need help. Here are a few that I took.
Working Genius Assessment
This assessment is similar to Myers-Briggs, but it specifically identifies working styles and how they affect productivity. There are Six Working Genius Types, which are Wonder, Invention, Discernment, Galvanizing, Enablement, and Tenacity. Each person possesses two they’re naturally gifted in and passionate about. They derive joy from activities that align with those two gifts.
My two areas of genius are Invention and Discernment.
While each type is important on its own, the pairing of the two working geniuses can be insightful in identifying one’s unique style. For example, some like to come up with ideas while others like to analyze them. Some like to create plans while others like to implement them. In my case, a person with a combination of invention and discernment is called a Discriminating Ideator.
(“The Discriminating Ideator”) is a creative, intuitive, and confident generator of new ideas who uses instinct and integrative thinking to solve real problems. They get real energy and joy from using their intuition and instinctive ability to come up with new ideas from scratch, and they are good at using integrative thinking and pattern recognition rather than data and expertise. As a result, they are particularly effective in solving problems and coming up with workable, practical solutions with a particularly high level of success.
As a Discriminating Ideator, I derive the most joy from marketing activities that align with those two working geniuses, whether it’s performing SEO audits, conducting gap analyses, developing new strategies, or optimizing existing results. If you’re curious, you can download and read a copy of the full assessment.
Other Behavioural Assessments
DiSC® Profile
DiSC® is a popular behavioural assessment that measures one’s level of Dominance, Influence, Steadiness, and Conscientiousness. This version specifically measures my management style. The result is that I’m a “C” or predominantly Conscientious. However, it’s near the center, so I can be Dominant, Influential and Steady, too.
Predictive Index® Assessment
Predictive Index® is a behavioural assessment that People Ops use. It’s like DiSC® in that it measures four similar personality traits, which are Dominance, Formality, Patience, and Extraversion. According to my PI assessment, I’m a Maverick, an “innovative, outside-the-box thinker who is undaunted by failure.”
Workstyle and Performance Profile
According to HeadHunters’ Workstyle and Performance Profile assessment, my three main characteristics are Dominant, Spontaneous, and Open-Minded. This assessment showcases my areas of strength for coaching and development.
CliftonStrengths® Assessment
Run by Gallup, CliftonStrengths® assesses a person’s five most dominant strengths. Mine are, in order: Strategic, Context, Empathy, Connectedness, and Learner. In short, I recognize patterns and issues; I look at the past to understand the present; I can sense other people’s feelings; I believe everything is connected; and I have a great desire to learn and continuously improve.
Inspired by Derek Sivers’ “What I’m Doing Now,” here are some of the latest activities, news, and events that I’m involved in:
- I write a lot. As a guest contributor, I often write for large publications and websites. I sometimes publish a sporadic newsletter called The More Traffic Memo™ when I have a chance. I’m also in the process of writing a book.
- I’m an avid reader. Besides reading articles on a daily basis, I listen to audiobooks and multiple podcasts. In fact, I’m a competitive powerlifter and listen to them while training.
- I’m fluent in both French and English. I was once tested by the government of Canada and rated EEE/EEE (exempt in both languages, which is above fluent). While I’m a native French-Canadian originally from Quebec, I predominantly work in English. In fact, my name is pronounced “Mee-shell,” but you can call me Michael.
- As a semi-professional drummer, I play local gigs with a few bands. I play classic rock, hard rock, pop, and country music. Sometimes, I work as a session drummer for recording artists, and I’ve contributed to several albums.
- I’m a history buff and an armchair philologist. I’m fascinated by linguistics and how languages shape civilizations, cultures, and customs. That’s why I love learning about the etymology and evolution of words and their meanings.
- If you want to know a little more about me and my background, here are 10 facts about Michel Fortin.
My favourite books are non-fiction books that were instrumental in my personal and professional growth as a marketer.
- Scientific Advertising by Claude C. Hopkins. Written about a century ago, the language and situations are outdated, but the principles are timeless. This book taught me about psychology in advertising and copywriting.
- Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz. This book dove deeply into buying psychology. The biggest takeaway was the stages of awareness (i.e., market sophistication), which I’ve adapted to SEO and visibility marketing.
- The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout. This is the book that launched my career. The creators of positioning, which is a key marketing concept, shared their wisdom in the form of 22 laws, like “The Law of Leadership” (i.e., don’t be the best, be the first).
- The Platinum Rule by Dr. Tony Alessandra. The rule states, “Do unto others as they would want to have done unto them.” This book introduced me to behavioural psychology in sales and marketing. It helped me understand how to use buyer personas in digital marketing and SEO.
- The Business of Expertise by David C. Baker. The author shares three foundational truths: that expertise flows from focus (i.e., specialization), diminishes interchangeability (i.e., positioning), and allows for premium pricing (i.e., value-based fees). It helped me shift my thinking from being in the service business to being in an expertise one.
