Photo ©2015 SaratogaPhotographer.com
BY ANDREA PALMER
Ed Foy is the man behind Professionally Motivated,
based out of Saratoga Springs. Professionally
Motivated is launching a content curation
platform to area professionals, and businesses
with less than 500 employees.
The platform will allow users to curate existing
content from the internet, comment on the
content and pull the content and original source
to the user’s website to generate traffic and SEO.
The platform makes the curation process and
content marketing efficient and user-friendly.
Foy compares content marketing to a gym
membership.
“If you join a gym, but never go, are you getting
the benefits? No. If you build a website and it
just sits there, it’s not going to give you much of
an outcome. Google doesn’t reward you for just
having a website,” he said. “It’s what you do with
it that creates benefits.”
Foy is no stranger to online entrepreneurship.
For 15 years he and his wife, Jennifer, ran eFashion
Solutions, a 300-employee internet technology
company that provided turn-key e-commerce
solutions to the fashion industry. The company
serviced over 100 brands such as DKNY, Victoria’s
Secret and Oscar De La Renta, also working with
eBay and Amazon.com.
The company designed, hosted and serviced
websites, photographed items for online marketing,
marketed the brands online, and shipped
orders from inventory maintained in an on-site
warehouse in New Jersey. Said Foy, “We ran everything
A to Z for these major catalog brands.
We handled 100 percent of the e-commerce for
the business, both technically and logistically.”
Foy exited the e-commerce business 24
months ago. He and his wife, Jennifer, took some
time to focus on one of their passions, fine dining.
They opened The Chateau on the Lake in Bolton
Landing, Foy’s hometown. The Chateau was voted
one of OpenTable Diners 2015 Top 100 Most
Romantic Restaurants in America.
In addition to being a fine dining restaurant,
the Chateau hosts weddings, parties and events.
“I grew up in Bolton and felt like the town
needed a luxury, fine-dining experience,” said
Foy. “We pursued the restaurant as a passion,
versus making a living, and ended up being very
successful. We’ve created a dining experience
around the lifestyle of ‘Lake Life’.” Foy’s parents
and brother own Cate’s Italian Garden in Bolton.
Along with starting a successful fine dining
restaurant, Foy made several investments since
exiting the e-commerce industry. One investment
that caught his attention and interest was in the
area of content marketing.
“I became a student of the creation, curation
and distribution of online content and content
marketing. It hit me that this could be an excellent
way for professionals to drive a lot of business,”
he said.
Foy negotiated the rights to such technology,
then set about beta-testing it for the past three
years with large companies such as AT&T, SAP
and Oracle.
“We saw a 65 percent growth rate in the companies
we beta-tested with, with huge growth in
lead generation. It’s a high-end global platform,
at a local level. It’s about the global web becoming
very localized,” said Foy.
The platform will put serious horse-power
behind marketing through content curation.
“There is a cost associated with creating online
content in the form of articles, blogs, that kind
of thing, and there’s already a ton of content out
there,” he said. “What if we could participate in
pre-existing content? With our technology, users
can highlight quality content, give a relevant
point of view on it and pull the original content to
their website. The original source receives credit,
and the user of our technology is rewarded with
SEO based on the original content, as well as their
added point of view. It is localization and consolidation.
It’s crowd-sourcing for the internet.”
Professionally Motivated is launching the
platform in Saratoga Springs and Glens Falls in
the fourth quarter of this year. The platform will
later be launched in 277 cities over the next 36 months and 1,200 cities over the next 5 years.
“It’s a limited platform. We are launching
with a total of 50 professionals and businesses,
for Saratoga. We are launching with a total of 25
professionals and businesses for Glens Falls,”
he said.
Users will pay an initial engagement fee to
establish the profile and receive training in the
use of the platform. Users pay a monthly participation
fee, established by the market. Bids are
being taken, with the top bidders being accepted
at the launch date.
Professionally Motivated is targeted at area
professionals and businesses seeking to increase
online traffic and therefore SEO ranking.
“Our platform is geared toward anyone in a
professional services industry who understands
the power of technology and isn’t afraid of it, but
doesn’t quite know what to do with it,” he said.
“This tool gives you the opportunity to take your
mind, your experiences, your education and
know-how, and get it online quickly–get it into
the world of Google algorithms for maximum
results and benefits.”