Promotional ads will entice your target audience and differentiate you from the pack, since most online marketers run product ads with feature listings. Try promoting free white papers and case studies, that are proprietary to your company. Don’t buy white papers that can be found in other places, otherwise, you won’t have a leg up over your competition.

SEO, for all the newbies out there, is the organic listings that appear on the left-side of Google’s search results. It is free to appear in Google’s organic listings, which is how 75% of online users will find content. Also, 85% of Google Search users tend to click on organic listings compared to paid advertising links that appear at either the top or right-side of Google’s results. Although free to appear, it is not easy to get your website listed on the first page of the organic search, which is primarily where you want to appear, since most people tend not to go past the 1st page of the listings. So, how do you begin to make your site SEO-friendly?

Start with the title of the web pages. Name the title tags with 3-4 keywords that are relevant to the information on the page.  Next, make sure that your information on the web pages are specific to the keywords.  Lastly, get as many external links that go to your website.  The more links you have, the more it will help in the popularity of your site, which will drive your site up in the rankings of the organic search.

There is a down-side to Google Analytics, it has problems aggregating all of the traffic accurately for unique visitors and visits.  For example, if you are running a Facebook advertising campaign, Google statistically will show less traffic to your site, than what Facebook reports, but hey, what do you expect from a free software.

For a more robust analytic software, try WebTrends.  WebTrends can be customized to your needs and is very granular about its tracking. Keeping in mind, it is a paid software, but if you can afford it, I would highly recommend it. If you are running a Search campaign, you’ll be able to see, down to the keyword, if new registrants or sales can be accounted to those specific keywords.

B2C marketing tends to focus equally on customer acquisition and retention marketing programs.  Consumers are more price & service sensitive than businesses. Consumers visit more alternative online services, if they believe there is a better value for them testing out varied sites.  Many good B2C online marketers will focus on creating customer retention programs that keep consumers coming back to their sites to extend their Life Time Value (LTV) of their online members…i.e. if the average of an online user is 2 months at a casual gaming site, then the marketer seeks to extend the LTV to 3-4 months.  By extending the LTV of an online member, potentially increases online usage at the site and will increase overall ROI for revenues.

Online marketing channels for B2C online services tend to concentrate on SEM, SEO, direct marketing, email campaigns, blogs, viral and affiliate marketing.

For example,  if you are trying to market a product to a consumer audience, consider creating a short video about how to use the product and place that video on MySpace, YouTube, and Veoh.   Make sure the video you create is fun and exciting to watch, otherwise, you won’t have anyone watching.  Don’t make the mistake that many others do, that assume just because you built it, people will watch it. Make sure to include your url in the video as a tagline at the bottom of the screen, so viewers can go to your site, once they are done watching the video.

By doing simple guerrilla marketing techniques as the video example, will help increase your traffic and boost your rankings in Google’s Search.

Check out KeywordSpy.com and SpyFu.com.  Both of these services will help you review your competitors organic and paid keywords by simply typing in your competitor’s domain. If that doesn’t work, try typing in search keywords that you think your target market finds your services online.  The keywords that you type in should bring up a string of related keywords that you can use to help drive more traffic to your site and to see who else is using similar keywords.

Also, try Alexa.com to see how your competitor ranks against you in traffic.

Keep in mind, that if you can see how your competitor’s traffic is being monitored, they most likely are monitoring you as well.

Also, check out HowStuffWorks.com, if you are a marketer with products that need demonstrations. HowStuffWorks.com can create customized pages for marketers that want to brand their products and services in a non-traditional way to their target markets.  The How Stuff team will maintain the page for you with their own editorial content, which is relevant to the products and services that you are marketing.

As the U.S.  economy worsens, big budget advertisers that have used multi-channels for their marketing strategies will be forced to cut their budgets and limit their marketing channels, which makes online marketing a more attractive solution to traditional outlets. So, what can you do as a Marketer with a limited budget competing with the Big Boys?  Try alternative advertising services to the baselines.  For example, advertising networks, such as AdOnNetwork represent some of the Top ComScore sites and offer cheap remnant ad spaces for a 1/3 of the price.

Now, that Google will be serving their search ads on Yahoo, that limits the amount of advertising choices, which ultimately means that Search pricing for your keywords are going to go up. Also, the advertiser will have to deal with higher online search budgets, since it won’t be offset, by running ads on Yahoo and Google separately. Traditionally Yahoo’s keyword search term pricing has been lower than Google’s, so now that Google will be running the show, there will be no choices to separate the Search campaigns in other platforms for reducing pricing. So, what about MSN?

MSN’s search has been no match for Yahoo or Google in the past, but maybe with this new partnership deal, will step up MSN’s effort to be a real player in Search and as an alternative for online advertisers. We will have to wait and see.