Judging by the astounding growth of online video viewership (close to 125% in 2009), there is no doubt about the tremendous opportunity that has emerged for marketers. Sure, online video still has a long way to go before it gets close to television viewership but eMarketer predicts that online video viewership will nearly double to 11.8 billion total hours in 2010.

Gone are the days when so-called “SEO Specialists” churned out pages upon pages of mindless copy stuffed with keywords. Search engines guard their credibility by trying to make sure that a site they rank high in their listing actually provides value to the person searching for that particular keyword or search phrase.

SEO, PPC, SEM, SMO... you’ve heard all the buzz words; you know you need online marketing in order to stay afloat and pace the competition, if not beat it. The important thing to remember is that a strategic mix of online marketing strategies can help you reduce your marketing spend, but an ill-informed choice could blow up your entire budget and deliver little or no results.

Over the last year, several advancements have been made in the tools and techniques available for Internet marketing research. Web Analytics which started out with data and analysis related to your website traffic details has evolved into a complex and highly intuitive research methodology.

No matter what industry you are in or the size of your marketing budget, there are smart ways to maximize your ROI and turn recession into an opportunity.

As a business owner you have the immense potential to leverage what customers are saying about you and market yourself better. Learn how to use social media online to be more profitable and enhance the value of your brand.

Online, almost everything can be measured: visits, clicks, engagement, buzz, open rates, conversions, demographics, branding, and time spent are just a few examples of the many available metrics. Marketers and business owners like yourself embrace the very real potential of all this information -- but often feel overwhelmed by mountains of data, as well as stymied by the technology that delivers the solutions.

Several free and member-only paid tools are available online for doing this research. The reason you can’t do without it is because strangely enough, the keywords you would like to promote about your business aren’t always the ones your customers will use to search. For example, you may be selling “swaddling blankets”, your customers may only search “baby blankets”.