I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Brian Carter of Fuel Interactive, for the upcoming SEM Canada conference. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it much, but it’s a great way to cover a lot of ground in SEM and online marketing.

Brian is the Director of Search Marketing for Fuel, based in South Carolina. Brian is an SEOmoz Pro Member and Google AdWords Qualified search marketing trainer, consultant, and speaker. Brian has more than eight years experience in the internet industry and is well known in the search engine marketing industry.

Being that one of our specialties in B2B and using SEO/SEM with longer sales cycles, we decided to cover those topics in detail. Brian was gracious to also ask me about ActiveConversion, which helps companies capitalize on search and online marketing.

The MP3 is around 45 minutes long, and I think you may find it interesting.

Here is a condensed list of things we cover:

• Search marketing in the B2B space
• 2.5m businesses that could benefit from SEM
• Advantages of online marketing over offline marketing
• Why Microsoft would spend so much to buy Yahoo
• Branding vs. Niche direct marketing
• Case study: Evans Console who sells $250k consoles to NASA and FedEx
• Effect of interactive marketing on Yellow Pages
• The Calgary business scene, and search marketing scene
• Shifting from the part-time in-house to search marketing agency experts
• Conversion tracking for lead generation campaigns
• A more sophisticated way to track and stay in touch with long buying cycle sales prospects

Lightning round topics! Fred’s quick opinions on…

• Twitter
• Yellow pages
• LinkedIn
• Local search
• Canadians
• Americans
• Calgary