There is so much buzz out there these days about blogging, I myself am starting to wonder if it is more hype than substance. The New York Times featured blogs recently, and Blogging was the cover story for a recent Business Week.

Though you may think that blogs today are the personal web pages of yesterday, filled with meaningless rants and the lionization of the mundane, consider reconsidering.

Thought the web became flooded with personal web pages, it also grew into the most measurable, effective, efficient new media of our generation. Can blogging do the same? I am not saying that for certain, but I also wouldn't write them off right away for three reasons:

1. The blogosphere is a dynamic pool of opinionated, passionate writers that have developed an entirely new grassroots network of communication. Marketers are constantly seeking that holy grail of "word of mouth" for their business's products and services. Think -- is there an area of the blogosphere that can be passionate about your products and services? (Read: iPod) Can you be passionate?
2. Blogging is becoming mainstream -- not in high quantity but in quality. There is now a blogger on the White House press corp. Bloggers are more and more participating in the wider conversations about national news and events, such as the prisoner abuse scandal.
3. Blogging's unique medium allow you to be both personal and professional. What other means to communicate with a large audience as a marketer has quite this combination.

Blogging is not for every business, but it is worth every marketer's time to think on whether blogging could work for their overall strategy. And if it does, blog with courage: be personal, passionate and avoid sounding like body copy.

Pay-per-click advertising is on my brain lately. It is a powerful Internet marketing medium that can bring instant results. But often "instant" does not translate to "effective."

For example, how do you measure the success of your PPC? Many people look at bid price,  click-through rate, and total visitors. Are you measuring actual conversions from pay-per-click visitors? Yahoo Search Marketing and Google AdWords have tools to measure which pay-per-click visitors coming to your site are purchasing from you.

With conversion tools set up, look at  your cost-per-conversion and your conversion rate. these can be more effective ways to measure PPC return on investment (ROI) than amount spent, visitors, and click-through rate.

I have seen examples where an advertiser's click-through rate may not be great, but its overall conversion rate for a given category or term is actually pretty good. I have also seen the opposite, where from a click-through perspective the category or keyword seems to be performing well but those visitors are actually not converting to sales.

Use the great tools provided by your pay-per-click vendors to measure pay-per-click advertising against actual sales.

Travel search engines work similar to regular search engines, but they feature one type of content: travel deals online. These engines crawl through the travel sites on the web and pick up listings on hotel websites, travel agent websites, suppliers and more.

Growing travel search engines include Mobissimo, Kayak, and Yahoo's Farechaser and they are gaining audience rapidly.

For example, Hitwise research indicted that travel search engine traffic has grown 250 percent in the past six months, according to Hotelmarketing.com newsletter. The top dive travel agencies (includes Expedia, Travelocity, etc.) only grew 11.4 percent.

For hotels and rental car companies, these travel search engines may be a good new distribution channel to consider, particularly to grow direct bookings.

Hotelmarketing.com additionally noted that visitors to travel search engines are more likely to be over 55 than other types of online travel engines. If this is your target market, travel search engines may be a uniquely interesting distribution channel online.

I often get asked the question: "who actually clicks on pay-per-click ads, anyway? Do people really use them?"

Good question. Recent research from several industry outfits indicates that on average 70 percent of searchers use organic or natural search engine listings and about 30 percent use paid listings.

Jupiter research released a report saying that 6 out of 7 sales from search engines came from organic listings.

Another set of research describes a "golden triangle" of search made up of a visual diagram of where people look most on search pages which corroborates this information.

So what to make of this? Three main things to take away:

1. Advertisers who avoid search engine optimization entirely and use the immediate gratification of pay-per-click as their only search advertising option could be missing 70 percent of their target audience.
2. Those who write off pay-per-click advertising because of the impression that people do not look at the ads may be missing up to 30% of their potential customers.
3. Though top rankings on both natural listings and paid listings bring the most traffic, it can still be profitable and effective to rank in the top 5 to 10 for either.

Understanding the potential of each of these Internet marketing tactics and how they apply to your specific business will ensure success, but the bottom line is that both can play a significant role in your online marketing program.

Wow. Pay-per-click bid prices continue to rise. The Keyword Price Index from Fathom Online reported an 11 percent increase from March to April to an average of $1.95. This is a continuing trend of bid price inflation that began getting a lot of attention last Christmas holiday season, when the growth in the number of advertisers using PPC and the tight, competitive holiday shopping season created drastic bid price jumps.

According to Fathom, the sector primarily responsible for the increase was finance, with mortgage refinance advertising showing the biggest jump.

It is important whether you are planning a pay-per-click campaign or are already conducting one to anticipate price increases. Small businesses are coming online in ever greater numbers and will slowly but surely ensure that costs will rise, because search ad inventory is relatively static.

Consider some additional factors as well -- if you have a seasonal sales fluctuation in your industry, then be sure to put aside for a price increase at that time. The summer travel market for Alaska is a good example of a business category with heavy seasonal fluctuations.

Keeping tabs on your competitive market will also help you stay on top of costs. If a large competitor suddenly comes online with Pay-per-click and has deep pockets, be prepared for inflation.

Active management of your pay-per-click advertising is critical to getting the most for your money.

AOL last week launched a pay-per-call program for advertising. Have you heard of it? Basically, it is an online ad that shows an 800 number instead of providing a link to the advertiser's website.

Pay-per-call is considered a good option for a number of businesses:

• Companies without a web presence
• Local businesses (ads can be targeted geographically)
• Companies that have a more consultative sales process

For lots of details on this new ad option, check on this great article on Search Engine Watch.

I am attending an interesting webinar this morning about using landing pages with your pay-per-click campaigns. This can be as simple a process as sending visitors from your ad to a more specific page, like sending them to a product page versus the home page.

But take this concept even further and think about your actual web site pages. Sometimes having a page more specifically tailored to your pay-per-click ad and the associated keyword might produce better results than if you just sent them to a page of your site.

Basically you can "merchandise" your products or services to a specific ad if you use a custom landing page. Furthermore, if you are trying to decide between featuring certain products or offers, you can test two landing pages, one with each to learn which will provide the best conversion.

Do you use landing pages? Do you use them to test? How are your results?

Thanks for checking out the new Apokrisis Blog, Apokrisis Answers!

I hope this will be a great source for you to get updates on what are the hot new trends in Internet marketing and how you might be able to apply them to your business successfully.

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If you want more information about my Internet marketing experience, check out the Apokrisis website.