It goes without saying that organic search engine traffic is what every online business wants to know wgat the formula for success is. Pay-per-click advertising continues to require more hard and soft dollar investments to maximize the ROI. We continue to see that corporations large and small are increasing online advertising by an average of 31% from a year ago in the third quarter, according to DoubleClick, Inc. (BusinessWeek, January 22, 2007). In addition, companies are increasingly hiring or creating positions for full time search engine marketing experts. But when it comes to evaluating the bottom line and the overall results with pay-per-click, businesses, and especially online merchants are looking for alternatives. The article I cited above goes on to say that small businesses are getting squeezed out of pay-per-click arena by being out bid by the big name brands and are being forced to find more cost effective ways to advertise online.

Blogs are not a new thing but the adoption rate of blogs for search engine marketing is growing immensely and effective marketing techniques are being developed for the purposes of:
1. Promoting product and service sales online
2. Building up the value of domain names for sale (Domaining)
3. Creating a profitable home based business
4. Becoming notorious in the online blogging community and profiting from it. (Moguling)

YouTube.com and MySpace.com are leveraging the popularity of other people to build value in their web sites for the purposes of selling advertising and building a valuable database for marketing purposes. Blogging, when done right, can effectively can accomplish all of the above 4 points and many more.

This blog and Microsite (in development) will be testing the effectiveness of blogging for search engine marketing purposes and implementing recommendations from the blog community and sharing the results over the next few months. If you are interested in participating in this online marketing test, please post your comments and stay tuned to see what blogging is doing to the search engine marketing industry.