Online Advertisers Turn to Pay-Per-Call – even if it costs them 7 to 10$ per call…

So once they have the lead on the phone it's easier to close the deal, as much more buying intention was demonstrated vs. just surfing and browsing around.-

"You've got a much better chance of closing a sale when you're talking to them rather than having them look at your site and 10 other competitors' sites," Brady said.

He estimated that he closes one sale for every 70 clicks, but with pay-per-call, it's one in three.

The Kelsey Group, a market-research firm based in Princeton, N.J., projects that pay-per-call will become a $1.4 billion to $4 billion industry by 2009.

That would roughly parallel the recent growth of pay-per-click advertising, which jumped from about $100 million in 2000 to $3.1 billion last year, according to Jupiter Research.

According to Cnet Google is quietly testing the waters of print advertising sales, and thereby launched their first "offline product" – re-selling
Re-Selling Magazine Ads they purchased in parts to their adwords advertisers.

Aaron writes about a not really new concept to SEO or marketing – placing paid articles – and compares it to site-wide links… or link rentals in general…

He calls paid article placements "pre sell pages"… sounds a bit odd to me… but
instead of buying sitewide links it is better to buy an advertising pages hosted on other sites. Link to that page from many pages on that same site (which in a sense is like pointing a sitewide link on that site at that advertising page). Link popularity flows more naturally within a domain than it does across domains.

Write the article page using appropriate page title, header, and subheaders. From the article page deep link to various locations on your site with descriptive anchor text.

If you make the article page well and the site you are advertising on is strong enough it gives you another opportunity to rank well. In fact, if your market is exceptionally competitive the authority of the site you are advertising on may allow that page to rank even if your site is not strong enough to rank.

In my opinion this option is way better than any single text link… no question can you position your products better via relevant descriptions around your link than a single text link… to both – search engines working more semantic than a few months or years before… and most important: to your humans! your customers… those that you REALLY want to address..

more thoughts on this at the seoblog's article

MS opens Hotmail to bulk mailers and said it had introduced a white list scheme to allow well-behaved email marketing firms to reach its customers without falling foul of its spam filters.

Marketing firms who post a cash bond of up to $20,000 through IronPort's "Bonded Sender Programme" will get guarantees that their message will be delivered to the estimated 170 million regular users of Microsoft's Hotmail and MSN e-mail services, providing they follow a strict set of guidelines. Firms who flout the guidelines – standards that exceed those defined in the CAN-SPAM Act – risk losing their money. The approach rewards marketeers who agree to be held accountable for the messages they send. Microsoft has been working on the programme with IronPort for five months but the arrangement was only made public yesterday.

With the support of Microsoft, more firms are likely to adopt the scheme. Good news for Ironport's sales team. Microsoft is behind the idea because it wants to reclaim email marketing from criminal spammers. For end users the scheme makes it less likely that messages they have requested from companies they do business with will be blocked (i.e. fewer false positives).

Adam points out that Sony pictures finally understood that copyrighting things and hunting the fans of characters like SpiderMan does not really help the marketing department at all.. so they provided ready made blog templates in a SpiderMan-Style for LiveJournal and Blogger… great to see this move…

Google rocks with it's latest feature – Google DomainPark allows domain name registrars and large domain name holders to unlock the value in their parked page inventory. DomainPark delivers targeted, conceptually related keywords and ads from the Google AdWords network to parked domain name pages by using Google's semantic technology to "understand" the meaning of each domain name. Powering over 1 million domain names, DomainPark is the industry's leading parked page service.

DomainPark customers redirect traffic from parked domains to the DomainPark service. When Google receives the request, it processes the domain name and returns formatted HTML that includes contextual ads and related searches. Customers can either display the full page HTML or include it in a frame.