According to David Sifry, part of growth of new blogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs.

What are spam blogs? They are fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.

They contain robot-generated posts made up of random words, with title linking back to blogger's own pages.

Many bloggers see them as a way of getting their pages indexed quickly by Google and other search engines.

Sifry estimates that about 20% of aggregate pings Technorati receives are from spam blogs. Most of this fake blog spam comes from hosted services or from specific IP addresses.

Those in SEO world are well aware of this. There are even services like Blogburner that encourage creation of spammy blogs and spam-pinging to get your sites indexed quickly.

As a blogging evangelist, I wholeheartedly recommend blogging as an SEO tactic. But I also emphasize that you should use your blog for more than just SEO.

At Spam Squashing Summit, blog services decided to collaborate to report and combat blog-spamming.

Technorati currently claims to catch about 90% of spam and remove it from index. They also notify blog hosting operators.

But I believe that they are fighting a losing battle. As I write this there are software and robots being created that will create spam-blogs more efficiently and in ways that will be harder to detect.

Let’s keep this simple and create a list of required tasks to successfully plan your pay-per-click campaign. These are:

1. Determine your product’s Unique Selling Proposition. 2. Define your pay-per-click campaign’s goals and objectives. 3. Decide starting and ending dates for pay-per-click campaign. 4. Establish click-through rate target for your pay-per-click ads. 5. Set conversion rate target for your pay-per-click ads. 6. Define your budget for pay-per-click campaign. 7. Establish your ROI or Return on Investment goal for pay-per-click campaign. 8. Determine value of each keyword phrase. 9. Plan how to measure your pay-per-click campaign results.

Task number one is determining your product or service’s Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. What is a USP? The USP clearly answers question, "Why should I do business with you instead of your competitors?"  Your organization needs to stand out from crowd! This could relate to services or products provided, guarantees offered, delivery mechanisms used, complementary services provided, pricing or any attribute associated with your business.

Identify your organization’s uniqueness since it is pointless promoting cheap prices if everyone else is promoting same. If everyone were offering cheap prices you would be better off promoting higher prices for providing better quality and service as long as you are delivering better quality and service.   An articulate USP assists in defining focus and selecting keyword phrases for your pay-per-click campaign.  For example, if your USP is focused on quality and service perhaps you would avoid a keyword phrase containing word “cheap” but rather include words denoting quality.

Task number two is defining campaign’s goals and objectives.  Typical examples might be:  increase web site traffic X percent, acquire X number of new business leads, obtain X number of new customers or orders per day, achieve X sales revenue dollars per time period, etc.  Whatever you set as your goals or objectives you must be certain they are quantifiable and measurable in order to determine success of your pay-per click campaign.

Task number three is deciding starting and ending date of pay-per-click campaign.  This is a major benefit to pay-per-click campaigns since you have ability to turn a campaign on and off at your discretion.  As an example, you could create a campaign promoting National Nurse’s Week or something similar with discounted sale prices supported by advertising coop funds provided by product’s manufacturer. 

Task number four is establishing click-through rate target or goal for your pay-per-click ads.  The click-through rate is number of times ad is clicked versus total number of impressions.  One impression is a one display of ad.  In general, click-through rates range from 1% to 5% of number of impressions. The formula is:

Click-Through Rate % = Total Number of Ad Clicks /                           Total Number of Ad Impressions * 100