For the first time, U.S. businesses will spend more of their ad dollars in digital/new media than in newspapers and magazines.

I'm only surprised that it took this long. Who pays any attention to ads in newspapers or magazines these days? What's more, who buys that way?

Back in the day, people actually used to pick up the phone and order items they saw advertised in magazines. Or they would send away for something because of an ad they saw in the newspaper. Do people still do that?

I'm going to share a link-building strategy (not specific tactics) that has worked exceedingly well for me when it comes to driving traffic to a website. This will not work for everyone because, frankly, few can produce content of high enough quality to make this strategy feasible.

(If you think you're tough enough to hang with this, you need to keep reading.)

It's here! The ultimate splog

If you want to know how to splog, check out my new splog, dedicated to getting people to buy stuff.

If you're seriously looking for advice on how to build a blog for profit, here it is in three simple steps:

1. The first thing you need to be able to do to splog successfully is find excellent products to promote. Cruddy products don't sell, and even when they do sell they generate lots of troublesome refund requests.
Go full-nerd and read on...

Includes free spreadsheet with all formulas and charts!

Plug in your own numbers and watch the magic.

If you read part one of my little exposition on PPC vs. SEO ROI, you should have noticed that the numbers were simple and unrealistic. Indeed, for illustrative purposes, those numbers produced a 100 percent return on PPC investment which is absurd.

Since I already had the spreadsheet with most of the formulas, I decided to tweak the assumptions a little bit to see how things might play out more realistically. The view from 30,000 feet on that is here.

SEO or PPC: Quality matters

I recently heard a marketing professional say that his firm didn't focus on SEO since search engines only delivered about 5 percent of their traffic, and it made me wonder how long that person will keep their job. This was a young, tech-savvy marketer who was really into social media and spending gobs of money on PPC advertising. Don't get me wrong: Used properly, those tools can be great drivers of traffic, but they're not necessarily the best drivers of profit.

"Think about this," I said, "You're putting nothing into SEO, and it's driving five percent of your traffic." What I didn't say was, "Have you looked at the conversion ratios from SEO as opposed to other traffic sources? I would be willing to bet you have not." No need to be adversarial.

Even if search engines are not your biggest source of traffic, they are probably your best source of traffic.