With a huge excess supply in media available, many marketers who were formerly forced to buy media on a cost-per-impression (or CPM) basis now find media firms ready to talk about pay for performance (or cost per lead). Gary Kreissman presents a 5-point approach to performance buying and a way to shave serious dollars off your media bill.

How the Recession Makes You Royalty [via MediaPost].

As more and more marketers are discovering, press releases are a good way to increase your website traffic without much in the way of out-of-pocket costs. But with an average of more than 2000 press releases issued every business day, you’ve got to do more than just write a release. Sarah Evans has some good suggestions for steps to help make sure your release gets a good ranking on the search engines.

Ten Ways ot Make Press Releases More SEO Friendly [via Mashable].

From oDesk comes a great list of ten ways to do more with less. Not all of them are marketing related, but what the heck? We have to run our businesses too.

Budget Salvation! 10 Ways That Less Does More [via oDesk Blog]

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is basically an auction system where advertisers bid for the best ad positions - the most coveted of which are on the first page. But price alone isn’t all that counts, especially on Google.

Quality scores greatly affect the price you’ll pay for a top position. These scores are the search engines’ attempt to rate how good your campaign is in terms of its relevance to the searcher. The better your quality score, the less you’ll pay for a given  position.

As an added bonus, advertisers with high quality scores generally get more qualified visitors clicking on their ads. Lower costs AND better prospects. Double win!

David Szetela offers three best practices to help you achieve a good score.

Those Mysterious Quality Scores: Fundamentally Simple [via SearchEngineWatch.com]