An article by Gil Murray, guest of the Pay Per Click Blog.

If this is the first time you are venturing into Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising, the following tips should help you develop an effective campaign.

Landing Page

You are likely to use more than one pay-per-click advertising company. Moreover, you're also likely to create a PPC ad for every product you're offering. Given the multiplicity of products you're offering your consumers, you'd have to have a landing page for every specific PPC ad you have.

This is necessary since if your ad says ‘diamond jewelry” and you directly lead your visitor to your home page that discusses your company, your visitor may get frustrated since he or she was looking for diamond jewelry, not your company's history.

Thus, for the above example, you must provide a landing page that maybe displays your diamond jewelry inventory or diamond jewelry classification (e.g. diamond engagement ring, diamond necklace, diamond bracelets, etc.). If you sell more than diamond jewelry, you can create a landing page that is a mild sales pitch about your products, but do not forget to provide prominent links towards your diamond jewelry or other products' pages.

Conversion Not Click-Throughs

It is easy to forget that you're in pay-per-click advertising not to increase your site traffic but to increase your site conversion rates. That is, PPC can only be cost-effective if you convert enough visitors into buyers.

This means that you have some tough decisions to make. For instance it can be very tempting to put your “free whatever” promo in your PPC ad. However, this can lead to high click-through rates or clicks that do not result in sales when people click your ads only because they want to see how they could take advantage of your free promotions. In this case, you will pay for clicks that did not bring you any profit.

On the other hand, you can remove the “free” term but place some other equally motivating term like “affordable” (use this only if your prices really are affordable). This may mean you'll get less site traffic, but the visitors you get are aware that you're selling. Since they clicked your site anyway, this means that they're more likely to buy.

Don't Try to Be First

Believe me, being one of the first PPC ads in search engine results pages are not the ideal place to be. You may not agree, but the reason behind this is rather simply understood. Some people are in the habit of clicking on PPC ads, either by accident or by design, say to test his bandwidth or just to explore the site provided.

Being one of the first ads, therefore, means that you will get a lot of nuisance clicks which you'll have to pay for anyway. These clicks just inflate the costs of PPC advertising without providing you the corresponding profit.

Contextual Advertising

One great way of getting ahead through your PPC campaign is by getting signed up with PPC companies that provide contextual advertising; that is, your ads get fed to member sites that have content relevant to your business or product. It is hoped that after reading informative content, the visitor may be more inclined to buy your products.

Signup for ExoClick Pay Per Click services to start some advertising campaigns at a low CPC!

I guess that's the 0.0001% in the "99.9999% uptime" :)
I'm wondering what would happen if Google was down for a full day!

A landing page is the first page a visitor to your website sees. Landing Pages used to be very important back in the days of email marketing, nevertheless, landing pages haven't lost any of their luster along the years and are still considered important. The reason why landing pages are important nowadays is because many affiliate marketers use them to sell their products that they have formerly advertised via programs such as ExoClick or AdWords. Why? Because landing pages are the new direct marketing technique, and anyone that owns a website can be a direct marketer. This might sound a big complicated, but it's much of a fuss really, a landing page is the page that the possible buyer, that 'landed there' via an ad he clicked, sees the first time. That page is going to be focused on the appraisal of one single product.

What makes landing pages so special

Studies have shown that landing pages can only create several actions, like:

* Get a visitor to click (to go to another page, possibly on your site or on someone else's).
* Get a visitor to buy (the ideal case).
* Get a user to register (works good if you plan on sending ads via email).
* Get a visitor to spread the word (tell his friends, family and so on).
* Get a visitor to implicate (this could include posting a comment, a suggestion or feedback, etc).

What makes landing pages really special is the fact that all the attention of that page is focused on one single product : the one you're selling (or offering for free). To make a landing page work properly, you have to ask yourselves if you were the visitor (possible buyer) of that page, what would the person that created the page want you to do.

Would he want you to:
a) Click on his ads, go to his page and afterwards leave, thus, making him loose money for nothing.
b) Click on his ads, go to his page and contribute, thus, giving him a heart warming sensation that he did something good.
c) Click on his ads, go to his page and possibly buy something that's worth the money.

First impression is something that matters the most for a first time visitor. If you are to cluster your pages with all sorts of ads and stuff like that, you will definitely have a low CR. If you are going to have a nice clean page, focusing on only one product, you're half way there, remember though, don't start your product description with the price, that might intimidate them. Remember that landing pages are not wandering generalities, they are specific measurable offers.

We hear this term more and more lately, "affiliate marketing", but what actually makes someone an affiliate marketer ? How did he get that status ? Affiliate marketing is a revenue sharing between a merchant and an affiliate who gets paid for referring or promoting the merchants products and services. It has gained more and more exposure because it has been proven to be cost-efficient and a way of attaining great profits. If you want to be an affiliate marketer and start earning nice solid streams of income, following the 7 most basic and easiest ways to start an affective affiliate marketing program will get you there.

1) Identify the one thing that interests you the most, and start monetizing it. It is best to go this way ensuring you will not get bored.

2) Understand branding as a very important step in your marketer career.

3) Look for good paying merchants and products or services that relate to your interests. (see point 1)

4) Choose the right product to sell, expensive products might not be as easy to sell as some other cheap ones, but with the right marketing strategies and sales techniques this could work.

5) Take the CR into consideration.

6) Be open minded. Keep your imagination gates open and never and I mean it, NEVER be afraid to try something new.

7 Use landing pages, and optimize them.

8) Embrace failure as you would embrace achievement, don't be afraid to loose, failure is the road to success.

Many affiliate marketers fail to understand this and when they don't have any sales they just quit, looking for other programs and repeat the same mistakes they did before. In conclusion, never give up on your goals, always follow them to the end.

The reason why affiliate marketing is considered to be so beneficial is because it usually represents a win-win situation for both the merchant and the publisher. Although there are much more benefits on the merchants side the publisher also has the liberty of choice a flexible working program and a work-at-home opportunity.

As a merchant you can enjoy the benefit of having a wider market to advertise to. Affiliate marketing will give the product or service the maximum exposure required that it might not receive by using other advertising techniques. Affiliate marketing is best described as the equivalent of having a bunch of people advertising your product. That bunch of people are actually the pillars for the publishers community.

As a publisher you will only get paid a certain commission if a customers purchases. Foremost among the benefits a publisher has is an easy way of making profits.

Affiliate marketing is a great way to earn and still work at home because :

- there are virtually no production costs;
- the product has been already advertised by the merchant you're just selling it;
- it's very simple to understand and work with;
- the possibilities are numerous;
- you can build a successful affiliate marketing business right in the comfort of your house;
- there's a minimum risk involved;

You will only have to worry about one single thing : finding prospects ; you don't have to worry about processing product shipping inventory payment processors or things like that - this is one of the reasons that makes it so great.

Because the power of the Internet has reached all of us finding a prospect isn't as hard as it used to be. Among millions of Internet users you can literally find thousands of prospects.By attracting more and more prospects you will also maximize your potential to earn a commission.

Bottom line

Affiliate marketing is an easy way to increase your income you can work at home in a comfortable environment while maximizing your revenues.

I could also have named this article "Ronaldinho, go home!"

So I was looking at the top videos of the day on YouTube when I see a video named "Hottie with skills", which I obvioulsy click to watch.

And this is what I see...



Now, I don't know what you think but I found it pretty impressive and enjoyable. But what I found even more impressive is the last image of the video, an ad for the site uMoviez.com

It's not the first time I see videos with this site at the end which makes me thing these people are working hard to hit YouTube's most viewed videos of the day and they are obviously succeeding!

This video was posted yesterday, July 16. So it's online since less than 24 hours and YouTube counted already 180,000+ views of the video. That's a looot of people!

Now, is this actually bringing them any traffic will you ask. Well, looking at their Alexa stats, it seems it does.



If only 1% of the users who have seen the video actually go to their site, that's still 1,800 free visitors they will receive in just a few hours. And the video will probably remain there for quite longer.

This plus the fact they are probably adding hundreds of videos to YouTube everyday, they must drive a nice amount of traffic to their site.

I don't know if that traffic is worth the effort, but at least it's worth a try!
The beauty of it is that this video will spread on the Internet forever with their URL at the end!

*** EDIT: The video has now been removed by YouTube, so it looks like they don't like that too much.

In this tutorial, I will try to give you some information on how to configure your campaigns with ExoClick and optimize them for the best conversions.

Account Funding

Note that ExoClick is only working with pre-payments. You decide what you want to pay and when you want to pay it. The minimum amount is $10
Today, we accept payments through Paypal, credit card, ePassporte and wire transfer. (Minimum amount for wire transfer is $500)

New Campaign

Once your account is funded, you can start creating campaigns. There is no limitation on the number of campaigns you can create.



There is 3 main sections for the creation of a campaign.

1. The campaign information.

Name of the campaign: This is just a name for you to remember what you are targeting in this campaign. Example: "MyProduct.com - Blogging Category - All countries"

CPC: Fixed "Cost Per Click" price you want to pay. If you want to bid $0.15 for this campaign, then you should enter 15. (Minimum bid is only $0.01)

Maximum number of Clicks: Number of clicks you want to receive for this campaign. You can just set a very high number if you don't want to have any limitation.

Ad type: Type of advertising you want to set. For now, you can choose between text or banner.

2. The targeting

This section is very important as this is where you configure WHERE your ad will appear.

2.1 Categories: Selecting a category is an easy way of getting wide exposure as your ad will be shown for that full category!
If you select some sub-categories, your ad will be shown on the selected sub-categories only.

I strongly recommend to select a category, and no sub-categories.

2.2 Countries: By default, there is no countries selected, which means your ad will be shown EVERYWHERE. If you want to restrict the geo-localization of your ad, just select the countries where you want your ad to be shown. (For selecting multiple countries, just keep the key "CTRL" pressed and select the countries you want)

2.3 Keywords: Add here your list of keywords so your ad will be shown on these searches. Note that if you selected a category, you can leave the keywords field empty.

2.4 Sites: By default, there is no sites selected, which means your ad will be shown on the full network. If you want to display your ad only on specific sites, then enter here the list of hostnames.

Example:
blog.exoclick.com
loudsearch.com
loveseeking.net

Tip 1, CATCH-ALL traffic: You can buy traffic from the FULL Network by using the sign "%" in the keywords list. By doing so, you ad will appear for all keywords, all categories, all sites, as far as your bid is sufficient. This is the maximum exposure you can get.

Tip 2, dynamic ad: You can use the tag "{keyword}" in the title and description of your ads to replace dynamically the tag by the search term. E.g. if you set the title of your ad as "{keyword} ringtones" and someone search for "Dido", the title of your ad will be "Dido ringtones".

3. Advertisement data

This is what the surfers will see.

Title: Enter the title of your ad. Try to make it as short and catchy as possible!

Text: Description of your ad.

URL: Where the surfer will be sent. Make sure your URL start by "http://"

URL to display: As your real URL can look complicate, with long parameters, etc... you can enter here a more friendly URL that the surfers will see. The real URL will not be shown.

I hope this tutorial was helpful and shed some light on the campaigns creation. If you still have some problems, then you know where to reach us.

Affiliate marketing is a method of promoting web businesses in which an affiliate (the actual publisher, meaning you ) is rewarded for every visitor, subscriber, customer, or sale provided through his efforts.

For instance, independent booksellers have limited shelf space for books. But they can offer their customers an almost unlimited inventory of titles by affiliating with companies like Amazon or Powell's. The more orders, the bigger the affiliate percentage.

Visitors to your site are interested in lots of things that may or may not be related to your product. Getting to know what your customers want and are looking forward to see from your website is one step ahead.

The basics

What you will need in your journey towards a successful affiliate marketer career are only a strong will and the courage to go on. In this business you are only limited by your imagination.

When starting your internet business through affiliate marketing there are five steps to follow to ensure success:

1. You must first find a niche market that interests you if possible, and is of sufficient size to sustain growth.
2. Thoroughly research the niche for problems and find what fits you best.
3. Research the available affiliate products for something that will rectify the deficiency.
4. You must promote the product or service, try promoting it with the help of an advertising campaign and remember to always track your progress, see what performs best and what doesn't.
5. Initially there is no need for a website, but there are advantages of having one.

Creating a trust between you and your customers, as well as your partners, is of prime importance to your business at start. This trust will serve you well as your customers will consider you to be a specialist in the chosen niche and continue to buy from you in the future. Do not think for one minute that without it you will be able to succeed. Affiliate Marketing, as well as any other business model, relies entirely upon the trust that you build over a period of time.

The pillars of your business should be imagination and hard work. Building that trust I mentioned in the above paragraphs is going to take some time and of course patience. You are going to achieve your goals only through hard work.

Why affiliate marketing is the way to go

Affiliate marketing has gained more and more exposure ever since it was discovered, back in the days of email marketing. Along the time, marketers have noticed the potential of affiliate marketing, the incomes it could bring and how much time it requires to do so. Further more, affiliate marketing has been and will always be a solid way of earning an income. Being based on real life sales, affiliate marketing is going to live a lot more and will continue to expand.

ExoClick has been reviewed by John Chow Dot Com, the famous "make money online" blog. They wrote a sincere and honnest review of ExoClick services and that kind of feedback is really helpful to improve our platform.

Thanks John Chow Dot Com for the review!

And remember we will pay you to review ExoClick, because your opinion matters.

WARNING, shameless self-satisfaction follows :)

I'm often getting the question, "Tell me, why I should use ExoClick?"

Well, there is an ad running on TV at the moment showing (quite agressively) why you should not drink and drive and giving a bunch of reasons. Then they just let you pick one of them or choose your own.

So let me do the same and tell you why you should use ExoClick! And you are always free to have your own good reason ;)

- Because you will never have to wait for your payments. ExoClick pays weekly. No exceptions.
- Because you can get your money using 4 payment methods. Paypal, Epassporte, mail check or wire transfer.
- Because we have a FRIENDLY live support and we are also available on MSN, ICQ, email and by phone in 4 languages. (English, Spanish, Polish and French)
- Because we accept all sites including blogs, files hosting platforms, web proxies, gambling content, adult, forums, communities...
- Because we will monetize traffic from ALL countries, including Asian and Eastern European countries.
- Because we will make sure you make the most money possible out of your advertising spaces.
- Because we have plenty of advertising tools including ads boxes, categorized search portals, a pay per click search engine, XML feed, etc...
- Because you don't want to have all yours eggs in the same basket.
- Because ExoClick is cool.

Check ExoClick's Pay Per Click platform today.

That must be the best example of viral marketing ever! Everyone has seen a Will it blend? video. And as soon as you have watched it, you will send it over to all your friends and contacts, giving them free exposure! YouTube made it really easy for such videos to spread and in just a few hours, thousands of surfers will have seen it.

The videos are pretty amazing, the product itself looks really awesome and it's fun to watch.
Just perfect.

Check the video of their last campaign if you have no seen it yet, obviously, they chose to blend one of the most hyped product of this month, an iPhone!

"Everybody knows that the iPhone can make phone calls, play movies & music, surf the web, and a lot more. But, Will It Blend? That is the question."


Even more amazing, they are selling what remains of this poor iPhone on eBay and as I'm writing this post, the highest bid is already $1,100 - 2x the price of a brand new iPhone!

Short Introduction

A lot of webmasters have been earning money from being PPC publishers for a long time, only those that are making the most out of it have stumbled upon an even better solution, of also bringing traffic to their websites via the same method.

It might sound a bit wrong, but when you come to think of it it actually makes perfect sense. Those people that are directed to your website, are possible to click an ad or even buy something from your site, it all depends on how well you can manage your your ads . Getting a balance between a CTR ( Click through rate ) and a Conversion Rate ( we're just going to call it CR for now ) is the key for making money from PPC.

Let me explain that a little bit more, imagine you are already managing an advertiser account and paying $0.05 for every click ( that's 5 cents a click ), for those 5 cents you spend you might be able to earn somewhere from $0.25 to even $20 or even more.

Let's explain those numbers a bit more, for every 5 cents you'll be paying you could earn a round $0.50 , now think about what if it were to spend $100, you would be multiplying your earnings by 10.

These earnings depend on how clever the advertiser / publisher is and also this is where the CR interferes.

How to improve CR

Your conversion rate depends on many factors, and is especially influenced by your CTR. Now , in an ideal case we could think that weeding out the 'tire kickers' and 'curiosity clickers' ( remember that you are paying per CLICK ) would get us to a high conversion rate , thus big profits . This is by all means true, but unfortunately it is impossible to weed out the 'tire kickers' and 'curiosity clickers' , so you'll have to turn your eyesight towards another method, designing your ads for conversion and not clicks.

A common mistake I have seen on many ads is that they're not informative enough. I see all sorts of ads like, "Click here to get " or "Visit this to get " and so on . This is an example of a bad ad , with a relatively poor conversion rate . You should keep in mind that you are paying per CLICK; people that are misinformed from the beginning feel like they have been fooled and after clicking your ad they will just abandon your site .

An example of a good ad would be "Get your free here - just enter your email and receive it", "25 free - with every new sign-up", and so on .

Remember, never try to fool your possible buyers, try to give them as much information about they are getting into before you start paying for nothing.

Further thoughts

The way advertisers/publishers are earning money this way is not only by using the same ( or an alternative ) PPC program, sometimes you have to be a little more clever and use affiliate programs ( that's what most people do , but not everyone does it correctly ).

In a future article I will tackle the reason why Landing Pages are important and possibly The basics of Affiliate Marketing.

An overview of black hat SEO and white hat SEO, by Perry W.

White Hat and Black Hat SEO techniques are the angels and demons of the SEO world. White Hat SEO methods are the "legal" ways of doing search engine optimization while Black Hat SEO methods are the exact opposite. There exists so little information on how to totally differentiate the two. As a matter of fact some reliable SEO companies use Black Hat techniques accidentally, though most use them deliberately.

Search Engines and Black Hat SEO

Black Hat SEO techniques sometimes give the impression that the whole SEO business revolves around the concept of outwitting - even to the point of fooling - search engine relevance algorithms. In fact though, there are ways of implementing fair and justifiable SEO processes. Most of the time (though not all of the time) Black Hat SEO techniques are easier to implement than White Hat SEO methods. For this reason, search engines like Google continue to find ways to level the playing field and to discourage the use of Black Hat SEO techniques.

Google polices the search engine environment and bans Black Hatters whenever they are caught or reported by concerned internet users and stakeholders. But as much as search engines strive to eliminate the use of Black Hat SEO techniques, there will always be clever people who will get away unscathed with unethical SEO techniques.

It's for the Money or for the Easy Way

For what reasons do Black Hatters practice unethical SEO? The answer is fairly simple. It's the big bucks in exchange for negligible effort. SEO companies who stick to White Hat methods work hard to succeed. On the other hand, Black Hatters exert a fraction of the effort and earn as much or more money than the White Hatters.

Moreover, sometimes it is disheartening and frustrating to find Black Hat SEO sites that rank above yours on search engine results pages after all the effort that you have exerted using White Hat techniques. Black Hat SEO sites rank higher because they trick the system. They look for the weaknesses in search engine algorithms and target them. On the other hand, White Hatters playing under the assumption that the internet is a level playing field usually end up being at the losing end of the search engine results.

Black Hatters as Algorithm Testers

Black Hatters are sometimes too clever for their own good. Once Google or any search engine for that matter discovers a Black Hat SEO anomaly, it will implement counter measures to fight it. In particular, Google's algorithm will be tweaked to make it more foolproof.

However, as soon as the new algorithm takes effect, Black Hatters then find other ways to trick the program. If this process continues, the good guys will basically win in the end.

There will always come a time when after encountering all the tricks behind Black Hat SEO, search engines will be able to provide the absolute counter measure. In other words Black Hatters are just providing the good guys an edge in the business. Black Hat techniques serve as the testing ground for search engines to improve their system. In the long run, White Hatters will gain all the benefits in the SEO market.

ReviewMe is a new advertising service, developped by the people from Text Link Ads.

The concept is very simple. Advertisers pay for bloggers to review their product, site or service and get some exposure. By default, the price of the review is set by ReviewMe based on 3 criterias. The Alexa rank, Technorati rank and estimated RSS readers. However, each blogger is able to set the pricing he wants.

The admin panel of ReviewMe is clear and simple, easy to use and you can get started in minutes.

The main disadvantage I see is that they take a 50% commission on each review, same as they do on TLA. This seems pretty high and will probably motivate advertisers to contact directly the blogger instead of going through ReviewMe.

I love the concept though and I'm sure it will be a great success. Congrats to them!

After the King of the Bill, Andrew launched another advertising model, "King of the Clock".

The concept is pretty simple, advertisers can become "King of the Clock" by paying $10 and this place their site on the top of the list. Once their ad is live, if somebody bumps it from the "throne," they can simply "rebuy" the spot for an additional $10, creating a kind of race between advertisers to remain on the top.

I found it pretty interesting though I'm not sure what type of traffic this would actually bring to the advertisers.

I just crowned ExoClick, let's see how long it stays there and if it brings any traffic at all.