Last tutorial for ExoClick advertisers was about 4 months ago and since then, we added a lot of new features. So I think it was time to update the original tutorial to include the different improvements and share them with you.

One of these improvements is the SSL certificate for the admin panel but there are much more and I'll detail them in this tutorial.

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. Click "New Campaign" in the left menu of the admin panel.



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

1. The campaign information.

Campaign Name: 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. This is a new feature and give you the possibility to restrict your ad only to the "Premium Network". By selecting this option, your ad will be displayed only on the sites we have selected as being high quality. So this would get you les traffic, but from better quality sites. However, the minimum CPC for this network is $0.05

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

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.

Dynamic parameters: There are 3 tags that you can use when creating your campaign.

The first tag is {keyword}, which you can use in the title, description and URL of your ad to replace dynamically the tag by the search term. E.g. if you set the title of your ad as "The best {keyword} ringtones" and someone search for "Dido", the title of your ad will be "The best Dido ringtones".

You have 2 others tags, {src_hostname} and {campaign_id} that you can use in your ad URL to better track the traffic.

For example, if your campaign ID is 2007 and the click comes from this page: http://www.loudsearch.com/index.php?cat=1
If you have set your ad URL to be:
http://www.yoursite.com/?track=exotraffic&tag1={src_hostname}&tag2={campaign_id}
Then the user will be sent to:
http://www.yoursite.com/?track=exotraffic&tag1=loudsearch.com&tag2=2007

3. Advertisement data

This is what the surfers will see.

For a text ad:

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. Image: We have a special ad format, which combine your text ad together with a 100x100 image. This gives a better look to the ads and usually improve the CTR. Uploading your own image for the campaign is always a good idea so you have an image related to your text.

For an image banner ad:

Title: Title of the image.
Upload Image: Select the image you want to upload from your computer. Currently, we accept GIF and JPEG in the following formats: 468x60, 728x90, 260x340, 120x600, 250x250 and 300x250 pixels.
URL: Where the surfer will be sent. Make sure your URL start by "http://"

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.

Our client Administration Panel is now more secure, thanks to a SSL certificate from Network Solutions.

All communications between you and our servers will go through a secure HTTPS connexion.

One year has passed since the first post on ExoClick's Pay Per Click Blog.

We've gone a long way since then and ExoClick has evolved considerably, I'm very happy to write this article after one year and see all the work that has been done.

I'm also happy to see all the possibilities we have ahead of us and I can't wait to see the next features that we will release.

I know you love numbers, so for this "one year post", I'll reveal a few numbers to you.

• ExoClick has now 7,716 clients signed up in its platform, mixing advertisers and publishers but the large majority being publishers.
• We generate about 7,000,000 impressions and 40,000 clicks each day.
• The domain exoclick.com is now ranked 8,916 on Alexa.
• I'm 26 years old.
• ExoClick platform runs on 6 powerful servers.
• Searching for "exoclick" in Google send back 84,200 results.

Ok, I think that's enough numbers for today, you'll have to wait another year for more :)

Thank you to all the people trusting us, and stay tuned because we are going to keep improving ExoClick and make it a powerful platform for all of you.

India is a vibrant country with more than 1.1 billion people. It comes second to China in terms of population. With more than 150 million Indians speaking English, India is a excellent prospect for the Internet Marketers and all those business that want to open up to a new vibrant market. India's middle class is young and they are well aware of US brands. The American effect is increasing in India with people now becoming more and more brand conscious and doing more things online from buying items to paying bills and even getting mobile contents.

India is growing very fast and has turned its economy from no where to world's second fastest growing economy in just a decade. Marketers in US think that India is fast developing economy but the truth is that it has developed in a quiet small scale and there are lot more areas still to be touched by development of technology and internet.

Demographics & Internet Usage

India's gross national income per capita is only US$630 for 2004, Though there are 150 million English speaking Indians but this is just 14% of total population, so this leaves a huge room for more development. Hindi is the official language of India, along with other 22 regional language. About 500 million Indian are under age of 21 and 70% of them live in the India's 5,00,000 villages and remaining in 200 towns and cities. The light of development has only touched the major towns and cities and still huge numbers of villages still wait to receive first electricity connection in their village.

India is a very traditional and conservative country. Family values and norms are highly respected and children live with their parents even after the marriage. The business of marriage is a big business in India. Websites like, Shaddi.com, Bharatmatrimonial.com are few sites who find marriage partner for those people who are looking for spouse online.

By the start of 2006, India had only 1 million broadband subscribers which is less that 0.1% of total population. Till today only 4.5% of the total population is online 55% of them are from households and remaining 45% accounts for business. Typically, 60% of Indians who use internet routinely use the 20000+ cyber cafes scattered all over India. It is rare to find internet connection in most Indian households, though this phenomenon is rapidly changing.

According to the survey done by Paul Budde Communications, an average Indian spends only 3 hours per month on internet. On an average 89% of those who use internet are using it for emailing, 86% regularly read blogs, 57% send e-cards through internet and 53% look for jobs online. Besides this Indian consumer's online activity also includes music, video and software downloads, playing online games and instant messaging.

Though, internet has taken a backseat in Indian economy but mobile technology has been embraced hugely by Indian consumers. By the end of 2005 India had 77 million mobile subscribers which is growing at the rate of 60% per year.

Challenges for Westerners Working in India

Westerns find very tough to start their business in India. Though its tough but there are tricks that can make business run smoothly in this close society. Business has too embrace the culture and tradition of Indian society to flourish in this market.

Indians like to feel the product before buying

Indian people want to touch and feel the product before they buy it. That is why very few people tend to go online for shopping. They feel it more secure to buy products from their store rather than buying it online.

Delivery issues

Most people feel insecure while buying online. They fear of lack of timely delivery and damage of product while delivery. This creates problem for online shopping site to raise security among their users.

Online fraud hinders ecommerce

Indian consumers have credit cards, debit cards and they use it frequently but they avoid using it online. They fear of online fraud and since the cyber law is not so good in India so majority of people don't feel safe to use their cards online. There are certain startups in India like Wallet365 that are trying hard to change it through high secure system but they still find it hard to implement in masses.

Price factor

Indian consumers have a habit to bargain while shopping. Even if the sellers quote the lowest rate, they will still try to reduce it through bargain. Since people cannot bargain online so most people avoid shopping online for such reasons.

Three India-Specific Online Marketing Tips...

1. Go viral

Viral marketing is one of the strong options to promote your product in Indian market. Spread your words among people and they will further spread it within their network. Rather then using banner ads, its better to send SMS messages directly to consumer's cell phone and emails into their inbox.

2. Learn Hinglish and get local approval on copy and creative

Indians have their own style of speaking English. It's a blend of English and Hindi which brings up a new language Hinglish. Most popular brand in India use this language as it easily relates to the majority of English speaking Indians. Hinglish is more and more becoming popular because it is being spoken by most urban youth and has a direct effect on their mind set when translated into ad jingle.

3. Static banners and telemarketing

The Indian version of Yahoo!, MSN, Google and portals like Rediff.com, Indiatimes, com, zapak.com are high traffic Indian sites. These sites are lot similar to sites in US with same type of content, design and news feeds. Moreover the Indian and US version of Yahoo and MSN have normally same advertisement running since the advertisers are same. The click through rate on banners is between 0.5% to 2% on these sites. People easily enter their contact information on the landing page but fear not to enter any financial information.Once the information is in the database, now its telemarketers job to call the consumers to promote their product.

One more thing marketers should know that India is a huge country with 28 states and more than 100 local languages. Its is not necessary to translate your ad campaign in all these language but be sure that campaign for one region doesn't hurts the sentiment or values of other. Ultimately, India was a former British colony so people still use British spellings. "Color" is spelled as "Colour" in India.

ExoClick has just released a beta version of its market place.
This allow advertisers to browse the different sites of the Network in a friendly way and get detailed information about each site.

Advertisers have total control as the campaigns targeting is very deep. Ads can be displayed on the FULL network, or be restricted by country, category, or to specific sites.
This open a new way for publishers and advertisers to create relevant advertising and generate the highest revenue for both.

Please, join us on ExoClick Forums to give your feedback on this new feature! Your thoughts are always much appreciated.

Just to make sure you didn't miss any important news this week, here is a super-quick summary!

Google Trends get hourly updates

Finally, Google Trends are updated every hour. Before, it was updating on monthly basics. From now we can get pretty new data and spot fresh trends in affiliate/SEO market.

DMOZ Open Direcotry Lounched a Blog

DMOZ Open Directory (owned by Netscape) has lounched thier blog. They will share there information about news and changes on DMOZ, describe some of their categories etc. They also want to recruit new editors in this way and get feedback from community. http://blog.dmoz.org/

Google Founders In Top 5 Richest People in USA

Forbes have published the list of 400 richeast people in United States for 2007. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Googe, are in top 5. Each of them owns $18.5 billion USD.

Rumor: Google going to buy Sirius Radio

There is a rumor around the net today (TechCrunch, Motley Fool) that Google is going to buy US Satellite Radio provider - Sirius. They propably want a radio station where they can sell their voice ads. What is more important (in my opinion) is that that Sirius owns three satelaties and if Google would buy them they actually would own those satelites!

Google 10th Birthsday

It's Google 10th birthsday and 9th birthsday of Google Corp. Google has some birthay logo today on thier main page.

Google Book Search get new design

Google Book Search get fresh look and this time I like it!

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool is BACK!

One of my favorite keyword research tools is alive again. Overture Keyword Selector Tool is back on-line and working! Yahoo finally made a good move (Overture is aquired by Yahoo).

Flickr Photos inside Yahoo Image Search

Lately Yahoo has annoucned that from now photos from Flicker will be included to Yahoo Image Search. Yahoo Image Search algorithm will be check such things like title, tags and comments on Flickr. Photos signed as private will not show up on YIS.

Live.com Gets New Design and New Algorithm Is Coming Up

Few days ago main page of Microsoft search engine was redesigned and now we know that it's just a begining of the changes. There is coming a total change of Live algorithm. Search results will be presented in a completly new way, here are few screenshoots and more background on changes: http://www.liveside.net/blogs/main/archive/2007/09/20/live-search-2-0-begins-rollout.aspx

MSN Video Search - new fres look and new features

MSN Video Search has got new look and new features. It supports Split screen, drag and drop features, it allows to watch video and still do searching. Pretty nice I must admit.

Facebook worth 10 billion US$?

Microsoft is willing to buy 5% of Facebook stocks for up to 500 million US$ which gives unbelivable high price of 10.000.000.000$ for whole Facebook!

Baidu stocks are HOT

I thought that Google stocks are really hot but it seems like there is yet another search engine with really hot stocks. It's Baidu.com, Google main competitor on Chinise market.