Adult webmasters are constantly looking for new opportunities to monetize their traffic. 99,99% of adult publishers are using affiliation programs, using a revenue share model.

Competition among these programs is very tough and the adult industry is having some of the most advanced affiliation programs. When new technologies are emerging, the adult industry is very often well in advance compared to other markets. Video streaming, high load servers, innovative billing solutions... the adult business is always innovating.

PPC in the Adult Business

When it comes to PPC, the adult industry is kept behind. A few years ago, when PPC was getting more and more popular, these adult affiliation programs launched a PPC option to their revenue share model.
Today, almost all of them removed that PPC option. They were not able to control fraud and filter the traffic on the countries and niches really converting on their products. They gave up that model and stick with the revenue share system.

On the other side, with their corporate/mainstream image, the big PPC search engines of today do not accept adult ads nor adult publishers in their network.

ExoClick penetrated that market, and with its large experience on the adult traffic, provided lucrative programs for adult advertisers and publishers. ExoClick counts with a set of carefully selected publishers and a wide network of advertisers in the adult market.

What are the advantages of the PPC for adult webmasters?

- There is a term well known in the adult industry: shaving! This word is used when affiliates see some sales "disappear" from their account. Or simply not granted in their statistics. Some affilation programs might be dishonest and remove sales to make some easy bucks or it can simply be a technical problem. With the pay per click model, no more shaving is possible. Each click is paid, no matter how many sales are done.

- Because each click is stored and paid, results are immediate and conversions ratios can be calculated very fast. Using affiliate programs, the sales can sometime be very long to come and earnings projections are difficult to make in these conditions.

- No more need to find alternative affiliate programs for certain countries or niches, the PPC engine is doing it by itself!

- No more need to rotate promotional pages or change the marketing to try to make more sales. Using PPC, this is managed by the advertisers directly!

What are the advantages for the advertisers?

Or: What are the advantages for Affiliation programs owners?

- Targeted traffic. Why get traffic that will not convert on their product? PPC allow to target by country, language, niche or keywords.

- Full control over the incoming traffic and the costs. The advertiser decides of the traffic evolution and volume.

- Affiliation programs could spare the efforts of managing affiliates and use those ressources to improve the products and conversions.

To learn more about ExoClick products and check adult pay per click, visit ExoClick web site.

I just discovered this article on Yahoo: Pay-Per-Click Tips for Attracting Traffic.
It's a pretty complete article with tips and strategies on how to manage your advertising campaigns and increase your profit.

If you are an advertiser and you are buying traffic, you really have to read this.

Here are a few tips and simple rules you should follow to improve easily your rankings in the different search engines. Nothing new and nothing very complex but good tips that works.
So, I hope you enjoy reading this little "SEO Beginner Guide" and I hope it helps you grow your traffic.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It's a set of techniques and strategies to optimize websites for the search engines and get beter rankings on the search results of those engines.

There are a few more abreviations and terms you should now if you start learning SEO, among others:

SERPs: Search Engine Results Pages.
Anchor text: Text used as a link.
Backlink: Any link pointing to your web site. Also called Inbound link.
One-way link: When a site or page has a link to your site, and your doesn't have any link back to it.
Keywords density: Relation of a keyword to the other words in a web page element. For example, the web page title <title>This is just an example for a web page title</title> has a keyword density of 20% because 7 out of 35 characters in this title make the word "example".
Outbound link: Any link on your page pointing to another site.

So, let's start working on it right away!

Tip 1 - Anchor text

When you create a link to another page or another site of yours, don't just use "click here" or "go" as the anchor text. Basically, don't do this:

To join our online HTML training, <a href="001.html">click here</a>.

Instead, use the keywords related to that page:

Join now our <a href="online-html-training.html">online HTML training</a>.

Try also to use these keywords in the name of the HTML file.
Search engines algorithms are taking into consideration the text used for the link itself. (anchor text)
"click here" is meaningless. But "online HTML training" correspond exactly to your subject, and this specific page, even independantly of its content, will be considered as an interresting page for "online HTML training" by the search engines.

Tip 2 - Backlinks

Spend time to contact other webmasters who have a site about the same subject as yours and exchange text links.
Again, use the keywords that you target in the anchor text of those links. Don't always use the same keywords but sometimes, use synonims and variations.
Only consider a link exchange with sites treating the same subject. Try to get at least 40 backlinks on 40 different websites.

Tip 3 - Pages title

Give a different title to each page, use keywords related to the page.

Tip 4 - Content

Search engines (through their spiders) are indexing text content from your pages. So the first thing you have to do, is make sure you have plenty of text, related to the subject of your web site. The context of the words is also very important, so don't just list hundreds of keywords. Write correct sentences, repeating several times the words you want to focus on. Try to use all the synonyms you know. Eventually, don't correct your typos or mistakes, people will do the same typos when they do a research!

Plus:
Always set the value of the alt="" tag of your images.

<img src="html-training.jpg" alt="HTML Training" />

Set the description and keywords metas. If possible, write different metas for each page.

<meta name="description" content="..." />
<meta name="keywords" content="..." />

Tip 5 - Content Actualization

You have nice content? Plenty of backlinks and optimized pages? Great, but don't start sleeping on it.
Update your content as often as possible. Add pages, articles, news... Grow your site.

Tip 6 - Web Hosting

Make sure your site loads fast and your hosting is good. A slow web site is no good.

Tip 7 - Clean HTML code

Try to have your HTML code as clean as possible. And try to reduce it a maximum. You should have a lot of text content and a bit of HTML code, not the contrary.

Tip 8 - Directories

Do not forget to post your web site to all the Internet directories related to your subject. These links are better than links exchanges as usually, directories do not require a link back to their site. These one-way links have a very good value for search engines.
Also submit it to DMOZ directory. It will probably take a few months to get your sited indexed, but the backlinks you will get there are worth gold.

Tip 9 - HTML tags H1, H2, B, U...

Use the headers tags for your titles and subtitles, search engine will give more importance to those texts.

<h1>HTML Training</h1>

The look of these tags is not so nice but you can use CSS to redefine it.

h1 { color: #000000; font-family: Verdana; font-size: 14px }

Tip 10 - Domain name

The keywords used in the domain name have great importance for some search engines, such as Google. If possible, register a domain name with your target keywords.

A domain name like http://www.buy-flowers.com has good chances to get ranked well on "buy flowers" with a bit of SEO and appropriate content.

You can also try subdomains for your most important sections. Subdomains will usually get indexed much faster than the sub-pages and directories.
Taking our example, you could create http://roses.buy-flowers.com, http://tulips.buy-flowers.com, ... generating a kind of "mini-site" for each.

Tip 11 - Inbound/Outbound links

Make sure you have more inbound links than outbound links on your pages. If you have too much outbound links, search engines will devaluate the importance of your page, considering it's just making a gateway to other sites, without having a good value for the surfer.

Tip 12 - Experiment!

Try new things. Play with the keywords density, your site structure, HTML tags and elements.
Some techniques work good with Google, not for Yahoo or MSN and vice-versa. And moreover, the search engines algorithms are changing all the time! Some old strategy might not work anymore but suddenly work great for one of them.

Well, that's it for today! I think that covers most of the SEO Basics you need to know to start optimize your site.

Ok, so that was just the easiest and funniest fraud detected! Still getting surprised on the Net...
Have a look at this chat transcript...

Benja: Hello
song: hello
Benja: How may I help you?
song: how can I make money?
Benja: Are you a publisher or an advertiser?
song: publisher
Benja: Can you tell me about your traffic?
song: when I can get my money?
Benja: End of each month
Benja: Sent through Paypal or Epassporte
song: paypal
Benja: ok, good
Benja: You did a signup some minutes ago right?
song: no Minimum?
Benja: $10
song: ok
Benja: Can you tell me about your sites/traffic?
song: no website
Benja: But you have traffic?
song: i can let my friend to click?
Benja: no you can't
Benja: That's fraud
song: i know
Benja: ...