ExoClick is expanding and looking for new talents to join the team.

If you have proven experience in online advertising and looking to join a young and dynamic company, have a look at our jobs section and send your CV. All requests will be answered.

Current opportunities

• Account Manager for Advertisers
• Chief Revenue Officer
• Sales Manager USA

Hey there, I'm sorry I have left the blog for so long without posting any new article. The new developments on ExoClick's platform are taking 200% of my time.

I just wanted to mention I will be in San Francisco from April 14th 2008 to April 20th 2008, so if you are going to Ad-Tech or if you are around San Francisco during that time, get in touch with me, I'll be happy to meet new people over there.

You can contact me directly by email: benja [at] exoclick.com
It's my first time there and I can't wait to see the show and the city!

If you are buying traffic, and never heard of "pixel tags", you should really keep reading...

What are pixel tags?

Before to explain exactly what is a "pixel tag" in the advertising world, let me explain why it has been created. The goal of any advertiser is to find traffic that is working good for his site or product. Usually, it means generate sales. It could also be free signups, grabbing emails, download a software, etc...

Whatever your goal is, the idea is always the same. Convert traffic, and generate the best ROI possible.

When creating campaigns, it is sometimes difficult to analyze what countries, keywords, traffic sources.... work or don't work. The main reason is that it can be difficult to connect the campaigns or traffic sources, with the actual actions. (or sales)

This is where the pixel tag enter in the game. Advertising companies, such as Google AdWords are providing a small HTML code, that you have to place on your site. This HTML code will actually display nothing. Hence the name "pixel tag", as these codes were originally showing an invisible 1x1px transparent image. Nowadays, it's not even showing that.

Thanks to this invisible tag, the ad network will be able to connect an action to a specific user, which means it will be able to calculate the conversions per campaign, country, site, traffic source, date, keyword... virtually anything. The reports that you will get are extremely useful since they will tell you what is good and bad for your product.

The optimization part

Once you have enough traffic history, you just have to check what is not converting for you, and exclude it from your campaigns. On the opposite, you might want to raise your bids on what does convert for you.

This is actually very simple to setup and will help you considerably to create successful campaigns.

ExoClick pixel tag

Obviously, I wouldn't talk about the benefits of pixel tags if ExoClick was not offering this feature. It is available to everybody from the admin panel and we called it "Goals". It allows you to create one pixel tag (as in one unique HTML code) per goal, or action.

Goals could be for example:
- Step 1, free signup.
- Step 2, payment page.
- Step 3, post-payment page.

Once you placed those tags on your pages, you will get detailed reports from ExoClick Admin Panel. With conversions per campaign, country, date and traffic source.

What about affiliation programs?

If you don't own the product that you promote, for example if you are an affiliate. You obviously can't modify the pages to add these tags.

However, this process is becoming really standard, and major affiliation programs allow their affiliates to configure pixel tags. Contact your affiliate manager and ask him about it.

How does it work technically?

Very simply. When a surfer is clicking on an ad, a cookie is placed on his computer. Then if he browses the site and load a page which has a pixel tag, the cookie will be detected and user data can be tracked. Which campaign, country, etc... This action is saved and statistics can be generated!

Thanks to the cookies, it's even possible to detect an action which occur several days (or weeks) after the actual click on the ad.

For example, a user clicking the ad, visiting the site, but coming back only 2 weeks later to buy a flight ticket.

In short...

If you are buying traffic, you can't ignore this feature. It is a wonderful tool to be succesful with your ad purchases and it's free!

Sebastian Gnieciecki (Support Manager), Geoffrey Bonnechère (Sales Director) and myself will be present at Ad-Tech Paris the 7th and 8th of April 2008.



Send me an email at benja [AT] exoclick.com to meet us there! We'd love to have a chat with you. We can also have beers...

Two days ago, we have released the new web design of www.exoclick.com as well as our brand new logo.



We also have updated the client admin panel, improving the navigation and user experience. I really hope you like those changes, which are only the first steps to the improvements we plan to do in 2008 for ExoClick!

As usual, don't hesitate to give us your feedback.

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.

Blogs and Blogging are growing as a new fashion on internet. There has become a trend of blogging and it seems everyone is starting his or her own blog. Well, most do it for fun and some do it to showcase their talent while many wish to make money out of it. Blogs are an easy way to open your identity on internet. You don't have to be too web savvy to get a blog and run it. All you need is a simple signup on any free blog provider like wordpress.com or Blogger.com and you are of to start a blog.

Well, running a blog is something and making money out of it is something else. You need to have some extensive knowledge before you can make some decent money from your blogs. You will need a basic training on some technical parts like to maintain and update blogs code, customizing the data and on top of it hosting it one your own server. While you can choose free blog providers like bloggger.com to host your blog but its lot better to host it on your own server which will give you more flexibility to customize the blog.

Running a blog is easy but making money out of it is a bit hard. You have to be consistent with your blog to get some decent traffic which in turn will convert into clicks. There are many ways of monetization that you can implement on your blog and test which one works best for your blog. Following are few tips you should always try when you plan to make money out of blog.

Contextual and In-page Ads

This is the most common way to make money from blogs. You can use contextual ads from Exoclick.com to monetize your blog. If you are a famous blog and have a good amount of readership then your traffic will automatically turn into clicks which will bring in more money. But just inserting ads into blog does not complete the process. You have to use the ads according to your site and in the best way so it increases the Click through Rate. Your users have to click your ads in order for you to make any money. SO, it's very important that you mix-up your ads with the content to have more clicks. You can always have the professional help of ExoClick to monetize your blog through contextual advertisement.

Affiliate and referral links

Affiliate links have been one of the most interesting make monet online tool. There are people making 6 figure income only through affiliates and referrals. You can too use affiliate and referrals links of other products that you like and can promote it through your site. If your visitors like your product and buys it then you are going to have a good income through the commission. It is very easy to add affiliate links on your blog but it is hard to find people buying your product. Your product has to be very good which strikes the user and he buys it. So, when you decide on the product, think carefully on what you choose and whether it suits your blog theme or not.

Soliciting though blogs

In this process you won't be selling anything to your viewers, but rather will depend on their kindness and will seek their help. You can ask donations and contributions either in form of money or goods for a charity or things like that. If your viewers like what you write and what you are offering them then they are certainly going to help you. Though this does not seem a ethical way to make money but there are people who do it.

Blogging to market

Blogs make it easy to market your product or service. If you have a product or skill to do something like designing or programming then you can promote your service through your blog. Blogs are a great way to find new potential clients and if you can have decent promotional campaign then it wont be too late that you will have tons of projects flowing to your way.

Blogs have turned into a powerful tool for marketing world and it has got great potential to change the way companies do their business. Blogs have brought customers closer to the companies and have made direct conversation easier. So, never underestimate this power and start blogging now.

Well, what is your first option when you have to store a website's URL? You are certainly going to bookmark it in your browser and check them again whenever you want but what if you have a list of bookmarks stored in your home pc and you are away somewhere and suddenly you need to visit a site that you had bookmarked and forgot it's URL. Now you are stuck. You either have to get back to your home pc or do extensive search on Google to hopeful find the site.

But there's one more option and that's called social bookmarking. After the rise of Web 2.0 social bookmarking developed very quickly. Tons of websites flashed all around webs inviting users to add their favorite website's list into their database. Normally, Social bookmarking sites work on same principle of traditional bookmarking. You add a website and tag it with a keyword and it appears on your profile page. So, next time whenever you need to see your favorite website just open your profile page from your social bookmarking site and all of your links will be placed in front of you.

Social Bookmarking for online promotion.

Social bookmarking sites provide a good platform for online promotion. They give a place where you can add your links and show it up to millions of users of the sites. Moreover sites like del.icio.us, Stumbleupon and Digg.com have grown in such a tremendous speed on providing quality traffic that sometimes the amount of traffic from a social bookmarking website exceeds the amount of traffic coming from Google or Yahoo!. This has changed the way web marketers used to promote their website. Sites like Digg and Stumbleupon have a huge army of diggers and stumblers who are always proactively waiting to add the content into the sites and visit the sites that come up in results. There have been lots of stories where traffic coming from Digg or stumble have created Bandwidth Outage to many websites, so you can understand how powerful these sites have become and what potential they have to promote a site.

Expertise Social bookmarking

In recent days content syndication and sharing are growing like never before and that's all because of social bookmarking sites. According to a survey conducted by Pew Internet and American Life project almost 28% of internet user are using social bookmarking sites to tag or categorize there contents like photos, news and blog posts.

For companies that are big and have a good IT consultants will not have problem implementing social bookmarking into their system but how small and medium sized business are going to do it ? Well, its lot easier and cheaper to implement social bookmarking tools into your site. The increase in Web 2.0 sites have brought in many free tools that you can use to easily integrate the power of social media into your sites. These tools help your users to syndicate and share the content with social bookmarking sites helping you reach the front page of these social bookmakring sites. Most Web 2.0 sites and platform like blog hosting softwares come built in with these tools but it is responsibility to owners of traditional sites to implement these tools into their sites. Only blogposts are not the thing to be bookmarked. You should also add Press Releases, articles, updates and any content you publish into these social bookmarking sites.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool and if used properly can give more return than even paid campaigns fail to provide. So, next time whenever you write a blogpost don't forget to digg it.

Everyone who works on Internet as a marketer knows very well that viral marketing is a strong tool to increase online sales of a product or any service. It's common for newbie marketers to jump on to this as they hear many good theories behind it but most people don't know what actually is Viral Marketing and how does it works.

Viral Marketing is in a long way attached to the term networks or connecting with people. The more people you have in your address book and more number of emails you can send will help a lot in your viral marketing campaign. It is all about spreading a word about your product or any service. Viral marketing completely runs on marketer's ability to spread the word into his network. You spread the word about your product among your contacts and in turn hope that they will pass that info into their contacts. But only hope cannot help to make a campaign successful. You need to have solid plans so that your customers and contacts become your sales agent and carry further the message about your product or service.

Web 2.0 as a essential carrier of Viral Marketing

Every internet marketer wishes for free traffic to his site and viral marketing does help in it. More over networking with people and increasing your numbers of contacts have grown significantly since the advent of Web 2.0. Viral Marketing is all about networking and Web 2.0 is a grand platform of networking and socializing with huge numbers of people. The social networking sites are an easy way where you can spread a word about your product and if its gets going then the word spread like wild fire.

It is very important to have a good marketing strategy before you start your campaign. You should be able to give your contacts or customers a solid tool that make them an agent of your services unknowingly. You are not going to force your contacts to promote your products but rather create condition where the message is delivered automatically through the process and even the contact gets a benefit from the whole thing. It is every marketers dream that someone else promotes their business time and again and that too for free. Well, this is possible in the field of marketing but the strategy needs to work as it is propounded.

Free Service = Free advertisment

The Best example of any viral marketing campaign can be the free email services. Companies like Hotmail and Yahoo give free email services to almost 700 million customers sending above 100 million emails each day. The basic principal behind these free mail services is the advertisement they show in the email sent and around the user's email inbox. The user is getting the quality services for free and companies make a healthy income by the advertisement. In this process users never know that they become a carrier of company's promotional campaign.

Well, Viral Marketing is a tool every marketer has to keep it in his arsenal. It can bring in free traffic in instant time while contacts or users will get quality services or a powerful tool for their own product.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I know that many of you had a hard work this week which but it is going to be over soon. Let's relax for a minute or two, I know you need it.

Check out this game - Desktop Tower Defense. It's a simple but extremely addictive flash game. I know many people (including me) lost a lot of time playing it so be careful! ;)



Just a few tips before you start playing:

1. Gain extra points by speeding up the bugs queue by clicking "Send next level" button.
2. The key for winning is to build an effective maze. You can check top players mazes in "Top 100 Scores".
3. Build a maze from Pellet Tower level 1, it's cheapest.
4. Squirt Towers are perfect wepon when you build it to maximum level. Their damage is pretty strong and their fire speed is fast.

Have fun! ;)

SEODigger is a simple and easy to use tool, which gives very valuable results. Enter a domain name and it will give you all the positions in Google SERPs, based on a database of about 50 billions of search terms.



For example, the site webmasterworld.com appears by 862 keyphrases in the first 20 Google search results.

Registration is free, enjoy!

DoubleClick is a leading company in the Online Marketing industry and helps agencies, publishers and advertisers to run successful advertising campaigns. They optimize their clients campaigns, mainly by gathering information on surfers, analyzing behavior patterns and providing detailed stats reports.

As Google keeps eating companies every month, it looks like they see DoubleClick as a perfect buy. It seems the deal both companies are working on is close to 3.1 billion dollars! This would be the biggest purchase by Google and there are more and more people concerned about the dominant position that Google is taking. The FTC already started looking into this deal.

Miam miam miam.

When I talk to our publishers I'm often asked to what keywords choose to make more revenue with ExoClick. You may be suprised but the answer is none. Yes, you readed it right. You can choose a category to advertise and then leave the kewyord field blank. Our system will screen on your pages top paying ADs for this category.

So, you can ask what is purpose of placing there a keyword field. Well, there is. Let's say that you run a website about Apple's iPhone, the actual closest related category will be mobile phones. It's not targeted enought. You will get more targeted ADs when you will put an "iphone" keyword in keyword field. This should rise your CTR (Click Thru Ratio) and on the end - your revenue.

I hope that the idea of targetting ADs and choosing categories and keywords is more understable for you now. Remember that if you need asistance with placing ExoClick ADs on your websites you can always contact our support. We will do our best to help you.

We just released a premium XML feed with high bids for publishers having pure search engine traffic. Check our Premium Network Application for details on how to apply for this feed. Note that we accept ALL countries for this feed, as it is an international feed. However, english-speaking countries will have much higher bids than the others.

A few popular/random search terms with their current bid

This would be with USA as country.

gambling - $2.29
online casino - $2.05
poker - $0.51

viagra - $2.10
xanax - $1.09
online pharmacy - $0.41
cheap tramadol - $1.46

escorts - $0.15
dating - $0.12
sex cams - $0.07

credit cards - $0.60
home loan - $0.88
make money - $0.48
make money online - $0.63

flight tickets - $0.10
car rental - $0.18
book hotel - $0.05

mobile phones - $0.09

Check the XML Feed Documentation for help on how to integrate this feed.

ExoClick.com released a new pay per click search engine, with a clean and friendly design for users. It's a mainstream search engine with categories such as blogging, gambling, rentals, travel, computers, shopping, video games, etc...

Publishers can send traffic to http://www.loudsearch.com/?login=YOUR_LOGIN and get paid for each click on the search results.

It's also possible to send traffic directly to search results pages: http://www.loudsearch.com/?login=YOUR_LOGIN&search=travel

This is the perfect tool to monetize your search engine traffic or to add a search box to your blog or site. Example:

Search the Web:

HTML code for this search box:
<form action="http://www.loudsearch.com"> Search the Web: <input type="text" name="search"> <input type="hidden" name="login" value="YOUR_LOGIN"> <input type="submit" value="Search"> </form>

ExoClick.com is proud to welcome a new member on board! Sebastian is from Poland and will take care of our SEO publishers.
Sebastian has been doing SEO for a while, approaching all the aspects of the optimization and monetization of web sites. He will promote our services to the different SEO communities but he will also be able to understand your needs as a SEO webmaster and help you monetize your search engine traffic at 200%.

This also means we add another language to our "customer support". We had English, French and Spanish and now also have Polish. So feel free to contact us in any of these 4 languages.

You can contact Sebastian directly at sebastian [AT] exoclick.com

Mamy nowego gracza w druzynie!

Witamy nowego czlonka w rodzinie ExoClick.com! Sebastian jest z Polski i zajmie sie opieka naszymi wydawcami SEO.

Dotychczas Sebastian zajmowal sie szeroko pojetym pozycjonowaniem, mial stycznosc ze wszystkimi aspektami zwiazanymi z optymalizacja stron jak i ich spieniezaniem. Bedzie promowal nasze uslugi w srodowiskach zwiazanych z SEO a takze zrozumie Twoje potrzeby jako pozycjonera i doradzi Ci jak jeszcze lepiej wykorzystac Twoj traffic.

To wydarzenie oznacza jednoczesnie, ze nasze biuro obslugi bedzie moglo kontaktowac sie z Wami w jeszcze jednym jezyku. Poslugiwalismy sie angielskim, francuskim oraz hiszpanskim a teraz bedziemy takze polskim. Zapraszamy wiec do kontaktowania sie z nami w kazdym z tych czterech jezykow.

Mozesz skontaktowac sie z Sebastianem piszac na e-mail sebastian [at] exoclick.com

We added a new feature at ExoClick.com to allow advertisers to buy untargeted clicks. This means your ad would appear when nobody is bidding for a specific country or keyword.
You can bid as low as $0.01 for that type of traffic.
This is a unique opportunity to get quality visitors to your site for a very low price.

Dynamic search term in the ads

We also added the possibility to use the search term in the ad title and text by using a small tag.

So if you create an ad named "{keyword} Ringtones" with a text as "All the best {keyword} ringtones. Get them now!"
And someone is searching for "Dido". Your ad would look like:

Dido Ringtones
All the best Dido ringtones. Get them now!


High CTR and conversions guaranteed.

If you don't have an account at ExoClick.com yet, SIGNUP HERE.
Don't hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or need help to configure your campaigns.

I was going to title this article "Make money online" but that was not really original. However, this is what it is about... make money online!
But the idea here is to build a stable and long-term revenue, not just work to make a quick buck. This is a bit of my experimentations in the last months, building sites and working with online communities.

Introduction

Domain names are worth money. A well indexed domain, with a minimum of content and a small design, even with no traffic, can be worth up to $500. The older the better.

So by building a small network of clean and well optimized sites, you are building a stable and long-term income. The investment to start such a network is minimum. The most important thing you need is patience...

So here is the plan, that I will detail later on:
1. Choose a niche.
2. Find and buy about 10 domain names.
3. Write and/or buy content.
4. Make a small design template per domain.
5. Interlink your domains and get external backlinks.
6. Place advertising.
7. Forget about it.

1. Choose a niche

Select a topic that you like and know about. But also think about the monetization of that topic, you must choose one that has a minimum of interest for potential advertisers. And the demand is obviously higher for sites about gambling, pharmacy, insurances, adult, etc...

2. Find and buy about 10 domain names

Get some good names, related to your topic. Preferably .com/.net/.org
GoDaddy is a good place to register your domains and get some ideas using their name generator. You can even find some coupons to get a good discount.

3. Write and/or buy content

Write at least 10 original articles per site, with a minimum of 500 words per article.
If your budget allows it, you can buy them from articles writers. A 500 words article can cost you from $7 to $40 depending the reputation of the writer and the quality you are looking for.

From your main topic, you can have some articles or even some of your domains dedicated to a sub-topic or a related topic, as far as you remain in the same context.

You can also add some video content from sites like YouTube, DailyMotion, etc... and RSS feeds from popular news sites or blogs to add more fresh content.

4. Make a small design template per domain

Create one simple design per domain. You can buy a small header design if you want to give them a professional look.

Sites can be pretty simple and get the look of a blog, small content site, news portal, etc...

Make sure to have a clean HTML code and optimize your pages for the most important keywords of your topic.

5. Interlink your domains and get external backlinks

Link your domains between each others in a clever way. It's better if the domains you point to don't link back to the first domain. Use different anchor texts for the links.

Exchange links with webmasters who have sites covering the same topics, add your sites to small directories and top sites.

You can also purchase text links ads to accelarate your rankings.

6. Place advertising

Insert ads boxes to your pages. ExoClick.com is providing text+images ads boxes that you can integrate perfectly in your sites.

Depending on the niche, you could also use programs like AdSense.

7. Forget about it

Now forget about the site for at least 1 month. Just make sure they are getting indexed properly and nothing block the spiders to fetch your content.

Once a month, spend 1 day to add some content and get more external backlinks.

Results

After a few months, your sites should have a pretty good indexation and the PageRank should be updated.

If you did a good job, each domain should get at least 100 uniques/day, that's about 1,000 uniques visitors on your Network. Depending on the niche you selected and the ads placement, this can already generate a good revenue.

The PageRank on your sites should be between 2 to 5 and additionaly to your PPC revenue, you can now start to sell text links at the bottom of your pages and generate an extra revenue.

Your sites are now worth between $50 to $300 each, or more, depending how successful is your work and you could even sell them to "impatient" webmasters, who want domains out of Google sandbox and with good backlinks.

But if you keep them and take good care of them, it's like old wine. Its value will raise month after month.

Online Communities

At every step, you can rely on online communities such as DigitalPoint, V7N or NamePros, which can be very useful to get help, find article writers, designers, buy and sell domains, etc...

I hope you liked this article and it gave you ideas to increase your earnings online! If you make some experiments, please let me know about them. Good luck!

For publishers interested to see what's hot these days, here are some TOPs we generated based on ExoClick.com data. Some of the countries are a bit surprising.

The top keywords are not so surprising but it's still interesting to see the most paid keywords.

This data is for the first 3 weeks of 2007. I hope you enjoy it :)

TOP 20 Keywords with the Max Bid

1. cheap tramadoll
2. tramadol online
3. what is carisoprodol
4. tramadol
5. buy soma<