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.

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!

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.

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>

I though the previous post would be the last one before I fly to Lisbon, but William from DDBoard prepared a 14 questions interview for me and I wanted to give him answers before to go off.

Here is an extract of this interview, if you want to read it all, check this post at DDBoard.

1. What made you want to create another affiliate program out of the gazilion affiliate programs out there?
I'm a Webmaster since about 7 years and followed with interest the boom of search engines and Online advertising. 2 years ago, I saw a good friend of mine (Search Engine Optimization Webmaster) struggling to monetize its traffic, especially in adult and dating. Pay Per Signup affiliate programs were bringing a very unstable revenue, Adsense does not allow that content... So I implemented XML Ads for him, in various formats, created stats and keyword optimization tools, and he doubled his revenue, even with me getting a nice share. So I wanted to push the idea further, providing tools that people need.

2. What do you think is the edge and advantage of exoclick.com over all other programs?
ExoClick.com started as a platform created by a Webmaster, for Webmasters. This means we are extremely flexible and move very fast in providing cutting edge tools, that fits your business. We pay using Paypal, Epassporte or Moneybookers and we pay weekly, which is good for any Webmaster. We provide attractive ads. I'm available for clients through email/phone/ICQ anytime.

3. What exactly is Exoclick.com? Please summarize in 2 to 3 sentences.
ExoClick.com is a pay per click platform, open for advertisers and publishers who are looking for something different. With all legal content allowed and good looking ads. ExoClick.com also offer additional services such as text links ads for Search Engine Optimization and domain parking.

...

Read the full interview at DDBoard, thank you to William and DDBoard for the opportunity!

If you are running a webmaster site, forum, blog or community, this is for you.

I want to see reviews of ExoClick.com everywhere!

So here is the deal. Signup at ExoClick.com, try our tools, services, write a serious review and post it on your own blog/site/forum. What do I mean by serious? Minimum 200 words, with real feedback, comments and information.
You must include links to http://www.exoclick.com (or any sub-pages) in your review.
Note that you MUST OWN the site where you publish that review, don't spam webmaster forums arround. This offer is valid one time per person.

I'll Paypal or Epassporte $10 to anybody that will do this. Send me the URL to the review and your Paypal or Epassporte details.

If the page where you post the article is a Pagerank 5 or more, it will not be $10 but $15 ;)

If you prefer to get 5% commission on the customers you send us through your review, then use your referal URL. (You can get it from ExoClick.com Admin area)
In this case, there is no $10 bonus.

I'm available by email or ICQ for any questions you might have on our program or this "offer".
I hope your tests will be positive and we'll get you as new clients.

So... looking forward to see your reviews and send out payments!

In response to the increasing demand for quality text links, ExoClick launched a new offer, selling cheap text links ads on the high PageRank sites of its Network.

You can buy these text links ads using Paypal for an affordable price and quickly boost your search engine results.

Don't mix these links with the pay per click ads. The goal here is to generate some quality backlinks to your site, thus improving your rankings on search engines and boost your traffic from Google, Yahoo, MS Live and the others. Not to generate clicks from those links directly.

Is it really worth it to pay for backlinks?

If you don't have any content on your site, or very poor quality content, then no, it's not.
But if your site has some quality content, then yes, definitely. And let me tell you why...

The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is becoming a key element when lauching any Internet project. Techniques have evolved and the easy days are over. If you want to get search engine traffic and be well ranked in the search engine result pages, you have to fight hard for it.

There are hundreds of criterias to optimize your web site and improve your search engine rankings. However, one of the most important criteria is the number (and the type) of web sites linking to your site.

Even though the search engines algorithms are extremely complex, the approach they use regarding the popularity of a site is simple. If a lot of web sites are linking to your site, and moreover, these web sites have a good "reputation", then your site must be of some interest. Which means search engines will give it more weight (crawl it more often and deeper) and rank it better.

If you are serious on the SEO you are doing on your site, text links ads are a no brainer. Your competition is probably already buying some links...

Have a look at ExoClick.com to buy cheap text links easily.

Browsing forums and talking with friends, I see that question popping up very often. Is the pay per click working? Should I buy traffic for my site? Do you do money with PPC? ...

I think these questions just don't make sense at all. PPC is mathematics and marketing skills. If you have a web site generating sales, and when you buy traffic, you generate more than what you spend, then you have your answer.

It's not universal science. Your product may work on some countries, not on others. The bids for your keywords might be interesting on some pay per click engines but too expensive for you on others. If you are really serious on trying PPC advertising for your site, you should decide of a budget, and spread it in different ways. $1,000 would probably be the minimum to do a serious test.
Select 5 pay per click engines, set low daily budgets, and analyze it for a week or so. Make sure you can detect on your site the sales coming from each engine and differentiate them.
Use statistics tools to monitor the behaviour of the users. If 90% of the user are just checking the first page and leaving, you know there is a problem and you can make some improvements. Try different approaches and see if you can bring more users on your "sale page".

Eliminate from your campaigns the countries that are not converting on your site.

Competition can be tough, so you might be losing money at the beginning. That's the price to pay to understand what is working for your site. Respect your initial budget and stop the campaigns that are not converting.

Some good places to start:

- Google Adwords
- Yahoo Advertising Solutions
- ExoClick.com
- MSN Advertising
- goClick.com

Good luck!

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.

Pay Per Click (PPC): Advertising model based on a fix cost per click. Medias can be text links, images or even flash movies. The advertiser pay a cost per click and can target its ad to specific countries, languages, categories or keywords.

Bid: The maximum amount that an advertiser is willing to pay for a click.

Budget: The amount of money that an advertiser sets aside for an advertising campaign. Different publishers allow for advertisers to set daily, weekly or monthly budgets.

Clickthrough Rate (CTR): The percentage of clicks on a link. This is usually a percentage based on the total number of clicks divided by the number of impressions that an advertisement has received.

Conversion Rate: The relationship between visitors to a web site and actions considered to be a "conversion", such as a sale or request to receive more information: the percentage of people whose clicks have resulted in a sale or desired action in relation to the total number of clicks on an advertisement.

Cost Per Click (CPC): The cost or cost-equivalent paid per click-through to an advertiser's website.

Cost Per Thousand (CPM): The amount an advertiser pays for one thousand advertisement impressions, regardless of the consumer's subsequent actions.

Advertising Campaign: Configuration of an advertisement with all its parameters. Ad link, link text, CPC, duration, keywords, countries...

Banning: Action from the pay per click service provider when a publisher or advertiser disrespect the rules.

Geo-Targetting: An advertisement targeted at a specific geographical region, area or location. Geo-targeting is done based on the IP address of the visitor.

Impressions: The number of times an advertisement is viewed by web surfers.

Keywords: Search terms or phrases targeted by the advertising campaign.

Landing Page: The specific web page that a visitor ultimately reaches after clicking an advertisement. Often, this page is optimized for a specific keyword term or phrase.

Linking Text: The text that is contained within a link.

Rank: How well a particular web page or web site is listed in a search engine or advertising results.

Return On Investment (ROI): The percentage of profit that results in a marketing or advertising campaign. Naturally, advertisers want the amount of money made to exceed the money spent.

Other terms

Paid To Read (PTR): Program where members earn money for reading email and visiting advertised websites. ExoClick does NOT tolerate these programs, any publisher using PTR will be banned immediately.

We created today a blog for ExoClick.com and here is the first post! We will obviously talk about ExoClick products here, but we also want to post valuable articles for advertisers, publishers, webmasters or SEO experts, whatever if you are using our services or not.

About us

ExoClick.com is a PPC platform developed from scratch to match advertisers and publishers demands. It was built by SEO experts, for SEO experts. Stop looking at conversions, switching affiliate programs and trying new marketing pages. Take care of the traffic, we take care of conversions!

Services for advertisers

If you are looking for new sources of traffic or you are working special niches such as casino, adult, pharmacy... Read more about our advertisers services.

Services for publishers

Start monetizing your traffic now! If you have search engine traffic, visitors from countries you are not able to monetize or you are looking for domain parking services, signup with us and start making money right away! Read more about our publishers services.