Pay Per Click Blog

New ExoClick Blog!

We have moved ExoClick's blog to another location.
From now on, please read us at EXOCLICKBLOG.COM

Ad:Tech New York 2008

November 3-6 2008, it was Ad:Tech in the Hilton Hotel of New York City. It was a great show, crowded as hell, and ExoClick was there.

Thanks too all of you who stopped by our booth! We had some very interesting chat during the two days of the show! If you were not able to make it to New York, watch out for the nexte events.

Check out all the pictures on our web site!

ExoClick is recruiting

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

Back from San Francisco

Sooo, after 2 flights and 18 hours, I'm back from San Francisco. Ad-Tech was really a great show. Nothing compared to Ad-Tech Paris. I met a lot of nice people over there, and it will probably take me a week or two to go though all the business cards.

Everybody from the online advertising industry was there and it was really nice to see how everyone is approaching this business.

The city itself was also really cool. Nice people, good restaurants and clubs for the night. I especially enjoyed the asiatic food and american breakfast!

If you get the chance, it's a nice place to spend a few days!

Ad-Tech San Francisco

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!

Pixel Tags

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!

Ad-Tech Paris

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...

New logo, new design...

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.

Measure your conversions

We are proud to present you our last tracking tag called goals.

This tool has been designed to help you track the efficiency of your campaigns by tracking specific actions. Indeed, you'll be able to track the users, from the moment they click on ExoClick ads to the different pages of your site they will visit...

This tracker is available in your Administration Panel > Advertisers > Goals.

It's very easy to use. For each step, one goal. You can create as many goals as you need. Give a name and an order to each one and click on Add Goal.

A short html code will be created automatically. You just have to add it on each pages of your website.

Example

You have 3 pages on your website: home, videos and billing.

Create three goals

Name : home
Order : 1
Click on Add Goal.

Do the same for videos and billing.
Click on the tag of each Goal and copy the short html code generated. Paste it in the body of each corresponding pages of your website.

Once each goal is pasted in your pages of your website, it's done! From now on, you'll be able to follow the efficiency of your campaigns directly into the statistics of your Administration Panel.

I hope this tutorial will help you analyse in details your campaigns. Do not hesitate to post your comments and questions concerning this article.

Yet another tutorial for ExoClick advertisers

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.

ExoClick Admin is now SSL encrypted

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.

ExoClick Blog has one Year!

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 Online - Opportunities and challenges

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.

Beta-test of ExoClick market place

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.

Industry News Summary

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

Google Trends get hourly updates

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

DMOZ Open Direcotry Lounched a Blog

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

Google Founders In Top 5 Richest People in USA

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

Rumor: Google going to buy Sirius Radio

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

Google 10th Birthsday

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

Google Book Search get new design

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

Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool is BACK!

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

Flickr Photos inside Yahoo Image Search

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

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

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

MSN Video Search - new fres look and new features

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

Facebook worth 10 billion US$?

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

Baidu stocks are HOT

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

4 easy ways to make money out of blogs

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.

What's behind Social Bookmarking?

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.

How to register a domain name easily?

Well, choosing a domain name can be a serious business if you don't start right away. You have to register the domain even before you register your company. If you want your business to have a brand name in internet then you must need a top level domain of your brand in your name. Moreover for business that completely works online requires a good domain name for their business. You cannot just settle for a secondary tld or go for an uncommon name. You domain name must reflect your business name.

In early days it was easy to get a name whenever you require since there were not much domainers in those days but today finding a common English name is almost impossible since almost all dictionary words have been registered or are available only in secondary tld format like in .info or .biz. It is very important that you have a .com domain to have a potential value in internet.

Why registering a good name is so difficult?

First thing is that almost every common name is registered and second is that there are tons of other business doing business in same name as of yours so, it is highly possible that your business name is already taken by others. You either have to be a big Multi national company to spend huge dollars or have full copyrights of your business name to get the domain back else you will have no luck in getting the domain name for your business.

Now you have very little chance to get a good name. So what options you are left with. Either to go with the full name of your business, but that can be too long in some times can be daunting task to write the domain in the browser's Address bar. You need to focus on short and sweet domain name for your business. There are few steps though you can take care of to get some real good alternative domain name for your business.

4 easy steps to find a good domain name

1. Go with your business name. If you are lucky enough you will find your business name. If you do so then register it for almost 5-10 years. Moreover if you are planning to expand your business across countries than register the domain for all those countries that you want to expand to.

2. Try your own niche. These days there are lots of newer tld like .tv, .fm, .name, .biz, .jobs, .pro, .travel, etc. If your business falls in any of these category than you can choose the name with these tld too. Though it will be hard initially to promote this name but once you create a brand it will be lot easier to handle such tld.

3. Create a flagship product with a unique name and create brand around it. Make it so popular that your business name goes along with the brand. It can expensive in times but will work if you can create a potential brand name.

4. Go for combinations. Try adding synonyms or extra word to the name. Be careful not to use dashes in domain name. Alternative names too can be difficult to find but they are easier to get than a one word domain name.

Ultimately whenever you decide to register a domain name, do it with a good registration company. Make sure that they provide all the features to handle the domain name with their Control panel. Don't go for cheaper websites that may disappear after few years. So, keep these ideas in mind and register a good name for your business. You will surely find a great name to build your brand online.

Viral Marketing - A powerful tool in Marketers Arsenal

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.

Monetizing International Traffic

Many things have changed since internet first started. More and more people are going online and internet has come up as a brand new media for the marketers' world. But one thing has been a serious problem for most internet marketers since they started marketing online and that is international monetization. In early days traffic from outside of US was not correctly valued and still today the problem remains as it was in those days.

There is lots of traffic that comes from countries like China and India but they are never considered valuable by PPC or ad network companies.

Most ad network rely on traffic from US and the traffic that come from out side US is generally not monetized. So, even of you have a high traffic blog, your 50% of impressions will go unmonetized. There are few ad network that do monetize non- US traffic but they all have there local offices present in those countries which help them cater the customers of that particular country. Besides, that no other ad network or PPC company thinks of monetizing non-us traffic because according to them income from non-US traffic does not yields much to them.

But this is changing through times. At ExoClick, we focus a lot on those countries and try to monetize quality traffic from all over the world. This helps publishers to monetize 100% of their traffic whereas advertisers get cheap quality sources of traffic from different countries. This is high time ad network and PPC companies should think of this major gap between US and non US- traffic. There is a lot of quality traffic that is waiting to be monetized and is going in under market pricing. But the questions still arises that Does non- US traffic performs less that the US traffic or is it well valuable. It is the question, marketers have to answer and this is the right time both in terms of money and resources to be invested to monetize this international traffic. I hope companies think on it and take this opportunity before the whole market goes on another boom to monetize international traffic.

Statistics Widget

Pay-Per-Click Advertising Guidelines

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!

Google crash

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!

The importance of Landing Pages

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.

8 tips on affiliate marketing

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 benefits of affiliate marketing explained

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.

Free Traffic from YouTube

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.

The ultimate tutorial for ExoClick advertisers

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

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.

The basics of affiliate marketing

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

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

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

The basics

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

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

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

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

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

Why affiliate marketing is the way to go

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

ExoClick reviewed by John Chow Dot Com

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.

Why ExoClick.com is the way to go?

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.

Will it blend - Best Viral Marketing ever

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

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

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

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

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

How to improve ad conversion rate

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.

White Hat vs Black Hat SEO Techniques

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.

Testing out ReviewMe.com

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

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

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

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

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

Interesting Advertising concept

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.

Google Acquires Zenter

Google has acquired Zenter, a company which specialize in building software that allows create on-line presentations and slideshows. Nobody named the price that google paid for Zenter.

There is no doubt that soon (some rumors says it will happen this summer) we will able to enjoy new tool at Google Docs which now seem to become more like Google Office and may become a strong competitor for Microsoft Office.

Plugin to turn off Personalized Search

Now you can use this plugin (works with Firefox and IE7) that will automatically disable Google's Personalized Search. If you want do it manualy you must add &pws=0 to the end of the search string.

Google Personalized Search has been developed on late 2005. It remembers your search history and choices you have made by clicking on specify results. Based on that Google now can sort results for your query that should fit to your previous search behaviour.

SEO.com sold for $5.000.000

The domain name SEO.com (SEO - Search Engine Optimization) has been sold for 5 million dollars to a comapny named Web Target. Dave Bascom, new owner of SEO.com already have some plans what to do with this domain name:

SEO.com will continue to be a search engine optimization firm, but our website will also offer lots of good stuff like SEO resources, tools, articles, tips, and insight into the SEO/SEM industry. Stay tuned for a new logo, website, and a lot more.

$5M places SEO.com in million dollars domain somewhere near 6th place. Not bad.

1. Sex.com $14 million
2. Porn.com $9 million
3. Business.com $7.5 million
4. Casino.com $5.5 million
5. AsSeenOnTv.com $5.1 million
6. Seo.com $5 million
7. Korea.com $5 million
8. Altavista.com $3.3 million
9. Loans.com $3 million
10. Wine.com $3 million
11. Wines.com $2.9 million
12. Tom.com $2.5 million
13. Autos.com $2.2 million
14. Mortgage.com $1.8 million
15. Express.com $1.8 million
16. Men.com $1.3 million
17. Feedback.com $1.23 million
18. Phone.com $1.2 million
19. Find.com $1.2 million
20. Wallstreet.com $1 million

Get Inside Google Search

Just a quick note. Today I found great article about Google on the New York Times. It gives some light on how Google's engineers work to improve their search algorithm. All SEO gurus should read it. ;) Here is small quote from the article:

Google recently allowed a reporter from The New York Times to spend a day with Mr. Singhal and others in the search-quality team, observing some internal meetings and talking to several top engineers. There were many questions that Google wouldn't answer. But the engineers still explained more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works.

Continue reading on the NY times...

Take A Little Break - You Deserve It

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! ;)

5 Simple Steps To Improve Your CTR

I'm sure that most of you know what CTR stands for, but just in case - it's Click Thru Ratio. One of most important factors for PPC publishers. It simply the percentage of impressions on your page that converted to clicks. To make it more clear let's say that you had 100 impressions on website and 10 clicks, so your CTR will be 10%. Why is it so important? As you propably noticed by raising your CTR you will raise also your revenue but more importantly, the CTR is one of these PPC factors that you can control. So, let's see what you can do to raise your revenue by raising CTR.

1. Use ADs revelant to your content.

It's pretty obvious but many of you after checking prices in Bid Esitmator Tool (it's a tool available from ExoClick admin area where you can check actual bids) for such niches like gambling or pharmacy (which are pretty high) put ADs from those niches even where they are not related to your site content. Don't do that. Your CTR will drop to really low level and you may earn less than you would put revelant ADs.

2. Use TEXT+IMAGES ADs.

Text + Images ADs are one of the best ExoClick's features. With these ADs your CTR will be way higher than if you would use standard text boxes, because they catch user's eye and in my opinion they are simply looking good.

3. Make ADs fit to your website.

That means you should make ADs look like integral part of your design. You should remove the border around the AD box. Don't make any signs or write texts like "ADVERTISEMENTS", choose the same colors that you use on your website and what's most important use the same color for AD titles as you use for links. This site should help you choose a right colors for ADs.

4. Place ADs in a right place.

You should make ADs visible for a user. He should see them without scrolling the page. From my observations I can tell you that T+I Vertical 260x340 box in the middle of the content site and T+I Leaderboard 728x90 above or just under the header should give the best results. Also simple text ADs placed under or above navigation menu should work good.

5. Don't stop experimenting.

Every website is diffrent and what works for me may not work for you. Or you can find better solutions than mine! Also, if your website has a significant percentage of returining visitors it's good to change something from time to time 'cause they may get used to your ADs and literally don't even notice them.

Get the positions of any document in Google SERPs

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!

Google looking to acquire DoubleClick

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.

Best Publishers Performing Keywords

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.

Premium XML Feed

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.

New PPC Search Engine

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:

HTML code for this search box:

New member on the Team!

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

New Webmaster Forum

Webmasterize.com is a new webmaster forum about SEO, Pay Per Click, search engines, and some space to buy and sell domains, sites, promote your services, etc...

Join now this young webmaster community and share with other webmasters! We expect to see high quality posts over there.

Buy cheap clicks

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.

The guy who proposed on a Superbowl commercial

If you didn't hear the story yet, Rand Fishkin, from SEOmoz.org proposed to his girlfriend in an ad aired on TV. It was supposed to be aired during the Superbowl, but they said no at the last minute and the ad was aired on Veronica Mars.

Here is the video of the proposal:

And... her reaction:

A pretty strong reaction!! I thought she was going to have a heart attack or something!

Anyways, congratulations to them!

Build a solid Network of sites and a stable revenue

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!

A few statistics for January 2007

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
6. soma
7. buy viagra online
8. order tramadol
9. loans
10. buy viagra
11. order viagra
12. buy tramadol online
13. online tramadol
14. purchase tramadol
15. online casino
16. debt management
17. carisoprodol soma
18. casino online
19. cash advance
20. buy tramadol

TOP 20 Keywords having the highest average Bid

1. tramadol
2. credit counseling
3. debt solution
4. hydrocodone
5. cash advance
6. buy hydrocodone
7. refinance
8. refinance home loan
9. credit cards
10. free credit report
11. online degree
12. online casino
13. credit card debt
14. loans
15. online cash advance
16. credit card
17. work from home
18. online forex trading
19. business credit card
20. hosting

TOP 10 Countries with the Max Bid

1. USA
2. Canada
3. United Kingdom
4. Haiti
5. Belgium
6. Turkey
7. Switzerland
8. France
9. Portugal
10. Germany

TOP 10 Countries having the highest average Bid

1. United Kingdom
2. USA
3. Canada
4. Italy
5. Poland
6. France
7. Portugal
8. Belgium
9. Germany
10. Finland

I'll try to give you regular reports such as this one!

ExoClick.com has a new home

It's a great pleasure for me to announce that ExoClick.com moved its technical platform to ISprime, a leading company in managed hosting solutions. When it comes to hosting of critical applications, ISprime is just one of the best.

Our whole structure is now hosted on brand new Dell PowerEdge Dual 3.0GHz XEON servers and the system is now faster than ever. Security has also been improved, with redundant hardware, redundant power and a powerful firewall.

Why did we choose ISprime?

- They work with top companies such as Akamai or Casio and their reputation is proven since a long time.
- They are available 24/7 and answer any request with no delay.
- They monitor our platform 24/7 for any problem.
- They provide highly scalable solutions, with great hardware. The structure we have now will be able to grow as our needs grow.

In short, it's a great news and give us the assurance our platform is running at 200% at all time. This also gives you the assurance of working with top quality services, at every level.

I have been interviewed by DDBoard

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!

Four days to Lisbon City

If someone cares, I'm taking a well deserved 4 days break and traveling to Lisbon! I've never been there but they say it's the most beautiful town in Europe so I'm looking forward to see it.

On the planning, a nice and quiet hotel, a bit of cultural visits, a lot of good typical food, a lot of cocktails and some relaxing days I hope. I'll post a few pictures when I'm back. There will also be some important changes at ExoClick.com next week, stay tuned ;)

Have a great week-end and see you soon!

A Google Pagerank Update is going on!

It looks like a Google Pagerank Update is going on right now. This blog, which is pretty recent and had a Pagerank 0 has now a Pagerank 4 on some of the Google datacenters!

You can have a look at this forum thread (on DigitalPoint) to read more about it and see what other webmasters are saying about it.

The Pagerank update is something that all webmasters are waiting impatiently. And it happens only a few times a year. Have a look at this page to see the full history of pagerank and backlinks updates. You can also see estimations of incoming updates.

A Pagerank 4 for the Pay Per Click Blog, that wouldn't be bad! Let's wait until the update is stable. So, how are your sites doing?

Adult Text Links Available

JiveWeasel.com

Boost your search engine rankings by purchasing good backlinks.

We have an adult site available for sitewide text link ads, your link will appear at the bottom of all the pages of the site. It's a solid Pagerank 5, with a clean site and content.

Getting a hardlink there will get your site indexed deeper and faster by all the major search engines.

CLICK HERE for all the details and instant purchase. There is only a few spots available!

You can also have a look at the full list of premium site available for links purchase.

Review ExoClick.com and Make 10 bucks

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!

King of the Bill

After the "million dollar homepage", everybody is trying to find the next great idea to become a millionaire!
Andrew Fischer is one of these guys, but it looks like he found something really exciting.

The concept is simple. Ads are sold starting at $1. Each additional ad costs just $1 more than the previous. It's advertising meets "King of the Hill," hence the name "King of the Bill."

Here is the current price:

I'm not sure the ROI would be so good but... it's tempting to become a King, even if it's just for a few hours. Today, it costs $92 to become King of the Bill. If the major medias are picking it up, I guess it can really make a boom!

Beta test of Text and Images Ads

Tell me the truth, you've first looked at the lady a few lines down, before to start reading this! Well that's OK, that's what I wanted. Now just keep reading ;)

We are testing some new ads formats, mixing text and images. These ads look pretty good and have a higher CTR than classical text ads. The colours of the links/text/backgroud are fully customizable for a seamless integration in your pages.

We already released 2 formats that you can see in the samples that follow. And we'll be adding new formats and features like those in the next weeks. We said 2007 should be a year to increase revenue so what are you waiting for? :)

Adult Ads - 260x340

Gambling Ads - 260x340

Pharmacy Ads - 468x60

Now, time to place those ads on your site and make money!
Signup at ExoClick.com to create your own ads boxes and see them work live.

ExoClick to sell text links ads

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.

Miserable Failure

This is not really new but I am amazed to see that searching "miserable failure" on Google still return http://www.whitehouse.gov/president as first URL. This George Bush Google bomb was done over 3 years ago and it's still there!

Looking a bit further, I see that Google actually commented this "issue" on their blog in September 2005. They even configured some Adwords on the terms "failure" and "miserable failure" to link to that article.

But it really looks like they have no intention to do anything about it. And this confirm something we already know. Backlinks and anchor text used in these backlinks are extremely important to achieve good rankings on Google.

Now, as experimenting is a great way to learn, I'm going to launch my own little bomb and see what happens, hehe. Let's try with a search term that is not too popular on Google and see if I can get a site on the first page!

So what is needed to make its own Google Bomb?

1. A victim. And my choice will go to http://www.dmoz.org as they usually take 1 year or more to accept a site, which is pretty annoying.
2. A search term. As DMOZ's subtitle is "open directory project", I think "closed directory project" would be a good one. It's not going to be easy as there is already 3 million pages indexed with that term on Google, but only 204 pages indexed on the exact term "closed directory project" so let's see.
3. Create a few backlinks, mentionning that DMOZ is a closed directory project.
If you want to help, don't hesitate to create a link!

Results in a few weeks...

Forums and Communities for PPC and SEO

I just thought I'd share the forums and sites I'm reading to keep in touch with the PPC and SEO community.

DigitalPoint Forums - http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
A reference. Forums about Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Design & Development... A big community with very interesting threads. More than 45,000 members!!

The V7 Network - http://www.v7n.com/forums/
Marketing and Web Development. A very busy SEO Forum. More than 17,000 members.

WebmasterWorld.com - http://www.webmasterworld.com/
Huge site, very known of webmasters. A lot of forums about search engines, PPC and webmasters news. But moderation is pretty strict and some sections are not free.

SEO Chat - http://www.seochat.com/
Lots of articles and nice SEO tools. (keywords density, meta tags analyzer, PageRank lookup...)

SEOMOZ.org - http://www.seomoz.org/
A nice site and blog about SEO.

Webmaster Talk - http://www.webmaster-talk.com/
Forum with a smaller community but growing. And interesting threads.

SEO Book - http://www.seobook.com/
Aaron Wall's blog about SEO.

SEO and Domain Parking

ExoClick.com just released a new version of its domain parking platform.

The goal of this system is not only to monetize your parked domains, but also to get them indexed in search engines and actually grow the traffic!

Each domain is automatically configured as a search engine friendly web site and it just takes a few clicks to park hundreds of domains.

The best features:

- Make cash thanks to ExoClick.com advertising Network.
- Bulk Add. Park hundreds of domains in 1 click!
- Several payments options, including Epassporte and Paypal.
- A LOT of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for the domain parked. Among other things:

           - Automatic generation of HTML pages related to your domain.
           - Generation of meta tags.
           - Possibility to select your Template.
           - FREE Backlinks!

And much more! Check on ExoClick.com how to monetize your domains and see all the features available!

Should I buy PPC traffic for my site?

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 Pay Per Click Ads

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 Tips for Attracting Traffic

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.

SEO Basics - Simple SEO Tips

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 This is just an example for a web page 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, click here.

Instead, use the keywords related to that page:

Join now our online HTML training.

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.

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

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.

HTML Training

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.

The best fraudster ever

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: ...

Pay Per Click Definitions

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.

Welcome to ExoClick's Blog

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.