The local favorite Joel Comm has hit yet another home run today. As if the confusing Adsense placements weren’t doing enough for him, today he emailed me about about a new service that works out great when used alongside Adsense. He says it’s “something new which pays off INSTANTLY!”

Well, are you excited??!

Me too. Now get ready for the shocker…

It’s “called WidgetBucks, and it is probably the most sophisticated and ingenious contextual product unit I have ever seen!”

Holy crap, look at that. WidgetBucks. Really, I’ve never heard of that one before. I can’t wait to go and be the first to post about it at the Digitalpoint forums!! I will be so cool, totally pwning those n00bs that only use Adsense.

There’s also a $25 bonus, which is great for Christmas. But I wonder if it’s the same $25 bonus I got back in October? The same one that you only get when you earn enough for the minimum payment that is certainly higher than $25…

Nah… couldn’t be.

I’m sure that this is a brand new service that no one has heard about yet, let alone written about before. Why else would someone call it “something new which pays off INSTANTLY!”

If you want $25 for nothing, keep dreaming. But if you want to join WidgetBucks, put lots of work in, and then get a $25 bonus when you get paid a month or two later, take a look at WidgetBucks.

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As if the Million Dollar Wiki wasn’t bad enough on its own, a bajillion knockoffs have since popped up, including the Million Euro Wiki, 5 Buck Wiki, One Buck Wiki, Quarter Wiki, I.O.U. Wiki, Peso Wiki, Barter Wiki, and the most shocking of all, the First Born Child Wiki. The trend is really absurd and hopefully dead (which is likely, because the Million Dollar Wiki is now valued at about $10,000, nowhere near the “million” it claimed…)

But just when I thought we were in the clear, some genius got the bright idea to bring back the dreaded pixel advertising site. Yes, a new knockoff of the Million Dollar Homepage has arrived. It’s not exactly taking the internet by storm, but the aforementioned genius is doing enough advertising to catch my attention (i.e. piss me off.)

The funny part though is this one is called BlogClutter. I guess it’s supposed to be a niche version for bloggers, but the “clutter” part is what gets me. Take a look at the site…

Where’s the clutter?!

Other than the header logo, the site is clean, organized, and clutter free!

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If you’ve been looking for a Pay-Per-Click search engine where you can still get traffic for pennies, or if you’re just sick of all the “quality score” crap from Adwords, I may have found the perfect solution.

And that would be a small PPC search engine based in Spain, known as Exoclick. Let’s take a look and see what it’s all about…

Intro

Exoclick is a lot like Google, in that they have a platform for advertisers to buy ads and a platform for publishers to display ads. But it’s quite different at the same time, because it is simple to use and doesn’t have all the crazy regulations and restrictions that plague Adwords and Adsense users.

Advertising

Exoclick really shines when it comes to advertisers. It’s extremely simple to setup a campaign, and you can buy clicks for as little as 1 cent! Even better, you can outbid your competition by fractions of a cent!

To get started, just head to the signup page and enter your information. Then once you get into your admin panel, just click “Fund the Account” in the left menu and you’ll get instructions to pay with PayPal (or credit card through PayPal.)

The minimum to get started is just $10. It’s easy and safe to fund the account, too, because you can just make a one-time payment and not worry about having your credit card stored in their system and billed all the time.

Then you can start a campaign by clicking “New Campaign.” That presents you with a (gasp!) one-page form. Yep, just one page to fill out and your ads are set to go!

It might be a bit confusing at first to setup the targeting based on category, country, keyword, and/or site, but once you see how it works, it’s very simple and quick.

Bids are a bit confusing, too, because you bid in cents. So entering “100″ means one dollar per click, while “1.5″ means one and a half cents per click.

Fill in your ad details and click “Create Campaign” and you’re done! Then you can track everything from the “Campaigns List” page.

Stats, Reporting, and Optimizing

The campaigns list has the name, clicks, CPC, and status for each campaign, so you can get a good idea of what’s going on just by skimming that. Click “edit” to edit an ad or “stats” to see more details. (The stats will display at the bottom of that same page, so scroll down to see them after you’ve clicked.)

(Note that you can target only US visitors if you desire.)

Exoclick lacks some of the advanced reporting features from Google, but I’ll gladly trade that for the cheap traffic!

My favorite part of Exoclick is optimizing my ad prices, so I use their “Bids Estimator” all the time. You can pick a category or enter a keyword, and it will return a list of ad titles and bids.

You’ll notice that a lot of bids are setup like 1.8 cents or 2.3 cents. If the top bid is 2.3 cents, you can up your bids to 2.4 cents and get the top spot! Similarly, if the top bid is 5 cents, only bid 5.1 cents to take over. Bidding 6 cents would just be a waste.

(When you’re getting hundreds or thousands of clicks, those fractions of pennies can really add up!)

That shows a top bid of 1.8 cents in the “webmaster” category!

Be sure to check the other tools, too, like “Traffic per site.” That lists the top 100 Exoclick publishers in order of daily hits, which will help you decide which sites to target. (It has CTR and CPC info, too.)

Publishers

Since Exoclick is so good for advertisers, it’s naturally a little lackluster for publishers. And by that I mean, with a 50% revenue share, you’ll probably get half to one cent per click.

But if you can’t get into Adsense or YPN, this could be a viable alternative.

Referral Program

There is a referral program built in, which pays you 5% of the revenue generated by any publishers you refer. That’s probably not going to be much though, unfortunately.

I don’t think you get anything for referring advertisers, though. (Which sucks, because that is what I’m recommending here!)

Other Services

When preparing this review, I noticed a few other services available through Exoclick. One happens to be text link ad sales, and the other is domain parking.

I don’t know why anyone would buy or sell text links publicly these days with Google getting all huffy and puffy about it, but it’s there if you’re so inclined.

However, I have some spare domains, so I decided to park one with Exoclick and see if anything happens. It’s simple enough to setup (even easier than Sedo,) and the pages do look nice. (You get three templates to choose from, along with a category.)

Here is my parked page in the Technology category using the default template:

Complaints

Just to sum up some of the complaints you might have:

• Lack of really advanced reporting tools.
• Low payouts to publishers.
• Publishers, such as FeelingHealthy.net, are basically MFE (Made for Exoclick) sites.

Final Conclusions

Overall, I think Exoclick is great, and the positives greatly outweigh the negatives.

The super cheap traffic is simply amazing. You can get to the top in popular markets for as little as 5 cents!

Especially if you have adult sites, this could be a gold mine. (But you’ll have to sign-up and see the listings yourself, as I don’t want to publish those URLs here!)

I almost didn’t publish this because I wanted to keep the secret to myself, but I wanted to let my loyal readers know about a valuable resource! (And… Adwords was really pissing me off this morning! )

And here’s the URL once again: Exoclick.com

P.S. You better bookmark this review, because I only give such positive reviews once in a blue moon!

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Judging by the title, it’s safe to say that so far, the Million Dollar Wiki has been a complete and utter waste of time.

If you want to see my testing page, it is the Exercise page. I figured that was a topic that could be applicable to the general population, including internet marketers, but it wouldn’t be focused just on internet marketers.

So far the page has had a few hundred views, but far fewer uniques, which is probably just from me editing the page. After checking my stats, I’ve had no website visitors from MDW, no affiliate commissions, and no Adsense clicks.

But my bank account is $90 less than it was.

So here are my three million dollar tips:

1) Don’t try to make your MDW page anything like Wikipedia.
2) Cater it to the type of people who are buying MDW pages, because those are the only people that will see it.
3) If you haven’t bought a page yet, don’t do it!

I went with the Wikipedia style page for the first part of the test, and it’s been useless, so it will be updated. I should have done something more like Shoemoney did with his free ringtones page. It is nice and simple (and is a lot quicker to make!)

So stay tuned for my next update on this link farm they call the Million Dollar Wiki.

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If you’ve ever been to an industry conference or trade show or at least read about them online, you’re probably familiar with “booth babes.” That’s the term for the hot girls that hang out at booths to attract the guys!

With all the hoopla around booth babe competitions and sexism, I’m wondering how long it will take before they are using a new marketing technique dubbed assvertising.

Just imagine walking by the Azoogle booth, checking out the ‘goods’ when a babe walks by you and lifts up her skirt to reveal a “follow me to the CPX Interactive booth” slogan. That would most definitely grab my attention.

Or if you can’t afford your own booth, why not just send some of these beauties to walk around the showroom floor? Then they can accidentally drop things and bend over to pick them up.

Booth babes certainly look good, so why not make the most of it and assvertise? I don’t think you can classify it as “black hat.”

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Boring Adsense ads can be seen on almost every site out there. It’s nowhere near as bad as those talking smiley face banners, but a lot of Adsense ads are mundane. Not all of them though…

Every so often you come across a really cool site-targeted Adwords campaign, sparking your interest and making you laugh. One of the ones I saw was from Advolcano, which is an advertising network similar to AdBrite and AdEngage, and the ad was on JohnChow.com.

See, John Chow had recently started displaying AdVolcano ads as a publisher, and AdVolcano took full advantage of that. If you’ve had any marketing classes, they tell you that a prospect must get your advertising message seven times before taking action. So Advolcano went to work! John Chow had blogged about the new ads, and you could clearly see the “Ads by AdVolcano” message on his site. But still, AdVolcano bought some ads to be displayed on JohnChow.com! (See the pic below.)

(Click the picture for a larger version.)

The ad just enhanced the powers of “celebrity endorsement” and “social proof,” the concept that if someone popular is doing something, you should do it too.

It may have worked well, but these days I don’t see any AdVolcano ads there. Perhaps AdVolcano got a good enough boost from that, but it could have backfired. One might wonder if John used the ads and ended up hating them, hence they are no longer on his site?

(Note: No worries, there are still plenty of good publishers listed at AdVolcano.com, including JohnChow.com, so it’s definitely worth a look if you’re ready to pay for big traffic.)

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Phone calls during dinner. Deadbeat salesmen. Stuff you don’t want or need. Telemarketers…

A staple in the offline business world, telemarketers are almost like spammers. Depending on when they call, they can be just as annoying.

Unfortunately, you can’t escape them, even in online business. They’ll pull your number from public Whois info, or just buy a list from some less-than-stellar online agency that scraped all the Whois data. (Or if you are a legitimate marketer, they picked the phone number right off your Contact Us page.)

Luckily there are a few things we can do to hinder these telemarketers. (The DO NOT CALL list is for personal/home phone numbers and they find lots of ways around this, especially if you operate a website.)

The first thing you could do is use a Private Registration on your domain name. That would probably deter most telemarketers, although it’s still possible for them to get your number.

Next, especially if you skip the private registration, get a PrivatePhone number. It gives you a nice phone number with voicemail, free of charge! It’s great for adding to your Whois details.

Finally, strike back at the telemarketers! Go to Who Called Us and check out the reports of annoyances from telemarketers. If you get a call, report it on that site. It’s simple - just enter the number, time of call, and some details.

Thanks to WhoCalledUs, we can block those numbers from getting to us or just not answer if the number looks suspicious.

Maybe some Web 2.0 company will come out with a service that tracks all the numbers from WhoCalledUs and setup an alert system that flashes “SLEAZY TELEMARKETER - DO NOT ANSWER” whenever they call you!

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