A few days ago I was thinking about high-paying affiliate programs after doing some reading about high PPC bids. I gave it a little thought but it wasn’t until just now that I found a very lucrative affiliate program (if I play my cards right.)

How lucrative? $2500 lucrative!

Good thing Vic posted about it instead of doing his TV dinner video!

This is when it would come in handy to have a site like HoustonJobs.com (HostGator is based there,) but I do have a number of connections down south that may help.

If you have any job or career related sites, or anything to do with Houston, you might be able to make some referrals and pocket a cool $2500.

Just be careful if you have a free job posting site. It was rumored that HostGator didn’t pay its regular affiliates who were operating free web hosting sites. (Biased against freebie seekers?)

However, that rumor could have started due to people trying to scam HostGator in the first place, in which case it’s a good thing they didn’t pay up.

Come to think of it, anytime an affiliate complains about not getting paid, it’s usually because they were trying to scam the affiliate program or doing something stupid.

So like I said in the beginning, if you want a big commission, this could be just the ticket!

Update: Back to the opportunity at hand…

I’m getting a few vague ideas in my head, but I’m kind of busy, so I want to post some ideas and maybe someone else can try them.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you have to refer someone to HostGator on your own by filling out a referral form before your referral goes in for an interview. That referral form is how they’ll track everything (there aren’t typical affiliate links for this.)

So if you’re paying attention so far, you will have realized that you need to have a relationship with your referral (at least enough to get their name, email, and phone number.) Along the same lines, you can’t just run some PPC ads direct to the Hostgator job application.

Which means… you have to collect their information!

You also have to wait and hope that your referral gets hired and stays employed for 90 days. Whew!

So what you need to do is set up your own job placement network. To make it quicker, it could be targeted to just Windows administrators. (Or Linux admins or whatever, but there are already sites like linux-jobs.com.) Then you market like normal to these potential employees and get them to come to your site and fill in a form with their name, email, and phone. Then you hand-submit the referrals to HostGator via the referral form.

That’s just one idea and it could be done in a variety of ways. There are other ways, too, but just remember, if you want a $2500 commission you have to take this seriously. Or I guess you could spam CraigsList!

Good luck!

(and by “good luck” I mean “I hope you don’t actually promote this because I’d rather keep the money to myself!”)

P.S. What would be sweet is if any super affiliate bloggers pushed this offer and published their results and/or strategies online…

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I don’t know about you, but I can’t think of one person that’s happy with their cell phone service provider or their long distance carrier. You just go on with life (with your fingers crossed) hoping you never have to deal with them.

But sometimes people just complain about them because it’s so common. So why not ease up on AT&T and cast your glance at someone that deserves it - Pay-Per-Click Ad Agencies!

That’s right, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, and all the others. Here’s why:

3. Keyword Restrictions

Whenever I call up an old buddy of mine, I regularly swear and use profanity. No one cares. I also talk about Nike, Adidas, eBay, Amazon, and many other trademarked brand names. No big deal. And my extensive slang… no problemo.

But have you ever used certain four letter words in an Adwords ad? Or bid on a trademarked name? Or used poor grammar and vocabulary?

If so, they probably disapproved your campaigns, banned your account, or sent your personal details over to the trademark attorneys.

2. Coupons and vouchers are only good for first-time customers.

Don’t you just hate seeing those offers for “$100 in Free Clicks!” that are only available for new publishers?

It’s kind of like the “all the long distance calls you want for $1.99 per month (for the first 2 days)” that you get from the phone company. But let’s say you get a new house with a new phone number - your new address means you are eligible for the deal once again.

(And sometimes if you call them and beg nicely, they’ll give out special treatment to long-time customers.)

But let’s say you start a new website and start new PPC campaigns for it. Do you get anything for it? Any good deals? NO! The PPC companies will keep screwing you until you start a new company with a new Tax ID number (and therefore can start a second advertiser account.)

To make things worse, there are sites that list all these vouchers. Even with third tier search engines. I get pissed at Adwords even more whenever I see that list!

1. You Can’t Bitch Someone Out

What’s the first thing you do when you see some extra charges tacked onto your bill? If you’re like me, you call up customer service and promptly bitch out every representative that picks up the phone. (Being rational is not something I like to do.)

There’s just something satisfying about yelling at helpless underpaid customer service reps. Yelling at their manager is great, too. Especially when the charges were all your fault to begin with.

But have you ever done that to Google? Called them up and said “Yo G, I can’t f&@$ believe this quality score $2*$&*$@!! What’s up with dat?”

Chances are your answer is “No.” That’s because you can’t talk to a real person at Google. So you have to go flame them on the message boards. And that is nowhere near as much fun.

* Note that you should still hate your phone company, but hate Adwords too.

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While my initial test of Exoclick seemed promising, long-term results make me question whether it’s worth using at all. I want to believe that it will send me quality traffic at 1.3 cents per click, but it looks more and more like Brainfox-quality traffic (and that’s about the worst traffic you can get.)

See, I’ve been checking things out, and even when Exoclick sends me 100 clicks to a specific page, 0 of those show up in Google Analytics. Their traffic used to show up, but it looks like there are too many spammers partaking in Exoclick these days.

(I should point out that some campaigns do get traffic from the actual Exoclick search engine, but I think the problems stem from some scammers in the content network that are ruining things for everyone.)

I guess the time has come where we’re limited to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

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Yesterday I had to ask myself, “Is Zac Johnson the smartest affiliate out there?”

And I had to do that because of this quote from his latest blog post:

There are many ebooks out there that promise you riches for the low price of $97 (but only if you act within the first 24 hours!)… but in the end they are usually nothing more than broken promises, outdated strategies, or just an overall waste of time. I took the time to create this guide because I want others to learn how to make money online, without having to weed their way through expensive ebooks and other programs which pass them further along the path of shelling out more money.

Yep, that did it for me! I didn’t even have to read The Super Affiliate’s Guide to PPC Marketing. That’s just details!

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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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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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You know how clicks on Google’s own search pages are more expensive than ones through the Adsense publisher network? I think Google claims that people using search engines are in the buying mood, whereas people browsing websites might randomly click an ad. (And this is commonly accepted, as advertisers pay more for clicks coming straight from Google.)

Did you ever think that Google was just greedy? Perhaps they display high-paying ads on their search pages (where they keep all the revenue) while displaying the cheap ads on Adsense publisher pages (where they have to split the revenue.)

There was an interesting discussion at the Warrior forum last month that revealed an Adsense exploit that allows publishers to take advantage of this. A member found that if you remove your publisher ID from the Adsense code for a couple days, Google will start to display some very high-paying ads (compared to what they were displaying.)

Then you can put your pub ID back in and reap the rewards for a few days, until Google replaces the ads with more low-paying ones. It’s a shady tactic and could get you banned, but the results were interesting.

So in situations where Google is not splitting revenue with anyone, they display the highest-paying ads. Switching your pub ID to someone else’s will not do this, so that’s further proof that the big G is keeping it all to themselves!

Warning: Removing the pub-ID alters the Adsense code, and could very well get you banned. Try this at your own risk.

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