What's your motive?

Background

Motive Interactive was founded by Brendan Smith and Colin Johnson in 2003 as Motive Advertising.  They changed their name to Motive Interactive after expanding their business to provide a lead gen CPA network in addition to their display ad network.  The company started in Lake Tahoe, NV but currently resides in San Diego, CA.

Find out more about Motive Interactive and their management.

Advent 2.0

I hate DirectTrack and Motive Interactive gets major points in my book for not using it.  In my opinion if you want affiliates to take you seriously you have to have a proprietary platform.  From the looks of Motive Interactive’s network platform they definitely want to be taken seriously.

The layout of Advent 2.0 is very nice, I would have to rank it in the top 3 network platforms.  The best part of this platform is that you are not overloaded with information the minute you log in.  In fact what you see when you first login is a very intuitive setup that is easy to navigate.  The part I like best is that you can list the campaigns you are running  on the main page and it displays the payout and the total revenue.

Finally, Motive Interactive will also provide you with a photo of your affiliate manager as well as their contact information.  I know this is not unique to them but I really like affiliate networks that do this.  It is nice to see the person you are working with for those of us who are unable to attend the various industry conferences.

Offers

Motive Interactive seems to provide a diverse selection of choices when it comes to offers.  They have everything from lower payout cost per action offers to higher paying cost per sale offers.  As with a lot of affiliate networks they boast the highest paying offers of any network.  The difference with Motive Interactive is that they back this statement up.  If you find a better payout on an offer that they also promote they will beat it.

The filtering of the offers is also very nice.  You can do a query on all the offers by distribution type, categories, offer id, payout, or select an offer from a dropdown list to go to it directly.  You can also do a filter by all, new, hot, or exclusive.  Once you have completed a search for the offers you wish to view the information is laid out in an easy to read format that will allwo you to click a button to view the landing page, creatives, or apply to run the offer.  The only problem I have with the search display is that you have to scroll to the right to see the creative preview and apply buttons.  This is only a minor annoyance but something that annoys me nonetheless.

Reporting

As you can probably tell from reading this far I really like Advent 2.0.  The bottom line is I like things that are easy to use with the content laid out in an easy to read format.  The reporting piece of Advent 2.0 meets those requirements.

The first thing you see when you click on the ‘Reports’ link is your revenue and how many active campaigns you have.  It would be hard for me to come up with any more ways to generate a report.  You can filter by simply select options such as ‘This Month’, ‘Last Month’ and ‘This Year’ to name a few or specify a date range.  You can also apply a filter to only see CPA, CPS, CPS% or CPLs.  Once you apply the filter you will see your filtered totals as well as all the offers that meet the search criteria.  This report can be easily exported to an Excel spreadsheet for further data manipulation.

Referrals and Rewards

Motive Interactive offers both a referral and rewards program.

The referral program pays 5.5% lifetime.  The catch is that the referred publisher must generate commissions without a lapse of 12 calendar months in order for the referrer to continue receiving the 5.5% commission from that publisher each month.

Similiar to the referral program Motive Interactive also offers a reward program for affiliates.  I do not have much information on the rewards program but do know they are paid each month based upon a publisher’s commissions for the previous month.  The reward payout starts at 1% then increases to 2% the higher the tier.

Conclusion

I am hard pressed to really find anything I dislike about Motive Interactive’s Advent 2.0 network platform. Out of all the affiliate networks I am a member of I would say this platform rival’s my favorite platform. It may be safe to say that it is my favorite.

Combine this with curteous and friendly staff as well as a negotiable payment schedule I highly recommend checking out Motive Interactive.  They really seem like a company that looks out for the interests of both publishers and advertisers.  If you don’t already have an account you should definitely sign up today.

If you have any suggestions I would love to hear them.  I will be gone for the next week on business but I hope to make regular updates throughout the week.  Please don’t give up reading this as I have every intention of making it a “must read”.  Thanks to all of you for reading.

WordPress 2.6.2

There is a new .1 release out for WordPress. Unlike 2.6.1 everyone should upgrade to 2.6.2 because this is a security release. This is especially important for folks who use open registration. Here are the details from the WordPress blog:

If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade. With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password. The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit. However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

You can download WordPress 2.6.2 here.

WordPress seems to be coming out with a lot of new updates.  In the case of a security release this is a good thing but can get frustrating if you have a lot of blogs.  I use a pluging called Instant Upgrade and I highly recommend it.  It makes upgrading WordPress very painless.  So if you have a lot of blogs orhate upgrading manually you should definitely download this plug-in.

Search Engine Marketing

Anyone who does this type of thing know that a great site is nothing without visitors. Fortunately for me I have been able to get to the first page of Google results for both of the products I am promoting so far. The search term I am on the first page for is the actual product name so the visitors I get are very targeted.

Some time I will share with all my readers how I have managed to do that. I do want to say that it is HARD and very time consuming. In the past few months I haven’t had much time to do the marketing I would like to do because of my full time job. Ideally I would like to get to start promoting two to three new products a week. This is definitely doable but I will probably have to hire some folks to help.

I know that I will never get rich of the products I am currently promoting but my results have been quite encouraging. It is nice to actually be doing something that works. Hopefully I can keep it up and achieve my goals.

Google Chrome Logo

I decided to check out Google Chrome yesterday. It would have been the greatest browser ever if it had been released eight years ago.

Now that I am used to Firefox it is hard for me to try another browser. It seemed like I was crippled browsing the ‘Net without the add-ons and plug-ins that I have grown use to. That was the only thing I didn’ like about Chrome, the lack of support for add-ons.

One thing I really like that I wish Firefox would use was the opening page with thumbnails of the sites you most recently visited. I thought this was a great feature and very useful. Chrome also did a great job of importing bookmarks from Firefox. It was nice not to have to mess around with any of that. Other interesting thing is Google actually gives you the option to switch to a different default search. They don’t make you use Google. Other companies could definitely learn from them.

The bottom line is I don’t understand why Google needs to get into the browser game. Why can’t they just support Firefox like they have been doing? I don’t plan to switch to Google Chrome anytime soon. It will be interesting to see what they come up with in future release.

The Word.Press.The.me logo

I encourage everyone to help Shawn out and add a theme if you have one. This is a good opportunity to be part of something great. Shawn is a very nice guy and runs a great blog. I think it would be awesome if he achieved his goal.

Quick Updates

As I mentioned in a previous post I have been experimenting with some search engine marketing.  The first page I created with on the second page of Google (~650,000 other sites) and the term with quotes was on the first page (~80,000 other sites).

Now, I realize this probably isn’t anything to get excited about but I consider a victory.  Hopefully I continue to have this kind of result with the other products I plan to create pages for.

Besides SEM I am also working on some Build A Niche Store sites.  I think I am going to use the same SEO techniques I used on the site I mentioned above to drive traffic to my BANS sites.  The only thing I really hate is writing all the articles necessary to be successful.  One day I should be making enough money to pay others to write them for me.  Until that day comes I will be writing them myself.

The Pay Per Click Formula course has been put on hold.  I need to analyze the change with Adwords a bit before I start up a bunch of campaigns again.  As someone else mentioned the chagnes seem to be mostly superficial but I would like to be sure before I try it again.

Last but not least I have been trying to come up with an idea for two domains I own.  BloggerFusion.com and BestOfLife.net.  The second is a PR1 that hasn’t been dropped in over seven years.  If any of you have an idea for what I would do please leave a comment.  If I use your idea I may be able to find it in me to send you a little something.

The problem with working on all of the above is time.  At work I am part of a business unit getting ready to launch a new product in mid-September.  That is really keeping me busy.  It is a short day when I work 12 hours.  I won’t even have a long weekend.  I hope to get some things done on my sites while I am off for a couple of days but the fact that college football has started and my wife wanting to spend some time together I don’t know if I can squeeze it in.  If I can I certainly will.

So, send me your ideas for BloggerFusion.com and BestOfLife.net and I will chat with you all later.

The Cuil logo

Cuil is a new search engine that was launched on July 28th. I have been checking it out and decided I would write a little review.

Site Look and Feel

I can’t quite pinpoint the reason but I don’t like how the search results are displayed. Maybe I am used to the look of Google or have been spoiled by shiney Web 2.0 sites. Cuil just isn’t sparkly enough for me. To me it seems like I am searching the archives of some legal site or something. The bottom line is the way Cuil displays their search results is flat out bad and does not hold my interest.

Search Results

Cuil claims to have three times the number of indexed pages than Google. I did a search for my name and the only results I get on the first page are comments I have made on other blogs. You would think that all I did was sit around and comment on DCR’s blog all day long. In another month or so I will try the search again and see what I come up with. If the results are littered with comments on DCR’s blog I will never visit his site again (just kidding Dan).

Site Name

Cuil, is pronounced “cool”, or so the founders of the search engine claim. For some reason I just can’t pronounce it like that. To me it should be pronounced “Q-L”, but English was never my best subject (as you can probably tell from my entries). Any way, imagine if Cuil was way better than Google and you decided to spread the word around school or work. It would be annoying as hell to have to spell it each time. Inevitably the person you are telling would misspell it once or twice and then you would just forget it because it is too much of a pain to tell people about it. Yes, I am reaching here but you must admit you most likely never had that Problem with Google or Yahoo!.

The fact of the matter is, I will not be switching to Cuil anytime soon for my search engine needs. I also believe there will be another search engine that will come along and make a name for itself. Afterall, ten years ago we had never heard of Google and search engines Alta Vista and Lycos were widely used.

Will it pay off?

Hot on the tale of my entry last week called “Article Marketing - What is it?” I am currently in the process of writing a ton of articles.  In the past week I have been doing a lot of research on various prodcuts offered by affiliate networks and have decided to try my hand at promoting some of these things through search engine marketing.

There are approximately 10 products I have picked out to experiment with SEM on.  With each I item I am writing several articles in addition to optimizing my main sites for the product keyword.  It is a great deal more work then I thought it would be and I thought it would be a ton.

The good news is I am almost finished up with the first site.  All I have to do is get the articles I have written onto some more blog directories.  The only thing really holding me back is the fact that I HATE having to sign up for different article directories.  It should take me long to get past this little wall and I should hopefully be ranked on the first page of Google in a couple of short weeks.  I will keep you posted.

I am also working on some BANS stores as well as PPC marketing.  Yes, it appears I am spreading myself pretty thin with all of this and my full time job but it is how I work best.  So stay tuned.  It is my goal to have an income report by October.

Changes are coming.

There are going to be some pretty big updates to Google Adwords. Here is the meat of the update:

• Quality Score will now be more accurate because it will be calculated at the time of each search query
• Keywords will no longer be marked ‘inactive for search’
• ‘First page bid’ will replace ‘minimum bid’ in your account

You can read more about this on the AdWords Blog.  It will be interesting to see how people adapt to these changes.  That is one thing you can always count on with Google, things will change.

From an end user prospective I think the changes are good.  Google is always looking to improve the end user experience and I think this is another move in their effort to do just that.

What does everyone else think?