As web publishers, many of us sink our teeth into tasty affiliate offers only to find they’re not the perfect fit for our audience. The network we’re on may give us a demographic but if we don’t create leads, then we’re out of the game, so to speak. Motive Interactive created an affiliate network that takes a lot of the guesswork out of which offer to push and which we should just pass over. The Advent 2.0 system was developed from the ground up to keep up with industry changes and publisher friendliness.

The Advent 2.0 Interface

When you log into your Motive Interactive account, you’ll be introduced to many of the publisher offers through a spotlight feature. You’ll also notice the graph showing your account’s performance metrics, like the number of clicks, conversions, the rate at which you convert, and more, like the amount of revenue you’ve earned to date.

The site breaks down the offers so you can search for four different types like CPA, CPL, CPS, and CPS%. Each offer has an associated distribution type, like email or banner ads. By narrowing down your search criteria you can find the offer that works for your method of affiliate marketing. This means less of a time sink for finding those ads that work for you, and more time generating leads and creating revenue.

The Advent 2.0 dashboard greets you with a lot of AJAX, allowing for on-screen changes and quick searches of existing offers. The affiliate network really shines with the various tracking features. I would say the campaigns should be broken down into user-generated campaigns. If I push a product through my emailed newsletter then I would want to see specific performance metrics related to that campaign. Right now the system only allows for an overall view of every campaign you run. This waters down the feature somewhat, but for those interested in only doing one type of campaign, like banner ads, then this shouldn’t be too much of an issue.

Reporting Features

The reporting features gives you what you would expect. You can select a specific time period to view the conversions, and you can narrow down the results to the different types of offers you’re running. Although the same limitations on custom campaigns exist here too. The reports can be downloaded in Excel format with the click of a button. It’s a nice feature many publishers would probably use frequently.

Referral Program

Motive Interactive’s referral earnings program is 5.5% lifetimes referral earnings. That’s a pretty good chunk if you happen to refer someone who makes a decent amount through the network. Imagine sending 20 people who each make around a $100 a month. That could add up month after month. You have to remain active as a publisher with no lapse greater than 12 calendar months to continue receiving your referral income. The referral system is accompanied by the rewards program they have in place as well.

The rewards program gives users a tiered bonus type of reward system, similar to the one Amazon affiliates enjoy. The rewards program pays out according to how well you do within their system. The tiers are based on how well you’re doing with their offers and the like. So if you want to make more of an impact, you’ll push their offers more. The tiers for the reward program look like the following:

Commissions - Rewards
$1,000 - $10
$2,500 - $25
$5,000 - $50
$10,000 - $100
$15,000 - $150
$20,000 - $200
$25,000 - $250
$30,000 - $300
$50,000 - $500
$100,000 - $1,250
$150,000 - $2,000
$200,000 - $3,000
$500,000 - $10,000
$1,000,000 - $20,000
$1,250,000 - $25,000

So what are you waiting for? Get out there and work towards that 25K reward!

Conclusions

Overall the Motive Interactive Advent 2.0 site offers publishers and marketers a great place to find decent types of offers. The site caters to publishers of many types, like those who may own a good email list or website. Every user has access to slick features, like the stat tracking and decent reporting. What about the payout? You can choose to receive payment through a number of methods, including check, bank wire or Paypal. They pay out after you’ve earned $50, which isn’t too bad and shouldn’t be too hard with the number of offers they have available to each and every publisher. If you’re interested in trying out a new affiliate network, then I suggest you watch the video that follows. It should help to give a good view of the network and introduce you to Advent 2.0.

We drew our first Adspace Contest Winner the other day. Congratulations to Not Just a Mama. The Adspace contest allows contestants to enter as sponsors by giving up ad space on your blog. You contribute enough and you can become a part of the contest itself. The winner of the contest has their ad placed on all participating blogs for the duration of a month! That’s a lot of eyes seeing your ad. This contest was a great success and I’ll be posting in a followup with the next contest’s verbiage. Be sure to enter, so you too can enjoy the exposure.

Thanks everyone who took the time to enter. I hope you all had fun with it. Let’s all take a minute to check out the winner’s blog.

Visit the Not Just a Mama blog

It was several weeks ago. I came home from the office and made a quick stop at the mailbox. On the way through the front door, I noticed a nondescript white envelop amidst the bills and magazines. I looked it over and quickly realized the return address was from a website I had signed up with some time before. Although it was a mass mailing, I still felt valuable to them. I opened the letter and found no postcard, no note, but three different stickers. The took a look at the stickers and before the night was over I was back on that site, digging for reasons for the stickers and making myself part of their community.

I must confess this is a paid review for a label and sticker manufacturing business. I only took the review because I liked what they had to offer and felt it could maybe help one of my readers with a need either now or down the road. This review presents the idea of the business to you, as I have not purchased any stickers from the company at the point of writing this.

Stickers and labels offered from Frontier Label could be used to promote a startup or to improve packaging for any number of products. The company uses state of the art technology to reduce costs and to improve output of the stickers. They use digital printing to create the custom labels and stickers. The savings get passed on to you.

The Sticker Ordering Site

The Frontier Label site has a lot to offer the end-user. The site looks terrific and really lends the company credibility from the start. You can quickly see they types of stickers they’re offering from the home page. You can also go through the site to create a custom order for everything from coffee bag stickers to bumper stickers.

Once you select the quantity of your desired sticker, then you can begin making decisions about its printing, quality, and size. They offer a wide variety of options for the laid back consumer and the need-it-now type. The prices are dependent on the type of printing your have done — HP Electroink or thermal transfer.

Buying from Frontier Label

Purchasing stickers couldn’t get any easier. The site offers a wide variety of stickers — good for any marketing venture, product image enhancement, or simple goodwill gesture. The site caters to small businesses, startups, and even bloggers if you had the need. Sending a bumper sticker through the mail to a reader might seem like a trivial thing, but it could encourage loyalty to your brand. If you have a need for stickers or labels, then you at least have one new place too look.

Google released their free Chrome browser today. This open source browser promises to be fast and quick with javascript applications, securing computers by sandboxing the websites they browse inside the tabs, and more than adequate with dynamic sites. I checked to see if G Chrome was downloadable when I first got online today, but found it hadn’t been released just yet. By mid afternoon, I was visiting www.google.com/chrome to see how it worked.

I was pleasantly surprised by the simple interface. Google created the browser from scratch, knowing that users like to watch videos, play flash games, and browse quickly from site to site. They also know most Web 2.0 sites have dynamic code to make them work. When I browsed to sites like Digg or Youtube, I was amazed at how fast they loaded. Others are comparing it to Opera.

Everyone should at least download the browser to see how your site looks in it — make sure it renders properly. There are also some neat features to mess around with, like the address bar suggestions/search and the incognito window.

The Incognito Window

I love the description of the Incognito window. They say to be wary of the following: 

Going incognito doesn’t affect the behavior of other people, servers, or software. Be wary of:

• Websites that collect or share information about you
• Internet service providers or employers that track the pages you visit
• Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys
• Surveillance by secret agents
• People standing behind you

Yes, be wary of the people standing behind you, secret agents, and other tin-foil hat wearing paranoids. Google’s got your back on this one. 

The Skinny

My sythesized thoughts on the new browser. Tell me your thoughts in the comment section. 

• The browser has no obvious IE 6 type of errors for my site. 
• I can access many sites faster now, especially dynamic sites. 
• I’m also scared of Google owning all the web. 
• It will likely work well for dropping EC, except the EC toolbar won’t work with it. Well, no plugins work with it now. 
• The “Most Visited” default tab rocks! It lets you quickly search, click on recent sites, and view recent bookmarks. Definitely a smart default screen. No reason why the IE one couldn’t do something similar. 
• I like the search on both the history and favorites. It’s nice, not sure how much I’ll use it, but handy. 
• I’m excited to see how they integrate other Google products with the browser, like Google Reader and Gmail. Any plugins related to those apps would be great. 

I have to admit, this post is shamefully late. The idea behind the Micro-blogging Olympics was to test out the three major Micro-blogging sites — Twitter, Plurk, and Pownce — to gauge their effectiveness towards site traffic. The experiment was a lot of fun. I met a lot of cool people and found myself enjoying new Twitter apps and the Plurk site more and more each day. I honestly never took to Pownce though. It just seems too void of performance. I actually enjoyed Rejaw better, which is a new MB site that allows 1000 character posts, which may be moving into mini-blogging, not micro.

I can’t say the experiment was a complete success. I don’t think I have the social ability to push out tweets every five minutes or get into debates with random users, like some do. Most of the time I’m too busy working to bother with updating. I used the services to unwind and to catch up with people I’ve come to know online.

All in all, I Plurk much more than I Twitter. I think its because Plurking allows me to converse rather than just speak into a void with the hope of someone echoing back a statement or two. On Plurk I’m almost guaranteed some eyeballs on my thoughts or a funny conversation to look in on.

What Results Did I See?

The immediate results have been tangible. I know I’ve attracted a few new readers to my blog, making friendships along the way. I’ve networked and found someone to help with another project of mine. I’ve received a few link backs from various people who found me through Plurk. On the scale that I used the service, it helped me branch out and find new people to read my blog, comment and to network with me both on the Micro-blogging site and in my other networks.

The statistics show a much blander result. Throughout August I had 17 visits from Plurk. Of those 17, 58% were new visitors. They stayed on average 2:37, which is well above my site average. Unfortunately Twitter sent me 10 new visitors and they didn’t stick around long. (Just noticed Squidoo sent me a decent amount of traffic, but not sure for what.)

Proportionate Results

You really do get what you put into these networks. I know I’ve made a few new connections, laughed a lot, and learned a lot too. Micro-blogging sites may cater to a specific personality, but everyone can enjoy at least some aspect of one of these sites — you just have to find the right one for your tastes. I gravitated towards Plurk, but maybe your message can get out there better through Twitter.