Andy Crofford

The Motive Network - powered by Advent 2.0

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.

Filed Under: Meanderings | 2 Comments

I will be back

As I have posted before I have been very busy the last few weeks.  I hope to get back to regularly scheduled posting sooner than later.  Currently I am in the process of re-vamping this blog.  Even though this blog is only a couple of months old I need to make some adjustments, much like a football coach does throughout a game.  Hopefully the things I have in mind will make this blog more fun to write as well as read, that is my goal any way.

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.

Filed Under: Meanderings | 1 Comment

WordPress 2.6.2 is out

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.

Filed Under: WordPress | 1 Comment

Search Engine Marketing

Recently I have been playing around a bit with some search engine marketing. I went to Click Bank and selected a few products I wished to promote then I started building websites to promote the product.

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.

Filed Under: Meanderings | 2 Comments

Google Chrome

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.

Filed Under: Internet | 8 Comments