affiliate marketing

The Motive Network - powered by Advent 2.0

Disclaimer; This is a paid review however not influenced by the fact it is paid. It is of my own, honest opinion.

Although i’m only really starting out in affiliate marketing, i can see the potential in it and it is the ultimate form of ‘passive income’ if you can master it. Creating a new site specifically to make money is never a good idea, never something that will work right out of the box… some can do it, most can’t. But when you have a high traffic site or a site in a really targeted niche, it’s much wiser to run affiliate offers on your site rather than just adsense ads. This is a valuable lesson i’ve learned in my short career online.

Affiliate networks, in a nutshell, allow me to browse various different affiliate offers and ads which i can then place on my site and make money from when somebody buys something through that link. I don’t get paid every time someone clicks on an ad, i only get paid when somebody buys something or signs up for something through my links.

Motive Interactive

Motive Interactive are an online advertising company which are comprised of two main platforms; Motive Media (for advertisers) and Motive Network (aka ‘Advent’, for publishers). I’ll be focusing on Advent for this review as i am of course interested in making money online, usually not spending it

Motive Interactive have recently launched their new ‘Advent 2.0′ system for publishers. In their own words this is “an advanced performance ad network that implements two functions critical to internet advertising: a publisher centric advertising network and a direct lead generation network”.

Review

Having played with advent 2.0 for the past few days, i have to say it is one of the most easy to use network backends i’ve seen. Loads of AJAX which reduces pageloads, simple navigation, easy to use search features and plenty of stats and reports to get stuck in to.

Once you login, you’ll be greeted with all the usual stuff you come to expect from affiliate networks… contact details of your account manager, clicks / revenue / important stats, notices and selected campaigns you may be interested in. Delving deeper in to reports, changing account details or simply browsing the offers in the system is also made really easy with the main menu located horizontally on the left sidebar.

In terms of the meat and bones (the actual offers available to publishers and performance of offers ), Advent 2.0 doesn’t disappoint. There are literally hundreds of offers available in the system. At the time of writing, ranging from $0.75 to $33.75 with mixture of CPA / CPS offers (Cost per Action / Cost per Sale). So whether you’re generating sign ups or converting sales, there’s plenty of cash to be made and speaking of cash, Motive Interactive payout using paypal, cheques or bankwire. So loads of options for everyone!

Motive Interactive also have a referral / rewards system. Referral earnings are 5.5% FOR LIFE, provided the referred publisher makes some cash for 12 consecutive months. So in layman’s terms, if i sign up under you, you’ll earn $5.50 for every $100 i make, provided i keep making money every month. This is great if you can get a few super affiliates to sign up under you, but not so great if you get a few guys to just sign up and then they give up after a month or two, which in my experience, happens quite often.

There’s also a rewards system (for those who earn above $1k/month) which pays out between 1-2% on top of your earnings.

Conclusion

Overall, Motive Interactive and their new ‘Advent 2.0′ platform for publishers, are user friendly and conform to the KISS analogy - keep it simple, stupid! I love their AJAX interface and as a result, the speed at which you can navigate between pages. If you’re in to affiliate marketing or just starting out, i recommend you join not only Motive Interactive, but as many programs as possible. Once you do, you’ll see that Motive are perhaps the most user friendly of the lot

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lessons learned so far in affiliate marketing

I’ve only been running my affiliate marketing campaign for the past couple of days but already i’m learning valuable lessons.

Lesson #1 - you can’t predict what people will do…

Here’s stats for yesterday - not a single conversion from 17 clicks! WTF! The offers i’m running are simple - enter your email address and win a prize. Of the 17 people who landed on these offers, not  a single one bothered to enter their email!

Check out today’s stats so far - 1 click, 1 conversion - that’s more like it

Despite getting off to a good start, i finished up day 1 with a -15% ROI. Day 2 was a -100% ROI and day three so far is a -10% ROI.

Not a great start, but at least i’m earning something - it’s not a completely lost cause. *IF* i could manage to rank organically for my keywords, i could be taking in $1/2 per day, possibly more.

wohoo! my first affiliate bucks!

It’s only a few hours since i launched my first affiliate marketing campaign. What i’ve done is created a new site using wordpress, stripped it down to the barebones, added massive in your face banner ads and then paid for traffic through adwords

I’m using offers through NeverBlueAds. I signed up with then almost 18 months ago but never really got going for various reasons. I like their interface and all round network - if you’re not already signed up, definitely consider checking them out.

I *was* going to simply re-direct the site directly to the affiliate offer but then i found out google’s TOS don’t allow that. I’ve seen it done and get results, but i don’t want to risk it. It’s only a short term solution and ideally, i’d like to keep this campaign running permanently if it’s profitable.

So after a bit of thought i decided to create a fully fledged site and it’s early days, but it seems to be working well… it should mean i won’t fall flat on my face like most people do when they start out in affiliate marketing - spending stupid amounts of money and getting nothing back for it.

My adwords ad (just one at the minute) is getting a 2% CTR which is pretty good. Conversion rate on the site is about 25%. Not bad and if it’s turning a profit - i can’t complain. So far, about $2.50 has been spent on ads with adwords. Adwords is also a bit quicker displaying stats than NeverBlueAds, so i might have made more than $2.95…

Let’s hope it continues.

Fist day with affiliate marketing

For months and months now i’ve been keeping an eye on the affiliate marketing industry, watching people fail and succeed. I think i now know enough to dive in and get my hands dirty.

Affiliate marketing is probably the easiest way to make money online, if you’re good at it. It involves much less work than flipping a site (imo) and it’s more longer term as if you put the effort in today, that same campaign will work 2/3/4 weeks or even months from now with very little tweaking.

I am of course talking about a site or landing page set up deliberately to make from from leads - i’m not talking about having an existing site and running affiliate offers just like ads - that’s a different story.

This could backfire horribly on me, but i’m hoping not. I’m going to start of at €5/day in adwords. I’ll send the traffic to a landing page and hopefully the traffic will convert. I’m estimating a 50% conversion rate at $1/lead so i need about $8/day or 8 leads from 16 visits to break even.

If this works, i’ll go bigger and better starting next month, but for now, it’ll be €5/day until the end of August and i’ll keep a close eye on my progress.

Although this will take a bit of time to start up, it’s really not that time consuming so i figured it’s worth a shot - i can only get better as i go along.

I’ll gather stats in excel and put them up on this blog once in a while… as it’s my first attempt, i’ll be surprised if i can turn a profit overall. Whatever happens though it’ll be good experience.