Inspired Affiliate Journey to Becoming a Super Affiliate

The following is a paid review of the Motive Interactive Affiliate Network.  Although I am getting paid to write this review, it is completely of my opinion and my review is not influenced by being paid.  If you would like your site or product reviewed, please contact me.

What do you get when you take an Affiliate Network and couple it with some kick-ass Web 2.0 technology?  You get the Motive Interactive Affiliate Network.

Over the last year or so, long before I seriously got into Affiliate Marketing, I decided to sign up for a whole bunch of Affiliate Networks to see if I could find some offers to promote on my Blog.  After signing up for a few networks I started to see that they are pretty similar and a lot of them have the same offers.  So after signing up for a few, when it came time to get an account with a new network I would always call the reps and ask them "What makes your network different?"

I did this so that I could keep track of the major differences that each network offers.  Sometimes it’s not really obvious what the difference is between one network and another.  You create accounts for both, and sometimes you can find the exact same offer on two networks.  So which network do you promote with?

If one network has an offer at a payout of $23, for example, and another network has the exact same offer at $25 it sound logical that you would just go with the network that offers the highest payout.  This isn’t always the best approach.  In a lot of cases, if you talk to your affiliate manager, and you raise your concern about the difference in payout, they might be able to match it so don’t just jump ship based on price alone.

So if price doesn’t matter in most cases, what separates one network from another?

Well, there are a number of factors involved.  So what is Motive Interactive Affiliate Network’s advantage compared to others?  Well, they just re-launched their network under a new technology platform called "Advent".

Advent is basically the technology / system they run their network on and it’s one of their competitive advantages over other networks.  I have to pause for one second here and say that I was provided a demo account login to be able to do this review and I did have some time to play around with their interface, but by no means am I an expert on their system.  So most of the things I will report here are going to be based on research and testing I’ve done over the last few days, and not based on years of experience dealing with the software.  In fact, it’s a new software so nobody has really fully explored it yet.  I’ll just cover some of the highlights that I saw poking around.

When you first login to the network, you have 5 main applications to work with:

• Home (Your Dashboard)
• Offers
• My Offers
• Reports
• Account

This is what the main Home (Dashboard) interface looks like.  Ignore the fact that there is no data there yet.  This is a test account so normally you would be able to see statistics and a graph of your revenue instead of a bunch of zero’s.

The Dashboard gives you a quick glimpse of your Total Performance and allows you to instantly see the following metrics:

• Clicks
• Conversions
• Conversion Rate
• Leads Rejected
• Leads Accepted
• Total Leads
• Total Revenue
• eCPC
• eCPA
• eCPM
• eCPL

The stats above are shown for the current month and you can select previous month from a drop down below.  What’s cool about this is that you can see all your important stats right on the home page.  Comparing that to some of the other systems out there, you might only see Revenue earned today, yesterday, this month and total on the front page Dashboard.  You probably won’t find the other metrics listed above in other systems.

Motive basically sat down and brainstormed what information affiliates would need to see right on the dashboard to save them time from running reports and put those stats on the home page.  This is super cool.  I like it already.

Next we have the offers page.

Just like any other "Offers Page", this page is here to help you find the offers you’d like to promote quickly and efficiently.

You can filter the offers by Offer Type (CPA, CPL, CPS, CPS%) selecting any combination of the four.

You can then filter by Distribution Type:

• Banner
• Email
• POP
• Text Links
• Co-Registration
• Incentivized
• Search

Then there is also Categories (ie. Dating, Education etc.), filter by name or ID , filter by payout amount , or you can just select an offer from a large drop down if you prefer.  One thing I didn’t see and still can’t find is a way to filter by country. Meaning if I wanted to see all offers that are available for Canada, I can’t see how to do that.

There is also tabs in the results pane which allow you to see either All, New, Hot or Exclusive offers on top of the filters you’ve already applied above.

The results page is pretty cool.  You can quickly see the distribution types allowed (Search, Email, Web etc.), the category , the Payout and type of payout , and then you can click on Preview, Creative, or Apply to get approved for an offer.

By clicking on any offer it does an instant drop down and gives you some more details such as a description and Qualifiers / Disqualifiers for the offer.  (ie. Must be 18+ Years Old, US Traffic Only etc.)

All these options will make it easier for a person to quickly get into the offers page, search for what they’re looking for based on very specific criteria and then see what’s available instead of wandering around aimlessly.

The next section is called "My Offers ".  This is really cool too.  It keeps track of all the offers you’re promoting, so that if you’re not looking for a new offer you don’t have to go looking through the Offers page to find what you’re looking for.

The page shows you an overview of the offers and a tab to see the creatives for each offer.  This is all pretty standard stuff, they just made it easier to find.  Of course you have the same filters available to you for filtering specific types of offers.

Next we have the Reports Page .  This is basically what it looks like:

Personally, I think this is one section where they can make it look even more sexy if they wanted to.  There’s nothing more cool than seeing your stats on a graph in my opinion.  I’m willing to bet they will put that kind of stuff in later.

For now though the most powerful stuff I see in their reporting system is the filtering system.  They pretty much have a filter for everything!

For example, if I wanted to see a report of all my campaigns but I only wanted to see details for campaigns that had more than 1,000 impressions AND a conversion rate of 2% or higher AND revenues of more than $500, I could easily do that with this interface.

Here’s what you can filter on right now:

• ID
• Conversions
• Leads Accepted
• Leads Rejected
• Name
• Conversion Rate
• ECPC
• ECPM
• Payout
• Accept %
• Reject %
• ECPL
• Revenue
• Impressions
• Clicks
• Leads Submitted

Of course you can filter on any combination of the above and the filters accept logical operators such as Greater Than, Less Than, Greater Than or Equal To etc.  Besides filtering the results you can also sort by any of the columns and also export to Excel with the click of one button.

By clicking on the SubIDs link for each campaign you can see the SubID’s for it as well, and export SubID’s to excel with one click as well.

Finally we have the "Leads Detail " tab which you can see here below:

This is where you can get more details on the leads you’ve referred and sort or filter by any of the filter types you see above (Lead ID, Sub ID, Post Value, Server Response, Campaign Name, Email or IP Address).

This new Advent software that Motive runs on was completely re-written from scratch with a cleaner design focused on faster performance, accuracy, maintainability and future enhancement.  This means that what you see today is not the end of it.  Although the software is very sophisticated already, they also have the ability to enhance it in the future if there are any features or functions that are not available right now.  This gives them an advantage over the other networks as the Affiliate Marketing industry changes so quickly and most software systems out there are already becoming obsolete.

Other Goodies

So, what else does Motive have up their sleeve to make you run to their Sign Up page and get signed up?

Referral Program

Well, they’re offering a referral earnings program which pays a whopping 5.5% for life on your referral’s earnings.  There is one stipulation though.  Anyone you refer must generate commissions without a lapse for 12 calendar months in order for you to keep getting commissions.  So if you refer someone who falls off the face of the planet for a year and then comes back later, you will not get a referral bonus from them anymore.  I think this is more than fair in my opinion, as anyone you refer that is serious about affiliate marketing will surely make SOME money in a 12 month period of time.  And if they don’t, they probably never will.

At 5.5%, I believe this is the highest payout for referrals that I’ve seen out there.

Rewards Program

Motive also has a rewards program for its publishers.  The rewards payout ranges between 1%-2% and their current schedule looks like this:

• 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

This means that if you do $1.25 million dollars in revenue with them, they’ll send you a $25,000 reward which you can go and buy yourself a half decent car with.  At $5,000 in revenue, you’ll get $50 which means you can take your girlfriend out to the movies.

If you’d like to sign up for the Motive Interactive Affiliate Network, you can find their sign up page here .  If you do sign up, make sure you tell them I referred you so that I can make a 5.5% referral fee from you.  That way I have an even bigger reason to share what I learn about Affiliate Marketing with you on my Blog here.

They have also put together this demo which shows some of the features of the network: