Hello bloggers, some weeks ago I signed up to Motive Interactive Advent but I didn’t use it until now because they were upgrading their platform. My affiliate manager recommended me to wait because the new changes would be awesome, improving the platform and making it much better.

In spite of his recommendation, I entered to my publisher panel in order to meet the platform and to check the available campagins. Basically, I entered just to take a look around, and I have to admit that I found a really slow platform.

The platform was easy to use but its slowness was terrible. I have for you a screenshot of the old interface:

What is new on Advent 2.0?

Loading times have been reduced! The platform is based on AJAX, which means everything load on the same page. Before continuing, let’s see a screenshot of it:

They have optimized the platform, reordering the left sidebars to make easier for the publisher to navigate and explore the campagins. If you see the first screenshot you will see a picture of my manager (with his contact information) in the second leftbar. In the new theme they have moved the picture to the top-right and in the second leftbar you can see an Offer Spotlight.

The Campaigns

You can explore the different campaigns by offer types, distribution types, categories and payouts. I have tested this to find some specific offers and it works very fine, it’s very accurate.

As other affiliate networks, Motive covers several categories which you can work with in order to make money. I saw some well-known campaigns there which you can see in other networks, but also I saw another ones which looks great.

Something I really liked about Motive is that you can preview any campaign in order to know how will it looks when the people click the banner. In other networks I couldn’t do this with the campaigns because most of them are restricted to US. So if you are not from US (as my case) it doesn’t matter, you could check the campaign and see how it looks!.

Other thing I liked which is related with the campaigns is the navigation. It is very user-friendly and if you click on one of them, a detailed description of the offer will roll-over, as you can see in the following screenshot:

The Statistics

Sometimes we don’t like to see statistics for some reasons, either they could be difficult to understand or may be they could NOT be friendly or just because they show something that we were not expecting . Whichever the case, it won’t apply this time. The statistics provided by Motive are very detailed and friendly, giving you information about the impressions, clicks, ECPM, ECPC, revenew and the most important, coversion rates and payouts .

Affiliate Commission Rewards Program

With the affiliate commission rewards program you will get extra commission rewards a month, whose payout starts at 1% then increases to 2% the higher the tier. Here’s the current structure:

• $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

The Highest Affiliate Referral Commission

The Motive Network offers 5.5% of lifetimes referral earnings for those you refer, making them the network with the highest referral commission!. But the good things have a catch too: ‘The referred publisher must continue to generate commissions without a lapse of twelve (12) calendar months in order for the referrer to continue receiving the 5.5% commission from that publisher each month‘, which means that you will only get extra commissions for active affiliates.

Conclusion

Motive Interactive Advent have improved the platform to make it more comfortable and easy to use. Now it is really easy to use and loading times are really short, it has everything preloaded and ready to display whatever you click.

The feature of SIDs and AIDs tracking are really important for every publisher, as well as the advanced tracking and reporting!

I encourage you to try Motive Interactive Advent and check out what it has for us.

Hello everyone, how was your week? Mine was very excited, it was full of changes… I restarted the university the first week of October and this week I was getting used to my new schedule.

Also, I start learning Flash because I’m going to develop a website in the next weeks which will require flash to do almost everything, so I was reading manuals and practicing with the interface.

In order to promote the new theme and ebook of mine (which I hope to launch the next week) I planned a contest. This week I was looking for sponsors, sending emails and contacting them by phone. At the end of this week, I collected $1500 in prizes and counting! And it doesn’t stop there, I will continue looking for sponsors the next weeks… So if you want to sponsor something to my contest, use my contact form to tell me about your offer.

Now, let’s review what was HOT this week:

• Mixx Turns One - Sees Rapid Growth by Frederic On ReadWriteWeb.
• 25 Ways to Build Your Community by Chris On ChrisBrogan.
• The Future of Content in the Age of Information Overload by Maki On DoshDosh.
• 8 Tips for Affiliate Marketers on Using Twitter by Darren On Problogger.
• 8 Strategies For Successful Relations With Clients by Jeff On Smashing Magazine.
• What’s Next After Web 2.0 by Richard On ReadWriteWeb.

This week was the first anniversary of Mixx, regular users as me have noticed the hard work of its developers. They have improve many things and 1 year after, they show their traffic statistics which seems very encouraging.

If you want to know more details about this news, visit The Mixx Blog and check it out. Remember to stay tuned this week, because Mr Javo dot Com 2.0 is coming very soon!

Some weeks ago, Viral Networks held a contest to celebrate the prelaunching of the platform. Although they had great prizes, it was so difficult so win some of them due to the rules of the contest, where you could win prizes depending the people you referred to the network.

Awesome prizes such as ipodTouches were given the past weeks, but now they are holding something a little different. WIth this contest everybody can win. If you are not in the top 5, but have 20 or more active referrals, you will go into a random draw for your chance to win $50 in cash or $50 worth of banners (5 of each will be given).

The following one is the list of prizes:

1. $300. At least 700 referrals.
2. $250.  At least 500 referrals.
3. $200.  At least 350 referrals.
4. $150.  At least 200 referrals.
5. $100.  At least 100 referrals.

From 6 to 10 - $50, with at least 20 referrals.

From 10 to 15 - 10000 Free Banners, with at least 20 referrals.

So all you need to do is join to this community and start referring people! So if you are not member of Viral Networks, watch this video in order to learn more about it:

Good luck!

Nowadays, almost every time you read a blog article you can find links pointing to other articles of the same blog. Internal linking is one of the most common strategies used by bloggers in their posts due to several reasons, which I’m going to explain in this post in order to let you know the secret behind this behavior.

Have you asked to yourself what happens with your old posts? And when I say “old” I want to refer to the posts you have published months ago… Well, let’s say that your visitors use to share your posts through social media networks, getting that post a good exposure and being a boom for some days. A week after, that post won’t be read with the same frequency which people read it in its first days with. Of course, if you do a good SEO you will attract visitors to that post through search engines, but it won’t be the same.

So there are other strategy which you can use in order to enhance the traffic of your posts, and that strategy is called Internal Linking.

The Advantages

What do you win by linking past posts? A lot! and I’m going to explain you why. If someone visits your blog for first time, you would like to make it subscribe to your blog right? Many times happens that people visit your blog and if they don’t like the first content they read, they just leave without reading anymore. If you link other related articles inside your posts, people will click all those links and this way, they will read more content of your blog.

Tip: is very important to use the attribute target=”_blank” in order to force that links to open in a new tab/window of the browser.

The problem is when you link many posts inside other ones, because the user will click all of them and then they won’t know what to read first. Sometimes that happens to me, I end with 4 or 5 articles of the same blog opened in my firefox and it could be hard to find a chronological order.

So once you learned that, let’s review the main advantages of internal linking:

• Promote your other posts.
• Make your visitors stick to your blog.
• Increase the possibility of getting new subscribers.
• Increase the number of backlinks pointing to your blog.
• Increase your ranks (pagerank, alexa…) because of the backlinks.

The Disadvantages

I think there are no disadvantages on this topic. Well yes, it is very important to remember that you should not bombard the users with plenty of internal links in your posts. As I said before, they could get bored or they couldn’t find an order among the posts you are linking, and this could end with a confused user closing all those posts that you linked. This way, you could get the opposite effect that you wanted to get which was the catch of a new subscriber…

Conclusion

Certainly linking other own articles in your posts can be a good idea to make your readers stick to your blog. Something you need to remember is to don’t bother them with several links, I suggest you to link 1 may be 2 posts and not more than that. More than 2 posts could result a negative reaction, and you don’t want to frighten your visitors . Any suggestions? Feel free to leave your comment and help this community to grow up!

In the creation of any kind of website (i.e. blogs, forums…) one of the most important aspects that you need to consider when you are going to design it is related to the interface between the final user and your website. That interface could be more or less amiable depending of the color scheme or palette that you have.

I know that is not possible to everyone to design its own website, so many times the people let their designer to make that choice. If that is the case, you suppose that your designer know about the website colors’ theory, or not? In this post I will give you the necessary tips to help you with the choice of a color pallete for your website.

Color Meanings

Do you know that colors have different meanings? Yes! Depending of the color your website will look adapted according to its niche. But what the colors mean? Let’s check it out:

Red: This color symbolizes energy, action, strength, leadership, courage. This color stimulates people to make quick decisions, is inherently exciting and the more color red the more the level of energy perceived. It draws attention and it is specially used on Marketing to focus the people attention on a particular element. That’s the reason why many people use this colors on landing pages.

Pink: This color symbolizes love, friendship, beauty. This color is a mix of a kind of red and a passive blue, that’s the reason why it represents passiveness, calming the mind and nerves. Also, it denotes feminine qualities, which make it one of the preferred colors of adolescent girls.

Brown: This color symbolizes stability, simplicity, health, reliability. It is the color of earth and people associate it with nature.

Orange: This color symbolizes happiness,  creativity, determination, stimulation. It is quite similar to red and many people use to misinterpret it, but think well about it. This color shares some properties with the red, but if you want to attract the people attention you should definitively use red.

 

Gold: This one symbolizes wisdom and wealth. This is the color of riches, and you could use it if you want to create feelings of success, good health, relaxation or personal power.

 

 

Yellow: Yellow represents optimism, enlightenment and happiness, stimulating metal and physical activity. Like red, this one is also good to attract attention, so this is why you can find landing pages with yellow and red squares.

 

 

Green: Green symbolizes life, growth, health, fertility, endurance. Like brown, this color is associated to nature.

 

 

Blue: This color represents peace, youth, spirituality, trust. This is the most favorite color among people due to it is the color of sky and the ocean, being perceived as a constant in our lives. It is perfect to inspire calming, cooling, depth and stability.

 

 

Gray: This is a monotonic color which represents security, formality, maturity. It is great because it can be mix with any color, but it should be mix with a vivid color if you don’t want to inspire sadness or depression.

 

 

Black: This color can be interpreted by many things, but basically it represents seriousness, conventionalism, Mystery. Black is authoritative and powerful but you should mix it with light colors if you don’t want to inspire death, emptyness, fear or evil.

 

 

Well those are the most basic color meanings, of course I’m not a proffesional on the topic but however you can guide yourself with this article. So once you know the color that you are going to implement on your site, what do you need to do next? How do you know which colors are mixable with it? Well, check out the following resources & tools that I collected for you:

• The Color Wizard 3.0 : The Color Wizard is a color matching application for anyone who wants to create designs with great looking colors. It generates a pallete of colors which look good among them.
• ColorToy 2.0: This is is a Flash based color scheme generator and picker. It generates complementary color schemes based on your inputted color values or randomly, which is much more fun.
• COLOURlovers: COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. It gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

With the information provided here and with the help of the resources mentioned above, you should be able to choose the colors that combine with your site personality/niche.

Nowadays, many of the good domain names are already taken on Internet. Many people buy domains just for reselling and not for personal use, people who make shorter the list of good available domains.

I remember when the .me was launched, I wanted to buy some names to work with in the future. The problem was that many of those good names were already bought, and remembering a specific case, I found a good domain which I decided to buy and just then I press the button to buy it -after entering all my information related with my credit card- I got owned, someone bought that domain seconds before me.

But why that kind of competition? First of all, to understand the reason of these competition for the good names, you need to know what is considered a good domain name.

What is the first thing you notice when you type an url in the browser? In effect, the very first thing you notice (may be unconsciously) when you do that, is the length of that url. If the url is too large (20 characters or more) the people can forget it because of its complexity. Even a string of 15 characters are considered as long by me. So the best thing you can try to find is very short domains, strings which less than 15 characters would be fine. In my case, I have just 6 characters on my domain name, but what’s the advantage of having a short web domain?

People tend to remember catchy and short words faster than long ones. If you think about it, you will remember faster a word with 2 3 or up to 4 syllables  than a word with more than 4 syllables. But besides having a short name, you should also look for simplicity. What if you choose a string of 6 characters but all of them are random letters? i.e. jahsdjsjdg.com, khaslkdh.net…. Could you remember that? So lesson two, you should use a simple domain name, something that you can spell and remember without problems.

Many people tend to include keywords in the domain, which is not bad. In fact, it is a very good way to rank higher on search engines but sometimes, it’s not possible. For example, if you try to include “forex” or “diet” in a domain name, you will see that there is only one way to have it included, and this is choosing a very long and complex domain name, at least in english, the more common language on Internet.

Have you noticed that in the present time, many of the new web services have strange domain names? As example we have flickr, plurk, tumblr and others… The reason of that is due to the supersaturation of the internet, forcing the people to acquire strange, but short and easy to remember domain names.

Where to buy?

You can acquire and register low cost domain names at GoDaddy. GoDaddy is the world’s largest domain name registrar and is the flagship company of The Go Daddy Group, Inc. Go Daddy is widely recognized for its success, having been ranked #8 on the 2004 Inc. 500 list of the nation’s fastest-growing privately held companies; #20 on the 2005 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 (growing 8,274 percent!); and having won the CNET Editor’s Choice award in 2001, the Name Intelligence Largest Net Gain Award in 2002, 2003 and 2005; the Name Intelligence Users’ Choice Award in 2005 as well as the #1 Best Overall Registrar in 2003. Go Daddy also won the Arizona Corporate Excellence Award for fastest growing privately-held company in 2003 and Most Innovative Large Company in 2004.

Things you should consider before buying a domain

Before buying a domain, I recommend you to make a big list of possible names. Remember that possibly, many of that names could be already taken by someone else, so try to have a wide list. Also, you should ask to yourself the following questions:

• Is it catchy, is it easy to remember?
• Is it easy to spell/pronounce?
• How long/short is it?
• Is it complex or simple?
• And may be the most important, match this name with my website/service/product?

Then, it’s time to go to GoDaddy and look for what you have listed. If you are lucky, you could find a shot and catchy website domain name . Good luck with that!