This is a guest post by TJ Aaron from LaptopLogic.com.  LaptopLogic provides laptop reviews and news on a regular basis. They cover everything for the laptop enthusiast, including accessory reviews and other useful information. Check out their Latest Review section to see what’s cooking in the world of laptops.

Bloggers are like any other PC user and have their own specific computing needs. We’ve compiled a list of the best notebook computers for bloggers, but you will notice that these machines are all very different from each other and offer different benefits for different bloggers.

Sony VAIO P

What could be better than an ultraportable machine that was designed around the smallest, functional keyboard? With over four hours of battery life, under 2 pound weight, and a high resolution 1600×768 resolution screen, the VAIO P has some great specs on paper. But in the end this machine will have a very divided following: some will hate it, while others will love it. It is also rather expensive for what is a glorified netbook, starting at $899 but surging to $1200 or more with a reasonable configuration.

HP EliteBook 2730p tablet

While it’s no surprise that HP made this list, but what may surprise you is that it is a convertible notebook with a tablet screen. You can fold this diminutive 12 inch convertible in half and use the tablet functionality to write by hand with the stylus. Another great use of the tablet is reading. Yes, reading; bloggers tend to do a lot of that. With the tablet in slate mode you can view a ton of text and easily scroll with one hand.

Asus Eee PC 1000HE

You knew you would see a netbook on this list, and here it is. Many netbooks are difficult to distinguish thanks to the ubiquitous Intel Atom platform and meager specs. However the new 1000HE model from Asus has the latest Atom processor and accompanying chipset, but more importantly a high capacity battery! Asus calls for up to 9.5 hours and with a pre-order price of $399, this is the netbook to get if you can stand the small keyboard and pokey performance.

Lenovo ThinkPad X200

Cool, quiet, tiny, powerful, and a perfect keyboard make this machine a top pick for any user, but it is especially great for someone who needs to be typing anywhere, anytime. Users are reporting over four hours of usage on the 6 cell battery or you can nearly double that on the 9-cell, which does stick out the back. The keyboard is a true full-size design with the impeccable ThinkPad quality we all know and love. Did we mention it’s super light, doesn’t get warm in your lap, and has your choice of blazing Core 2 Duo processors? The price is pretty reasonable too.

HP Pavilion dv2

HP’s latest notebook has a lot to offer with its 12.1 inch screen, 1 inch thick design, and 3.8 pound weight with an LED-backlit display, nearly full-size keyboard, discrete graphics, and plenty of other goodies. The optical drive isn’t integrated, as with the Lenovo X200, but a matching external drive is available with regular DVDRW or Blu-ray capabilities. AMD’s new Athlon Neo chip is at play here, with a respectable ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3410 graphics chip under the hood. While it is small and slick, the $699 starting price tag is even more attractive.

As most of you are aware, Feedburner has two separate metrics by which they measure your feed — total subscribers and reach. The subscribers number shows the estimated number of subscriptions. The only real concrete number you have there is your email subscribers, but even then those subscribers could be filtering your messages to a junk folder or simply deleting it without reading. The real RSS metric is the reach of the blog.

The blog’s RSS feed reach tells how many of your subscribers actually took a look at the feed and what posts they read. You might have 35 subscribers who read the latest post, with 10 or so reading the previous post.  What if you had 130 subscribers? That’s about a quarter of your possible reach. How could you possibly increase that reach?

How did you obtain your subscribers in the first place? Did you run a contest or were they all organic additions? If you ran a contest to gain subscribers, then the subscriber may have used a secondary email or filtered the feed out in their email software. It could be advantageous to contact your email subscribers one-by-one to create a dialog. This would help gauge their interest in your content. If you run a photography blog, then inquire about their needs. Find out what makes them tick. Do they need support on their particular digital camera model, photo development tricks, or software enhancements? Once you create that dialog with them, they’ll be more likely to interact with your content in the future.

All email subscribers are listed in your Feedburner account. You just have to dig a little to find them. Go to the Analyze tab –> Subscribers under the Feed Stats (on left) –> Scroll down to Email Subscription Services –> Click on it then open the link to Manage your Email Subscriber List. From here you can see every email subscriber in Feedburner, including their email’s status, like whether they’ve verified their subscription or not.

While I don’t condone using these emails to spam a copied letter, I do think it would be fine to send them one email asking them if they’ve returned to your site in a while, what they think of the content, how you could improve the content, and possibly if they remember how they found the site. Realistically most won’t respond, but many might. Those that do can help you improve your brand. I would only send one email though…don’t force the issue if they do not respond.

RSS Reader Subscribers

To increase the reach of those RSS subscriber readers who use a feed reader rather than emailed updates, the solution becomes much more difficult. The reach really is dependent on whether they check their RSS reader software or not. Once you have them open your feed, you need to keep them interested, so they survey all the information. I would also include branding logos inside the feed, which Feedburner allows, as well as a footer message to encourage their interaction with your site. I’ve seen this done quite artfully in the past. A little personal message enticing them to check out your new feature or site design can do the trick. At this point though, you’ve already accomplished what you set out to do — increase your reach.

Aside from stepping into someone’s office and pulling up their Google reader to your feed, there’s not much a blogger can do. We can make our content stand out a little from the other feeds in our readers, write quality content, and ask for feedback at regular intervals. Most of all we need to keep at writing content and the challenges that our blog presents.

The fire has gone. The smoke from the smoldering mess wafts listlessly into the blogosphere. Something happened here. An attack maybe. A disaster of some sort. Many have questioned. Others have emailed their concern. One man cared to pay a little to help clean up the wreckage.

The site continued in this state for how long? Some new visitors smelled the smoke, and searched in the archives for the fire. They hung onto hope by subscribing to the RSS feed, hoping either to see rebirth from the ashes or never to be bothered again.

Meanwhile the earth continued revolving, endlessly spinning, shifting, changing. The writer, Jason Boom, felt the urge to grab a shovel and begin moving earth, but something kept him from it. His wife, at home, was pregnant. The freelance writing had taken hold. The web development projects trailed off into the night.

Then, a miracle happened. A light. Jason woke one day with energy to spend towards cleanup. There was a lot of work to be done. It’d been three months, since he’d visited the site, but he knew he could still pull something out of the ashes.

He began by upgrading Wordpress to the latest 2.7 version. The new digs helped brighten the back end of the site some, but what could be said for the content? Would people still care? Would they understand?

Jason noticed that feedburner still had subscriber numbers. How awesome! Survivors! They’re out there. So he pleaded with them.

“Forgive me! Content is king, but lately my content has been absent, off fighting the good fight in the real world. But now I’m back to clean up this mess and make the site no longer stink.”

“I’m back,” he whispered softly into the blogosphere.

Did they hear him?

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