Shawn Collins' Blog

Affiliate marketing and other stuff from Shawn Collins, co-founder of Affiliate Summit.

Archives for December 2005

Ask Shawn Collins: Best Affiliate Marketing Teachers

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Q: I would like to be an affiliate, but I am new. Could you suggest an affiliate program that has an affiliate manager that can help me all the way? I am a practical type person, I don’t like theory. I want to learn from zero.

Shawn CollinsA: In general, you will find that affiliate managers won’t give newbies the time of day. That’s if they even admit you into their affiliate programs.

But don’t fret, because there are four folks that can absolutely show you how to get started and succeed as an affiliate.

Ken Evoy has been writing books and creating products for affiliate marketers for years, and one item that would benefit you is his Affiliate Masters Course. This complete, free 10-day course focuses on helping you succeed as an affiliate. It pulls no punches and hold nothing back.

Rosalind Gardner is the author of the Super Affiliate Handbook. This is her true story of how with no previous business experience, she earned $435,000+ in a single year as an affiliate (and now earns much more than that!).

James Martell has created a training program for affiliates, and his students swear by it. He’ll teach you in eight easy lessons how you can start publishing Web sites and earning substantial money as an affiliate.

Anik Singal runs the popular Affiliate Classroom training course and magazine. Check out his free newsletter and magazine to start learning. And take a look at his course, too.

You will probably be overwhelmed if you try and devour the work all four of these folks. Try one or two, apply yourself, take advantage of their resources and tools, and you will start seeing results.

Affiliate Marketing Competition Will Bring Improvements

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The following is what Jonathon White of AffiliateSeeking.com had to say in response to the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing?

In the future affiliate marketing is going to get better and more widely used on the Web. There are going to be more sites using this sort of marketing strategy to get their brand awareness accrossed the entire Web.

I have even produced my own affiliate programs directory as I believe in affiliate marketing.

Affiliate marketing works for both affiliates and also the merchants.

Affiliate marketing has quickly grown and will keep on growing, but things are going to improve as the affiliate marketing competition will also increase.

How would you answer the question, What is the Future of Affiliate Marketing? There are no right or wrong answers.

The author of any response that is published at affiliatetip.com or affiliatesummit.com will receive their choice of one of the following:

  • Size: small ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Size: medium ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Size: large ‘It’s an affiliate thing, you wouldn’t understand.’ t-shirt
  • Affiliate Summit coffee mug
  • Affiliate Summit optical mouse for a notebook computer

Share your thoughts now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=281531467120

Buying Advertisements on AffiliateTip.com Through Google AdWords

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I’ve gotten lots of inquiries in the past from folks that wanted to know what terms they needed to bid on to get their Google AdWords ads to run on AffiliateTip.com

Treadmill dog

Unfortunately, I had no idea, It seemed the same advertisers were on there all the time, so they must have cracked the code.

But it’s all different now, because Google AdWords now allows anybody to have their ads run on AffiliateTip.com. Ad slots available are on the left on every page in the main site and then blog square ads in every blog entry.

Get your ads up there now before everybody else catches on and drives the prices up.

Click here for more information about buying ads on AffiliateTip.com with Google AdWords.

OneandOnly Affiliate Program Shuttering – Thanks for the Memories

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It’s with a heavy heart that I share the following e-mail that I received yesterday:

First, let us thank you for your affiliation with the OneandOnlyNetwork. We regret to inform you that the OneandOnlyNetwork will be ceasing operations on December 30, 2005.

Beginning January 2, 2006, we will begin processing all final commission payouts due through December 30, 2005. Please allow 4 – 6 weeks for final payments to be made to you.

As an affiliate, you will continue to have access to the OneandOnlyNetwork member login until February 5, 2006.

We encourage you to join our Match.com affiliate program found at http://affiliates.match.com. Please feel free to contact us at affiliatemail@oneandonly.com if you have any questions.

Best Regards,
OneandOnlyNetwork Staff

Back in the 90’s, the OneandOnlyNetwork was a trailblazer in affiliate marketing. I’m not sure if they were the originators, but they were the first affiliate program on my radar to do things such as sharing the commission amounts of their top ten affiliates, creating an affiliate resource site, and offerring customer testimonials as affiliate creative.

The OneandOnlyNetwork also enabled affiliates to set up co-branded sites that featured the affiliate’s name and logo, and they had an attractive two-tier program.

Back in the day, there was an OneandOnlyNetwork affiliate named Jeff Belton who was a fixture at affiliate marketing conferences.

He would regale the conference attendees with his success story as an affiliate of the OneandOnlyNetwork. He’d tell how he dabbled in SEO and built a company called American Web Ventures Network Inc..

He would work in tandem with the OneandOnlyNetwork and recruit second tier affiliates, train them, and provide tools and resources to succeed as part of his network of sites that promoted the OneandOnlyNetwork.

They were a pioneer in affiliate marketing since May 1997 and they’ll be missed. Affiliate managers could learn a lot from the way they did things.

Convert RSS to E-mail Newsletters Automatically

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AWeber, my favorite vendor for sending e-mail autoresponders, follow ups, and newsletters, has launched a new feature that enables customers to distribute their RSS feeds by e-mail.

EmailThis has many applications for affiliates and affiliate managers, and I think this will really help to mainstream the adoption of RSS feeds.

According to an October 2005 White Paper published by Yahoo, “Awareness of RSS is quite low among Internet users. 12% of users are aware of RSS, and 4% have knowingly used RSS.

So forget about this RSS jibber jabber!

Let your visitors opt-in for your RSS feed without calling it that – the new service from AWeber is called the Feed Broadcaster and it allows your visitors to sign up for a traditional e-mail newsletter on your blog or other website that uses RSS.

The Feed Broadcaster will take your RSS content that is published through your blog, forum or however you leverage RSS and automatically create an e-mail newsletter sent to subscribers.

I just set it up in a matter of about two minutes and it was really easy. Here’s what you have to do:

  • Add the website address for your RSS feed to Feed Broadcaster.
  • Select how many news/story items you would like to be in each newsletter broadcast.
  • Select a pre-designed fancy HTML template and click “Load Template”.
  • Edit the template that is loaded automatically or use as is.

Within one hour AWeber will automatically grab the available RSS content from your feed and queue that content as a new broadcast in review status.

You can choose to send those broadcasts or delete them. From that point forward newsletter broadcasts would be sent out to any subscriber on the list automatically when a new post to your RSS feed is detected.