Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for May 2007

Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants on Video

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I was just looking at a dusty copy of my book, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants, and thought I should bring that sucker into a new format.

Shawn CollinsThe paperback and electronic versions are still out there for purchase, but they’re pretty stale at this point. So I’ve decided to bring the book to affiliate managers the world over for free as a video book.

I will be providing a short recap of each chapter of the book. If you’d like to view each of the chapters of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants, be sure to subscribe (it’s free) to my YouTube channel.

Here are the chapters of the book coming soon…

Part I: What Affiliate Marketing Can Do for Your Business

1. What is Affiliate Marketing?
2. The Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
3. Become an Affiliate Yourself and Earn Income

Part II: Setting Up Your Affiliate Program

4. Step One – Planning Your Affiliate Program
5. Step Two – Choosing Your Program Model
6. Step Three – Getting the Word Out
7. Step Four – Choosing the Right Affiliates
8. Step Five – Creating Your Affiliate Agreement
9. Step Six – Tracking Your Affiliate Program
10. Step Seven – Paying Your Affiliates

Part III: Managing Your Affiliate Program

11. Managing Your Program
12. Communicating with Your Affiliates
13. Supporting Your Affiliates

Affiliate Marketing Outrageously

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I read the book, Marketing Outrageously, by Jon Spoelstra during my epic flight to San Francisco for ad-tech in April, and I think that was one of the most enjoyable marketing books I’ve read.

Shawn Collins, Jon Spoelstra, and Missy Ward

Jon Spoelstra has been a very successful sports marketers, and his contention is that there is less risk and more payoff in creating outrageous marketing.

Marketing Outrageously is based on 17 ground rules, and it includes lots of examples and anecdotes of successful efforts from Spoelstra.

Some interesting concepts worth trying out, such as ground rule #6: if you mimic the market leaders, you’ll just add to their dominance. Lots of the advice here can be leveraged by affiliates, merchants, and networks.

In the spirit of Marketing Outrageously, I tried an experiment in marketing Affiliate Summit.

I registered the domain, AffiliateSummitSucks.com, and created a blog with some unusual postings that were critical of the conference. The posts were actual criticisms we’d received or read on forums and blogs.

So I decided to put them all out there, and in the process, I gently answered the criticisms within the same posts.

The blog turned out to be an interesting study in perceptions and assumptions. Despite the source of the blog (me) being in plain site (WHOIS, About page, and IP location), many folks fell for it.

And plenty of people didn’t fall for it, but they talked about it. They talked on blogs and forums, plus they called me to say they shared some of those criticisms and now they looked at them differently.

The most important metric was that I was able to measure a significant incremental lift in registrations in the week after the blog launched. This was based on the registrations the previous week and the same time before the conference compared to the last few shows.

Not bad for an investment of $18.34 for registering the domain for two years.

You know, traditional media gets a little mundane sometimes. It’s fun to do something out of the ordinary, and sometimes you just may get extraordinary results.

Affiliate Programs as a Business Model

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Q: Can a million dollar business model be based primarily on affiliate activity?

A: I wouldn’t personally stake a whole business on the performance of the affiliate program for the company.

The affiliate program can add some great incremental value and growth to your business plan, but to put all of your eggs in one basket is a bit risky.

It’s common with e-books, but you’ll generally never see a retailer do that sort of thing. You really should diversity and explore a lot of different marketing channels.

So I wouldn’t recommend it, and wouldn’t do it myself. It’s probably doable, but risky.

Five Things I'm Looking Forward to at Affiliate Summit

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I was just looking over the agenda for Affiliate Summit and came up with the five things I am looking forward to the most this coming July in Miami.

In no particular order…

  • Monday keynote from Ze Frank
  • Tuesday keynote discussion with Lisa Riolo (MC), Rob Kniaz (Product Manager at Google), and Mark Papia (VP of Performance Marketing at FOX Interactive Media)
  • Elevator Networking
  • Moniker Live Domain Auction
  • Learning opportunities from speakers and one-on-one interactions

So that’s my top five things I’m looking forward to in Miami. How about you?

Confucius say "It's Time Sam Harrelson Got a New Blog Home"

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I was just looking through my WordPress dashboard and saw an incoming link from a site called Affiliate Fortune Cookies.

Hmm… what’s this new site? So I check out affiliatefortunecookies.com. It’s got a BUMPzee! widget and links to familiar faces – I narrow it down to Sam Harrelson or Jim Kukral.

Off to WHOIS and I find that Sam is guy behind the new Affiliate Fortune Cookies blog. It seems his days writing on Cost Per News are numbered.

His mission, according to the site…

Simple: affiliate marketing is not easy to learn or to stay up-to-date in terms of the latest tips.

Affiliate Fortune Cookies is a blog where we’re going to be throwing out quick and easy tips, tricks and hacks to help out both newbies and old pros alike.

So, the experience level required to understand posts will range from absolutely none to fairly advanced understanding of algos and CJ inner workings. However, there will be something here for every affiliate marketer looking to stay up on the latest tips.

I’m looking forward to reading what Sam has to say here.

And now for my hackneyed prediction: Sam is a genius with his Affiliate Fortune Cookies. He’ll fill us up with great information, and an hour later we’ll be starving for more. Cue the rim shot.

Update
I just saw that it’s official – Sam will stop blogging at Cost Per News as of June 1 and then exclusively blog at Affiliate Fortune Cookies.

Name the ABestWeb Members and Win

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On Thursday, May 10, Haiko de Poel Jr. hosted an ABestWeb affiliate marketing dinner at Amalia in NYC. Great crowd and great times for the couple dozen folks in attendance.

I was planning to corner some of the luminaries there for brief video interviews, but the combination of a loud restaurant and fun conversations kept me from my mission.

But I did manage to gather ten seconds of footage of the crowd during dinner. So lets make something of this – the first person that can name three people in the video will get a free, full conference pass to Affiliate Summit 2007 East – July 8-10 in Miami.

Entries must be posted to the comments on the AffiliateTip.com blog for this post.

Mpire Affiliate Shopping Widgets

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Mpire has rolled out about 80 new e-commerce widgets that are geared towards bloggers.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, these affiliate widgets…

…will allow bloggers and online publishers to post shopping-related content to their sites and make money by passing leads on to Amazon.com and eBay. Those who download the widgets will keep 100 percent of the revenue, with Mpire hoping to make money by selling custom widgets to large search engines, online marketplaces or other players. It also hopes that the widgets — if added to hundreds or thousands of Web sites — will boost Mpire’s rankings in search engine results.

Mpire widgets are designed to integrate easily with MySpace, TypePad, WordPress and other blogging platforms.

More details at http://www.mpire.com/widgets/.

Affilipedia Dies a Wikid Death

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Back in October 2005, I launched Affilipedia, a wiki intended to be “the Affiliate Marketing Encyclopedia.” Today, I am saddened to announce the passing of the site.

Affilipedia was a non-commercial endeavor with the objective of defining the affiliate marketing space via the contributions of folks in the industry.

Unfortunately, the Web 2.0 doors swung open for affiliate marketers to submit articles and update terminology in the space, and nobody came.

Well, some people were there regularly. Adult, pharmaceutical, and ringtone spammer skells regularly overwrote content with their links. I was banning IPs for breakfast each day with these characters.

They shouldn’t shed a tear – all of their garbage links automatically had the nofollow attribute on them.

Anyhow, maybe it was the name (“sounds rather like some dreadful illness or worse, some heinous crime” – ThreadWatch), lack of need for it, or whatever. But that’s that for my wiki experiment.

Adieu Affilipedia.

Literati + Affiliate Links = Twitter 2.0

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This week on Affiliate Thing we welcomed Debra Hamel, creator of TwitterLit (Twittering the first lines of books so you dont have to).

Topics discussed included how Debra came up with the idea for the site, other Twitter related ventures, and how she got into affiliate marketing.

We also touched on a successful viral video from Pepperjam, an ABestWeb dinner in NYC, the upcoming LinkShare Symposium, and how Nick Wilson, founder of ThreadWatch, Twittered reports and pictures as his wife gave birth.

Maybe next week we’ll go 30 minutes without saying Twitter.

More Affiliate Thing shows at GeekCast.fm.

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