Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for June 2009

Affiliate Solutions and Refer-it 10 Years Later

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Back in the spring of 1999, Cindy Arko (then Aylward) hired me to join her and James Marciano to run Refer-it.com, the first affiliate program directory.

Prior to my joining them, they ran the first Affiliate Solutions conference at the Harvard Club in early 1999.

It was an exciting, explosive time in affiliate marketing back when affiliate directories mattered and the first affiliate conference was getting off the ground.

Refer-it.com in 1999

The first Affiliate Solutions conference I attended was on December 2, 1999 in New York City. It was also the first conference where I was a speaker.

Affiliate Solutions

Shortly after, I wrote a recap of Affiliate Solutions NYC 1999 for ClickZ.

Anyhow, I met up with Cindy for lunch today and we had a quick chat about how she got started with Refer-it and Affiliate Solutions.

Introducing the Affiliate Summit Advisory Board

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The Affiliate Summit Advisory Board is a group of people from a cross-section of the affiliate marketing space.

The role of the Affiliate Summit Advisory Board is to contribute thoughts, opinions, and insights into the planning of Affiliate Summit events, as well as voting on speaker proposals and Pinnacle Awards.

Affiliate Summit Advisory Board

Meet the Affiliate Summit Advisory Board at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/affiliate-summit-advisory-board/.

Scheduling Time for Autoresponders

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AWeber has released new options to their follow up email messaging system that enable scheduling of automatic messages.

With this new feature, you can select certain days for your automatic messages to send or not send regardless of the day interval you have chosen.

I’m excited about this functionality to optimize my open rates, and I am going to go in and select times for my follow ups as soon as I post this.

And I love that I can select the times to apply to the time zone of the recipient, because my emails are currently ET-centric (since that’s where I am).

Free Affiliate Crab Feast in Baltimore

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Affiliate Summit and buy.at are hosting a Tax Talk & Crab Feast on Thursday, July 9 in Baltimore, MD at the buy.at office.

We’ll be getting together starting at 4pm for a discussion on the advertising tax legislation, the impact on affiliate marketers, and how to fight it.

Advertising.com Internal Crab Feast Celebration 1

Also, we’ll use this time to demo the buy.at interface and answer any questions.

And then, the networking runs from 5pm to 8pm with a crab feast, as well as various BBQ foods and drinks on the promenade outside the buy.at offices.

Advertising.com Internal Crab Feast Celebration 3

Affiliate Summit and buy.at are covering the tab, so come on out to do some business on the Bay.

Advertising.com Internal Crab Feast Celebration 4

Note – this event is for affiliate marketers only. Please do not bring any guests with you. Space is limited, and the RSVP will be closed when we reach capacity.

RSVP at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/tax-talk-crab-feast/

Advertising.com Internal Crab Feast Celebration 2

The buy.at office is located at 1020 Hull Street, Ivory Building, Baltimore, MD 21230.

Service to Stop Trademark Abuse in PPC Ads Launches

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BrandVerity has launched PoachMark, a service to help brands identify and stop trademark abuse in paid search ads.

PoachMark identifies the websites, keywords and affiliate IDs used by affiliates as they run campaigns in paid search.

Benefits for brand owners using PoachMark include saving commissions paid to fraudulent affiliates, improving the performance of their brand keywords, and gaining a stronger ability to control their brand’s messaging.

Try it out at http://www.brandverity.com/.

15 Tools and Services for Affiliate Marketers on Macs

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Affiliate marketer John Engler works on a Mac (sorry John) and has listed 15 tools and services he uses frequently in his affiliate pursuits.

John’s list is foreign to me, except Jungle Disk, which I use on my PCs, but it looks like a helpful bunch of things, such as FTP, text editing, screen capture, IM, etc.

I actually sketched out a similar list of stuff I use a while back – look out for that post.

More details at http://inluminent.com/2009/05/31/fifteen-mac-applications-for-affiliates-and-affiliate-marketers/.

Get Your Username on Facebook

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This week on the Brandmouthing podcast, I talk about reinforcing your personal brand by securing your personal name or brand name on Facebook.

Angry dog

According to the Facebook blog…

Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that you administer by visiting www.facebook.com/username. You’ll also see a notice on your home page with instructions for obtaining your username at that time.

So even if you don’t hear this before the username rush for profiles and pages on Facebook, try and secure your name whenever you hear about it.

Check out brandmouthing.com for a collection of all future episodes of Brandmouthing, as well as images, videos, etc. that I mention on the podcast.

Offer Your RSS by Email

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I am a big advocate of offering email as a subscription option for RSS feeds. Not only does it give people another choice to consume RSS feeds, but this option has been far more popular among reader of my blogs than subscribing with RSS readers.

EmailThere are various ways to do this, but I’m going to share how it’s done via AWeber, since that’s the vendor I use.

In addition to the ability to collect emails for RSS feeds via AWeber, they also enable you to build email lists for newsletters, autoresponders, and more.

Anyhow, when you’re in AWeber, you can start an RSS opt-in list by going to “Blog Broadcast”. It’s an intuitive process where you setup the email subject, select a template (or design your own HTML), choose frequency, whether you want click tracking, etc.

I have a number of different RSS lists going, and some drop daily, while others go out weekly.

The default for the subject in your emails is the name of the RSS feed. Based on feedback I received (people thought I kept sending them the same emai), I changed the subject in the interface, so the email subject is always the title of the first blog post in the email.

I’ve seen my open rates increase since that change.

There is also an option to have your RSS email subjects syndicated to Twitter through an AWeber account.

Affiliate Fatblogging: Running Away from Beer

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This week I decided to incorporate some more types of exercise into my routine. I went running for the first time since 1994 or so.

This run revealed to me that I have horrible stamina and I’m very out of shape. Granted, it was late in the day and very hot, I didn’t stretch (stupid!), and I wasn’t well hydrated.

So, I was dying with cramps after like a half mile. I need to work up to a 5k and later a 10k this year.

If anybody has some advice on running shoes, I’d love to hear a recommendation (with an affiliate link, of course). I’m at the end of the life of my current pair, and need to get new ones now.

I remain at 219, much to my dismay. This extended plateau isn’t working for me. It’s time for extremes, and you know what that means… no more beer for a while.

I am thinking/hoping that is the problem, and will see if I can move the needle in the coming weeks.

Starting weight: 225
Last week: 219
This week: 219

FeedFront Magazine Issue 6 Now Online

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The sixth issue of FeedFront, the official magazine of Affiliate Summit, is at the printer and it will be hitting mailboxes later this month.

FeedFront Magazine, Issue 6Issue six will also be distributed at the Linkshare Symposium East in NYC on June 23, 2009.

The cover features super affiliate Connie Berg, founder of FlamingoWorld.com, and an interview about her career, thoughts on the affiliate marketing industry, the fight against the advertising tax in Minnesota, and which Aerosmith song sums up her life.

There are also articles on social media tactics, tips for keeping WordPress running smoothly, things to look for in an affiliate programs, search engine marketing strategies, and more.

Issue 6 can now be downloaded in PDF format, as well as on Scribd.

Get the FeedFront RSS if you’d like to get all of the articles as they are published to the feed.

If you haven’t subscribed, you can get the magazine for free at http://feedfront.com/free-subscription/.

Also, become a fan of FeedFront on Facebook to see past issues, covers, etc.