Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for September 2010

LinkTrust Connections and the OfferBoard Coming Soon

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Affiliate marketing software company LinkTrust is releasing new tools, LinkTrust Connections and the OfferBoard, for LinkTrust 6 users at the end of September.

LinkTrustThey’ve had requests from LinkTrust clients for a way to connect with other LinkTrust clients and exchange campaigns easily between accounts, according to the LinkTrust blog, and LT Connections addresses this request.

Additionally, the OfferBoard, which is being integrated directly into the Partner Center of LinkTrust, is a place where LinkTrust clients can advertise campaigns to syndicate to other LinkTrust clients.

More details at http://www.linktrust.com/hold-on-to-your-seats-%E2%80%93-this-is-a-good-one/.

Affiliate Marketing on 9/11 – Nine Years Later

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I can still see, hear, and smell NYC from that day. I was the affiliate manager at ClubMom, and I was excited that day, because we were relaunching the affiliate program (I guess I get excited easily).

September 11There weren’t many people in the office, yet, and I heard about the first tower being hit when one of my co-workers sent an email to the whole company with an image of the WTC burning. I think he was on a list to get email alerts from CNN or something.

Anyhow, the first thing I thought was “what is wrong with this idiot that he created this fake picture and sent it to the company?”. Because it had to be fake. I’d just seen the World Trade Center about a half hour before as I walked across town from Penn Station.

Then I tried to go to CNN.com. It was down. Every news site I tried to visit was down. And I got an IM from a friend in Maryland asking if I was OK. I was confused and getting increasingly freaked out.

Somebody put on a TV and as people came into work, we were all locked on the footage. It was just this scene of shock in the office. After about an hour, when nobody had moved from in front of the TV, I decided I needed to get out of the city. I was the first one to leave the office that day.

New york Post on September 12, 2001

When I got home, I posted a message to a discussion list of affiliate managers I’d started the year before. The list was a sort of support group for the bunch of us, as we tried to figure out what happened on 9/11 and the days after.

Here is my report to the list after making it home that day:

From: “Shawn Collins”
Date: Tue Sep 11, 2001 5:15 pm
Subject: Re: Are you OK?

The ClubMom crew is ok – our office is in midtown Manhattan. But since we’re close to the Empire State Building, I was a little freaked out that it might also be a target, and I left for home at 10:30 AM.

Just seconds after I left the office, I was walking down Fifth Avenue and people started screaming and crying – I looked up and the 2nd World Trade Center tower was collapsing before my eyes.

It was a real nightmare – people were hysterical and transportation was shut down. I was afraid I would not be able to leave the city – as I made it to the West Side, I saw people running uptown on the West Side Highway – many were covered in soot, some were bloody – a really horrible scene.

Fortunately, the ferries were running, and I was able to get across the Hudson River to NJ, where I took a bus to Giants Stadium, and then hitchhiked home.

My prayers go out to all who are affected by this (who isn’t?).

Be safe,
Shawn Collins
ClubMom

Video: My 9/11 Story

Enhancements to the LinkShare LinkGenerator Bookmarklet

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LinkShare has announced enhancements to their LinkGenerator that creates LinkShare affiliate links for any product on a merchant’s site.

LinkShareAffiliates Publishers can now add a U1 value (if they use Signature to track sub-sites or members), as well as append some promotional text and get back an HTML link.

The LinkGenerator bookmarklet is available in the Bento Box.

Here is how the pop-up window looks after affiliates click the LinkGenerator bookmark:

LinkShare bookmarklet

More details at http://blog.linkshare.com/2010/09/09/announcing-enhancements-to-our-linkgenerator-bookmarklet/.

FatWallet is a Great Place to Work

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Super affiliate FatWallet was just named as one of the 50 Best Small and Medium companies to work for in America in the 7th Annual Great Place to Work Rankings from Entrepreneur.

FatWalletFatWallet, based in Rockton, IL, came in at #20 of the best small companies (50-250 employees) to work for in America.

FatWallet has been described as a “dotcom located in a cornfield”. Fun aspects of the workplace includes events like kickball tournaments for charity, pinball, foosball, shuffleboard, and monthly game days.

The company also has a “no miss” policy, where people are not allowed to miss important family events for the sake of work.

Additionally, Tim Storm, Founder of FatWallet, is a finalist for Entrepreneur of 2010 by Entrepreneur Magazine

See the complete list at http://www.greatplacetowork.com/what_we_do/lists-us-sme.htm.

Congratulations to Tim and the FatWallet team!

Last Call for Affiliate Summit West 2011 Speaker Proposals

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The speaker proposal period for Affiliate Summit West 2011, taking place January 9-11 in Las Vegas, is about to end.

The submission deadline is September 23, 2010.

Jeremy Schoemaker speaking at Affiliate Summit East 2010

Accepted speakers will be notified no later than October 14, 2010. Due to the volume of submissions, we will not notify applicants if they have not been accepted. Therefore, if you have not been contacted by October 14, 2010, your proposal was not accepted.

Just like we did for Affiliate Summit East 2010, there will be a public voting system where everybody has a voice in the selection process of speakers for Affiliate Summit West 2011. Stay tuned for more details.

Submit your speaking proposal at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/11w-speakers/.

I’m Moving the Important Sites to Liquid Web

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I’ve used many different hosts over the years since I launched my first affiliate site back in 1998.

For years, I went with shared servers and then got to the point where I needed a dedicated server five or so years back.

This past March, I thought I’d found the ideal solution with the Rackspace Cloud. I was wrong.

My sites are now in the Rackspace Cloud

There ended up being frequent downtimes and the sites (my blog, Affiliate Summit.com, FeedFront.com, GeekCast.fm, and others) were too important to tolerate it.

For the month of August 2010, there were 16 downtimes for a total of 4 hours, 35 minutes, and 3 seconds, according to pingdom.com.

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So anyway, I spoke with a large number of folks about the hosts they were using, and it turned out the majority were at Liquid Web.

Based on the people using Liquid Web, I decided that was the host to investigate, and I loved what I saw.

They had competitive pricing and rave reviews from friends. Also, it was nice that they performed the migration of my sites for me for free, and they did it over Labor Day weekend.

I was a needy case with lots of questions during the migration, and they got back to me quickly with resolutions throughout the weekend.

Granted it’s early now, but I’ve been very pleased with Liquid Web.

Setting Up an Ebook Affiliate Program

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Q: My name is Darrius. I am a former college men and women basketball coach that wrote a booklet called the “Scholarship Game”. I sold the booklet on my website for $5.00 to athletic camps, aau, and soical group example boy & girl clubs. But now I intersted in adding affiliates to my site. I plan to use the topic in my booklet to attract my audiance to the the affiliate program such as recruiting services, eduactional services(sat,act), retail different product for six team sports. I had the opportunity to reading your articles and know the process is slow to develop. Please give me some advise on how to set up my blog, affiliate programs and exmple of website that have affilates displayed.

Shawn CollinsA: There are a couple different platforms you can use for a blog. I would suggest going with WordPress.

There are many hosting companies that will install WordPress for you at no additional cost. I have a shared hosting plan with bluehost for some of my affiliate projects, and then a dedicated server at Liquid Web for my main sites.

As far as some examples of affiliate sites, the only one I have that had an athletic angle is FatShawn.com, which is a WordPress blog.

On that blog, I use the Thesis theme (a theme is an easy to install design for your blog), which is a premium theme, meaning that you’ve got to pay for it. There are lots of free themes, too, but I really like the features that come with Thesis.

Anyhow, while you’re asking for examples of affiliates, I understand from your question that you want to be a merchant or advertiser to sell your booklet/ebook.

There are a couple places to sell an electronic product – the main one would be ClickBank.

If you’d prefer to go direct with affiliates, rather than a network, you could sell via PayPal. But if you go that route, you won’t have affiliates ready to promote you like you will in ClickBank, and you’ll have to also find a solution for the affiliate tracking.

Video: Setting Up an Ebook Affiliate Program

Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned From Google

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Everything I Know about Marketing I Learned From Google by Aaron Goldman was recently published, and I had a chance to sit down with him to ask some questions about the book.

Everything I Know About Marketing I Learned From GoogleShawn: Google can teach us a lot about how to market effectively, but are there any examples from Google where we can learn from their failures, too?

Aaron: Absolutely. Chapter #9 is Track Everything and I cover a lesson that Google learned the hard way about how important it is to capture signals about how your marketing is working.

When Google launched its print platform, it had all these fancy ways of trying to measure performance of print ads — unique URLs, 800 numbers, even a 2D bar code. This was great for advertisers to see if people actually responded but Google itself couldn’t track these responses.

With search and display ads, Google can not only track if an ad was delivered but it can see clicks and, in some cases, conversions. These signals are crucial for Google to tweak which ads get delivered, in what positions, at what times, etc. Google didn’t have these signals in print (nor audio ads, for that matter) and that’s why it had to shut it down.

The lesson for marketers is that it’s not enough to just know that your ad ran as scheduled. You need to track responses as far down the funnel if you can and always look for new ways to smoke out signals.

Shawn: Do you think Google’s tactics can also be applied well to strictly brick & mortar operations?

Aaron: Definitely. In my last example about tracking, it may be more difficult to connect the dots between an online interaction and in-store purchase, but it can be done. In my book, I talk about how comScore uses panels to link offline purchases to online activity.

And, even if a brick and mortar isn’t doing any online advertising, it can (and must!) still track performance of all marketing efforts, even If that means just asking, “How did you hear about us?” at the register.

Many of my other lessons have more obvious implications to the offline world. Keep it simple, stupid. Altruism sells. Etc. These are tried and true marketing principles that can be applied to businesses of any size and scale.

Shawn: What is the single, most important thing we can take away from Google’s marketing?

Aaron: Oy vey. That’s like asking me which of my children I like best.

I guess I’d say the most important thing that Google taught us is that marketing does not just mean advertising. Google spends very little on paid advertising (Super Bowl commercial notwithstanding). Rather, it finds unique and innovative ways to earn brand affinity, usage and loyalty.

In Chapter 19, I preach about making your company a great story. Google gets tons of great PR every day just by being, well, Googley. Great employee perks. Elaborate April fools pranks. Goats mowing lawns. It just goes to show you don’t need to spend money on ads to get noticed.

Shawn: You talk about how a company should distribute their brand everywhere… don’t you think that could be a wasted effort for brands that already know their audience?

Aaron: Knowing your audience isn’t enough. You have to reach them in their environment and engage them.

In Chapter 17, “Show off your assets,” I talk about breaking your brand down into bits that can be distributed everywhere. But the key is that the “bits” you create are relevant, meaningful, and valuable to your target audience.

An example I cover in the book is Time Warner, which took its entire Life photo archive and digitized it so that the images would live on long after the magazine folded.

Another example is Intel which created “Centrino boots” to allow gamers to run two times faster in World of Warcraft. Here, too, the key was developing (and digitizing) a key brand asset and seeding it out in the community.

But let’s not forget the lesson of Chapter 5 which is “Be Where Your Audience Is.” Distributing your brand only makes sense in places where the people you’re trying to reach are hanging out and spending time.

Shawn: How often do you Google yourself and/or your brand?

Aaron: At least once a day. And I’m not shy about it. I do it at home, in my office, even in public. Sure, it’s embarrassing when I get caught but I just keep telling myself its normal and everyone does it.

Thanks to Aaron for taking the time here.

Commission Junction Announces Finalists of CJYou Awards

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Commission Junction has announced the finalists for their CJYou Awards, which will be presented Wednesday, September 22 at Commission Junction University (CJU) in Santa Barbara, CA.

CJYou Awards Dinner at CJU

Here are the finalists for the 2010 CJYou Awards:

Rookie of the Year, Advertiser: Awarded to a new advertiser who has achieved the highest total revenue:

  • BodenUSA
  • Discover Bank
  • HomeEverything

Rookie of the Year, Publisher: Awarded to a new publisher who has achieved the highest total revenue:

  • Blue Door Media
  • Natural Intelligence
  • TheCouponScoop.com

Advertiser of the Year: Awarded to an advertiser who has achieved the largest year-over-year increase in revenue and greatest percentage of growth:

  • Expedia
  • HP Home and Home Office Store
  • The Home Depot

Publisher of the Year: Awarded to a publisher who has achieved the largest year-over-year increase in revenue and greatest percentage of growth:

  • Offers.com, Published by Vertive, Inc.
  • Polyvore
  • SurfMyAds.com

People’s Choice, Advertiser: Chosen by the publisher community and awarded to an advertiser who demonstrates the best partnership qualities and excellence in supporting publisher needs:

  • BuySeasons (BuyCostumes.com & Celebrate Express)
  • Priceline.com
  • The Home Depot

People’s Choice, Publisher: Chosen by the advertiser community and awarded to a publisher who demonstrates the best partnership qualities and excellence in delivering value to an advertiser’s affiliate program:

  • DealTaker.com
  • Savings.com
  • ShopatHome.com

Innovator of the Year: Awarded to an advertiser or publisher who demonstrates the most successful use of emerging technologies:

  • Freshpair.com
  • ShopStyle
  • SurfMyAds.com

Agency of the Year: Awarded to an agency that has excelled at fostering relationships between its clients and Commission Junction:

  • Blue Cherry Group
  • Gen3 Marketing
  • Schaaf-PartnerCentric

More details about the finalists at http://www.cj.com/cjyouawards2010/index.html.