Shawn Collins' Blog

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

Archives for April 2011

Last Call for Affiliate Summit East 2011 Speaker Proposals

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The speaker proposal period for Affiliate Summit East 2011, taking place August 21-23, 2011 in New York City, is about to end.

The submission deadline is April 29, 2011.

Jeremy Schoemaker speaking at Affiliate Summit East 2010

The speaker submissions are chosen based on the following:

  • Public voting scores and comments.
  • Voting scores and comments by the Affiliate Summit Advisory Board.
  • Voting scores by Affiliate Summit founders Missy Ward and Shawn Collins.

Accepted speakers will be notified no later than May 20, 2011. 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 May 20, 2011, your proposal was not accepted.

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

Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants Turns 10

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Successful Affiliate Marketing for MerchantsI started writing about affiliate marketing in 1999 with my first column for ClickZ.com, “Affiliate Programs 101 – A Primer For Success“. In late 2000, Que Publishing found me on ClickZ.com and contacted me about writing a book on affiliate program management.

I had about six weeks at the end of 2000 to finish up what was originally titled “Pay for Performance: Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants.”

The book, “Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants,” which was based on my early years of managing affiliate programs, came out a few months later.

The official release date on Amazon is April 21, 2001, though it did come out earlier, because I brought a box of copies to sell at the Affiliate Force conference, which took place on a cruise ship over April 20-23, 2001.

Affiliate Force 2001

Anyhow, it’s ten years later, and it has been gratifying to hear from so many people over time on how the book helped them to learn what to do when they were thrust into the position of an affiliate manager.

The book is pretty out of date now. Well, there were parts that were out of date from the time I turned in the manuscript to when it was published. But that’s the nature of any book about Internet business.

In 2007, I updated each of the chapters in short videos, which I posted to YouTube. You can see all of the chapters of that updated video edition of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants.

Thanks to everybody who has purchased a copy over the years. Happy Birthday, book.

Chrysler Lost Me and @Chrysler Won Me Back

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I was watching the last Super Bowl when I got annoyed by the Chrysler Eminem Super Bowl Commercial – Imported From Detroit.

The commercial was well done, but it touched a nerve with me, because my 2006 Chrysler Town and Country was falling apart from bumper to bumper.

So when Eminem told me, “This is the Motor City, and this is what we do,” all I could figure was that he was bragging on broken down cars.

A couple days later, I was communicating with some folks on Twitter, and I Tweeted about the commercial and my minivan.

Tweet about Chrysler

The next day, I got a message from Mike Driehorst of @Chrysler, and after collecting some details, he got the ball rolling on a resolution for me with Chrysler customer service.

Even though my 2006 Chrysler Town and Country was out of warranty, the good folks at Chrysler helped me get everything fixed with a break in price, and it’s running like new now.

They could have easily said tough luck, and that’s what I expected. But they didn’t, and now I’m a reclaimed customer.

I hope my minivan runs a good while longer, but when it’s time for a new one, I’ll be looking at Chrysler again.

Will Your State Destroy Your Affiliate Business?

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I was on a video chat with Travis Campbell of Marketing Professor about the latest on the advertising tax and implications for small businesses around the United States.

It’s a quick 12-minute video about how states are putting affiliates out of business, and the action that can be taken to try and preserve business in your state.

I’d also suggest that any affiliate marketers read an article in issue 14 of FeedFront Magazine (page 3) by Mike Allen on 9 Times for Contacting Legislators.

More details at http://www.marketingprofessor.com/affiliate-marketing/successful-affiliates-out-of-business-overnight/

Video: Successful Affiliate Marketers Out of Business Overnight – Why? How You Can Help

Membership Site, Blog and Forum for Sale

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Jim Kukral and I started Unguru.me as a place for small business owners, entrepreneurs and marketers of all levels of experience to get together to learn and network in an unfiltered atmosphere that is void of hype.

Unguru.me homepage

But after pulling together the membership site built on aMember, vBulletin, and WordPress, we found that we didn’t have time to grow it in the way we had originally planned.

So now we’re selling it on flippa.com.

The sale of the site includes the existing setup and content, logo, the domain ungurume.com, Twitter account @ungurume, and facebook.com/ungurume

Unguru.me forum

Our original plan was to charge a monthly membership fee for access to exclusive interviews, forums, and tools. But we just have too many projects, and weren’t giving Unguru.me the TLC it needed to grow and thrive.

The site has just over 500 registered members, and it could grow far bigger in the right hands. Provide an active community and useful resources to 500 members paying $10/month and you’ve got $5,000/month.

Bid now at flippa.com/132234.

The Ultimate Affiliate Fight – ShoeMoney vs. Barman

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Jeremy “ShoeMoney” Schoemaker has challenged Barman of ppc.bz to a charity fight “under UFC rules (basically anything goes besides strikes to the groin and kicks to the head of a downed opponent) that will be guest referred by UFC Hall Of Famer Randy Couture.”

In his post, ShoeMoney to Fight Barman At ASW for charity?, ShoeMoney alludes to simmering fued between the two.

ShoeMoney fight challenge

Soon after the initial post, Barman replied on his blog with a post, Challenge Accepted – Shoemoney Has 4 Months to Live, that he’d accepted the challenge.

ppc.bz accepts the challenge

It looks like they might move it up to take place during Affiliate Summit East 2011, which takes place August 21-23 in New York City.

Stay tuned for more details.

Note: Affiliate Summit is not involved in this event.

How to Monetize Your Site with Widgets

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How to Monetize Your Site with Widgets presentation from Affiliate Summit East 2009, which took place August 9-11, 2009 in New York, NY.

Speakers:

This presentation will discuss how to enhance your site using various widgets, what works and what doesn’t, and how effective different widgets are to your site.

Slides from this session are available at http://www.slideshare.net/affsum/how-to-monetize-your-site-with-widgets

More details on Affiliate Summit at http://www.affiliatesummit.com/

Note: the company(ies) and position(s) listed above were current as of the time of the conference. Some of this information may have changed since then.

Video: How to Monetize Your Site with Widgets

If you liked this video, be sure to register for the next Affiliate Summit. The session videos aren’t made public until a year or more after each conference.

My Favorite Traffic Sources

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I gave a presentation on My Favorite Traffic Sources at the Austin SEO Meetup last night.

traffic sources

The discussion covered how I embrace site scrapers, and leverage Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, AWeber, Meetup.com, LinkedIn, Flickr and more to drive quality traffic to my sites and affiliate links.

I also talked about how I used Facebook Ads to help sell my house in New Jersey in just 14 days last year.

The sites and resources I mentioned in the presentation are listed on my resources for affiliate marketers page.

Presentation: My Favorite Traffic Sources

My Favorite Traffic Sources

View more presentations from Affiliate Summit

FatWallet.com Moves to Wisconsin

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I got a chuckle out of a Tweet from super affiliate Tim Storm earlier today.

He was referencing a comment on a news story about his moving FatWallet.com from Illinois to Wisconsin.

Who is Tim Storm?

If you’re not familiar with the story, last month Illinois Governor Quinn signed HB 3659 into law, which forces out-of-state retailers to collect Illinois state sales tax for Internet sales, based on the view that affiliate marketers constitute a tax nexus for the retailers.

This law made it impossible to Tim Storm to continue his business in Illinois, so he picked up and moved his operation and dozens of employees to Wisconsin.

Speaking of John Galt, Atlas Shrugged (the first of three parts) opens in theaters this Friday.

Who is Tim Storm?

Video: FatWallet.com Packs Up for Wisconsin

Affiliate Summit is the Top Internet Conference

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I was chatting with Marc Ostrofsky, author of the upcoming book, Get Rich Click, at the Austin Internet Marketing Party, and he gave me an advance copy (thanks Marc!).

As I was paging through the book, I came across his list of the Top 25 Internet Conferences on page 222 of the book.

Affiliate Summit is the Best Internet Conference

And I was happily surprised to see Affiliate Summit up in the #1 spot.

Our goal is to make Affiliate Summit the best return on investment of any event in the schedule of our attendees, and we’re always anxious to hear harsh criticisms, suggestions, and anything else.

Contact us any time – our contact form goes to the entire Affiliate Summit team. So many changes over the years, such as the current version of our name tags, the newcomer program, our method of session Q&A, and the first timer sessions I run, have been the result of your feedback.

Keep telling us what you want and we’ll do our best to give it to you.

Get Rich Click is coming out on May 2 – stay tuned for a review of the book from me.