Shawn Collins' Blog

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

About Shawn Collins

Shawn Collins has been an affiliate marketer since 1997. He is a Co-founder of Affiliate Summit, the leading global conference and tradeshow for the affiliate marketing industry, and Co-Editor-in-Chief of FeedFront Magazine.

He has authored the books “Affiliate Manager Boot Camp“, “Extra Money Answer“, “How to Get the Most from Exhibiting at Conferences”, “How to Get the Most Out of Attending a Conference”, “How to Become a Successful Conference Speaker“, and “Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants“. Also, he co-publishes the annual AffStat affiliate marketing benchmark reports.

Shawn blogs at AffiliateTip.com. Additionally, Shawn has been quoted in numerous publications, including Entrepreneur Magazine, Internet Retailer, Inc. Magazine, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.

You Can Be Healthy During COVID-19

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I see lots of people on social media talking about how they’ve gained weight this year from COVID-19. When the global pandemic hit, I was freaked out and wanted to do whatever I could to avoid catching COVID-19.

In the pre-COVID-19 days, I would go to the gym a few days a week. It wasn’t making a big difference, but it was helping to preserve the status quo.

After we were locked down, I was going a little crazy being homebound and the only thing I could do outside the house for a while was exercise, so I started doing it every day.

At first, it was a half-hour or so a day to get my blood pumping. Then it morphed into 5 miles a day – either walking or intervals of walking and running.

In addition to enjoying the fresh air and change of scenery, I had read that vitamin D was helpful in staying resistant, so being out in the sun each day was a plus.

I also began taking 1,000 mg vitamin C each morning and one gallon of water per day with a motivational water bottle that had times you should drink the water by.

Since I wanted to track my progress along the way I also got a Withings watch, which tracks steps, heartbeat, sleep, etc. It has some similar functionality to an Apple watch, but it looks like a real watch.

I like the Withings brand and have used one of their WiFi-enabled scales for years to track weight loss and gain. This information syncs into their own app and others.

I didn’t stop at exercise and water consumption – I also focused on low-carb foods in the Atkins Diet.

Since I started my COVID-19 exercise plan I have lost around 20 pounds and I am feeling a lot better.

If there is any silver lining from this global pandemic, it’s that it got me to get more healthy and build my immunity to avoid becoming a statistic.

Take Steps to Make Your Home Safer

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Our neighborhoods feel like a safe bubble, but if you get alerts from a Ring doorbell you know there is property crime happening in and around any given area.

That’s inevitable in any city, so it’s a good idea to take some steps to improve your home security and minimize your risk of becoming a police statistic.

While you can’t guarantee you won’t be a victim in the future, you can take precautions to make your home less attractive to burglars.

Here are some steps I’ve taken at my house…

  • Shine a light: I have a couple of motion-activated lights, as well as keeping my front porch light on at night, so there are less dark places for people to creep around.
  • Sound the alarm: I got wired up with a security company and planted the signs and stickers around to let prospective burglars know breaking into my place will be met with an ear-piercing siren and automatic call to the police.
  • Reinforce your doors: a security bar can help fortify the doors to the outside and garage. If somebody is trying to get in, make it as difficult as you can by getting an adjustable door security bar.
  • Locking the gate door: I put a simple padlock on my gate door so entry into the yard is more of a hassle than it’s worth.
  • Big Brother is watching: I have a Ring doorbell, as well as a handful of Google Nest cameras to cover outside areas and let any passersby know they are on camera. I have them inside, too, and there is an option to tie to your phone so the internal cameras can be shut off automatically when your phone is home.
  • Locks your doors: My parents were from a big city, and even with growing up in the suburbs I learned from a young age that you lock the door whenever you come and go. Some people think that’s paranoid. I think it’s a good way to keep uninvited guests from entering my home.
  • Take away their view: I have a camera in my garage and I get notifications when movement is detected. One time I got that notification because a stranger was peeking in my garage door windows to see what I had. Right away I went online and ordered some frosted window film to keep prying eyes off my things.
  • Wag the dog: a barking dog can be a nuisance, but that furry face and noisy snout can also get criminals to think twice about trying to get into your home. My dog ate through some blinds in my front room to show her face more – I was not pleased about the destruction, but happy she likes to show her pretty face to anybody casing the house.

Think about taking these steps to keep your home and family safe and make the burglars know you’re not an easy target.

The Long Goodbye from Home

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On January 30, 2020, I boarded Southwest flight 1713 from Las Vegas to Austin. I woke up with an empty feeling. I always got this feeling as an Affiliate Summit ended, and I knew it would be a while before I saw all of these people that I’ve come to know and love. I missed them already.

My last Affiliate Summit party

The night before, there was a beautiful sendoff at Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill with so many friends who became family in the time since Missy Ward and I started Affiliate Summit in 2003. My heart was full from that night, but there was a feeling of sadness as I thought about how some of these people wouldn’t be in NYC for Affiliate Summit East 2020.

It hit me that I may well never see some of these people again. But I found solace in knowing I would still see a bunch of others.

Well, that plan got COVID-19’d, didn’t it?

That expected closure after this 17-year journey wasn’t meant to be, and I still have a lot of unspent hugs to give out at some future time and location.

In the meantime, I smile about all of the shared struggles and successes and experiences across 50 Affiliate Summit events on three continents. The late nights and early mornings. I never did come down with “conference crud” like so many of you, unless it was just a really bad hangover all of this time.

Building Affiliate Summit with Missy and all of you was the best thing I’ve ever done. All of you! We certainly didn’t get here alone. We never could have. From the very start, there were great people helping us stuff bags, carry boxes, and spread the word.

So many people spoke and wrote words, shared ideas, stood with us, and supported us through all of these times. When competitors came after us; the Great Recession hit; people were needed to speak out against legislation that would harm the industry… you were there. You always were. A great big, dysfunctional, beautiful family.

I wish I were going to see that family this July in New York City. There are so many little things that add up to a rich experience there each time.

I’ll miss stocking up on my Diet Dr. Peppers at Duane Reade, serendipitously meeting people in the Marriott Marquis smoking area, having drinks in the Broadway Lounge and the Playwright Celtic Pub around the corner, hanging out with people for the first time in a while, the hotel decked out with Affiliate Summit signs and banners and check-in booths, walking through the Meet Market before it opens and getting butterflies, confusing which side to go to for an up or down escalator, heading to the Copacabana for Affiliate Ball, late-night street meat, looking out the window from my room to Times Square, seeing all of the people excitedly doing business together, catching a Yankees game, and then the goodbyes.

So, I guess this is my goodbye. Actually, no. Let’s make this my “until I see you again.”

This anonymous quote really resonates with me right now… “At some point in your childhood, you and your friends went outside to play together for the last time, and nobody knew it.”

I miss y’all.

Early Affiliate Marketing Statistics with AffStat

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Back in the early 2000s, there was not a lot of data on affiliate marketing, and I wanted to know more about what was going on. So I decided to make my own report of statistics on the industry and registered AffStat.com on October 29, 2002.

Presenting at Affiliate Force 2003

The first report came out in the spring of 2003 and I gave a presentation on it at the Affiliate Force conference, which took place April 24-28, 2003 aboard the Carnival Imagination cruise ship.

At the time I was the ClubMom.com Affiliate Manager, as well as the President of the US chapter of the Internet Affiliate Marketing Association.

It was during this cruise conference that Missy Ward and I presented together in a session for the first time.

It was also the time the two of us became disenfranchised with Affiliate Force and the work we were doing to build it up. So we made plans to launch our own conference, which could have easily faded away as nonsense we spouted off about at one of the cruise bars.

But we got on the phone a couple of weeks later and AffiliateSummit.com was registered on May 19, 2003.

Less than six months later we had our first event, and there was never another Affiliate Force.

Over the years AffStat was folded into Affiliate Summit.

Nate Beal on Trains, Working at an Amusement Park, and Air Fryers

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Nate Beal, marketing manager in the telecommunications industry, joined me to chat on my podcast, This is Affiliate Marketing with Shawn Collins.

Nate Beal

I wanted to learn more about the real Nate, so I asked him a variety of questions I figured he had not been asked in previous interviews.

Topics included…

  • His hobby of photographing trains
  • Working at Cedar Point
  • Listen to the Detroit Tigers on the radio as a kid
  • Model trains
  • Sporting events and COVID-19
  • Cooking with an air fryer

Links from this episode

Kimberly Juchnowski on Elephants, Blackberry, and Solo Quarantining

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Kimberly Juchnowski, who runs Webhead New Media joined me to chat on my podcast, This is Affiliate Marketing with Shawn Collins.

Kimberly Juchnowski

I wanted to learn more about the real Kimberly, so I asked her a variety of questions I figured she had not been asked in previous interviews.

Topics included…

  • Spending time with elephants
  • Exploring Southeast Asia
  • Becoming disoriented over food during quarantine
  • Still using a Blackberry
  • No longer having toilet paper on the roll
  • Speaking French and Thai
  • Being known as Webhead

Links from this episode

Watch Netflix with Friends Using Netflix Party

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Since everybody is cooped up and unable to socialize outside of things like Zoom and FaceTime, there is a fun option called Netflix Party to watch shows or movies with friends.

Netflix Party

With this Chrome extension, you can watch in sync with people and chat while you are streaming together.

It’s a quick and easy installation when you are in the Chrome browser.

After all, Tiger King is more fun to watch with people.

The Unskippable Handbook For Dealing with JERKS, IDIOTS & TERRIBLE People

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The Unskippable Handbook For Dealing with JERKS, IDIOTS & TERRIBLE People by Jim Kukral and Lisa Picarille was written in a fun, conversational style and I read it in one sitting, which is a rarity for me.

The Unskippable Handbook For Dealing with JERKS, IDIOTS & TERRIBLE PeopleThe whole time I was enjoying the hell out of it and laughing to myself.

It’s for anybody who has to deal with jerks, idiots, and terrible people… so all of us.

I am hesitant to call it a self-help book because that feels a little hokey to me, but it really is. And it’s a tone that was enjoyable, rather than preachy.

There is some profanity, but I’d say it’s an amount that is entertaining, and not distracting. The only thing that put me off a little bit was the frequent lack of an Oxford comma, but I was able to get past that because of the fun content.

Affiliate Summit – The Family We Chose

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We just celebrated the 50th Affiliate Summit event over 17 years and I am still trying to process all of this.

Affiliate Summit Friends

Back when we started all of this in 2003, I don’t think Missy and I could have imagined what it would become. We just wanted a place for the industry to get together to learn and network. Also, we thought most of the conferences out there were lame, so we wanted to create something that didn’t suck.

Missy and I were conference friends for a couple of years before Affiliate Summit, but still, we didn’t know each other that well, and we didn’t have any money or knowledge of running events.

But we believed in it and we were sure we could create something useful, fun, and different.

Along the way, we met more and more amazing people in the space. Over time I recognized that these people weren’t just colleagues, they were friends… and family.

Our family, that we discovered at Affiliate Summit, would often remark that attending was like going to a family reunion, but one where we got to pick the family.

I felt the same, but I never had my heart swell up with love as I did at Affiliate Summit West 2020 when so many people came together to recognize Missy and me. Two different events with so many awesome people and drinks and cake and awards and pictures and cards and videos and hugs. I was so overwhelmed that I was speechless.

Wayne Porter Award for Service to the Affiliate Industry

Affiliate Summit is such a family that it’s where my brother came and introduced me to his wife Victoria for the first time and they’ve been to lots of Easts and Wests.

Mike and Victoria notes

It was amazing and I’m still on a high from it.

AS picture collage

Deb Carney, Warren Corpus, Angel Djambazov, Liz Fogg, Bhavik Modi, and everyone else who made those days so special – I thank you from the bottom of my heart. It was amazing and perfect.

And so great to end it all with drinks at Toby Keith’s I Love This Bar & Grill – something that started small in the days we were doing Affiliate Summit at Bally’s (2006 maybe?) and grew to a grand goodbye party for all of us.

Poet Rod McKuen once wrote…

We come into the world alone. We go away the same. We’re meant to spend the interlude between in closeness or so we tell ourselves. But it’s a long way from the morning to the evening.

That reminds me of all of us – so many of us were living in places where other people didn’t get us. Then we’d get together and all speak the same language. We made sense to each other and we liked being with one another. We didn’t just share the latest tips and tricks. We shared our lives.

This was supposed to be a business thing, but yet I would always be so excited to see everybody and I had this sad feeling in my heart when it would end each time.

That closeness we all shared was just a couple of times a year, but when it happened it sure was awesome. Thanks to all y’all for all of these years, and cheers to the times ahead.

Hustle Porn Will Ruin You

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I was hanging out with relatives over Christmas and the topic of leisure time came up. Some of them went on about how they were too busy for TV and movies and even friends. Those were indulgences that got in the way of work.

I get it. That was me once upon a time. I was convinced that time not working was time wasted. I was wrong, misguided, and a sucker for the whole hustle porn ethos.

And while hustle porn has porn in the name, it’s not a sexual term. It’s basically the fetishizing of people in tech who overwork. Their lives are all about work and nothing else. That’s not exciting or interesting. And it’s damn sure not something to aspire to.

But people eat it up on social media. The Instagram pictures of early cars to the airport, long days in meetings and on phone calls and speaking engagements, and then red eyes back home in time to rinse and repeat.

It took me a while to understand that. Back in the late ’90s when I was getting into affiliate marketing, I was hungry to make a name for myself, learn everything I could, and put in whatever time and effort it took to achieve it.

Early on I didn’t brag about it or tout it to anybody. I just worked like crazy. Back then I was living in New Jersey and commuting three hours round trip to New York City each day to my first affiliate marketing job at Medsite.com.

Shawn at Medsite

At the same time, I was working on my first affiliate site, Velocity NYC, which was a guide to things to do in NYC with affiliate links to related books on Amazon. I was also working on a site called BabyLounge where I created online birth announcements with a few paid options, plus I monetized those pages with affiliate links. An extension of the baby theme that I also promoted from the site was a baby naming software I private labeled and sold through ClickBank.

There were a bunch of other affiliate sites then, and they were all hand-coded in HTML.

A friend who was a ticket broker asked me to create a website for him, and I ran that for years, too. It was frequently updated with new events and it had a bunch of satellite sites for things like the first George W. Bush Presidential Inauguration. In addition to the web work, I was running PPC for him with constant adjustments.

All of the stuff outside of my 12-hour workdays also had to fit in after my Saturday and Sunday morning job as the sports editor for NJ.com (the web version of the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper). I would do that each weekend day from 6 AM to around 10 AM.

By 2000 I was running the affiliate program for ClubMom.com and I was also writing weekly columns for ClickZ.com, and occasionally for other publications on affiliate marketing. That got me noticed by Que Publishing, who offered me a book deal (Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants). The catch was that I had a few months to write hundreds of pages. I got it done.

But around that time I noticed cracks in my non-stop work life. It was a Sunday and I had enough. I felt miserable and overwhelmed and dissatisfied. I guess it wasn’t a full-blown nervous breakdown, but it was a breakdown. Or maybe an anxiety attack.

Shawn Collins at ClubMom 2This would happen again from time to time as we started up Affiliate Summit while working a full-time job, managing other affiliate programs on the side, running affiliate sites, and doing a good amount of consulting on affiliate marketing.

We didn’t make any money on Affiliate Summit for the first 18 months or so, and I worked full-time as an outsourced affiliate manager for a bunch of companies for the first five years of Affiliate Summit to make ends meet.

Have a look at this cringey hustle porn video I made in those days titled “Day in the Life of an Affiliate Marketer” – I made this without a hint of irony. I was proud and impressed with myself.

I barely slept, I didn’t take vacations, I didn’t really do much of anything but work. I had no balance. I didn’t find that balance until moving to Austin in 2010. It was the best decision ever to relocate and embrace downtime, the outdoors, vacations, fun, and more sleep.

And a lot fewer hours of work daily. The result – I didn’t have any drop in productivity. I was so busy being busy that I didn’t have time for anything else all that time. But that busy was a mirage, a waste, and a lie. It can lead to ruin and burnout.

Replace rise and grind with rise and shine and you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.