Affiliate Marketing Blog

Affiliate marketing news and opinion 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.

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.

Is Affiliate Marketing Still Profitable?

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Q: Is affiliate marketing still profitable?

Shawn's first affiliate management job

A: Affiliate marketing started back in 1994 when CDNow launched the first affiliate program, and ever since people have been wondering if they can still make money with it. The answer is and always has been yes.

The picture with this article is me at my first affiliate marketing job, which I started back in 1997. Prospective affiliates I pitched then were unsure and people new to the industry are still skeptical.

James Marciano, who founded Refer-It (my next affiliate marketing job), the first affiliate program directory back in the ’90s, said it best when he dubbed affiliate marketing a “recession-proof marketing channel.”

“When the economy tanks, the CEO cuts the marketing budget first. The sales budget doesn’t get cut. With these programs, you’re out there already making money for nothing,” continued Marciano.

We saw this play out when the dot com bubble burst, as well as in 2008 when the economy was in bad shape. Through it all affiliate marketing has persevered.

And you know how there are always articles around Christmas-time how the latest year had the highest sales in the history of E-commerce? Well, as E-Commerce grows, so does affiliate marketing and the opportunities around it. Virtually every big brand has an affiliate program, and they are commonplace with small and medium-sized businesses, too.

So, yes, it’s still profitable, but not for everybody. Lots of people want to be affiliates and they are lazy about it and don’t add any value to a transaction. Strive to provide a solution or solve a problem as an affiliate and keep at it and you can make money.

Multiple Topics vs One Topic for an Affiliate Blog

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Q: Should I have one blog with multiple topics or one domain per topic?

Shawn Collins ASE19

A: There is no correct way to set up and run a blog. But one key thing is that if you cover multiple topics I would recommend that they have something that ties them together.

For instance, if you wanted to blog about the city you live in and promote related affiliate links, it would make sense to cover news, sports, politics, etc all on that site.

But a blog that tries to be everything, without some overall theme tying it together, will not have an audience.

Do you know the old saying, “Jack of all trades, master of none”? That’s not a good approach for a blog, because you can essentially replace “master” with “audience”.

My blogs typically have one clear topic and then posts are broken down to five or so different categories.

For instance, my site 512.soccer was created as a fan site for the upcoming Major League Soccer team, Austin FC. So, a lot of my links are for Austin FC merchandise on MLSsoccer.com.

But I also mention other soccer-related products and news, so I’ll link out to Amazon and other places, too.

Affiliate Sites Focused on One Product

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Q: Do you create an affiliate site based on 1 product that can be purchased at a place like Amazon? I’m an amazon affiliate.

Captain Shawn CollinsA: There is no one correct way to create an affiliate site.

I have lost track of the number of affiliate sites that I have created over the years, but I am pretty sure there was only ever one that was focused on a single product.

My site was called BallFourBook.com and it was a fan site about the book Ball Four by Jim Bouton. I still have the domain, but I’ve been pointing it straight to the Amazon page for the book for quite a while.

Anyhow, it’s a strategy that can work, but there are so many variables, such as the size of the audience, the commission, the price, etc.

The commission for a book on Amazon is 4.5%, so on a book that costs $15 you’re going to get $0.45 per sale. With a typical conversion rate of 2%, you’d have to send 100 clicks to make nearly $1.

When I was doing it I had a passion for the book and was generating a lot of unique content related to the book. It became pretty popular and the author even included the URL in the last edition of his book.

But it was never a huge success. It was one of lots of affiliate sites that would generate some money here and there. And that’s the key – don’t count on one niche site to make you a fortune. Experiment with a bunch of different topics and methods as an affiliate.

The First Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas was a Little Bumpy

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The first Affiliate Summit West took place on June 13-14, 2005 at the long-gone Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, NV. But we didn’t call it Affiliate Summit West back then because it was our only event that year.

Affiliate Summit West 2005

Before arriving in Las Vegas for this show I’d never been there before, and we were still pretty new to organizing conferences. That plus not a whole lot of money in the bank meant we were handling everything ourselves – the outsourcing of things didn’t happen until later.

So the day before the conference check-in was opening we enlisted the help of a bunch of friends to stuff the bags for the 550 or so attendees. We were in a suite at the Riviera all day with drinks and an assembly line going.

One of my favorite pictures from that conference was Missy laying on the hundreds of bags after we’d finished up.

Missy and the attendee bags at ASW05

After the last bag was stuffed, I went on an odyssey in Las Vegas that included taking a nap on the Strip and various versions of how I ended up back in my room at some late hour. You can hear the gory details in my video recap of the conference.

The check-in process was way more primitive back then, but we had smaller crowds and it worked.

ASW05 check-in

Affiliate Summit West 2005 was the first time we had an exhibit hall, but that may be too generous of a term for what was going on there – we had 15 booths in a room. You can see the “exhibit hall” and other entertaining Affiliate Summit relics in the Affiliate Summit West 2005 program, which was lovingly created in Microsoft Word.

ASW05 exhibit hall

While we were at the Riviera there was also a group of rugby fans, and one of the things many people remember from that conference was that a boozer from the rugby crowd threw up in the pool and it had to be closed.

Towards the end of Affiliate Summit West 2005, there was a big scare after a panel on blogging. One of the panelists, Wayne Porter, collapsed and had to be hospitalized shortly after the panel.

Blogging panel at ASW05

Thankfully, Wayne recovered from that fall and was later anointed as the first Affiliate Summit Legend.

It’s hard to believe Affiliate Summit West 2020 will be the 16th year in a row that Affiliate Summit is in Las Vegas. Looking forward to seeing lots of the old-timers who were there at the start, as well as the youngbloods.

Check out the pictures from Affiliate Summit West 2005.