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Know When It is Time to Leave

August 5, 2019 by Shawn Collins

I was really excited on the morning of September 11, 2001. It was a gorgeous, sunny day in New York City as I headed into my job at ClubMom.com.

My dog Mickey when I lived across the river from the World Trade Center

My CMO with an impressive MBA from an Ivy-League school forced me to pause the affiliate program for the summer, even though it was cash positive with every lead and doing great. But that’s a discussion for another day.

Anyhow, September 11, 2001, was the day I was tasked with resurrecting the affiliate program. It was on Be Free (a popular affiliate network at the time) and I had an email scheduled in BFAST (their technology that had to be installed locally!) to hit all the affiliates that afternoon announcing the return of the affiliate program.

As I was finishing up my everything bagel and strawberry Yoo-hoo I got an email from one of the IT guys. It was sent to the whole company and it was a breaking news alert from CNN about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. The idea of that was impossible in my mind and I thought he must have been trying to make some bad joke.

But no, it was real. Somebody wheeled out a TV on a cart to a conference room and turned it on. It was reminiscent of 15 years earlier when a TV cart was brought into my class in high school for coverage of the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion.

One big difference, though. The Space Shuttle was way far away from me when it exploded. The World Trade Center was a couple of miles away. I was in shock. We all were. I alternated between watching and chatting with friends and family on AIM. Then I saw a plane hit the South Tower on TV.

The bosses were telling us to stay calm and stay put. Then the South Tower collapsed before my eyes on TV. I needed to get out of there.

I chatted with some people and then gathered my things to try and make my way home. In addition to being totally freaked out, my now 17-year-old daughter Lexie was due to be born on September 27, 2001, and I wanted to live to see her birth.

That might sound overly dramatic now, but nobody knew what the hell was going on then, except that this was apparently terrorism. And our office was a couple of blocks from the Empire State Building. I figured that could be the next target and I didn’t want to be there to find out.

So, I headed over to my supervisor’s office to tell her I was heading out. She said, “No, you can’t leave.” It was at that moment that my fight or flight instinct kicked in. My first thought was to fight, and I was going to do that by saying, “Fuck you.” But I chose flight and just left.

As I headed down Fifth Avenue towards 34th Street, where I was going to hang a right towards Penn Station, I heard thundering noise across my whole body. People in the street were screaming and running.

I looked up and right there in front of me, the North Tower was collapsing. I froze. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It was too much to handle. I watched the whole thing crumble and I was in shock. Shortly after, I snapped out of it and started running towards Penn Station to escape from New York by way of an NJ Transit train.

It was all a blur. Some people were walking There was screaming and crying in every direction, and I was running as fast as I could in jeans. Finally, I got to Penn Station and sprinted down to the tracks to jump on the next Jersey bound train. I got a seat and about 30 seconds later the doors closed, and the train began to move. The train erupted in cheers that lasted about ten seconds. Then it stopped.

We sat there for a while and they wouldn’t let us off. Finally, they announced that there may be explosives in the tunnel, and we should safely evacuate the train. I’d like to say I sat there and did the women and children first thing. But a few years earlier I saw those guys die in the Titanic movie. I broke out ahead of everybody and ran all the way to the Hudson River to get away from buildings and people and everything.

I tried frantically to make a phone call and say I was on the way home, but there was no getting a phone signal. I walked into a line of people about ten blocks long waiting to get on a Circle Line Cruise boat to cross over to New Jersey.

When I finally got on the boat there was an eerie calm. We started moving south towards lower Manhattan before cutting over and pulling into a dock in Weehawken, NJ. I didn’t know what to do and wandered off the boat until I saw an NJ Transit bus. I asked the driver where it was going, and he said they were taking everybody to Giants Stadium. I just wanted to get away, so I got on board.

After they brought us to Giants Stadium there wasn’t a plan for moving on from there. Bus after bus unloaded people and we all walked around confused and flustered and hot and thirsty. They were not allowing traffic in – only out. So, I got an idea – I took a piece of paper out of my bag and wrote the name of the town where I lived: MILLBURN.

I stood along the road hoping to hitchhike. And I was ecstatic that a car pulled over within ten minutes. It was a station wagon that already had like ten people in there and they let me jam in with them. The driver was some guy who worked for the Giants. We rode mostly in silence while hosts on the AM station WABC tried to make sense of things for themselves and us. There was all sorts of confusion and misinformation.

The highways were empty, so we made good time. I was the third or fourth to be dropped off and they let me out at my local train station where I’d parked that morning for the commute. There were literally no cars gone, yet. The lot was packed. I am pretty sure I was the first one to make it back. I wondered how many of my fellow commuters weren’t making it back that day or any day. I learned later that eight guys from my town were killed.

Over the course of the day, I was thinking a lot about how I was told I couldn’t leave. I had to leave, and I really didn’t like that feeling of being told I couldn’t. It weighed on me and I just couldn’t shake it. I spent the rest of that fall in a daze, except for the birth of my daughter, Lexie, on October 2, 2001.

My daughter Lexie born weeks after September 11

I was so wrecked by the whole thing that I was asking the obstetrician, during the birth of my daughter, about the risks of Anthrax exposure, as there was some monster mailing it to places in NYC after 9/11.

I started to get a grip on things in 2002 and figured out my first step in leaving the company. I started my own OPM company on the side to see if that could take off and replace my day job. The affiliate program management gigs started taking off, and then a random conversation with Missy Ward turned into us starting Affiliate Summit. We registered the .com on May 19, 2003.

That was the final thing I needed to leave my job for good. We held the first Affiliate Summit on November 3, 2003, in New York City. It was 783 days after 9/11. Shortly after I quit my job.

Know when it’s time for you to leave and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Resources Tagged With: 2001, Affiliate Summit, Anthrax, ClubMom, fight or flight, Lexie Collins, Missy Ward, New York City, NYC, September 11, Space Shuttle Challenger, World Trade Center

Remembering Jim Bouton and His Keynote at Affiliate Summit

July 22, 2019 by Shawn Collins

Jim Bouton, former New York Yankees pitcher, author of Ball Four, creator of Big League Chew, sportscaster, activist, and a bunch of other things, passed away on July 10, 2019, at 80 years old.

Shawn Collins, Jim Bouton, and Missy Ward

I discovered his book, Ball Four, in the 1990s, and I just loved the book. So much that one of my first affiliate sites was BallFourBook.com, which I started in 2000 to promote the book with Amazon links. Jim’s site still has me listed as one of the fansites.

In the late 1990’s I interviewed Jim for a zine I was publishing at the time called Velocity NYC. The interview also ran on NJ.com, the online version of the Newark Star-Ledger, where I was the weekend sports editor for years for the online edition.

Bouton updated Ball Four every decade, and in the 2000 update, he mentioned my affiliate site in his book. I was out of my mind excited.

BallFourBook.com

So anyway, I was in touch with him over the years and as Affiliate Summit was taking off I thought he’d make an awesome keynote speaker. We had him come in and keynote Affiliate Summit East 2006 in Orlando.

I loved his keynote, but even better we chatted for a couple of hours before the keynote and he had me in stitches with his old baseball stories. It was amazing to hear first-person accounts of times with Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, and other legends from the 60s.

It was one of my favorite days, and I will always cherish it.

RIP Jim.

“A ballplayer spends a good piece of his life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.” – Jim Bouton

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Filed Under: Affiliate Summit Tagged With: Affiliate Summit, Ball Four, Jim Bouton

Maximizing the Value of Your Internet Properties from Affiliate Summit East 2017

April 22, 2019 by Shawn Collins

This was a conference session titled Maximizing the Value of Your Internet Properties at Affiliate Summit East 2017, which took place July 30 – August 1, 2017, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City.

Mark Daoust at Affiliate Summit East 2017

Session speaker(s):

  • Mark Daoust, CEO, Quiet Light Brokerage

Session description:
This session will dissect what motivates buyers to acquire an online business. I’ll provide practical advice anyone can use to increase the value of their business.

Experience Level: Intermediate
Target Audience: Affiliate/Publisher
Niche/Vertical: Acquisitions

Slides: Maximizing the Value of Your Internet Properties

If you liked this video, be sure to register for the next Affiliate Summit.

Note: the companies and positions listed above were current as of the time of the conference. Some of this information may have changed since then.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Summit Tagged With: acquisitions, Affiliate Summit, ASE17, Mark Daoust

How Negative Brand Images Can Affect Affiliate Revenue from Affiliate Summit East 2017

April 8, 2019 by Shawn Collins

This was a conference session titled How Negative Brand Images Can Affect Affiliate Revenue at Affiliate Summit East 2017, which took place July 30 – August 1, 2017, at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in New York City.

Tony Wright at Affiliate Summit East 2017

Session speaker(s):

  • Tony Wright, CEO, WrightIMC

Session description:
This session will outline how a negative brand image can affect both affiliate revenue and the recruitment of top affiliates.

Experience Level: Intermediate
Target Audience: Affiliate/Publisher
Niche/Vertical: Reputation Management

Slides: How Negative Brand Images Can Affect Affiliate Revenue

If you liked this video, be sure to register for the next Affiliate Summit.

Note: the companies and positions listed above were current as of the time of the conference. Some of this information may have changed since then.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Summit Tagged With: Affiliate Summit, ASE17, brand, reputation management, Tony Wright

Sara Malo on Running in San Diego, Tom Brady and @TreeHouseBrewCo

March 21, 2019 by Shawn Collins

Sara Malo, Client Success Manager at Affiliate Summit, joined me to chat on my podcast, This is Affiliate Marketing with Shawn Collins.

Sara Malo

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

Topics included…

  • Her favorite city to run in
  • Back when she was a bad influence
  • Tom Brady
  • Running a daycare in the past
  • Addiction to Fortnite
  • Tree House Brewing
  • Running in patterns to draw pictures

Links from this episode

  • Sara on Facebook
  • Sara on LinkedIn
  • Sara on Instagram
  • Sara on Twitter
  • Affiliate Summit

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Filed Under: Affiliate Resources Tagged With: Affiliate Summit, Sara Malo

Video of Julie Gurner Keynote at Affiliate Summit East 2014

August 20, 2014 by Shawn Collins

Julie Gurner, Doctor of Clinical Psychology, gave a keynote address at Affiliate Summit East 2014, which took place August 10-12, 2014 at the New York Marriott Marquis.

ase14 006

Dr. Gurner has made it a mission to unlock human potential and understand why we work the way we do. A speaker and consultant at the intersection of psychology and technology, she applies cutting-edge research and psychological principles to the technological space and enhancing the way people operate.

She has appeared in such media outlets as NBCNews.com, Men’s Health Magazine, and The Huffington Post for her knowledge of the brain, psychology, and technology and currently serves on the Board of Advisors for SquareOneMail and Progress.ly.

Follow Dr. Gurner on Twitter – she’s one of my favorite follows on Twitter.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Summit Tagged With: Affiliate Summit, Dr. Julie Gurner

Cory Booker Could Be the First Affiliate Summit Keynote to Become a U.S. Senator

April 27, 2013 by Shawn Collins

Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark, NJ, was the keynote speaker at Affiliate Summit East 2008, which took place in Boston on August 10-12, 2008.

I would guess it was one of the more unique introductions Mayor Booker has gotten, as he was introduced by the Blue Man Group.

Cory delivered what still stands as my favorite keynote in ten years of Affiliate Summit (watch the video of the Cory Booker keynote at Affiliate Summit), and he literally left many of the folks in the crowd with tears in their eyes from his moving, inspirational talk.

One of the stories he told was of a woman named Virginia Jones who had a big impact on him as he started his political career in Newark.

The following spring after the conference, he took over control of his Twitter account from his staff and has since become the standard of how a politician can connect with their constituents online.

In addition to making all sorts of positive changes in Newark, NJ, he has also done some things, such as rushing into a burning building to rescue people, which resulted in jokes that Cory Booker is a super hero.

But I think he’s simply a guy that terribly wants to change things for the better, and now he’s heading towards the end of his second term as Mayor.

He hasn’t formally kicked off his campaign for U.S. Senate, but Booker has raised nearly $2 million, and it seems likely he will throw his hat in.

That said, there would still be the matter of a tough primary in NJ, so there is a long road ahead of him.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Summit Tagged With: Affiliate Summit, Cory Booker

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