Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn Collins Affiliate marketing news and opinion from Shawn Collins, an affiliate marketer since 1997, co-founder of Affiliate Summit and author of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants.

Thanks for visiting the Affiliate Tip blog. Subscribe to my RSS feed or enter your e-mail on the top left to get updates by e-mail.There is an ongoing conversation in affiliate marketing about the next generation of tracking where there would be no reliance on cookies.
Sure, there are options out there where affiliates can get [...]

Last week at the SMX Social Media conference, there was an interesting panel, “Linkbait: Chumming for Traffic on Social Media Sites.”
The panelists, Rebecca Kelley of SEOmoz, Brent Csutoras of BrentCsutoras.com, and Cameron Olthuis of Factive Media, covered all angles of linkbait, as well as lots of tips that were covered in live blogging on Search [...]

Where can I find a mentor in affiliate marketing?
I would say to take a look around the various affiliate marketing discussion boards, forums, and blogs. Then ask a lot of questions and make comments.
If you’re willing to invest some money for a consultant, you could get an affiliate marketing mentor in that way. Otherwise, I [...]

The Federal Trade Commission made an announcement today regarding the use of consumer information by affiliate marketers.
“The Federal Trade Commission today approved a final rulemaking on affiliate marketing that provides consumers with an opportunity to “opt out” before a person or company uses information provided by an affiliated company to market its products and services [...]

There is a post on affiliate blackhat PPC on the PPC Blog that any affiliate manager should read as a primer on cheating affiliates.
The tactics are focused on things like geotargeting and dayparting to hide forbidden affiliate PPC campaigns from affiliate managers.
“There are a number of tricks I have seen used to bend completely flaunt [...]

Larry Adams, Affiliate Product Manager at DoubleClick Performics, has announced a redesign to their links interface for affiliates.

The new Get Links interface enables affiliates to use links right away, rather than generating the links before using them.
In order to avoid any disruption during the holiday season, the new interface is being made [...]

One of my favorite tools as an affiliate is WordTracker. I’ve been a longtime subscriber, because it helps me to optimize my sites by identifying the most popular keywords for a given niche.
WordTracker is also really good if you’re running PPC search campaigns, as it helps to generate relevant keyword lists to bid on.
The [...]

Google AdSense may be coming to Facebook applications, according to Steve Rubel of the Micro Persuasion blog.
Steve referred to a quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in AdAge …
“How will those developers get paid for those services? We would like to have our ads in those applications.”
While Google would certainly like to have penetration on [...]

AdMob, the popular mobile affiliate network, had published AdMob Mobile Metrics, a new report with market level data derived from data collected by AdMob.
This initial report covers the month of September and includes manufacturer, device and country-specific data on AdMob’s top four markets by impressions served: US, UK, India and South Africa. [...]

Google AdSense is running a story contest, and they want to hear from you about your experience with AdSense.
They have an example video up from Tim Carter of AskTheBuilder.com. I’ve created a video of my AdSense story, too.
If you’d like to enter, you will need to shoot a video (2 minutes or shorter) about your [...]