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.The sessions from Affiliate Summit West 2009, which took place January 11-13, 2009 at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas, are all available to download or stream in [...]

There are three groups of people that have emerged since the announcement of the death of Michael Jackson yesterday: devastated fans, haters, and marketers.
Well, if we drew up a Venn diagram, most marketers probably also belong to one of the first two camps, too.
Anyhow, it didn’t take long for fans to express their despair with [...]

This week on the Brandmouthing podcast, I talk about the branding and tangible benefits of having a presence at industry conferences.
I think about this often, but it just jumped out at me as I was prepping for LinkShare Symposium NYC 2009. As I looked at the agenda, I got excited to see the DealMaker portion [...]

Back in the spring of 1999, Cindy Arko (then Aylward) hired me to join her and James Marciano to run Refer-it.com, the first affiliate program directory.
Prior to my joining them, they ran the first Affiliate Solutions conference at the Harvard Club in early 1999.
It was an exciting, explosive time in affiliate marketing back when affiliate [...]

AWeber has released new options to their follow up email messaging system that enable scheduling of automatic messages.
With this new feature, you can select certain days for your automatic messages to send or not send regardless of the day interval you have chosen.
I’m excited about this functionality to optimize my open rates, and I [...]

Affiliate Summit and buy.at are hosting a Tax Talk & Crab Feast on Thursday, July 9 in Baltimore, MD at the buy.at office.
We’ll be getting together starting at 4pm for a discussion on the advertising tax legislation, the impact on affiliate marketers, and how to fight it.

Also, we’ll use this time to demo the [...]

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille talked about the Facebook username rush, the launch of the Affiliate Summit AffStat Report, and a lawn full of pink flamingos.

Lastly, the finalists were announced for the LinkShare Golden Link Awards.
Show Links

Get Your Username on Facebook
AffiliateTip on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/affiliatetip
AffStat: Affiliate Marketing Statistic [...]

The 2009 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report is now available for free at http://affstat.com/. The report can be viewed online or downloaded.
Over four-hundred and fifty affiliates were surveyed on their methods, preferences, and strategies for the 2009 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report.

The report features dozens of charts of data, based on the responses from the participating [...]

Affiliate marketer John Engler works on a Mac (sorry John) and has listed 15 tools and services he uses frequently in his affiliate pursuits.
John’s list is foreign to me, except Jungle Disk, which I use on my PCs, but it looks like a helpful bunch of things, such as FTP, text editing, screen capture, IM, [...]

This week on the Brandmouthing podcast, I talk about reinforcing your personal brand by securing your personal name or brand name on Facebook.
According to the Facebook blog…
Starting at 12:01 a.m. EDT on Saturday, June 13, you’ll be able to choose a username on a first-come, first-serve basis for your profile and the Facebook Pages that [...]