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.Scribe is a new WordPress plugin from Brian Clark, publisher of Copyblogger, that helps writers optimize content.
I have never been much of an SEO guy, so I was excited when I [...]

I was reading “Top 10 Wordpress Plugins That Affiliate Marketers Need” at MarketingElf.com the other day and came across a really useful WordPress plugin I wasn’t using.
The plugin is called Pretty Link, and it enables affiliates to shrink the huge affiliate links and get a branded URL with the affiliate’s domain name. Plus, the plugin [...]

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I had a fun chat with Deb Carney on her AffiliateABCs podcast the other day about my early days in affiliate marketing.
This discussion came out of a link I Tweeted recently for an article I wrote in 2000 on the history of affiliate marketing.
We touched on the origins [...]

Do you know which site is the next Twitter? Me neither, which is why it’s essential that we get usernames locked down on as many social media sites as possible, so we are protected.
If not, there are other people who will take our names.

So far, I’ve been creating accounts as I have come upon sites, [...]

There was a post on Search Engine Journal a few months back, No Precedence For Social Media – Amazon Hangs Us Out To Dry, that railed at Amazon.com’s affiliate program, because “Amazon.com refused to pay any commission on a link that I distributed through Twitter and Facebook.”
There was a lot of buzz about the issue, [...]

You’ve probably heard by now that the Federal Trade Commission announced new rules yesterday regarding disclosure of freebies and financial interests by bloggers.
But what does that mean to you when it kicks in on December 1, 2009?
I am fortunate to be a part of a secret cabal, and I heard about the new [...]

I’ve been hearing a lot about AffiliateReporting.com, but hadn’t had a chance to dig into it until this week… and I am very impressed.
If you’re not familiar with AffiliateReporting.com, it’s a search engine marketing (SEM) software platform designed for affiliates. The suite of SEM tools come from m o v e software, and the software [...]

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 [...]

I am a big advocate of offering email as a subscription option for RSS feeds. Not only does it give people another choice to consume RSS feeds, but this option has been far more popular among reader of my blogs than subscribing with RSS readers.
There are various ways to do this, but I’m going to [...]

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]
This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins pulls a solo shift on Memorial Day before heading out for the Inbound Marketing Summit in Dallas.
Topics covered this week include how the majority of affiliate marketers, based on a totally unscientific study, were in fraternities and sororities in college.
Also, [...]