GeekCast.fm » aweber

Free Affiliate Summit Passes, the Death of Osama Bin Laden, and Invest in Shawn Collins

Shawn Collins — Mon, 02 May 2011 21:00:23 +0000

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille talked about free passes to Affiliate Summit, ShareASale ThinkTank, Vibram Five Fingers, and the death of Bin Laden.

Also covered were monthly affiliate marketing meetups, the passing of affiliate marketer Scott Campbell, the reasons people buy online, and Empire Avenue.

Show Links

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Lijit Angers Bloggers, Pay-Per-Call Case Study, and Free Beer

Shawn Collins — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 21:32:00 +0000

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille talked about the upcoming LinkShare Symposium and pre-party, an affiliate manager job at AWeber, and Shawn heading to Austin to visit Dell.

Also, bloggers cry foul on a Lijit change, slitting up affiliate commissions, expected market share growth for Bing, and a controversial video from Jim Kukral.

Show Links

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Black Friday, Zhu Zhu Pets, and Lisa’s Little Blue Toy

Shawn Collins — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:44:28 +0000

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille talked about the lead up to Black Friday, Zhu Zhu pet fever, and the acquisition of Tracking202.

Also, Lisa’s blue toy on DailyBooth, the annoyance of Twitter’s new style of ReTweets, AWeber’s Web form generator, and enhancements to Link Connector’s Naked Link Technology.

Show Links

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Affiliate ABCs #16 Email Marketing with Aweber Part 1

Deb Carney — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:19:51 +0000

In this episode of Affiliate ABCs your host Deborah Carney (a.k.a. Loxly) discusses email marketing with Aweber with Justin Premick, Director of Education Marketing at Aweber. This episode covers the basics and we took questions in advance which Justin got to answer. Part 2 gets into more advanced topics and more depth.

Here are some relevant notes, more in the next post!
AWeber’s Webinars

4-part series on getting more subscribers for your
blog newsletter:
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-subscribe-page.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-sharing.htm
http://www.aweber.com/blog/email-marketing/double-blog-newsletter-beyond-blog.htm

It’s Advertising Tax Season for Affiliates

Shawn Collins — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:38:18 +0000

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins was solo and he talked about the return of the advertising tax in the California budget bill, a LinkShare Symposium preview, and MD affiliates getting together over crabs to learn more about the advertising tax.

Also, affiliate Jonathan Volk purchased a new house with his AzoogleAds earnings, AWeber has another cool feature, and the ten golden rules of affiliate management.

Lastly, a trip down memory lane with Refer-it.com and the Affiliate Solutions conference from back in 1999.

Show Links

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Five Successful Strategies for Monetizing Blogs

Shawn Collins — Fri, 29 May 2009 04:59:06 +0000

Five Successful Strategies For Monetizing Blogs

View more OpenOffice presentations from Shawn Collins.

The “Five Successful Strategies for Monetizing Blogs” presentation was given by Affiliate Summit Co-founders Missy Ward and Shawn Collins at the Inbound Marketing Summit on May 27, 2009 in Dallas, TX.

It’s not easy making money with affiliate programs. You’re a blogger, not a marketer, right? There’s no reason you can’t be both. Affiliate marketers Missy Ward and Shawn Collins will provide proven tactics to monetize your blog, and associated photos, videos, podcasts, and Tweets. This presentation will outline the multiple tactics available to provide action items that enable you to be both a successful artist and entrepreneur. Methods will be categorized into one of five focused strategies for blog monetization.

The presentation is available to view or download at http://www.slideshare.net/affsum/five-successful-strategies-for-monetizing-blogs.

Make Money Online with Affiliate Programs

Shawn Collins — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:45:06 +0000

I was thinking about what goes into creating a new affiliate site, and I’ve outlined the seven important elements when I start up a new affiliate project.

This primer is intended for folks that are just breaking into affiliate marketing. I know some people are searching for a “get rich quick” lesson, and that’s not the way it works with affiliate marketing.

Affiliate sites should be viewed as long-term projects, and not quick hits.

As far as the prevalence of affiliate programs among retailers, Internet Retailer magazine recently released their list of the Hot 100 Retail Web Sites, and 75% of those retailers had one or more affiliate programs in place.

Anyhow, here are the seven things to consider when setting up an affiliate site. Note that the various services I mention are those that I use personally. I mention them, because I’ve been happy with the pricing and service and would personally recommend them.

Also, I would create a new site with WordPress as the content management system, because of the ease of use and flexibility of the platform. You can get WordPress for free. If you’re not familiar with WordPress, I’d suggest reading through WordPress For Dummies

2-3 topics you care about
When starting a new affiliate site, don’t try to leverage the latest trends. Instead, focus on topics that interest you. Try brainstorming 2-3 areas where you are passionate and create your site based on the one that you think you’d like to focus on the longest.

Domain name
You’ll need a domain for your new site. I use GoDaddy.com, where you can get a .com domain for around $10 per year. Don’t obsess about your domain name – I’d say you shouldn’t spend more than 20 minutes picking it out. Just get something relevant to your topic, and the shorter the better. Start with a registration of one year, because you can extend it at any time, but if you decide the domain stinks, there is no use being locked into multiple years.

Hosting
There are many options for hosting your site. For the purpose of simplicity, there are two main types of hosting accounts you can get: shared servers and dedicated servers. The former is a cheaper option where your site is on a server with lots of other sites, while a dedicated server only has your site(s) on it. When you’re starting a new affiliate site, a shared plan should suffice. Currently, I use LivingDot for some new, small projects and RackSpace for my main, important sites. LivingDot is low-cost and they will install WordPress on your account for you. RackSpace is a bit pricey, but you’re paying for excellent support and uptime.

Email service
One of the key methods for driving traffic back to affiliate sites is to work with an email service provider that enables your visitors to opt-in to get updates, newsletters, etc. from you by email. I use AWeber to manage my email lists and messages. AWeber enables me to provide an option for visitors to subscribe to my blog RSS via email, as well as newsletters, and series of follow-up emails on various topics.

Patience
This is the cheapest and most important part of a new affiliate site: patience. Resist the temptation to put up ads right away. Instead, focus on building content to give people a reason to visit your site. When the time comes to incorporate ads, focus on relevant ads, and not those that pay the best. I’d suggest posting ten or more times (or longer) to a blog before any ads are up there. When you do put up ads, go beyond the banner. The vast majority of my affiliate commissions come from text links.

So, if I am writing about a new camera or computer, I’ll link the name of the device to a place where it can be purchased. That’s far more effective than a banner for the product. But it’s essential that you constantly test different ways to run advertising on your site to optimize the advertising strategies and phase out things that don’t work. Use an ad server like OpenX to run A/B testing.

Also, you don’t want to hear this, but you shouldn’t expect much money for months. It takes time to build up a site and an audience. It can be a grind, but stick with it.

Find your voice
People will follow your affiliate site as they get to know you. Odds are that you’re not a journalist, so don’t pretend. Just be yourself and write in your voice. It can sometimes get tough to think of things to wrote on your blog, so make it a practice to have an editorial calendar where you will schedule topics to write in the future. I frequently send myself email with ideas for future blog posts.

Also, consider setting up a page where people can ask you questions about your topic and answer them on the blog. I use Freedback.com to manage this process. And you can bulk up the content of your site with targeted articles from EzineArticles.com. I not only publish articles from there, but write them, too (Shawn Collins on EzineArticles.com), so I can get more exposure for my site.

Where to find affiliate programs
There are a variety of ways that affiliates can find affiliate programs. The 2009 Affiliate Summit AffStat Report breaks out all of the ways that affiliates are finding out about affiliate programs to join.

I mostly search in Google for affiliate programs that make sense for my affiliate sites. For instance, if I have a site about Halloween costumes, I’d search for costume affiliate program to find merchants to promote.

Good luck with your affiliate site!

The presentation is available to view or download at http://www.slideshare.net/affsum/make-money-online-with-affiliate-programs.

Black Friday and Affiliates

Shawn Collins — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 21:10:46 +0000

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Shawn Collins and Lisa Picarille talked about Black Friday and what’s hot for affiliates.

The show also includes talk of a new affiliate marketing conference, ASUS eee as a Christmas gift, Instant Form Pro from Joel Comm, a new affiliate control panel from AWeber, and the Affiliate Summit Twitter Contest.

Show Links

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

Too Lijit to Quit Turkeypalooza

Shawn Collins — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 20:53:08 +0000

This week on the Affiliate Thing podcast, Lisa Picarille and I recapped our recent social media conferences.

We also touched on free turkeys from LinkShare, Twitter scraping, the Social Media Swami, Lijit Ad Network, and AWeber publishing broadcast emails to Twitter.

Show Links

Subscribe to the Affiliate Thing RSS feed or listen on iTunes. You can also send a blank e-mail to affiliatething@aweber.com to get each podcast delivered by e-mail.

GeekCast 37: BlogWorld Expo Recap

Shawn Collins — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 22:04:50 +0000

The GeekCast crew is fresh from getting together in person for BlogWorld Expo 2008 in Las Vegas, and this episode goes over all things BlogWorld.

We get into our impressions of BlogWorld, take-aways, use of Twitter, meeting Frank @comcastcares, whether bloggers and affiliates are mutually exclusive, and more.

Show notes:

Jim Kukral and his Las Vegas Lookalike
Dinner with Affiliate Summit and Market Leverage
Frank aka @comcastcares
Twitter at BlogWorld Expo
Venn Diagram of Blogging and Affiliate Marketing
Video from BlogWorld Expo
Flip vs. Mini HD
Customized Jones Soda Bottles
Building Lists with AWeber RSS
Twitter Search
Podcast Liberation Day for TrishaLyn

Subscribe to the RSS for the weekly GeekCast show, or add us on iTunes.