• Co-founding the Affiliate Summit with Missy Ward (the next Affiliate Summit East is from Aug 10-12 in Boston)
• Multiple updates on his Affiliate Tip blog
• His sarcastic and wry style on Affiliate Thing (together with co-host Revenue Magazine editor Lisa Picarille)
• His relative new foray into group podcasting at Geekcast.fm together with partners-in-crime Sam Harrelson and Jim Kukral. (Jim did a video interview with me in the midst of the recent Affiliate Summit West)

If you like Shawn’s Road Trip/American Pie-ish style of humor, you’d want to check out this Easter bunny video broadcast:

Also, check out this Facebook thread where we’re aiming to hit 500 comments. Every little comment helps!

Here’re some of my favourites:

With the ShareResult affiliate network affiliate manager Julia Steat at the Great Affiliate Road Rally

With Notebook Forums‘ Laura Alter (yes, she is 6’ and wearing heels…)

After talking to him for about a year, I finally got to meet B5 blog network’s training manager Tris Hussey

At the social media session with Justine Ezarik and Tris Hussey

Zac Johnson and Amit Mehta at the Super Affiliate session

At the “Engaging the Media” panel session with Lisa Picarille, Anik Singal, Valerie Stevens and Jim Kukral

I don’t know about you, but I think Jim Kukral deserves some type of award for being the most photographed!

Be sure to check out the other pictures at the ASW photo collection.

Affiliate Summit as always was a blast (I still have about 500 of my own pictures to put up somewhere…).

If you’re keen to bring your affiliate business to the next level, be sure to check out Affiliate Summit East from Aug 10-12 in Boston, MA.

No matter whether you live in Las Vegas, or Vancouver, BC, New York city or Singapore, the questions are the same – How do you grow your business?

I’m going to outline 3 discrete stages that I see business go through, and I’m going to paint some generalizations here. (generalizations refer to 90-95% of the people in each of these categories out there. So hold off on the flames, especially if you’re part of the 5-10% of “distribution curve busters” out there)

The 3 stages of business ownership:

• Stage 1: Bootstrapper/Solopreneur (Generalized income potential: $1,000 per day or $30,000 a month)

At this stage, you’re building your business and might be the sales guys, the operations guy, the bookkeeper, and coffee maker all rolled into one. Bootstrapping can be a useful tool, especially if you don’t start out with or you’re not willing to pump a lot of working capital into your initial endeavor.

I like this stage because it’s very “hands-on” in nature. I believe to have “business ownership”, you need to have a basic understanding of each function in your business. I am a pretty terrible “details” person, but having a basic understanding of the “nitty gritty” helps you put all the pieces together at the strategic/macro level.

The major constraint here is time, because you’ll have to juggle the various tasks within a 24-hour workday.

But if push comes to shove, remember that marketing and sales are the most important element of your business because that’s what brings home the bacon.

The solopreneur model works regardless of whether you’re playing in the brick-and-mortar space, the online space or the hybrid of the two. The one major advantage of being in the online space is that technology can give you a major advantage, whether it’s managing a PPC campaign with 120,000 keywords or managing an email campaign out to 25,000 subscribers.

It’s a fair simple stage to get up to speed on. But here’s where it gets interesting…

• Stage 2: Employer (Generalized income: $10,000 a day, or $300,000 a month)

So once you’ve maxed yourself out, you’ll probably start hiring people. They could be outsourcers or employees (young kids or work-at-home mums are a great fit here…).

Being an employer means you’ve very much moving from being a “do-er” to a “project manager”. You coordinate your workers, give them daily tasks, weekly tasks, set milestones, motivate them and help them pick up new skills.

A good time to move from bootstrapper to employer is at the $5,000 – $10,000 a month income mark. At that income level, you should be familiar enough with the business operations to delegate out responsibility.

One common issue I hear from bootstrappers is that it takes “too much effort” to train an employee…which might be a valid argument, except that if you don’t get through the initial hurdle of training someone up, there is a tendency for things to bite you in the behind, especially when the projects and contracts starts flooding in (you become a victim of your own success).

One of the worst things that could possibly happen at this stage is not being able to make the transition to becoming an employer, and having to turn work away.

The one major shortfall with being in this stage is that you become the bottleneck. Because your business is reliant on you giving out the orders and being the project overseer, if you go on vacation or fall sick, the business tends to grind to a standstill once your existing orders have been fulfilled.

So it’s worth taking a look at the third stage…

• Stage 3: Business Owner (Generalized income: $100,000 a day, or $3 million a month)

From being a “project manager” (employing employees) during the employer stage, you move on to become an employer of “project managers” – that means the people reporting to you function independently and take on projects, set their own milestones and come back to you when the project is complete, or if they run into a major challenge.

–

So how does the landscape look?

The majority of businesses function mostly like “employers” and have some elements of the “business owner” model.

On the other hand, organizations like Microsoft, General Electric, HP have moved very much into the “business owner” mode of operation.

If you’re an internet marketer capped at the $10,000 per month, or $100,000 per month level of income, the limitations you are facing might not be because you are not working hard enough…it may be a matter of looking at the strategies needed to move up to the next level in your business’ growth and working smarter…

At Affiliate Summit West with ASW co-founders Shawn Collins and Missy Ward

If it was your first Affiliate Summit or you would like to get more out of your trip, here’re my suggestions:

• Follow Up

Yes, you can mass mail all the people you met, but social marketing/conversational marketing is what’s going to give you an edge in building relationships and bringing your business to the next level. Include a personal note, talk about winning that $15,000 top prize at the slot machines at 3am, or downing round-after-round of shots at the Ghost Bar. People connect best with those they have a personal connection with.

For more tips check out “Internet Geek Girl” Stephanie Agresta’s blog. She’s mentioned she’s really good at the following up part.

Here’re 2 things I’ve learned from my consulting to brick-and-mortar companies, 2 things need to stand out and are probably more important than the sale (whether it’s the sale of a product/service or inking of a service/consulting contract). The pre-sales and the post-sales.

Pre-sales might’ve taken place at your Affiliate Summit booth, or over dinner, or at one of the parties. Post-sales means you continue keeping in touch with your customers/partners even after the project has been kicked off or the product has been delivered.

Is it too soon? Too late?

I’d say that you have a 2-week window to drop people a note after the summit. After 2 weeks, it’s difficult to place a reference.

• Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize

You have a business to run, maybe a day job and a family or significant other to take care of or spend time with. So you need to sort out your business contacts:

Who should you get touch with immediately.

Who should you get in touch with within the next 7 days.

And then there’s everyone else that you follow up with when you have time. Eg. checking your email on your iPhone during the boring bits at a meeting, or while waiting for someone and you’re in a WiFi zone.

• Lessons Learned And Key Takeaways

Yes, it’s not as cool to keep a diary or notebook (the paper-based variety!) anymore, but let’s face it, you’ll forget 50% of what you learned a week later, and 50% of whatever remains a month from now, and so on. Pretty soon, you’ll forget that you were even at the Affiliate Summit!

I keep multiple text files on my computer, labelled:

• PPC-tips.txt
• marketing-pointers.txt
• contact-info.txt
• trial-super-affiliate-exclusives.txt

and so on. If there’s going to be an invite-only launch for a new product or service, I need to keep track of when it starts, how long it’s running for, and most important my account name and password.

If going to a couple of great parties and meeting “celebrities” was the highlight of ASW for you, you’re sure missing out on a lot of good stuff!

• Bringing Home More Bacon!

Typically I come home with a list of 10 new things to test out in my existing campaigns, or new product ideas to test out. This past summit was no different.

By “testing out something new”, it has to be more than adding a new widget that someone mentioned during a session or during a conversation, I’d do a benchmark to see what the results are before testing a new strategy, then I’d test the new strategy.

Going one step further, I’d develop 3 more variations of that idea and test those too. It’d be like a mini multi-variate test if you will. And only after enough data has been collected will I continue testing the two best performing strategies out of the bunch of 5 tests.

Going by past experience, I’ve seen modest increases of 10-20% testing new techniques, with the occasional 50% jump in my results. If that doesn’t already pay for the cost of your trip and room and board and entertainment, I’d be hard pressed to find an alternative.

–

To give you an idea of how important attending live events is to my business, I’m already making plans to attend Affiliate Summit East in Boston from August 10-12 later this year.

Uncensored and via “fake live satellite” (to quote some Jim Kukral Daily Flip parlance, we present spy video and spy pics from the hallways of the Rio.

Note: Please note that these acts are performed by pure amateurs who did not undergo any professional training. Please do not try this at home, or anywhere near beloved household pets…

The Shawn Collins video montage with obligatory pounding bass dance track back:

More photos and videos…

Revving up the Segway’s gyroscope while celebrity pit engineer John “Evil Blogger” Chow looks on.

Amit Mehta tears up the carpet in his Brian Littleton Sweatervest(TM) race attire

John Chow prepares to do his high speed wheelie into a crowd of Affiliate Summit participants. Shawn Collins revised the number of attendees from 2,500 to 2,450 attendees shortly after. A new Guiness record for most number of ambulances at an Affiliate Summit is set.

Schaaf Consulting‘s Brook Schaaf practises his “Drive-By Blessing” technique. ASW attendees report seeing the “monetization light” shortly after.

ASW attendees gasp at the life-like nature of the Madam Tussaud’s wax scale replica of Shawn Collins. The figure will also be displayed at Affiliate Summit East in Boston, MA, August 10-12, 2008.

Here’s a video Joel Comm captured of my time on the Segway.

Also check out Joel’s latest project: TextCastLive.

For more goodness, check out:
Shawn’s post about the Segway at the Affiliate Summit

If you missed the first season of VH1’s The PickUp Artist, you can check out the VH1 page.

The series is slated for a second season and there’re a number of surprises planned, so reality series fans should be waiting with bated breath…

So into an undisclosed apartment complex in Hollywood, I got to check out Mystery’s digs, which has a great pool and BBQ area, just perfect for parties…

I got to do the old meet-and-greet at Project Hollywood 2 AKA Hotel Mystery:

And besides getting a copy of his “Mystery Method” book autographed, I also got to hear about some of the upcoming projects in store…you can expect to see some interesting stuff coming up in the next couple of months.

And it was cool to file a couple of my last blog posts from their office too. It was fun hanging with the Venusian Arts team and just relaxing after the last couple of days at the Affiliate Summit, and having a nice 2 hour afternoon nap.

[I’m looking bloated because of the weird angle I had to take to get this shot…]

And I got some great advice about working on my avatar and social dynamics skills…

I think internet marketers, whether affiliates or product owners can benefit from adding some of the “game” into their communication. If anything else, better communication and more rapport in this business benefits everyone.

Reporting from Project Hollywood 2, this is Andrew Wee out…

To find out more, visit: VenusianArts.

With that, here are the women of the Affiliate Summit:

Justine Ezarik is a lifecasting star who vlogs over at iJustine.tv. She spoke at the social marketing session with Sam Harrelson, Stephanie Agresta, Debbie Schultz and Tris Hussey sitting on the panel.

Schaaf Consulting’s Stephanie Harris spoke at the Anik Singal’s AC Certified workshop the day before Affiliate Summit.

Buy.com‘s Melissa Salas chaired the video marketing panel and also received the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Award for Affiliate Manager of the Year award. She’s done some great work with Buy.tv.

Irene Rojas is an affiliate manager with the OfferHive affiliate network based out of florida. Met her at the Affiliate Bash and she is friendly.

Carolyn Tang: I’ve talked to her on ABW and on Facebook and it was great to meet her at the summit. Carolyn’s probably the second most public face of ShareASale after ski fanatic and founder Brian Littleton. Although we didn’t have a chance to talk a whole lot, it was great to meet Carolyn and a number of the SAS merchants at the Affiliate Meet Market and the trade show.

Laura Alter, Lauren and Andrea Schoemaker

WickedFire regulars Laura Alter of Notebook Forums, Lauren AKA Turbolapp and my homie Andrea from PlanetAndrea…who’s been one of my buddies and supporters since I began.

Samantha Brachat: Sam over at NeverBlueAds has been a great affiliate manager and we did a podcast on seasonality and getting started in affiliate marketing. (Samantha Brachat Friday Podcast)

Heather Paulson:
We’ve exchanged emails and talked on the forums. I caught her presentation at the Affiliate Classroom Live workshop and it was a great opportunity to meet and talk to an experienced OPM and PPC manager like Heather at SAS’ Party Under the Stars. Check out the Paulson Management Group.

Danielle Nagami AKA MsDanielle
It’s always a great opportunity to meet people behind the blogs and meeting MsDanielle was no different. We were talking at the John Chow BBQ pig out the last day of the conference and I even got to carry her box around…

Robyn Jones
The former Ms Robyn Martin and now Mrs Kris Jones, always looking fab. Check out the PepperjamNetwork.

Rachel Honoway: Affiliate marketing veteran Rachel (who’s driving the AC Certified program) and I had some fun with the moving bed in the suite during the ShareASale party…but it’s really not what you think! If you haven’t yet, check out this edition of the Friday Podcast we did earlier. (Rachel Honoway Friday Podcast)

Julia Stead: We’ve talked on Linda Buquet’s 5Star Affiliate Marketing forum and I was surprised at how short she was.

Well, actually she’s like over 6′ and used to play basketball. We actually had got some footage of her and fellow ShareResults affiliate manager Jamie Fortunaso dancing on the couches at Tao during the Affiliate Bash, but the footage didn’t come out…

Ah well…ASE Boston I guess.

Debby Banning: Building trust and credibility is important in building your network and I first “met” Debby when she added me as a friend on Facebook. I checked out the link and saw that Mark Wielgus of 45n5.com was a common friend. Debby’s with Market Leverage.

Note: This is a snippet from the 300+ photos I took at the seminar. More to come, including some commentary and analysis of the topics covered during the show.

Check out details on the next Affiliate Summit

Upcoming Affiliate Summits: Boston (August 10-12, 2008) — New York City (October 5, 2008).

I’ve known about Affiliate Summit East in Boston later in August, but “New York City”?

That’s news to me.

Is that going to be “Affiliate Summit East 2”?

My buddy, Loxly, aptly pointed out that the NYC event is just one day. So it could be a scaled down event?

I would have checked with Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins, but he looks like he’s away from his computer now.

Maybe we’ll see some updates shortly from Shawn.

I’m already making plans to attend the Boston event, though it’ll be interesting to hear what “Affiliate Summit East 2” in NYC holds…

If a 20% (1 in 5) chance of winning a $5,000 prize (and an opportunity to contribute to a worthwhile cause) doesn’t excite you, I’m not sure what will…

Enter the Great Affiliate Road Rally, where you get to race against other Affiliate Summit West attendees for a chance to win a booth at the Affiliate Summit East tradeshow/seminar Aug 10-12 in Boston, MA.

Yes, the prize is transferable, and I’ve got word from Affiliate Summit co-founder Shawn Collins that a second and a third prize might be added too.

It’s a “bring your own car” (BYOC) competition, so you can pick up a remote controlled car at Target, Wal Mart or order it from an online retailers like Amazon or a RC specialist.

The event will be held indoors, so only electric cars will be allowed and it’ll be conducted in the same room as the keynote address (seating capacity of about 1,000…!), so you can expect a pretty big room.

To separate this from being a pure drag race, Shawn says he will fiendishly set up obstacles along the race route, so it’s not just a matter of getting a F1 car or a Nissan Skyline and hitting the throttle as hard as you can.

I’ve noticed that Affiliate Summit founders Missy Ward and Shawn Collins have gone all out to raise funds for a selected charity at every event and this Affiliate Summit is no different.

The beneficiary is the Starlight Starbright Childrenâ€s Foundation. Great Affiliate Road Rally participants can make a minimum donation of $100 at the Affiliate Summit link to Starlight to secure your entry.

I have my pit team already putting one of my cars through its paces…

Pit mechanics Bianca Wee putting the car through its final paces

So my team and I will be ready for the rally.

I am hearing that Shawn might be driving his “salami car” to serve as a pace car… (or to perhaps transform the race into a demolition derby…)

What’s a “salami car”? Watch the video below:

There’s a rumor that the great affiliate race queen Lisa Picarille (AKA Revenue magazine editor-in-chief) might be flagging off the race with a checkered flag….or a napkin… so there’s a Kodak moment right there…

Here’s a list of the current road rally competitors:

• InternetGeekGirl.com / Stephanie Agresta – $100
• Shopping-Bargains.com / Mike Allen – $100
• Affilisites Ltd. / Benjamin Bertisch – $100
• ZacJohnson.com / Zak Johnson – $100
• ShareASale / David Zelken – $100

For updates, you can visit the Starlight donations page.

To participate you should visit the road rally participation page ideally before this Friday. More importantly, you should order or buy your race car ahead of time.

Take note that with recent Department of Homeland Security regulations, you will need to wrap lithium batteries (most RC cars use these) in plastic. And you will need to put your RC remote in your check-in luggage.

In the meantime, my daughter Bianca was asking, when’s the Affiliate Motorcross coming up?

I first met Rachel on the Warrior Forum when I purchased her WSO (Warrior Special Offer). For a new Internet Marketer then, she certainly put out a great product on niche research, keyword strategies and putting your marketing campaign together.

A Drexel/UPenn grad, she’s also a member of the Phi Eta Sigma honor society, so I guess you might say we’re fellow “nerds”.

But then again, I think she’s a tough chick (can I say that?), having made a looong road trip from Philadelphia to LA to pursue her Internet Marketing goals.

She already has a successful membership site under her belt, YayFood – a caloric cycling/weight loss/weight management community – which has been featured in Women’s World magazine.

Although I’ve not met her yet, I have an intuition that she’s pretty hyper – going by her blog postings, and her penchant for T Harv Eker’s seminars and workshops.

She’s currently hanging out in LA, leading the Sex and the City Lifestyle (set in LA, rather than Manhattan) – getting hit on by Cuba Gooding Jr. (We’re still waiting for that follow up post, Rach…)

And hamming it up with the likes of:

Eben Pagan, creator of the Altitude program (and also known by alter ego, Pick Up Artist guru David Deangelo)

as well as

4-Hour Workweek Author Tim Ferriss and Rachel Rofe

–

After Affiliate Summit West, I’ll be headed to LA, and perhaps have a chance to meet up with Rachel.

If I do, I’ll certainly post an update.

I found his site when he first launched his eBay-Amazon-Youtube mashup script, which lets you build an affiliate site easily. Mark has already done the API (application programming interface) work for you, so you can skip around the techie aspects and get round to the business of generating affiliate commissions.

He followed that up with his 19pages.com application, which lets you build a niche site easily, and the best thing about it doesn’t require a MySQL connection, so you can transport it from one webhosting account to another easily. If you’re into site development/site flipping, it can be a handy tool to add value to a site (and increase it’s monetization and asking price too).

He’s since gone on to launch his Top100 “make money online” blog rankings (he developed the code) and it’s generated a fair amount of buzz in the internet marketing blogosphere.

So naturally I had to have him on the Friday Podcast to pick his brains about developing software applications to boost your internet marketing efforts and to directly monetize.

We talked about the building blocks of application development, as well as monetizing your application once it’s good to go.

You can hear our thorough discussion (weighing in at more than an hour long) and hear about his latest project ShowYourAdHere.com in the latest edition of the Friday Podcast accessible below:

Incidentially, Mark is also Blog Captain for the upcoming Affiliate Summit and you can hear about the blog room facilities too.

I probably spend about 1-2 hours each day driving and where I used to listen to music, then later switched to listening to news programs like the BBC, I’ve since switched to listening to podcasts a couple of months ago.

Why listen to podcasts? I personally would absorb more information out of a book, especially since I like to mark them up, but a podcast is a good way to multi-task, especially if you’re short on time and a great way to find something to do while you’re driving, exercising (I’m shooting for at least 2 hours of exercise a week to fight the flab), or while cleaning my desk or doing paperwork.

My personal preference is to go for programs with useful content, although I do like the occasional “talk radio” style podcast with hosts who are doing a “Seinfeld” (ie a podcast about nothing…) but generally that doesn’t take up more than 5% or 10% of my listening time.

If a podcast contains very good information, I’ll make a mental note to go through it again and take down notes.

Here’re some of the podcasts which I listen to and might be useful for you:

• Lisa Picarille and Shawn Collins’ “Affiliate Thing“: A great weekly topical podcast, Lisa and Shawn usually have a number of industry experts on their show and cover the latest shows.
• Sam Harrelson’s Affiliate Fortune Cookies: This is a new project which Sam has recently started up and it follows a “22 minute” (refering to the program length) daily podcast (5 days a week) format . It’ll be interesting to see Sam keep this up and perhaps make reference to it during the Social Marketing panel that he’ll be moderating at Affiliate Summit West. (Especially since the session synopsis reads “With almost 50% of Internet users now creating and sharing their own content, this new medium is changing how markets operate and how companies communicate with consumers.“
• Jeremy Schoemaker AKA Shoemoney’s Shoemoney Show: Jeremy hosted the Net Income show which featured interesting guests and where Pepperjam’s Kris Jones talked about doing seasonal PPC campaigns based on UGG boots and the American Idol television series to great effect. The latest show continues the tradition.

In addition to these, I buy quite a number of information products on CD or MP3, and also have utilities to rip DVD videos into MP3 tracks, so finding more audio material to listen to isn’t an issue.

If you’re looking for more audio podcasts, you might also like to check out the SEO podcasts on WebmasterRadio.fm. I spoke to WebmasterRadio founder Daron Babin (AKA SEGuru) last week and he mentioned that a number of new programs are in development.

Linda Woods’ (CEO and President of Partnercentric) new Affiliate Marketing Insider podcast looks interesting.

Shawn, Sam and Jim Kukral have recently launched/re-launched Geekcast.fm which will be a podcast aggregator of sorts.

For more podcasts, check out:

• Listing of podcasts on Shawn Collins’ iPod
• Carsten Cumbrowski’s Podcast Directory

Rachel has been in the industry since 1997, starting as an intern at KowaBunga! Technologies, maker of the MyAffiliateProgram (myAP) affiliate tracking and management platform, and following it’s acquisition by Think Partnershi, was promoted to VP of marketing and client services.

Most recently, Rachel has taken on the portfolio Vice-President, Marketing at Anik Singal’s Affiliate Classroom.

Besides speaking at numerous tradeshows and seminars, Rachel’s an excellent resource for affiliate management.

I invited Rachel to come on the Friday Podcast and got her thoughts on a number of issues that merchants and affiliate networks would need to factor in their affiliate programs.

Some of the issues we discussed included:

• Changes in the affiliate marketing industry
• Key trends to look out for this year, especially in the convergence of affiliate marketing techniques
• Structuring an affiliate program, especially if deciding to go along the affiliate marketing, pay per lead, revenue share or cost per impression route

Most interesting is Affiliate Classroom’s new ACCertified program which Rachel is spearheading and will see a launch of sorts at the upcoming Affiliate Summit West with the Affiliate Classroom Live workshop on Saturday 23rd February.

The event features affiliate industry veterans like Lisa Riolo,  Heather Paulson, Schaaf Consulting’s Stephanie Harris and Bryan Rhodes, Ned Farra from Zappos and Steven Lerch, Todd Farmer and John Vehlewald of Think Partnershipâ€s KowaBunga! and PrimaryAds Networks.

You can check out the Friday Podcast below:

To sign up for the free workshop, head over to:

–> Affiliate Classroom Live workshop

If you STILL haven’t got your Affiliate Summit West tickets yet, you should get them now:

–> Affiliate Summit West

I’ve created a temporary page listing my schedule (which will change over time) and the summit highlights.

You can take a look at:

–> Andrew Wee’s Affiliate Summit West schedule

Going by the last summit I attended, I met Scott Jangro and Geordie Carswell just once during the entire 3 days.

I hung out mostly with the WickedFire affiliate marketing forum folks.

You will meet so many people at one point that it will seem like a blur and it’s only after going through the business cards that you’ll recall who you met.

So if you would like to meet and talk to someone during the summit, it’d be a good idea to either:

• Private message them on their Facebook profile
• Contact them using the contact form on their blog
• Attend the session they’ll be speaking at.
• Head to one of the smaller events like Affiliate Classroom Live, Gospel Brunch, the Affiliate Dinner
• Arrange to meet at one of the parties and try to find each other from the hundreds of people there…

Else, it could be a hit-and-miss affair, especially with more than 2,500 people registered for the event.

Forewarned is forearmed…

Heather is a ReveNews writer/blogger who interviewed me for her “Internet Expansion Into Asia” piece last November, as well as founder and president of internet marketing consultancy and outsourced affiliate program manager, Paulson Management Group.

Heather has thrown down the gauntlet to the members of the Affiliate Fit Club, two teams of affiliates and affiliate members who were aiming to compete and lose weight by Affiliate Summit West a la “The Biggest Loser” format.

The members include veterans like Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Wade Tonkin, Karen Garcia, Lisa Riolo and Wade Sisson.

The affiliate fit club had been an inspriation to me, especially since working in front of a computer every day and not getting out much has meant the scale has hovered at 192 lbs for quite some time (especially after having great eats in the US each time I’m there for a seminar or event).

I’ve started swimming for about 20 minutes a couple of times a week (you need to get at least 20 minutes of rigorous exercise to get the metabolic rate into its “fat burning” phase.) and have lost about 5 lbs over the last week.

I’m definitely game to take part in it, if it opens up again. I’m highly competitive, so I’ll be in to win!

So it was pretty inspirational to hear that Heather has lost about 35 lbs (possibly more since the last Affiliate Summit – I’m not sure if she meant ASW last Feb or Affiliate Summit East in Miami last July). In any case, 35 lbs is very impressive!

She’s also thrown down this challenge:

And I’m sure she’ll be pretty smoking in a swimsuit.

Shawn’s mentioned that he’ll be in a tux at 6pm that day (kinda expected given that he’s one of the organizers for Affiliate Summit West). He’s also mentioned that the AFC has kinda fizzled out (Their last post was on 18th November on the Affiliate Fit Club blog).

And I thought it was pretty strategic for Heather to have this right after the Christian Affiliate Marketer’s Association “Gospel Brunch” that day. Where I have the feeling I might be challenging Wade Tonkin to see how much White Chocolate Walnut Cookies and White Chocolate Banana Bread Pudding we can chow down.

If they do show up, I am fairly sure the Affiliate Fit Club is set for a downfall…

But more importantly, if it does go through, you can be sure that pictures of Heather in a bikini and the members of the Affiliate Fit Club in their Swimsuit Showdown will make it to this blog.

Stay tuned…

–

If you haven’t yet, get your tickets for:

–> Affiliate Summit West (use code Affiliate Summit West coupon code “ANDREW10” for a 10% discount)

–> Christian Affiliate Marketers Association Gospel Brunch