Posts Tagged ‘shawn-collins’
Affiliate Summit co-founders Shawn Collins and Missy Ward present innovative events in conjunction with their signature Affiliate Summit events. They organized an affiliate road rally when I was in Las Vegas earlier this year, with about 20 affiliates and networks taking part. It was truly radio control mayhem as our radio signals crossed and cars, trucks and other vehicles careened into the human drivers and into the wall.
This time round, the next Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas will feature an Affiliate Triathlon, billed as “designed for affiliate marketers by affiliate marketers”. As affiliate marketing gives most successful affiliates the option to eat and sleep as much as they can comfortably tolerate, the tendency is to put on a little weight around the waist, thighs, face, etc. (With the exception of a couple of notables like Shawn, Missy, Heather Paulson, Ros Gardner, Amit Mehta, Chad Frederiksen, John Hasson, Nickycakes – who are the healthier minority among the affiliate majority).
All proceeds from the event go to charity, which will include the National Breast Cancer Foundation. It’ll be a fun event for sure, though I’m hoping Shawn will give more details. Maybe this year, we’ll see Heather in her bikini at the Rio pool taking on all challengers?
Shawn Collins on his preferred mode of transport
Affiliate Summit West 2009 will be from Jan 11-13 in Las Vegas at the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino.
Get your tickets early to avoid disappointment.
Tip: Use promo code ASW09WHOISAW to save 10% off any type of pass
Longevity is the name of the game if you want to be in business on the internet for the long term. With that, scraped content affiliate sites, blogs republishing RSS feeds verbatim, mashups recycling content from Wikipedia, can expect short term traffic, but seriously, who is going to go back to one of these sites?
It’s important to look at long-term strategies to get your business on a solid foundation. That is, if you don’t want to find yourself scrambling from one rock to another, as your “empire” sinks into the sand.
Let’s look at some ways to build up personal credibility, especially in the vastness of cyberspace, where a billion websites are calling out for attention.
Here are some essentials that every website should possess:
- Background and Biographical information
At the least, you need an “About” or “About Me”, “About Us” or “About Andrew” / “About (insert your name)”. And having text like “This is an example of a WordPress Page” doesn’t count either.
People want to read and possibly do business with people they know. And “knowing” goes beyond a run-of-the-mill “XYZ Inc is a leading Fortune 500, Inc Hot 100 Tech Startup”.
Pfft. These awards carry some weight, but if you take a second to think about some of the leading tech companies like Dell, Apple, Microsoft, the names Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Steve Jobs come to mind. Personalization if not just a “strategy”, it should be the cornerstone of your success if you want to succeed online.
Going beyond a mention of yourself the person, going a little deeper to (more…)
Shawn Collins has posted the seminar track presentations from Affiliate Summit Boston at the Affiliate Summit Blog, providing a wealth of resources and information for those in affiliate marketing as well as internet marketing.
Going through the various topics, it’s easy to add more tools to your marketing arsenal. At the same time, it will be prudent to avoid falling into the “one trick pony” pitfall.
What does this pitfall involve? Given that the content comes from some of the brightest lights in the internet industry?
Falling into the trap of seeing and then believing that a buzz technology, whether it’s twitter, seesmic, SEOQuake, or some other keyword, analytics or social media tool is going to transform your business.
Is one technology, or a handful of technologies or “tricks” going to transform your business? (more…)
One of the strength and at the same time, weaknesses of social media is it’s social nature.
Because you are able to broadcast your message across multiple platforms and multiple social networks, you can reach a huge number of people in a very short time.
A recent incident (nowhere near conclusion now) bears this out.
Jim Kukral’s TwitterMeThis social adventure.
At the recent Affiliate Summit West in Vegas 2008: Andrew Wee, Shawn Collins, Jim Kukral, Sam Harrelson, Zac Johnson
About a week ago, Jim published a blog post “Twitter Marketing Experiment – TwitterMeThis” where he’s pay $5 to the winner of a trivia game played on the Twitter micro-blogging (similar to SMS text messages) platform.
Shortly after, the topic was discussed on Geekcast, Jim posts a follow up about “social media being bullshit” and Sam posted a response and Shawn follows up with a sequence of 3 posts: one, two and three. In between there’s a discussion on TrishaLyn’s blog that Jim might not continue with the Geekcasts.
But I’m not so keen to talk about the discussion as to look at how it took place.
Far beyond a one-to-one email exchange, the issue has escalated to the point of seeming disagreement and the potential departure of Jim from the Geekcast team.
In the non-social media world, it would have just remained a private exchange of emails.
Within the social media context, the communication trail has gone through several blogs (many of which are highly trafficked), and re-syndicated or referred to by other blogs.
It has also been twittered about (with many of the protagonists in this exchange having followers in the high hundreds.
Add to this the number of Youtube and other video responses being generated, and you can see that a minor disagreement has blown up to probably most of the affiliate industry knowing or at least hearing about this.
If you factor in the fact that (more…)
Note to self: Do not keep the bulk of tax filing till the last month before taxes are due.
In the midst of shuffling paper around for hours and hours in my office (a real joy), I’ve been listening to episodes of Geekcast.
What I like about Geekcast’s easygoing, conversational banter between Shawn Collins, Lisa Picarille, Jim Kukral and Sam Harrelson is that it’s pretty stream-of-consciousness and more shoot-from-the-hip compared to a more produced program like Lisa and Shawn’s Affiliate Thing or Linda Woods’ Affiliate Marketing Insider.
It’s like talk radio for the internet marketer, and goes beyond the affiliate marketing/affiliate management/blogging/social media borders to cover all things “geeky”.
In the latest episode Web 2.0 is the Devil, (yes, it’s still a dirty word) – it’s interesting to hear about the dirty word beyond it’s traffic and monetization implications to get into the guts of the zeitgeist or spirit of social media.
As Lisa mentions, how do you separate (more…)
Probably have to do with the fact that since “everyone” is doing it.
Or the opposite scenario “no one” is doing it, so you should be the first.
I have been downloading and listening fairly religiously to the Geekcast podcasts (one of the Geeksters Shawn Collins mentioned that the new episodes come out every Tuesday) and watching Gary Vaynerchuk’s video posts.
So the $1m question is if you like this audio and video content, should you also jump on the metaphorical bandwagon and fire up your Flip camera too?
Here’s where I might differ from some of the others – there’s 2 elements to communication – there’s form (whether you write something on a sheet of paper, take a photo, do a blog post, shoot a video) and there’s function (AKA content) – the meaning behind your message.
In the rock-paper-scissors equation of multimedia…
- graphics trump text-alone (a picture says a thousand words?)
- audio trumps graphics (usually)
- and video trumps static images and audio, right?
In most cases, if you’re judging the value of (more…)
