Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

I'm Shawn Collins, author of the book, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants. I'm going to be doing a thirteen part video series on each of the chapters of the book.

The book is a little outdated at this point. I wrote it at the end of 2000, and it was published in April 2001.

So basically, I wanted to recap Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants and provide some updates. And as an introduction to the video version of the book, I wanted to set some expectations.

I'm going to go through each chapter. The book is setup in three sections: What Affiliate Marketing Can Do for Your Business, Setting Up Your Affiliate Program, and Managing Your Affiliate Program.

Each video will be about 3-4 minutes. They won't be so in depth, but rather a recap if you're already familiar with the industry, or else a primer for folks that are new to affiliate marketing.

It's not going to be a one-stop solution for affiliate managers. I'd still encourage everybody to attend conferences, read blogs, and participate in forums to get a well rounded affiliate manager education.

Anyhow, the foreword of Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants was written by a guy named James Marciano. I met him almost by accident.

I was riding the train into New York City for work and reading the business section of the Newark Star-Ledger. There was a profile on James, because he'd started up the first affiliate directory, Refer-it.com. This was back in late 1998 or early 1999.

At the time, I was running the affiliate program for Medsite.com. I felt sort of isolated, because there weren't groups or forums of affiliate marketers. I was so excited to see somebody else in the business, and I reached out and asked if he'd like to grab some lunch together.

We chatted, and James ended up being something of a mentor to me in affiliate marketing. I'd say James and Declan Dunn were two of the biggest influences in my affiliate marketing career.

James was a really sharp guy, and he started up the affiliate directory concept with Refer-it.com, and sold it to Internet.com. And so he wrote the foreword to the book.

The dedication I wrote for the book is very timely today. I recorded this video on my eleventh wedding anniversary and the dedication read...

For my wife, Vicky, a masterpiece of nature and the best ROI my heart will ever know.

I managed to sneak in a mixture of geekiness and romance.