We’re here today to talk about events and affiliate marketing, two topics where Shawn Collins, founder of Affiliate Summit is a pioneer and is here to share his insights.

Shawn is Co-CEO of the Affiliate Summit, the leading industry conference for affiliate marketing, which regularly sells out and features the biggest names in performance marketing.

He is also the Co-Editor-in-Chief of FeedFront Magazine and Founder of GeekCast.fm, a marketing podcast network where he hosts This is Affiliate Marketing.

His book, ‘Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants‘ is the best selling book in the space, and it is considered to be required reading by affiliate managers. He wrote the Amazon best-selling book, Extra Money Answer, as well as Affiliate Manager Boot Camp: Recruiting, Educating, and Retaining Affiliates.

Interview with Shawn Collins, Founder of Affiliate Summit

Could you tell us how Affiliate Summit got its start?

Shawn Collins: Yeah, so it’s not a really conventional kind of start. Back in 2003, I had been on the third or fourth year of helping this guy run his event called Affiliate Force, which was taking place initially in Miami and then it started taking place on cruises. And as I was doing it, I was offering up a lot of help with driving people there and advice on how to do things. I had just written a book so I had a pretty good list of people. So I was referring probably about half of the 200 people he was having on board on the cruise ships.

At the same time, there was a woman, Missy Ward, who I had met through that conference and she was helping as well with the travel. And we were both just really doing it on a volunteer basis. And we became sort of disenfranchised because he was, we were giving ideas on how they could improve it and make different changes and he just told us basically we should know our place and he knows how to do things better than we do. So we were both frustrated and basically over on a cruise ship

… over a couple of drinks, the two of us decided we should make our own competing conference.

And it didn’t make sense on any level because we really had zero money to invest and absolutely no experience running events.

But we were both just agitated enough with our being brushed off by this guy that we just think figured let’s go give it a try, we wanted to have something for the industry. We went back after that conference and had a phone call, and back in May of 93, we decided on the name and got the domain. And really the eight or $10 or whatever on GoDaddy for that domain was the only investment we had. Otherwise, we just did it all ourselves with just using the hosting. We already had for different sites and our own, I was using AWeber for email and just using all those different services I already had for other things. And we just built it from scratch without any kind of, we just basically when to make an event the way we thought they should be instead of how they had been running, something more interactive and more fun.

And we got our start in November of that year in 2003. I was working around, I guess it was 23rd Street and Park Avenue in New York city at the time, and we were trying to figure out a way we could get a cheaper free venue. A friend of mine told me that Baruch College, which was just a couple blocks away, they would let you come in there and run events if you gave some free tickets to the marketing students. So we went in there and we were able to get completely free all of the space in the AV and everything just in exchange for 10 free tickets. And so, we just had to pay for some coffee and lunches that day. So basically, we got our start with zero investment, $10 investment. We were selling tickets before we had to pay our bills so it was profitable from the start.

Sherri Langburt: That is amazing.

Shawn Collins: And then within a year, we did a competing cruise against him in 2004, and his never happened because I was recruiting so many of his attendees and they all just moved over to us. And so he was out of business within a year of us starting.

Sherri Langburt: Did you ever speak to him again?

Shawn Collins: No. He basically ripped off a lot of the people in the industry, and he was originally from South Africa and he just, he was living in Miami at the time. He just disappeared and left a lot of companies hanging who paid for booths and tickets and things. So he just sort of disappeared.

How big did Affiliate Summit get to? How many conferences? How many attendees? How did you get to that level?

Shawn Collins: So, these days, there are four events in Las Vegas, New York City, Singapore and Amsterdam across, in any given year, it’s over 10,000 people going to the four different events. We just started really slow and steady. We didn’t want to get in over our heads, and also just take on the big risk because trade shows was a tremendous risk with all of the contracts with hotels and everybody. We were just growing incrementally. We went from 200, it broke to 230 on a cruise ship to I guess in the 400s for our next land conference. And we just kept growing slowly and steadily.

People were always telling us how we’re making a mistake by not growing faster, but we wanted to, a lot of it was optics for us.

We used to have a crowded room and also we’d like to sell out each time. So people were always in a frenzy and they were buying tickets earlier in the next cycle. So it was really just, we just always had very controlled growth and I guess somewhat artificial sellouts because we kept it smaller.

Sherri Langburt: Very smart. So, you talk about risks with events, which is timely given what we’re going through right now. What do people do?

What are your predictions now for the event industry?

Shawn Collins: Well, I guess one thing is we sold in 2017 and we’re still on board until this July, co-CEO is my friend Missy and I. But I am very glad that I’m not an event owner any longer because I would be completely flipping out right now. I see it playing out with South by Southwest here in Austin. Similar to them, whenever people signed up for a pass, the agreement stated that they had a clause, if we ever had to postpone, there were no refunds, they would get a ticket to that future event whenever it was. Thankfully we never had to exercise that because I’m seeing people very angry towards South by Southwest.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, it’s not their fault. It’s crazy.

Shawn Collins: Yeah, the city told them they couldn’t do it, but the customers don’t want to have that money sitting in limbo, especially if they’re small companies and they can’t really, they want to either go and do business or get that money back. Some people are saying they’re going to do charge backs, which I’m not sure, I’m assuming they’ll probably rule in the customer’s favor there or else they, I think they’ll just have a lot of animosity towards the brand and it’s going to, even if they can pull off coming back next year, I think it’s going to take a hit because people are angry at them.

Sherri Langburt: You can understand both sides. It’s awful.

What are your predictions for the event industry?

Shawn Collins: I think probably a lot of the events will probably disappear just because they, the early ones, like for us, we didn’t make a profit for our first year and a half. So I think if I had deferred another year, I don’t know if I would stayed in business and keep working for free. I think a lot of the smaller ones will do that.

The ones that have more capital, like the company that bought Affiliate Summit, Clarion Events, they have a couple of hundred events and they’re very well funded, so I don’t think that they have any issue with this. Certainly not optimal but they can work through it. But I think the smaller mom and pop kind of conferences I think are going to really suffer.

Sherri Langburt: What do you think about, I’m seeing a lot like obviously leveraging technology to turn conferences and trade shows into virtual events. Are you hearing and seeing a lot of that?

What type of technologies could companies use to run virtual events?

Shawn Collins: I hear people predicting that. I know there are a lot of pluses to virtual events.

We’ve always sold a unique in-person experience and I think that, and I’ve seen a lot of different virtual events.

They just can’t really copy that, I guess they can for the distance learning part of it. We can just sit there and watch a speaker in front of a podium. The actual networking where all the relationships happen, I don’t see how that is realistic that it could replace it. But I’m sure that we’ll see a lot more platforms that are more robust to make virtual events more of a real feel like an in-person event, because a lot of them I’ve gone to in the past, they’ve been really nothing more than a glorified webinar.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. It’s interesting. There should be a lot of new disruptive things coming out of this whole thing.

Shawn Collins: Yeah. And I guess with a lot of people that are in Silicon Valley in New York, if they’re going to just be stuck, not really going into offices, still have a lot of time to brainstorm.

Sherri Langburt: You’re right, I didn’t think of that. Thanks for making me laugh. So, moving on to the affiliate topic, recently, like I know what affiliate is, but believe it or not, I would say eight out of 10 of our partners don’t know what affiliate marketing is.

Could you please what is affiliate marketing?

Shawn Collins: Yeah. I think that’s not surprising because my family would re-ask me every time I would see them, and even after I’ve been doing it since 97, and still most people I know just totally understand when I try to tell them. So I think it’s fair enough that a lot of people wouldn’t know. Somebody said one time that basically

affiliate marketing comes down to selling products you don’t own to people you don’t know.

So I guess that sort of distills it.

But I guess an example would be that if somebody had a blog about their favorite sports team, and just writing about different news and opinions and things, they can run ads from say Fanatics or Amazon to sell hats and shirts and jerseys as well as joining up with affiliate programs for Ticketmaster and StubHub to sell tickets. And in those cases, the affiliate programs would pay them, they would give them a unique link for tracking and then they would, as well as the creative, and they would pay them either a flat fee or percentage of a sale for anything they referred to them.

Sherri Langburt: So now here’s where it gets complicated.

What is the difference between that and today’s influencers?

Shawn Collins: I’d say it mostly comes down to the way that they’re compensated. So with a lot of influencers being paid on a set fee for promoting, while affiliates are all paid on performance. So otherwise, it’s somewhat of a similar deal except that the, I guess it’s more preferable for the influencers since they get the money theoretically whether or not they actually perform, whereas the affiliates only get it if they do perform. That gives more advantage to the advertisers.

Sherri Langburt: How do you think, because we have influencers producing tons of content, how do you think, a big question we get is what’s the ROI? Influencer content doesn’t drive sales.

What could companies do to move the needle with influencer content to drive a sale?

Shawn Collins: I think the biggest factor there is just to be very careful picking who you’re working with since there are some shady characters that have been exposed over time that go out there and buy followers and likes and comments just to game the system. So I guess it just has to be based on reputation and making sure that they seem to be authentic and real.

I’ve seen some tools out there, so you can sort of sniff out if people bought a bunch of Twitter or Instagram followers and see if they’re real or not. And I guess you can also just eyeball it and see what kind of activity they have and see if it seems like it’s real with the comments and likes. I guess you can’t really measure the likes, but the comments, see if they just seem to be something that they bought on Fiverr or Mechanical Turk versus real people talking if they have established accounts to people that are commenting.

Are there any other criteria when looking at an influencer? Because the big thing I think is, were traditional affiliates just better?

Sherri Langburt: At first they were serving banner ads and things like that, but aren’t a lot of them like really savvy SEO experts where they’re getting tons of qualified traffic to a landing page and then turning that into a deal?

Shawn Collins: Yeah. Well I guess, affiliate is sort of an umbrella title, but some people are doing SEO, some are doing paid search or strictly social or regular content creation in texts or videos and podcasts. There’s so many different specialties that affiliate marketing just sort of is all encompassing for. And then there are some of the companies that, especially in the coupon and like rebate kind of business like RetailMeNot where they’re giant public companies that have hundreds of employees and it’s all around affiliate marketing. So it really varies.

Sherri Langburt: I know that there’s a lot of platforms like Rakuten, you’re talking about some of them, and LinkShare and Commission Junction. But one that keeps coming up in the affiliate world, in the influencer world, sorry, is rewardStyle. Are they doing something different?

What is rewardStyle doing that every influencer is talking about them and using them?

Shawn Collins: Yeah, so it’s sort of a different animal where instead of being a regular merchant or advertiser, they sort of act both as the affiliate and the advertiser. And so, they take some steps to make it easier for the affiliates to, or the influencers to work with them than it is for, they do some of the legwork that an affiliate would have to do otherwise. But then the catch there is that if an affiliate is working directly with some of these retailers, it can be lucrative for them.

But then there they are doing more of the work. And there are some other companies that don’t necessarily target influencers like Skimlinks and some other ones where they, you can just basically put a script on your site and it’ll just turn a lot of the text into links that can be monetized. But then they’re taking a portion of what you would’ve gotten if you went direct.

What are the payouts? What percent is a regular compensation for an affiliate?

Shawn Collins: It varies wildly depending on what you’re selling. If you’re selling computers, you’re looking at like maybe 1%, but then most of the products on Amazon range from about five to 10%. And then if you’re going up to something that’s sold digitally, like a piece of software, you can get in the neighborhood of 50% or more.

Sherri Langburt: I think when I ran Weight Watchers, our percentage was 30% but I don’t know if I’m correct in my memory.

Shawn Collins: Yeah, I don’t remember for them. But I guess for that, that seems almost more like a, the same kind of model as hosting companies where you know that you have the recurring billing and as long as they stay as a customer, so, lifetime value, you can sort of project that and pay the affiliates that much more.

If a company or brand is on an affiliate platform, could they join another affiliate platform?

Shawn Collins: The one thing there that becomes complicated for some of the companies is if they have, if one company has programs or affiliate or influencer set ups with more than one network because then it could lead some times to attribution issues and which one actually referred it because the cookies might get a little bit goofy.

But otherwise, it was a thing back in, it was never mandated for affiliates or influencers I guess where they couldn’t belong to more than one network or platform. But advertisers were restricted back maybe 15, 20 years ago. They tried to keep them from being in more than one, especially with LinkShare, they were pretty tough on it.

These days, it’s all a very relaxed, so really, people could work with as many as they need to or want to. I’ve had accounts with really, and I don’t do anything fashion wise, so I haven’t worked with rewardStyle, but I have a half dozen different accounts on affiliate networks just so I can promote whatever I want to with the companies that I want to put on my sites.

Sherri Langburt: Right. From a brand perspective?

Shawn Collins: For me as an affiliate, I’ve joined up at all these different places.

Sherri Langburt: But aren’t these affiliate networks like the CJ’s and LinkShares, aren’t they, there’s a fee that’s pretty expensive now?

Shawn Collins: Just for the advertisers. For the affiliates, there’s no fee.

Sherri Langburt: Right. But for the advertisers.

Shawn Collins: Yeah. So if they were to go and be on two or three different networks, then they’re paying that fee over and over again. For many years, I managed affiliate programs and some of them insisted on being on multiple platforms. I tried to persuade them against doing that and they never wanted to listen. And there was never really that much of a big lift because most affiliates are on all the platforms.

Sherri Langburt: They hop around, yeah.

Shawn Collins: Yeah. There are some that have a preference for one and they have some kind of loyalty there, but that’s not very common. So there’s not really a big lift if you’re on two or three different networks.

Sherri Langburt: And there’s the minimums that you have to, you have to pay minimums and fees and it could get pretty expensive.

Shawn Collins: In my opinion, it’s not worth it. I’ve seen a lot more consolidation in the last couple of years. Like Fanatics that I mentioned earlier, they were on I think definitely two, maybe three different networks. And now they’ve consolidate it all and they’re just down to one now.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. Well I will say that, kind of to your point earlier, I stayed away from doing performance basis marketing with our influencers. But the reason my questions are so pointed is that we did just turn on an affiliate play. So, we do have 30,000 influencers that, I don’t think that they’re traditional affiliates who are in all these networks, it’s more across categories of different types of verticals, but really people who started out as Instagrammers or YouTubers or bloggers. And so, we just turn that on. Your responses have been very helpful to us. Thank you.

Shawn Collins: Great. And there is so much crossover too. There’s been a lot of influences coming to Affiliate Summit as speakers or just as attendees. I’ve seen a lot of people go back and forth or do hybrids, do some affiliate and some influencer flat fee stuff. I guess I’m dating back to maybe that was 10 or 15 years ago and it was like the big mommy blogger era. A lot of them were getting flat fees from GM and different companies to put paid posts. And after that dried up, a lot of them all shipped on over to affiliate marketing strictly.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. I think for the smaller ones, affiliate is kind of an easy way for them to try to get content that they could write about and also try to earn, start out their careers. But then for the bigger ones, sometimes they’re busy and they just need something quick, and here’s a hole in their editorial calendar and they do it. So, it’s surprising but they’re doing it.

Shawn Collins: And for any influencer that can merit the big fees versus performance from affiliate, I don’t see why they would consider affiliate. But definitely for the folks that are getting started up and growing that have to prove themselves, then that’s a good way. And also, it gives them some reputation with their followers if they have the impression that they are sponsored by some big companies they joined as affiliate programs.

It’s more organic you mean?

Shawn Collins: I think it just, as far as the optics of it, looks good if people have the impression that they’re sponsored by some of these companies just because they have affiliate ads on there.

Sherri Langburt: Well, what’s interesting you say that the smaller ones, why would the big ones do it, but I was, one of our influencers was talking about a post she did for a Gucci belt and it was an affiliate play. And she took it down for controversial reasons. But she said that she didn’t need to, she makes a lot of money, but she took it down. But she said that that one belt with the affiliate link was making her like $3,000 a month.

Shawn Collins: Yeah, and that’s great. And the nice thing there too is that if you do say one posts as an influencer and you get that set fee, and the chance that it could have taken off and maybe been viral and you could have had ongoing revenue for I guess maybe in perpetuity as long as people are still going to that versus the one time payment. It’s definitely more of a grind having to get it one transaction at a time though.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. And there’s also the arbitrage in it. Now with the media boosting on Instagram and Facebook, you could technically boost your own posts to get more exposure on that post and see how it turns into more sales.

Shawn Collins: Oh yeah, for sure. I do that pretty frequently mostly just on Facebook since it’s just more of a hassle to get a click on Instagram. For a lot of my affiliate sites, I’ll boost posts, and sometimes just a little small thing just to move a little bit just like $2 or so. But otherwise, some bigger boosts.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, that’s amazing. Well again, so helpful. I’m going to conclude with one question that I always ask, my guilty pleasure.

Name an influencer you love to follow but hate to admit that you do?

Shawn Collins: I guess probably the top one there would be Gary Vaynerchuk.

Sherri Langburt: Me too.

Shawn Collins: I’ve known him for a long time, he spoke at Affiliate Summit back in 2009. His whole message, it doesn’t really resonate with me, and I’ve actually written some things about the like the whole hustle porn kind of culture is just sort of corrosive to people.

Sherri Langburt: Why?

Shawn Collins: Just because it, people take pride in really just abandoning and having any kind of life and just focusing solely on work. I did that for a long time and I used to taut how I would barely spend time with my family and I was just up all the time just working. In 2010, I moved from New Jersey to Texas, and I really wanted to recast my lifestyle and started having some kind of lifestyle. And so, I started going out for long lunches and meeting people. I literally just didn’t really go out with friends at all for about 10 years. I was just so focused on building my company and working.

Sherri Langburt: Welcome to my world. I might have to leave New Jersey now.

Shawn Collins: And all of a sudden, I started just going out and I would just go on a hike once in a while, midday and meeting people for dinners and things, and I made a really big effort to just meet people and go to meetups and things. I used to work say till six and be with my family for a few hours then go back to work for like a second shift from about 9:00 PM to 2:00 AM. I cut that out, that late shift there and started just doing more recreation and meeting people even during my regular full time day. I noticed that I didn’t have any reduction in productivity because I guess I was just so exhausted. I’d have a movie on in the background at midnight and I probably mostly watched that and wasn’t even doing anything.

I took so much pride in the fact that I was just working all the time and sleeping four hours. At the end of that, it just felt very unfulfilling.

Shawn Collins: A few years ago, there was an event for entrepreneurs in Hoboken, New Jersey. And Gary Vaynerchuk was speaking and he had like rock star status there. And he was describing his day, how he never really watches TV or movies or anything. He doesn’t really do much for fun. He gets all of his fun out of working. And there were all these people there that were just giving a standing ovation about basically saying that he didn’t really have any indulgences or any fun. It just seemed warp to me that these people were screaming and cheering about the idea of doing nothing but work.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah, I think he’s gone back recently in the past year or so and he’s really refining that messaging, like kind of correcting it. I do think that the messaging that he gives out to start ups, not the work hustle stuff, but just go for it. If you’re 55 or 60, just do it. It’s kind of like a Mike Rowe mentality, you’re not good in school, not everyone’s good in school, go get it. Go work and do something else. That’s the part of him that I love. But I am guilty of falling into that, where you were 10 years ago.

Shawn Collins: Yeah. I watch his daily stuff on Instagram and everything and I like a lot of his stuff there. I think his personality and his work ethic aren’t really something that people can replicate. And also, there are some advantages there too. He’s certainly worked hard but his father did have a business that he was able to participate in versus starting from scratch. But it is a very neat story because I used to live walking distance from his old wine library and I would go there, that was my liquor store when it was just a little typical like three aisle liquor store.

Sherri Langburt: It’s 10 minutes from my house.

Shawn Collins: Oh, is it?

Sherri Langburt: Yup.

Shawn Collins: I used to live right across the 24 and Summit and I would walk over there.

Shawn Collins: But it’s amazing the place it is now, it’s a cathedral.

Sherri Langburt: He was here for Thanksgiving and I dragged my eight year old to go meet him on his birthday, my son’s birthday. And I’m like, maybe there’ll be like 15 people there. We waited for two hours in line.

Shawn Collins: Oh yeah. And I did the same thing for a book signing there a couple of years ago with my oldest daughter. We waited for a couple of hours to snake through there and go meet him. He was still so great and gracious with people because I hadn’t seen him in many years at that point and he gave me a big hug and asked me what was going on and everything. I wish I had that gift because I have a hard time recalling people that I had an hour long lunch with a year ago. He’s just very talented that way with people and he just really knocks himself out with work. I love some of his more recent things too that are more entry level, like helping people to go to garage sales and try to get things to resell for profit and stuff.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. And I like his message about kindness, and kindness in employees and kindness in your team.

Shawn Collins: That is so very important.

Sherri Langburt: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. This has been wonderful, amazing insight, and very timely and topical. So I really appreciate it and best of luck to you.

Shawn Collins: Great. Thanks so much and thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it.