Once a week, Del and I have “date night”.  He was less than impressed when I asked him to do a quick photo shoot before we went out this week. He perked up when I told I had a chance to win $1000 from Affiliate.com in their T-shirt Blogging Contest and that I’d share if we won!

Affiliate.com – a huge CPA network – gave out these cool King and Queen tees at Affiliate Summit last month.   My original intention was to pose like a fanned hand of cards, but as you can see, I’m no choreographer.

Yes, I know Affiliate.com has already made the Free Shirt Friday list, and I bumped this post up for a chance to win a grand – do you blame me?  I apologize to the other shirts in waiting for being selfish.  If it makes you feel any better, Affiliate.com is also donating $1000 to the American Red Cross Haiti Relief Fund as well.

And as a bribe to the celebrity judges – Missy Ward, John Chow, Zac Johnson, and Murray Newlands – drinks on me at #ASE10 with the winnings?!

*Update – seems I missed the entry deadline to enter the contest – it was 2/22/10 (for some unknown not-blonde reason, I thought it was 2/28). So even though I wasn’t qualified to win, the prize went to the most deserving Heather in BC!

This Saturday, I’m headed to Affiliate Summit in Las Vegas where the weather is guaranteed to be better than here in Nebraska where I’m looking out my office window to see twelve foot drifts of snow. And I’m ready for a semi-vacation as we’ve been cooped up in the house for way too long! The kids finally got to go back to school today.  So I debated on nap vs. work, and work won out.

If you are attending Affiliate Summit next week and want to meet up for dinner, drinks or discussion, just holla! Here’s definite times/places to find me each of the days…

Sunday 1:30pm-2:30pm – I will be presenting on the panel…

MommyBloggers: Changing the Face of Affiliate Marketing?

MommyBloggers are involved in many types of monetization strategies for their blogs, affiliate marketing being one, however they aren’t necessarily doing it in the “traditional” ways. 

Granted I am a mom, and I am a blogger, but I don’t label myself a “Mommy Blogger” (as they usually get a bad rap), but I’ll share my blogging monetization secrets in this session. Other panelists include:

• Deborah Carney, CEO, Team Loxly (Moderator)
• Wendy Limauge, Blogger, Sweeties Swag
• Carrie Rocha, President, Pocket Your Dollars
• Heather Sokol, Proprietor, Inexpensively

I’ll also be attending the ShareASale Under the Stars Party (they are serving PIZZA, my favorite) and the Strike Out Breast Cancer Midnight Bowling Fundraiser.

Monday 11:30am-12:30pm I’ll be participating in the Affiliate Showcase

Affiliate Showcase will be an opportunity for affiliates to preside over tables where merchants and networks can visit with them to discuss working together.

Tuesday 10:00am – 11:15am Presentation of Pinnacle Awards where I’m up for Affiliate of the Year!

You’ll also find me roaming the Meet Market and Exhibit Hall, maybe checking my email in the Blogger Lounge, and attending a few parties (ie Carolyn Tang’s Bachelorette Party and the Affiliate Summit Trivia Tweetup with Lisa Picarille). See Missy Ward’s complete party list. I’ll be the one drinking “something fruity.”

ShareASale ThinkTank 2009 Recap by Shawn Collins

ShareASale ThinkTank 2009 Wrap-Up by Missy Ward

ShareaSale Think Tank 2009: ReCap by Ian Fernando

Shareasale ThinkTank09: Epic Win! by Joe Sousa

Lessons Learned from ShareASale ThinkTank by Matt McWilliams

I didn’t plan to arrive early enough to participate in the golf outing, as I’m not a good golfer.  But after watching the Think Tank Golf Classic Video, I wish I would have tried. I may have had a chance at beating Asif Malik from GoldenCan! Watch the video for a good laugh PLUS learn how to embed your own video content that can includes affiliate links for monetization.

Special thanks to Brian Littleton and the ShareASale gang for including me in this awesome event! Are we really going to Hawaii next year?!?!

Next month, I’ll be attending my first Blog World Expo. And not only will I be attending, but I’m speaking in the Monetization Tract with Missy Ward, Scott Jangro and Brian Littleton talking about “Affiliate Marketing Blogging Secrets”.  See who else is speaking on the monetization schedule posted by Tim Jones.

So, I’ve booked my trip to Las Vegas!  I found it cheaper to fly Allegiant Air from a closer, smaller airport than making my usual trek to Omaha. I decided I’m staying at the Las Vegas Hilton* since it was inexpensive and within walking distance of the Convention Center.

I hope I receive my Poken in the mail that I won from I WearYourShirt.com and PokenZoo.com before my trip so I can “high four” everyone there!

Are YOU registered for BlogWorld yet? Or you can take your chance and win a free BlogWorld pass from John Chow!

*I applied to the Hilton affiliate program managed by Converseon.  I replied to the “Your Application Has Been Received” email asking how long it would take for approval. Reply was “2 – 5 days”.  After 8 days, I replied again asking. Reply “You should be approved next week.” Not cool. I ended up booking my stay through Hotels.com where they are offering up to $100 Rebate! And I’m still not approved for the Hilton program.

Saturday

Didn’t get into NYC until evening, but when you stay up until 4 a.m. in the morning, you can still pack in a lot of fun!  First stop was the Buy.at party atop the Empire Hotel followed by pizza, pubs and private parties.

Ken O'Donovan, Jon Levine, Kim Rowley, Pat Grady, Adam Reimer at Quality Meats

Sunday

Luckily I got to sleep in for a bit to heal my self-induced headache. I bounced back in time to hit the first session: Getting Noticed FAST Session. The panelists (Lisa Picarille, Michael Buechele, Trisha Lyn Fawver, Jen Goode and Stephanie Lichtenstein) did a great job, even if they did use some embarrassing pictures of me in their slideshow.

The afternoon was spent carousing the Meet Market. I was happy to volunteer my time at the Affiliate Marketers Give Back booth to raise money for breast cancer awareness.

Kim Rowley & Melissa Salas - Photo courtesy of Warren Corpus

Next up was the Market Leverage Yacht Party which ran us late getting to the ShareASale “Under the Stars” Party.  Brian Littleton always plans the perfect parties! I actually hit the bed early at 1:30 a.m. knowing I needed some beauty sleep.

Monday

I enjoyed the keynote with Chris Brogan and Julien Smith. I wish I would have brought along my copy of their new book Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust to have it autographed.

My favorite session (as in most notes taken and I’m smitten by the guy) was with Wil Reynolds. He was kind enough to type up his presentation with links for us all: SEO Tools You Can Use Today.

There were so many parties scheduled Monday night that I couldn’t possibly hit them all. But I couldn’t miss MarketLeverage’s Pizza Party as pizza is my absolute favorite food!  I also made appearances at Linkshare’s Unofficial Affiliate Summit East After Party at Johnny Utah’s (I did not ride the mechanical bull this time), the Drop.io Party at the SoHo House, and the GTO Management Bowling Party.

Bowling & Beers with GTO Management! Photo courtesy of Karen Garcia.

Tuesday

I was anxious to see the keynote with Peter Shankman as I’ve always been a fan of his HARO – Help A Reporter Out newsletter.  He proved to be just as motivational live in person.

I skipped the afternoon sessions to take a subway to Canal Street in Chinatown. I considered this “work” as well since my main sites are shopping related!

I missed going to the Yankees game (thanks for the invite Jason Rubacky) in the new stadium as I had to fly out Tuesday night.

I got to meet a lot of internet celebrities that I had never personally met (ie Gary Vaynerchuck and Ted Murphy) that I plan to blog about individually in upcoming posts.  I also met several non-internet celebrities that you can read about here.

Thanks to Shawn Collins and Missy Ward for putting on yet another phenomenal Affiliate Summit! Can’t wait for #asw10 in Vegas!

On the show, we talked about various WordPress Plug-Ins that we recommended.  Chris, on the other hand is “anti-plugin” and stated you don’t need plugins if you use the Thesis Theme from DIYThemes (hint, hint). Chris gasped and had to pull the sword from his chest after I said I currently have 36 plugins activated on my shoe blog (obviously I don’t use Thesis Theme…. as of yet anyway…) 

I picked 8 of the plug-ins I recommend to highlight…

1. Aggregate – Allows you to place the contents of an RSS feed into your posts, pages &/or sidebar.

2. All in One SEO Pack – Out-of-the-box Search Engine Optimization (I actually forgot to mention this one, but Karen brought it up!)

3. Google XML Sitemaps – Generates a Sitemap.xml for search engines (Chris recommends submitting your sitemaps to Google Webmaster Tools.)

4. Link Cloaking Plugin - Cloaks outgoing links (ie masks affiliate links). Missy recommended the MaxBlogPress Ninja that Shoemoney has been pimping, so I may have to give that plugin a try.

5. phpBay Lite – Adds eBay auction listings to your posts with just keywords.

6. Post-Plug Library Supports Similar Posts, Recent Posts, Random Posts, and Recent Comments plugins.

7. Subscribe to Comments – Allows readers to receive an email when new comments are posted to an entry. This is the only plugin that Chris recommended!

8. Youtuber – Adds YouTube videos to posts easily.

Other WordPress Plug-Ins we discussed were…

AdRotator – Rotates Ads (duh)

Adsense Deluxe – Inserts ads into posts

Category Visibility – Post only certain categories (Karen recommends this for “hiding” personal stuff from the main category line up)

Linkshare Link Lookup – Shawn Collins reviewed this.

Do you have a favorite plugin for WordPress not listed above?  Please leave a comment and tell us!

I was a panelist for Episode 2 of The Spew Podcast yesterday with moderator Missy Ward, Karen Garcia from GTO Management, Lisa Riolo and guest Brian Littleton from ShareASale.

Missy broke the ice by asking if any of us had seen Shoemoney’s post about GoGirl – the female urination device that allows girls to pee standing up!?  Although it didn’t sound like the other women would find it useful, me being a redneck would!  Trust me when I say you don’t want to know how many times I’m squatted in the ditch of tall weeds on a country road.

The discussion turned to the California Assembly Bill 178 that targets affiliate marketers and not in a good way.  I have to be honest that I haven’t followed the turmoil much since it hasn’t affecting me directly by living in Nebraska.  I was hoping the bigger states would resolve the issue before such legislation even hit Nebraska. C’mon Nebraska is eons behind other states – we still pee outside!  But Brian put me in my place, saying all affiliate marketers need to fight AB 178 and he tells us how we ALL can help. If you are unfamiliar with this proposed “Affiliate Sales Tax” then you should listen as they explain everything in layman terms. I learned a lot myself.

Since all of us women on the show work from home, we also talked about balancing time with kids.  And I just had to ask Bachelor Brian about his interview with VH1 about a matchmaker reality show.  Listen yourself over at Geekcast.fm.   After I shower for the day (I’ve been trying to shower before noon everyday….), I plan to listen myself to see how dim-witted I sound.

Missy Ward announced that she is the new affiliate manager for DIYThemes, the home of the Thesis Theme for WordPress. And the best part, Missy is working on a performance basis, with all the money earned to be donated to the National Breast Cancer Foundation (NBCF). WTG, Missy!

The Thesis Theme boasts the strongest SEO of any theme, so I see why Missy herself uses it for her blog, MissyWard.com and loves it.  Lots of other well-known bloggers, such as CopyBlogger and SimpleMom use the Thesis Theme as well. In fact, I think I may purchase it for my shopping blog.

So, improve your website and donate to NBCF at the same time either by purchasing the Thesis Theme for your WordPress blog or sign up to be an affiliate yourself.  Missy is also offering great incentives, like a free pass to Affiliate Summit East 2009 in NYC (details). See you there! 

Pinnacle Awards Finalists at Affiliate Summit West 2009 …
Scott Aiken; Mike Allen; Kim Rowley. Affiliate Manager of the Year. Angel Djambazov; Stephanie Harris; Kim Salvino. Exceptional Merchant. 4Checks.com; Amazon; CelebrateExpress.com. Affiliate Marketing Advocate …
Affiliate Marketing Blog by Shawn… – http://blog.affiliatetip.com/

You can read the Shawn’s full article above, or read about it on Missy’s blog (as hers is better looking).  I was nominated as a Pinnacle Awards Finalist for Affiliate of the Year, along with Scott Aikin and Mike Allen.  The only thing I have on those guys is that I have more hair, ha.  They are both exceptional affiliates, and I am privileged to be considered among them.  In fact, every finalist is a respected authority in the affiliate community, and I’m glad to call them all my friends.  Congratulations! And see you all in Vegas!

Another Google Web Alert I received…

Who has the most Followers on Twitter? (Top 100) (Nebraska, USA …
Kim Rowley (kimarketing), Nebraska, http://kimarketing.com, 399, 302, 531, 232 days ago. 9. Anne Good (AGOutLoud), Nebraska, http://www.agoutloud.com …

I didn’t know that a hundred people in Nebraska actually used Twitter!  I even made the Top Ten. Are you following me yet?  And if you aren’t using Google Alerts yet, I highly suggest it to see who’s talking about you!

When I first started dabbling in affiliate marketing a decade ago, the industry was dominately male, which worked to my advantage to get a lot of free drinks.  But as the years have progressed, so has woman power! And I still get free drinks, so all is well. I was honored to make the cover of Issue 4 of FeedFront Magazine as one of the “The Women of Affiliate Marketing” (subscribe for free at FeedFront.com). I personally know a lot of the other women featured as well, and consider them not only colleagues, but friends. Those gals that I don’t know yet, I hope to meet next month at Affiliate Summit in Vegas. You can read the issue online here. My bio is on page 18, and my Will Blog For Food pic made page 43.