Kim Rowley: The Marketing Mama

September/October 2007 Issue: Page 82

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Kim Rowley once dreamt of living in a big city. She's currently a single mom living in a small Nebraska town, but don't let that fool you – she's still living out her dreams. Rowley is a successful affiliate marketer who runs 50 websites and also has her hands full raising four kids. Still, she found time to design her own house from the ground up and manages to shuttle between Nebraska and Denver to see her boyfriend every other weekend.

She has an easygoing manner, and carries the enthusiasm of someone just a few years out of high school even though she's 34 and has been through a tumultuous seven years, which included a divorce.

Rowley says she didn't have the best of childhoods. Her parents were also divorced. At the time it was scandalous for the tiny town of Pierce, Neb., (population about 1,700), which she describes as "very fl at." She graduated in a class of 50 and she says that living in a very small town has its good aspects and bad. Her plan was to leave as soon as possible. She wanted to become a commercial artist, maybe make TV commercials, maybe light out on the promise of a track scholarship. But then at 17 years old, she got pregnant, subsequently married and stayed in Pierce.

Her oldest son, Taylor, is now 16. She has twin daughters, Macy and Mallory – who were preemies weighing 2 pounds each at birth – are 13. Her youngest son, Tatym, is 4. Taylor and Macy have been diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), something they inherited from their father, says Rowley. It makes for a busy household and Rowley says driving them more than two hours away to the doctor in Omaha can be trying. While OCD can be controlled with medicine, Rowley says she still gets great pleasure from raising her kids and designed a nice "bonus room" in her new house where her daughter can "rock her head," her way of making sense of the day. The oldest can drive the younger ones to summer sports activities now and Rowley's sister often helps out.

She says she feels more stable without her ex-husband, who she said liked to spend money a bit too much. "He basically remarried soon after our divorce was final," she says. She learned his "mood swings" were OCD after the kids were diagnosed. He was a pilot by hobby and the plane she bought him went with him when he faded from town.

She says she's the talk of the town, but not because people are peeking over the fence at her private life. In the time she's been an affiliate marketer, she designed from scratch and built a brand new 4,000-square-foot house on what the neighbors call "snob hill." She drew out the design on graph paper and turned it over to contractors to come up with a budget and then construct the home. She says she wants to do it again because there were so many things she wants to improve on already. While she designed an office for herself, she realizes now that it isn't big enough because that's where everyone tends to congregate.

A DIY Attitude

This speaks to her do-it-yourself attitude in nearly everything she does. In the beginning of her affiliate career she knew nothing of online marketing. One night in one of her first experiences with the Internet she typed "html" into Yahoo and, bam, a whole new world opened up. She taught herself HTML when she was a physician's assistant in the local doctor's office. She chased a college degree in business administration at night and completed it after nine years. Her first site was on Tripod.

PreemieTwins.com was her first affiliate site. As an avid coupon clipper, she started with coupons on her own sites and then realized she could actually get paid for doing it. At first, she says, it was still a hobby while working at the doctor's office. Then in 1999 she started getting checks. Since 2001, she has supported herself solely off her affiliate sites. One of her first programs was with Staples, who at the time was with Be-Free. She thought it was win-win because customers get the savings and she gets the commissions. From there she signed up for a whole bunch – Amazon.com, LinkShare's More.com drugstore and others. Now-defunct e-currency site Flooz.com once named her "best affiliate."

Now some of her sites include AllBabyDeals.com, CoffeeAffiliate-Blog.com, EnterOnlineSweeps.com, FreeCameraPrints.com, Florist-Village.com, FreePregnancyCalculator.com, OneDayOnlyDeals.com, RxSaver.net, TopLineWatches.com and WorkInMyPajamas.com. She founded Shoeaholics Anonymous and launched a deal site at House- ForKim.com when she was building her new house.

Most of her sites are blogs, with frequent updates written by Rowley and her two aunts. Her older son chips in by swapping coupon codes and adding links to her ShoppingBookmarks.com. She's trying to get him to learn to code in PHP so he can teach it to her. She says he is more technically inclined and wants to design computer games eventually. She'd like to get her boyfriend to work for her as well. She says she always has fresh ideas for new things and keeps a pen and paper by her bed to jot down brainstorms in the middle of the night, like an idea for a blog or a new domain name.

Blogging and the Personal Touch

If you go to any of her sites, the blogs are breezy and conversational. There is certainly no hard-sell here and that's probably why she sees the traffic she does. A typical ShoppingBookmarks.com blog entry goes something like: "On Sunday, I wanted to go to Sam's Club in Sioux City to stock up on some staple items (you know, lasagna, pizza pockets, crab rangoons), so asked my sister if she wanted to ride along. Sure, as she wanted to go shopping at the mall for some clothes. Continued on Page 2...

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