“decades of research into expert performance has shown that experience itself — the raw amount of time you spend pursuing any particular activity, from brain surgery to skiing — can actually hinder your ability to deliver reproducibly superior performance.”

“Experts tend to be good at their particular talent, but when something unpredictable happens — something that changes the rules of the game they usually play — they’re little better than the rest of us.”

“Experience is not only insufficient for expert performance; in some cases, it can hurt. Highly experienced people tend to execute routine tasks almost unconsciously”

As I was reading the story I started reflecting back on some of the mistakes I’ve made as an experienced affiliate. I thought I would share a few:

1. Assuming that a keyword is bad before trying it. I recently launched a campaign in haste and forgot to add negative keywords. To my surprise many of the keywords I would have added as negative qualifiers, actually converted into sales. For example, “cancel (insert service name)” may seem like a negative no-brainer, but I’ve found in some cases that customers just want to know how to cancel before they buy.

2. Assuming that trademarked keywords convert best. It’s been widely accepted that brand keywords convert better than generic terms; however, I would contend that this isn’t always the case. I’ve found that many people searching with the brand name are existing customers, not prospects. In order to make a trademark strategy work you need to have a long list of negative keywords – e.g. (brand) problem, (brand) help, (brand) support, (brand) shipping etc.

3. Relying on one source of traffic. Since late 2003 I’ve been generating most of my traffic from paid search. While I’ve become very adept at pay per click, I’ve failed to be at the leading edge of new traffic generation techniques like social networking sites, and Web 2.0.

4. Taking advice from an affiliate manager (without due diligence). Most of the time the tips offered by your affiliate manager can be helpful, however there are occasions when their own experience gets in the way. For example, I had a merchant tell me that their current landing page was the top converter. They had done months of multi-variate tests and come to the conclusion they couldn’t move the needle any further. I decided to do my own landing page, bypassing theirs, and linked directly to the shopping cart – my conversions doubled.

5. Dismissing advice from people with less experience than you. After you’ve been in the business for a while you turn into a hammer. And when you’re a hammer everything looks like a nail. Newbies see things differently -they don’t have the same pre-conceived notions that you do.

Experience can lead to over confidence. Think about the last time you went into the doctor’s office… chances are they diagnosed you before you even finished describing your symptoms. This can have serious consequences, from prescribing the wrong treatment to worsening your condition. According to the FDA, medical mistakes are one of the top 10 leading causes of death in the United States.

Luckily, bad judgments in affiliate marketing seldom kill anybody; however, it could lead to the death of your business.

Going back to the Time Magazine article:

“If you’re coasting you’re not improving”

“we like to practice what we know, stretching out in the warm bath of familiarity rather than stretching our skills. Those who overcome that tendency are the real high performers.”

Don’t get caught up in comfortable routines, going through the daily motions. If you really want to have continued success you must push yourself into uncomfortable territory and learn to try new things.

One last thing, you can make this post better by sharing your mistakes.

http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/more.html

Just login to your Gmail account to find out how you can have your e-mails sent to you through snail mail.

That’s what I call innovation!

Google didn’t stop with Gmail. Check out Vinny’s blog for the scoop on the new AdWords revenue model.

Google has made it quick and easy to create your own custom search engine. Simply fill out a two page web form and you have your own customized search engine running high-octane Google under the hood. There are several featured examples on the Coop site. Affiliate Classroom has already developed a vertical search engine for affiliate marketing.

User generated content has been fueling the rapid growth of Web 2.0 companies over the last 2-3 years. The rise of community-based vertical search will add even more fuel to the fire. Google Coop could improve search the same way Firefox improved the browser by harnessing the power of an active and passionate user community.

Google is smart to let publishers monetize Google Coop through AdSense. The financial incentive combined with the desire to improve search results will continue to drive innovation. However, Google will have to take the necessary steps to detect and remove community spam and fraud, otherwise, there will be an unusually high ratio of sites based on keywords like “mesothelioma” and other expensive search phrases.

Google could make custom search even better by adding more social elements like user ratings and reviews. I would also like to see them add some more user-defined search options like Google Base, which would allow us to refine search results even further.

The underlying technology powering vertical search platforms will continue to remain proprietary for the foreseeable future. Building and maintaining a hardware infrastructure to support a search index costs millions of dollars, which will prevent an open source engine like Nutch from gaining mass appeal. However, the open source community is very innovate – I could see somebody building a distributed computing environment that could support such an endeavor. As soon as someone pairs a money-making business model with this idea, open source search could become feasible.

Just two months ago David Carruthers, former CEO of BetOn Sports (I would link to it, but I don’t want to go to jail), was arrested while changing planes in the U.S. Then last month Peter Dicks, the former Sportingbet chairman, was picked up at Kennedy International Airport on a warrant. These arrests coupled with increased rhetoric from Capitol Hill lawmakers officially put the online gaming companies on notice.

Last week congress hammered the last nail in the coffin by passing the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (I would link to it, but I know you’re not going to read it), which essentially bans online gambling in the United States by making it illegal for banks to accept transactions from online gaming sites.

Previous efforts to outlaw online gaming had no teeth and were rarely enforced. This new bill, soon to be passed into law by President Bush, has lion teeth and has already chased the online gaming companies up the tree.

This week publicly traded gaming companies based in the U.K were reeling after their stock prices plummeted on the news. 888.com and other gaming sites quickly began notifying their affiliates that they should cease promoting their sites to US-based customers, and focus on international campaigns.

What does all of this mean to Revenews readers? It depends on your situation…

Casino Affiliates

If you’re a casino affiliate, it’s time to start thinking about affiliate opportunities outside of the online gaming world. You’ll probably find that these programs are less lucrative than what you’ve grown accustom to, but also less competitive. The same innovation that you used to make a six figure income promoting No-limit Texas Hold ‘em to Johnny Chan wannabes will help you dominate search results for Mrs. Fields cookies.

As an added benefit, you can stop worrying about the two guys in suits and sunglasses sitting in the black van that’s been parked across the street for the last two months.

Traditional Affiliates

If you’re not a casino affiliate, brace yourself for the upcoming jolt that may soon shake up the comfortable little niche that you’ve owned for the last two years. Casino affiliates have managed to survive and thrive in hostile conditions for more than a decade. Even when Google, Yahoo and MSN pulled the plug on them, they found a way to adapt and grow their business.

My advice is to watch what they do. When Google said they had to stop promoting high-stakes online bingo through paid search, they adapted by giving away a free strategy guide for bingo on their landing page. They used the bingo guide as a lead generator to promote online casino offers on the back end.

Online casino affiliates were also among the first to discover that buying old websites with decent search rankings were prime real estate opportunities for casino redevelopment (optimization) projects. Why build a new site and risk getting sandboxed, when you can simply tear down and rebuild an existing site with casino-targeted keywords.

Survival of the Fittest

The bottom line is that we all need to adapt and diversify our income streams. You never want to be in a situation where 80% of your income is derived from one merchant or category. You want to build several streams of income by building out multiple sites in multiple categories.

Ask yourself the following question: Would you rather have 1 site making $1,000 a day, or 100 sites making $5/day?

As I was doing some competitive research on Google for some of my keywords, I discovered that Google now has a geo-targeted search feature to help you find local singles. Here is a screenshot from my search for “Austin Dating”:

It appears like Google is scraping profiles from websites like LoveAccess.com, Date.com, and other popular dating sites and showing them in the results. I also noticed that Google is using GoogleBase to pull in results.

You can refine your search by age, gender, sexual orientation, marital status, and more. Google also allows you to type in keywords to get more detailed results.

It looks like the search results for these keyword searches are being dominated by just a few players, who seem to be getting a lift from their listings in GoogleBase. Many of the sites listed in the online dating results pages are not showing up in the regular searches for the same keywords. This could be a good opportunity for other dating sites who have struggled to achieve top rankings for online dating keywords.

After spending some time doing some test searches, I have concluded that Google Online Dating has a long way to go before their search functionality can catch up to industry leaders like Yahoo Personals and Match.com. I also fail to see the added value that Google is providing to searchers by scraping results from a handful of dating sites.

Perhaps Google wants to become an online dating affiliate… they have been looking for ways to diversify.

My first thought was that I was hacked, or that my web host deleted some files by mistake. It wasn’t until I logged into Blogger that I discovered that Google took it upon themselves to disable my blog.

Apparently Google now has a “Spam Prevention Robot” (Spot), which crawls the web looking for spam blogs (splogs). For those of you who don’t know what a spam blog is just go to MSN and search for anything. If you see a Blogspot result, chances are it’s a splog.

I’m not sure what the Robot disliked about my blog… Did I use a forbidden keyword? Did I misspell too many words, or use incorrect grammar? Maybe somebody from a bad neighborhood linked to my site? I’ll probably never know.

I understand that Google’s spambot isn’t perfect and may produce a few false positives in an attempt to rid the web of a few splogs. But I don’t understand why they would allow Spot to automatically disable and delete blogs without 1 – contacting the blog owner, and 2 – verifying Spot’s findings.

I think this issue is indicative of an even bigger problem at Google – a failure to communicate. I’m not asking Google to call or e-mail me every time they update their index, but if they plan on disabling my blog some kind of notification would be nice.

In the meantime, I think I’m going to make time to convert my blog to WordPress. I’ve always had the intention of doing this anyway.

To be honest, I wasn’t really surprised by the news… A few weeks ago Yahoo allowed me to have a peak under the hood and it didn’t seem like the product was even close to being ready.

Apparently investors didn’t like the news either; the stock fell 22% today (biggest 1 day drop for Yahoo). For those investors looking for a great value I recommend you pick up some shares while the price is low.

The upcoming upgrade will completely change the way we use Yahoo Search Marketing. It’s so fundamentally different than their current product that most won’t even recognize it. I suspect there are going to be a lot of account migration problems during the transition.

I’m not sure why Yahoo wants to rush this product out in Q4 when online advertising is at its peak. I would suggest they wait until Q1 of ‘07 so that the impact on advertisers won’t be as significant. This will also give them more time to beta test the product. A poorly timed and implemented upgrade may cost them more than 20%.

Yahoo has a real opportunity with this upgrade to recruit advertisers away from Google. If the upgrade goes well, advertisers who have been priced out of Google will flock to Yahoo in droves. On the other hand, they risk losing their own advertiser base if they blow it.

Personally, I’m cheering for Yahoo. Google needs a tougher competitor that will help them appreciate their advertisers… even if they are only affiliates.

The new linking initiative is set to launch June 23, 2006. From what I’ve gathered, legacy links will continue to work after this date, but CJ will be actively pushing affiliates to use the new links.

What does this mean for affiliates? I’ll try to break it down…

New JavaScript Links

Instead of using a standard HTML link, CJ will now use JavaScript links. For those who don’t know what a JavaScript link is, Google uses them for their popular AdSense program.

Here are the benefits of using JavaScript links (according to CJ):

• Support multimedia and future dynamic capabilities such as automatic rotation, etc.
• JavaScript links are dynamic, so for example, if an advertiser makes a change to a text link, it will be dynamically updated on your site without any effort on your part.
• Offer new defense against ad blocking software, so links won’t get blocked.
• Can still be modified in all the ways important to you, including modifying destination URL, appending with SID, encrypting, changing destination URL and designating hyperlink location in text links.
• Will call any future link type, such as video.
• Are very common and can easily be incorporated into any Web site.

My questions and thoughts about JavaScript Links:

I haven’t seen the actual JavaScript code yet, but I’m hoping that it’s a simplified string of code, and not some multi-line JavaScript with hundreds of variables. I’m thinking they may do it like an include file so that they have more control over link updates.

Will affiliates still be able to customize the anchor (link) text to suit their needs, or will they have to use legacy links for this?

The new JavaScript links will provide temporary relief from ad blocking programs like Norton. However, I predict this won’t last as Norton will update their ad blocking program to check for the new JavaScript pattern.

Updated E-mail Links

Because many e-mail clients don’t run JavaScript, CJ will continue using legacy links for e-mail.

Updated Keyword Links

According to the FAQ, affiliates will have to declare themselves as SEM publishers in order to access keyword links. I’m not sure I understand this change?

Keyword links and e-mail links will continue using the legacy link format. I’m guessing this is meant for affiliates who link directly to the merchant from the search engines.

Datafeeds Untouched

CJ has also noted that they will be using the legacy link format for datafeeds.

The Bottom Line:

The new JavaScript linking format will give CJ more flexibility and control over their links and creative. The new links will also give CJ Google-AdSense-like insight into their publishers, which will help eliminate rogue affiliates from their network.

Some affiliate networks provide their affiliates with merchant stats, but these stats don’t always give you the complete picture. These stats are merely a baseline to help you weigh a merchant’s potential.

When I partner up with a merchant, I evaluate them like I’m entering into a business partnership with them. I go through their site, look at their shopping cart, search for customer feedback and evaluate their competition. I’ll even perform a test purchase so I can experience their products and services as a real customer.

Before I decide to promote a merchant I want to know as much about them as possible. If the merchant is a public company I’ll look at their financials and news headlines on Yahoo finance or CBS Marketwatch. I’ll even look at the financials of some of their competitors and the industry as a whole. If the company is privately held, I’ll use a service like Hoover’s (a D&B company) or Google to do my research.

Once I’m up and running with a merchant I’m continually evaluating their performance. If their conversion rate increases or decreases I want to know exactly why.

I also setup news alerts and RSS feeds on my merchants. This allows me to step back and look at the company’s big picture. It can also serve as an early warning for troubles ahead.

For example, I recently noticed that one of the merchants I was working with was reversing a lot more leads than normal. I couldn’t figure out exactly why this was happening. Then I received an important clue in my inbox… I found out through a news alert that the company was laying off thousands of employees and shutting down hundreds of offices.

The company layoffs and office closures may not have anything to do with the increase in reversals, but it put me on notice. I will continue to monitor the situation closely so I can make informed decisions about working with this merchant.

In nearly 3 years as an affiliate, I have only been burned by a merchant once, and it was not very severe. I attribute this largely to the diligence I use when entering into partnerships with merchants, and continually monitoring their performance.

This year the show was moved from the Marriot Hotel, to the Moscone Convention Center down the road to accommodate growth. If the size of this years conference is any indicator, next year Ad:Tech will be hosted at AT&T Park (Home of the Giants). I don’t think the conference organizers would object to this either.

Just before the first of three keynote presentations, the Ad:Tech Chair Person rattled off some interesting stats about the conference. She claimed that there were over 9,000 people in attendance at this years show, making it the largest Ad:Tech ever. She went on to talk about additional shows being added to the lineup in places like Dubai, and Germany.

They have also launched a chain of mini Ad:Tech’s dubbed the Impact One Day Series, which are hosted in big cities throughout the US. By 2007 you will probably be able to hit an Ad:Tech show once a month. At this rate, the conference will start looking less like an Internet Marketing show and more like a U2 concert tour.

The size and rapid growth of the show demonstrate the success of Ad:Tech, but at what point does an event like this become too big? The show is very wide and covers a lot of topics, but with such a diverse group, is it possible to go deep enough into any one subject?

Perhaps one of the biggest benefits to attending an industry conference is the networking. When your conference is the size of a small city how do you encourage and facilitate networking and relationship building? I was able to make a few good connections at the show, but I didn’t even get a chance to run out of business cards like I normally do. Not that I didn’t try, but the opportunities to network were limited. I guess I could have started handing out cards to the booth operators, but I didn’t feel like hearing their sales message, and getting a series of 20 follow-up e-mails.

In my opinion, I think you can get more value out of a more specialized show like CJU or Affiliate Summit. These shows appeal to a highly-targeted audience and are limited in size. This allows you to have more advanced sessions and put together more networking opportunities.

As the Internet marketing industry continues to grow and become more segmented, I think there will be an even greater need for more specialized conferences and training sessions.