I was sitting in the pub the other night having a quiet drink with a very good friend of mine who expressed her concerns about Google Instant Search, she was telling me how much she disliked the way everything changed as you typed a query into the search box, now this lady is just a normal computer user and not a complete and utter geek (yes I do have none geeky friends).

Well to cut a long story short the conversation ended with the plea “How do I get rid of it?” and I got to thinking many others may want to do the same, hence this article….

so How Do I Turn Off Google Instant Search?

Well the short answer is very easily.

Actually there are 2 ways:

1. You can turn off Google Instant Search by clicking the link Instant is on next to the search box on any search results page.
2. Or by visiting your Preferences and scrolling down to the bottom of the page and clicking
   Do not use Google Instant.

When researching the subject I discovered this excellent video from Lifehacker which goes though the process.

page.

I recently caught up with Matthew Wood Managing Director of Existem Ltd and founder of the leading affiliate conference a4uexpo and the popular affiliate forum affiliates4u, with a4uexpo 2010 looming large Matthew agreed to answer a few questions. So without further ado…

Hi Matthew, Can you give me a bit of the background of A4uexpo, how did the initial concept come to fruition?

Within the industry affiliates have a desire to meet people who really ‘get’ affiliate marketing. After all, it’s not something you want to bore and chat to your mates about down the pub!

We started with local Get2Gethers around the UK, much like the ones we have recently held in Dublin, Bristol and in Manchester this week.  The popularity of our events in London were frankly bewildering with our last bar style event at the Pitcher & Piano attracting nearly 600 people.

Was the time right though to launch a fully blown conference? We had some hard thinking to do.

What was the biggest challenge getting A4uexpo off the ground?

The risk. Let’s face it we were a very small team in Bristol; affiliates by nature  – certainly not event or conference managers and to invest £250,000 in a conference at ExCeL was mind-blowing.

I sat down with key players in the market to gauge appetite and most importantly support.

Back in 2007 Affiliate Marketing was going through a big transition, its reputation growing but brands were still unclear about its actual ROI.

With significant support from affiliate networks we were able to push forward and it was a bumpy yet exciting ride.

The most important thing however was that the whole industry backed the event networks, bloggers, agencies and so forth and saw it as a way of getting everyone together at the same time in the same place and to really put our channel in the limelight.

Four London Expo’s and two in Europe, any plans to go intercontinental?

Affiliate Marketing whilst established in the UK, USA and major mainland European markets such as Germany is still embryonic in nature elsewhere.  However that said we are hoping to launch some a4uexpo ‘lite’ events in 2011 in emerging markets. Keep an eye on our twitter account @a4uexpo for details.

If you were only able to go to one session at this year’s a4uexpo which one would it be?

I think it would have to be the a4uexpo Grilling Session – Day 1 @ 17.15 in Room 2-4. A session which involves the Publisher Directors of some UK Networks, Duncan Popham I’m sure will be providing some controversial questions towards them. I’m expecting the questions to cover Affiliate Payments, De-duplication, Closed Groups and Confidentiality, but we’ve left these questions in the capable hands of Duncan!

That’s just one. It’s an incredibly difficult task to schedule 50 sessions and to ensure we cover the latest trends and topics often before they hit the minds of those in the industry. I urge people to take a good look and if there is not something for you let me know!

Which one person in the affiliate marketing industry do you most admire?

That’s incredibly hard. The beauty of Affiliate Marketing is that it can be used to supplement your lifestyle alongside a day job or enable entrepreneurs to create tangible businesses.

It’s fair to say people have come and gone, so anyone who has innovated to stay in the game gets my admiration.

What is the biggest change you have seen since you started in the affiliate industry?

I’ve been around long enough to see many types of business model leap to the top of the earnings chart. However the biggest change I guess is the overall acknowledgement of Affiliate Marketing as a professional and genuine online marketing channel. That said it frustrates me that leading publications still don’t give us the credit we deserve.

Where do you see affiliate marketing in say 5 or 10 years time?

It’s going to change to Performance Marketing and will be closely aligned with other marketing channels in an integrated fashion. There will be far greater segmentation of publisher business models, many traditional affiliates will fade away and be replaced with top level high tier publishers, performance marketing enabled mobile applications and high value add web applications. Everything will be open sourced with closer collaboration and a keener eye on the actual ROI. That’s next year though! – It’s just impossible to go further ahead!

Finally is there any particular funny anecdote or incident from a previous a4uexpo you would like to share with my readers?

Too many to mention! Though I’m sure I’ve seen some videos of James Little from Affiliate future and Mark White from UK Web Media dancing on youtube.

Thank you very much Matthew for taking time out of your busy schedule, see you in October.

Oh here are the video’s Matt mentions:

a4uexpo 2010 Europe’s largest Performance Marketing Conference with over 1,000 delegates, 48 conference sessions will be held in London on the 12th and 13th October 2010.

Its been a while since I posted anything here so I thought it high time I got my finger out, so here is a piece I have plagiarised.

No seriously the following article by coaching expert Annabel Sutton landed in my inbox this morning and I immediately was struck by how much of it applied to affiliate marketing so much so that I contacted Annabel and asked permission to reproduce it in full here, enjoy.

The Art of Getting it Wrong by Annabel Sutton

Mistakes are the portals of discovery. (James Joyce)

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. (Albert Einstein)

When was the last time you watched a small child learning to walk?  They’ll walk a couple of steps, fall over, pick themselves up and try again.  Heaven knows how many times they fall over before they master the art of walking.  They might cry the first time they fall down — they might be a bit surprised and perplexed — they might have a bit of a chuckle — but do they give up?  No.  There isn’t the tiniest question of giving up and they get back on their feet and try again.

Just imagine, if a child stopped and thought too much about walking, he or she would probably never start.  They could spend days, weeks, months thinking about it and preparing for it, take umpteen courses, read books on how to walk but never actually do it.  Perfectionists can learn a lot from toddlers.  Not only do they put off doing things, but sometimes they’re so paralysed by the fear of not getting it right that they shelve an idea completely.  We procrastinators are exactly the same: we over-think things and over-prepare, worried that we’ll never know enough or be good enough.

Entrepreneurs and toddlers have a lot in common.  They’re both risk takers and refuse to give up.  Successful entrepreneurs often don’t become successful overnight.  In fact, they often suffer several disastrous forays into business (and lose horrible amounts of money) before they make it big.

So what can we learn from this?  Maybe to overcome the curse of perfectionism – and procrastination – we have to return to child-like thinking.  Don’t prepare. Don’t think or analyse.  Just do it.  Be prepared to fall over, pick yourself up, fall over again.  Enjoy the process, rather than worrying about the outcome.  You may not get it right the first time, or even the second – but with persistence you’ll make it in the end.

Several years ago I was struggling with trying to write the text for my first website.  I kept putting the job off because of the fear of not ‘getting it right’.  I was on the verge of giving up completely when I read a newsletter by US marketing guru, Robert Middleton, on exactly this topic.  He recalled how, many years before, he had been writing the text for his first website.  It wasn’t perfect — in fact, the look and feel of the site had changed several times since that first effort.  He had, effectively, fallen over many times before eventually fashioning the product he wanted.  The point was that he had made a start and done something.

This was a revolution in thinking for me and has helped me a lot over the years.  Accepting the idea that what you do actually doesn’t have to be perfect first time.  It can be changed. It probably WILL be changed!  Sometimes you just have to recognise that what you undertake probably won’t be perfect.  But you can always strive for 80%.  We’ll do the very best we can, at the time, and with the resources available to us.  The important thing is to get started.

Question:  Have you made enough mistakes recently?

 

© Annabel Sutton, Coaching Tips – 2010

Annabel Sutton, BA (Hons), PCC
ICF Professional Certified Coach
Author of 52 Ways to Change Your Life
Coach University Graduate
Member International Coach Federation
Tel:     44 (0)1747 871196
Email: annabel@annabelsutton.com
Web: www.annabelsutton.com

To receive Annabel’s Coaching Tips: email annabel@annabelsutton.com and type ‘subscribe tips’ in the subject line.

Earlier this week I attended the LinkShare UK Symposium in London’s Westminster, this was going to be a straight review however Symposium UK – Official Event Wrapup and The Need For Feeds @ LinkShare’s Symposium have saved me the effort thanks guys ‘n’ gals.

The theme for the event ‘Targeting Your Efforts – in 2010 and beyond’ and Linkshare UK certainly hit their target with this event right on the bullseye.

Despite a few logistical nightmares, which must have had Liane Dietrich, Managing Director of LinkShare UK and her team tearing their hair out in the run up to the event as various speakers had to cancel due the flight ban brought on by the Icelandic volcano eruption, the whole day went really well, the quality of the speaking was excellent and was in my opinion pitched at the right level for a mixed and varied audience, kudos to those drafted in at last minute to fill the breach it must have been a bit daunting with so little time to prepare.

2 important points which came out time and time again over the course of the day were:

• Embrace social media, at the very least ensure your company has a twitter account and a facebook page and engage with your users.
• The importance of accurate up to date product feeds, Existem’s Chris Johnson covers this in more detail in the article referenced above.

Lunch was a resounding success and the caterers deserve a round of applause, don’t think I have attended an industry event before where I have heard absolutely no complaints about the food.

The afternoon Dealmaker Tradeshow was a fabulous networking opportunity, a chance to catch up with old friends and meet new ones plus the chance meet the people behind the merchant name and talk about how we can work together towards the common goal of making sales.

The evenings after party went well too in less formal surroundings over a beer or two plenty more chance to network, I would have liked to have seen more merchants in attendance though, its at the end of the day when everyone is a little more relaxed that you can really get to know people and long standing friendships as well as business partnerships can be forged even though the conversation tends to be less about work.

All in all it was a very successful day, and I look forward to Linkshare Symposium UK 2011.

Thank you very much to all at Linkshare for hosting the event, the fantastic hospitality you extended throughout the day and for an interesting session of 2 truths and a lie over a late night Chinese, that will be a topic of conversation for many months to come .

When thinking of branching out into a new niche one first questions that pops up is who sells relevent products? the task of finding out recently got easier thanks to a new feature that Easy Content Units (ecu) have added to their already fantastic product.

To do your research simply log into your ECU account and click on the Product Search link in the menu, type in a key word, click search and bobs your uncle…

…and it doesn’t stop there you can filter your results by Merchant, Brand and Network.

And theres more, now you can either select and store the products you want, this allows you to make a content unit later, or if you click on the link icon a box pops up with a deep link url, a HTML link, an image link and the Html for an image with product link embedded, all nicely configured with your affiliate tracking code.

This is just scratching the surface of what you can do with the product search from Easy Content Units, give it a whirl.