If baseball is the thinking person's game, then online advertising is the thinking person's medium. Much like the national pastime, part of the draw of online advertising comes from the ability to break down performance into limitless particles of useful (and useless) information, such as batting average with runners in scoring position after the 7th inning, or the clickthrough rate differential for an ad run at 8 a.m. versus 8 p.m.

Over the years stories about intimidation and goons knocking on the doors of various affiliates and search marketers have circulated at industry events. Some of these scary accounts have taken on a life of their own - much like a game of telephone where fact and fiction are often intertwined as the stories are told over and over again.

This past summer, super-affiliate Colin McDougall traveled around British Columbia with his family in his newly purchased travel trailer. From mid-July through Labor Day weekend McDougall worked a grand total of about 10 hours from the road. The rest of the time he spent paddling his kids around in an inflatable kayak, feeding the ducks, building sandcastles on the beach and simply enjoying his free time.

Food has recently been called everything from the new theater to the new porn. Regardless of how you think about food, you certainly can't avoid it.

Your phone rings. A good friend is calling, more excited than you've heard her in months. "My book is on the home page of Amazon! I can't believe it. My book was just published last week and already it's on Amazon's home page!" Exciting? Maybe not to someone who knows how Amazon works. Your friend has seen her book on her version of Amazon's home page, but a closer look shows it under "Items Recently Viewed." She views her book's page each day to check any new reviews. Based on what books she looks at, Amazon thinks she's very interested in buying this book and places it on her home page.

Someone is hijacking your traffic and stealing your commissions. That someone might be a competing affiliate marketer, or worse, the merchant whose products you are promoting.

To my dismay, I discovered that traffic from one of my sites was being diverted when a friend sent me some screen captures of that site's home page. The first screen shot showed my site open in a browser window with 80 percent of the page behind an AdultFriendFinder pop-up window - despite the fact that my site does not have a pop-up to AdultFriendFinder.com on the home page.

I find that many website owners are divided into two camps. One camp is very good at developing unique content and garnering tons of search engine traffic, but they have a hard time turning that traffic into dollars. The other camp is great at monetizing traffic, but they can never generate very much traffic. In both cases the individuals involved eventually become discouraged with their site's lackluster performance and move on to something else.

One of the biggest problems of mass-market advertising is that it vies for the attention of prospects by interrupting them. That's why TV commercials have long been called "dream interrupters," because that's exactly what they are. The TV show is your dream. The TV commercial interrupts that dream. Not good.

It all started with Asa Candler, a "prescriptionist" in Atlanta 112 years ago. A modest pharmacist who dealt in tonics and medicines, he bought an unassuming recipe for a patent medicine called Coca-Cola. When he gave out handwritten slips of paper for customers to try the new drink for free, the coupon was born.

How to Limit Commission Theft