The keynote for Affiliate Summit was delivered by Jason Calacanis, currently of Mahalo.com fame and previously Weblogs Inc. and Netscape (the bookmarking site that's now called Propeller, not the once-dominant browser).

His talk alone was worth coming to the conference, in my opinion. I'll explain the reason why in more detail in another post.

Jason is approaching the affiliate industry as an outsider of sorts. He's working on a much higher level than most affiliates, particularly those who build what have affectionately become known as "thin affiliate" sites.

If I were to boil his talk down to a couple of sentences, it would be to quit thinking small. Stop shooting for the low effort, high returns (which are actually harder to find and rarely last in my experience) and work for the high effort but much, much higher returns.

Instead of shooting for the $100,000 Adsense cheques we've all seen posted on those blogs that market to the make money crowd, like Shoemoney.com, shoot for the multi-million dollar payouts that the big deals offer (and that you'll never see a picture of a cheque for).

His rationale is that you're going to be putting in the hours anyway, why wouldn't you shoot for the stars and reach the moon instead of thinking small potatoes?

The worst that can happen is you fail. You accept it, move on and use the experience to improve your next shot.

Judging from some of the questions and comments following his talk, from attendees, other panel members and at least one comment on Jason's blog post about the keynote I think he touched a few nerves. There were a couple of people who obviously couldn't relate to where he was coming from, and questioned why he would be down on a $100,000 payment.

Personally, I don't think he was saying to discount that kind of money, just don't make that your measure of success. And certainly don't be so crass as to actually post your picture holding that cheque for the world to see.

He had a couple of interesting points that warrant a post of their own, so I'll be following up on them separately.

You can read the follow up posts here:

Affiliate Summit Day 1 - Calacanis Keynote Part 2

Affiliate Summit Day 1 - Calacanis Keynote Part 3 (aka Long Term Thinking)