First it was Frienster, then MySpace, then Tagged/Hi5/etc.

First it was Altavista, then Ask, then Yahoo, etc.

First it was adsense arbitrage, free trial rebills, CPC to CPA arbitrage, mobile gaming, etc.

If you noticed, the only thing constant here in the past 3 sentences are the commas.

Internet is changing. All the time.

Why? Because people change. Companies start. Companies die. Ideas change.

Every time a new product or service and makes a killing, 30 clones and copycats will try to take your lunch. (*cough cough* Zynga… *cough cough* King.com)

Every time an affiliate blogs about his hot new campaign, 50 idiot affiliates will straight up rip his pages and try to milk that thing to death.

For every action, there’s a reaction. If you’re making money, someone wants some of that. Internet connection is cheap, and so is software. So why shouldn’t I try take your lunch? I can do it, and so can you.. and every other person on earth with 1/2 a brain.

Remember Microsoft? It was a $500 billion dollar company in early 2000’s. Who’s the king now? Not Microsoft.

How the tides have turned.

Change is the ONLY thing that is permanent.

Is this a new concept?

No way. Buddha taught this thousands of years ago:

Thus early Buddhism declares that in this world there is nothing that is fixed and permanent. Every thing is subject to change and alteration. “Decay is inherent in all component things,” declared the Buddha and his followers accepted that existence was a flux, and a continuous becoming.

According to the teachings of the Buddha, life is comparable to a river. It is a progressive moment, a successive series of different moments, joining together to give the impression of one continuous flow. It moves from cause to cause, effect to effect, one point to another, one state of existence to another, giving an outward impression that it is one continuous and unified movement, where as in reality it is not. The river of yesterday is not the same as the river of today. The river of this moment is not going to be the same as the river of the next moment. So does life. It changes continuously, becomes something or the other from moment to moment.

Take for example the life of an individual. It is a fallacy to believe that a person would remain the same person during his entire life time. He changes every moment. He actually lives and dies but for a moment, or lives and dies moment by moment, as each moment leads to the next. A person is what he is in the context of the time in which he exists. It is an illusion to believe that the person you have seen just now is the same as the person you are just now seeing or the person whom you are seeing now will be the same as the person you will see after a few moments.

So, are YOU changing or are you clinging onto the past?

Most super affiliates I know who are still successful have evolved. They own their own ad or CPA networks, they started a software as a service company (like my PAR Program), or they’ve moved onto creating their own brand / product / offer.

That means REAL responsibilities, not just brokering traffic. You gotta hire people, you gotta learn real marketing & sales, you gotta learn to negotiate, and yes, run a real company with real people.

If you have been doing affiliate marketing for a while now, congrats for sticking to it.

But the rules of the game always have and always will change.

There’s whole kinds of legal compliance you have to deal with, affiliate taxes, FTC regulations, etc etc

On top of that, mobile is taking over the world. Don’t believe me? Just go stand on the street and see what people are staring at.

If you’re a great marketer at your own “niche”, good for you.

But are you growing? It’s good to be a specialist but remember, you can’t have tunnel vision and expect to see the horizon. Especially if the horizon is constantly moving.

If you’re not optimizing for mobile (and trust me.. a shit ton of people are still too lazy about this, i have no idea why, slap yourself silly and invest in responsive design.

So why don’t people change?

For some, they might say fear. For some, its lazinesss.

But for some, it’s because self-control (to change) is tiring.

Whatever the case maybe, if you don’t change.. someone will change you for you. And you might not like that change.

Detroit used to be #1 auto manufacturer in the WORLD but where are they now? And what about the people that used to believe that they had a safe pension waiting for them at the end of the rainbow? What happened to them?

Whatever happened to CDs, laser discs, VHS, DVD, BluRay…? What happened to Blockbuster Video?

They didn’t change. So the change was forced upon them.

Fear, laziness, .. whatever the reason maybe, change WILL happen.

Only thing I know for certain is that the next 10 years will be NOTHING like the past 10 years, so i’m gonna get my shit together and create the future that I want .. the future that I see.

Yeah, i might be wrong. I might go the wrong way.

But at least I’ll be moving.