Reinventing Yourself
Posted On: 2007-03-09
I was just reading Seth Godin's blog and something he said jumped off the page at me. In one of his recent posts he was talking about big companies and the fact that even big companies fail. They may not fail as spectacularly as Enron but fade away over a period of time.
The big companies that succeed ... and go on succeeding ... are the ones that are continually reinventing themselves. That struck a resonated with me because it's something that is so true in this industry on both the affiliate and sponsor levels.
Everyone who comes into this industry has reinvented themselves. Whatever your background might have been you change when you become an adult webmaster. You reinvent yourself from an office worker, a burger flipper, a college dropout, a whatever into an adult webmaster. Instead of doing whatever it was that you were doing before most of you get into this industry as an affiliate marketer and that's reinvention.
Sadly that's where so many new members of this industry stop. They think that once they start making money selling memberships they've arrived, there's no more to success in this industry than what they're doing right now. They're an affiliate marketer and they're going to be an affiliate marketer till the day they die.
And they're wrong!
Sure they might last for years as an affiliate marketer. They might be making really good money doing what they're doing and see no need to change. But then boredom begins to creep in; they grow tired of doing the same old same old day after day, week after week, year after year.
They know that they really can't stop because the long tail in affiliate marketing isn't as lucrative as many might hope. So they struggle on until finally they have to stop; they need a break and once they take that break they find it very hard to ever come back to the grind of affiliate marketing.
I've seen it happen several times and with people I knew face-to-face. They weren't just nicknames on a message board; they were real people and I watched their successful business go down the tube because they stayed doing the same old same old and it finally got too much for them.
If you've been around the industry for a while you too will have seen the same thing. Successful people who don't reinvent themselves just fade away. I look back now at the group that were around on the newbie board that Steve and I first joined and the only ones left in the industry now are those who reinvented themselves.
They evolved from affiliate marketers into other things within the industry. One is a very accomplished coder, another is doing very well for himself with search engine optimization and yet another has gone from being a sole operator to employing others to do the hard and boring work for him.
They've gone on to bigger and better things while those who thought that they would remain as solo affiliate marketers have gone. Obviously it doesn't happen to everyone but it does happen to so many that there is a valuable lesson there for newcomers to learn.
Sure, be prepared to come into this industry as an affiliate marketer and stick at it till you are making good money but at the same time be prepared to reinvent yourself. Be prepared to evolve and go beyond what you first thought was your ultimate goal.
When you do that boredom never sets in because you are always pushing the limits of your dreams. My small business is still evolving and there's never a dull or boring time here. We're still involved in the core part of our business but we're constantly looking at new challenges and new opportunities and that's why we get up every morning filled with enthusiasm for what we're doing. Admittedly the level of enthusiasm can rise and fall but it's never left us yet.
And small webmasters like you and me are not the only ones in this industry that need to evolve. Many sponsors understand that they too need to go on evolving. The ones who have a clue know that they can't stay stuck in the past doing things the way they've always done it.
They know that they have to keep up with what the marketplace wants and so they have to keep on changing their product to meet the demands of the marketplace. So if they understand it and keep on evolving then you need to understand it too.
If you don't then becoming an adult webmaster will just be one more bump on the rough road to long-term failure.