I\’m scared of change.
There, I said it. It\’s not big news though. Everyone is scared of change. Change is a scary thing. It means giving up what you have now for something better that you can only hope you\’ll have in the future.
It\’s risky. It\’s dangerous. It\’s disruptive.
It\’s also thrilling, exciting… and inevitable.
My career has gone through all sorts of changes. Some of those changes, like turning my software newsletter into a website called WorldVillage, were my choice and required little more than gradual improvement and steady growth. Some, like working with a games developer to create the site that would become Yahoo! Games, were opportunities that I was lucky enough to stumble upon and quick enough to make use of.
And some changes, like the collapse of the dotcom bubble that almost wiped out my early Internet business, were forced upon me. (I would have been happy to have kept the sorts of click rates companies were paying then! I wish that hadn\’t changed.)
Every industry changes. Few industries change though as quickly as online marketing. Twitter is probably the best example of that. My followers have increased ten-fold in the last six-months or so. The top celebrity twitterers recently hit a million followers. A few short weeks later and they\’re already halfway to their second million.
It\’s been an incredible journey and I\’m loving every minute of it. I\’m getting a kick out of interacting with my followers. I\’m having a ball reading their tweets. And I love discovering the best strategies to form relationships on Twitter and build those relationships into sales.
I was having a ball with AdSense too. I still am. But now my business has expanded. As well as earning from Web content, we\’re having tremendous success with iPhone apps, with software programs and with social media, and we\’ve got a whole bunch of other things bubbling away in the lab as well.
All of that growth required embracing change. It might be scary, but it\’s also fantastic, fun and usually it\’s profitable. The world doesn\’t stand still and frightening though change might be, you can\’t stand still either.