Has any industry moved as fast and evolved as rapidly as this one has? Whether you are blackhat, whitehat, a publisher, or an affiliate marketer you must stay on your toes if you want to keep making money online. Fortunately new opportunities are plenty and under served niche markets are virtually limitless. Right now the web is like the wild west, but this time around the gold rush is minting new millionaires on almost a daily basis.

Will this always be the land of opportunity? I would like to believe so. But, sometimes its worth thinking about a rainy day.

I think that there are two different elements to making money online — making money through assets, or earning money through work. Huh?

Think about it this way — ad inflation. Ad cost inflation means that the price of advertising rises, either because of new buyers or because two competitors want the same inventory. As an ad seller ad cost inflation is great. You make more money on the same, or even less traffic. As an ad buyer, not so great. Ad cost inflation may mean you are out of business.

So, how do you make sure you are still earning an income 5, or even 10 years from now?

First, think about having a project or two that is more on the asset side of things. That means being more independent and less dependant on someone else (like ranking in Google, for example.) This could mean building a community through a forum, an e-mail newsletter, having a great generic domain that gets type-in traffic. Short term, these projects typically aren’t too profitable — but that’s not always true.

On the other side, you have short term profit projects. This may include PPC arbitrage or affiliate sites. A distinguishing factor here usually is your visitors come to your site and leave, never to return.

Sometimes it makes a lot more sense to do the short term stuff. If solely focusing on building affiliate sites makes you enough money to retire within 2 or 3 years, trying to build a forum could be very costly.

Here is the bottom line — don’t think that you are going to be doing the exact same thing for the next 30 years. Your not. Plan accordingly.