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I had a post already planned for today, and then I came across The Shrinking Window Of Opportunity by Gyutae Park over at his blog. It is a great article that’s really a wake-up call for Internet marketers to get busy because of the way the landscape of the net is changing. If you aren’t building your web empire yet, it could be too late real soon for the small, independent webmaster.

I’ve always believed that if you have an idea for a business on the web, you should have started it yesterday, because of the time it takes to get established and now this seems more important that ever with Google’s preference for older, well established web properties.

Even though we all know how evil Google is, the simple fact is that they control the game. While you may be able to get some traffic from various sources on the net, at this point if you don’t have traffic from Google, you probably aren’t doing all that well, and it’s only going to get worse. Gyutae points out that Google seems to be giving less relevance to or even completely discounting things like paid links, directories, widgets and more, resulting in the small business person on the web being driven out of business.

What Google supposedly wants is more relevance and in their eyes, large, established web sites will get more attention and will be pushing out the little guy and soon start to take over search results. So goes the day when everything on the web was to be on equal footing.

I don’t believe it is the end of the road for Internet and affiliate marketers and neither does Gyutae, but now is not the time to procrastinate with your ideas. If you are going to make your mark on the web, you have to start to establish yourself as an authority in your niche today. Rather than explain again how to go about that, go read Gyutae’s post about the dwindling opportunity for the independent webmaster.

As a little counterpoint though, I’m not so sure Google will always have the monopoly they do. Google’s track record as of late is to just make people mad. We aren’t reading about how wonderful Google has been to webmasters lately, we’re hearing about exactly the opposite, from lots of different sources. While they are trying to create a cleaner search index with more relevance, they could (some would argue they already have) become out of touch and elitist somewhat like the United States government.

Not that I would ever want to see such a thing, but companies who control commerce in such a way that it effects the economic stability of a large mass of people, attract the snooping eye of government intervention. With Google’s increasing record of putting people out of business, no telling what could happen if this were to manifest itself on a much larger scale. We would then have one out of touch bureaucracy giving orders to an out of touch company that controls a huge portion of commerce. Can you spell disaster?

The point of all this is to start building a relevant web empire today that will add value to the web for years to come. Don’t wait until the entry point for the small businessperson is beyond your reach.

I came across a brilliant quote from Winston Churchill and thought I’d share it for this Sunday’s though.

“It’s not enough that we do our best; sometimes we have to do what’s required.”

Have you ever worked your tail off and not seen the results and then you’re disappointed because you thought you did your best? If you’re involved in any kind of internet marketing the answer I’m sure, is yes.

But maybe what you were doing was more fun, than it was necessary. There are many things I enjoy doing for my online businesses and yet some things that are required, I’m not that fond of. When I sold stuff on eBay, I despised having to package the things I was selling because it took so much time, but obviously, packaging was required if the customer’s merchandise were to arrive undamaged.

Are you giving your best to the fun things, but avoiding the required?

Your thoughts?

Today is the last day for The Craziest Internet Marketing Contest You’ve Ever Seen and there are tons of great prizes up for grabs. Some big internet companies have gotten in on this one and it is one of the biggest I’ve ever seen. I’ve even sponsored a prize for the contest and will be giving away a 125 x 125 banner for 2 months on my sidebar.

There are more than $15,000 in other prizes including cash, an iPod Touch, lots of advertising, consulting, a conference pass, internet marketing training, memberships, web site subscriptions, blog themes and lots more prizes. The list is nearly endless. The contest has been an incredible boost to Winning The Web and I’ve been watching his rss subscribers go from around 400 to almost 900 in just 3 weeks.

The contest has been going on for three and a half weeks now and is finally coming to a close this evening at 9 PM eastern daylight time when no more entries will be accepted. All the points will then be tallied by Gyutae and prizes will be awarded by random drawing on April 2nd.

Don’t miss out on all the great prizes in this contest.