I'm typing out this blog post on my Blackberry sitting at the bar of a BJ's Restaurant & Brewery. I'm inspired to write this because I realize what a great profession affiliate marketing is.

The funny thing is that while Internet affiliate marketing is perhaps 12 years old by now (if you consider Amazon.com launching the first successful affiliate marketing program), most Americans still don't know about this business.

After 12 years of being in this business myself, I still have to explain it in painstaking detail to my mom and dad. I'm convinced that if the world understood this line of work, everyone would become an affiliate marketer.

So, how cool is it that you can earn an income while seated at a bar drinking a beer and not really caring where you'll end up sleeping at? You don't care if you wake up at 10:00am, because you don't have a boss or any clients calling you.

But what if everyone was an affiliate marketer?

What if the whole world knew everything we knew?

How would the Internet be different?

I tend to think that Google itself would he different, trying to deal with a glut of affiliate marketing spam sites. Perhaps, the Internet would have a far different reputation than it has now. Maybe the Internet would be as useful as a pile of advertisements you find in a Sunday newspaper.

In that sense, it's good to be unfamiliar.

But then again, I'm speaking from the standpoint of someone who found enough success with affiliate marketing to be self employed and self sufficient. There is still another 99% of us who still hold down a "regular job" to pay most of their bills. To those folks, affiliate marketing is not all that it's cracked up to be.

So, I'm sitting here at the bar watching these cute bartenders serve up a busy crowd of people, realizing that despite all the innovations we've enjoyed, the world has not changed. When I was just a little boy, in the early 1970's, my mom was a bartender. The gal serving me tonight could just as well have been my mom some 37 years ago. In that sense, the Internet has made hardly an impact on our lives.

But for me, I'd be slaving away in an office, working for the Man if not for the Internet.

And for that matter, the fact that I can write this blog post on my BlackBerry, and publish it to my blog while seated at this bar, is a miracle.

For those of you enjoying this same lovely predicament, I salute you!