Diversify to Survive

Over the past few days the news headlines have been focused on Wall Street and the downward spiral of all of the major stock indexes. As usual when one of these shake-outs occurs, the popular media tries to reduce the issues to easy to understand, bite-size morsels. A favorite strategy is to profile a “typical” small investor who had all his eggs in one basket when the market crashed and now his entire life savings are nothing more than red ink on his personal balance sheet.

Investing some of his capital in blue chip stocks, some in tech stocks,
some in property, some in bonds, chances are he would still be
in the black. The same can be said for anyone running an online
business. The online environment is so dynamic and volatile, and
so many so-called “hot” opportunities come and go (and don’t do
much in between), that devoting your entire enterprise to just one
product or service offering is nothing short of dangerous, if not
outright foolish.

The answer, then, is to place a few eggs in several baskets, so if
the bottom falls out of one, you can still make an omelet with
what’s left. In other words, diversify your product and service
offerings to generate multiple streams of income

SOURCES OF INCOME

Here’s five ideas to get you started:

1. Affiliate programs.
2. Own products and services.
3. Website advertising.
4. Ezine advertising.
5. Content access via subscription.

We’ll look at each of these individually in a moment, but first, one
important caveat. The concept of multiple streams of income does
NOT mean you should rush out and add new products and services
to your repertoire willy-nilly.

Whatever you choose to offer must be closely related to the subject
matter of your site. If your site is about pet care, don’t try and sell
saucepans. To do so is not only a waste of valuable time and other
resources but you compromise the integrity of your site’s purpose,
not to mention your credibility as an expert in your field.
But even more importantly than that, all traffic is not created equal.
Sure, if you create a separate page on your pet care website just for
your new saucepan line you may attract one or two site visitors you
may not have attracted otherwise. But those visitors were interested
in saucepans, not pet care. Once they reach your site they’ll
assume you’ve lost the plot and click away faster than you can say
“where’d he go?”.

Far, far better to have fewer site visitors who are all highly interested
and motivated by the subject matter of your site (highly targeted
traffic) than relatively more visitors who are only somewhat interested
and motivated (untargeted traffic).

The return on your investment will always be MUCH higher from
targeted traffic in the form of repeat visits, referrals, recommendations
and, of course, all-important sales.

OK, let’s turn now to the five sources of income.