Develop Multiple Streams of Income
You realize that if you only sell one product and then all the world has that product, you’re going to be out of business. That assumes that people will not ever need more than one of that widget that you’re selling.
That’s certainly one good argument for diversifying your income. Another is just the general concept that is presented to stock investors that diversifying and holding a mixture of stocks is a good policy. They usually put this in terms of high risk stocks versus low risk stocks, but there is a lot of advice in this area that also talks about diversifying into different business sectors as well.
Developing Multiple Streams of Income for the small business or the home based business or self employed can be the difference between success and failure. Let’s say for instance that all your revenue depended on one customer. That customer kept you busy but it was 99% of your income. Now, let’s say that customer vanished or found someone else that they decided to use as their supplier (whether we’re talking about services or products it’s the same concept.) You’ve now lost 99% of your income. You’ll certainly have time to develop other leads, but until then you are out a paycheck.
I have spent quite a bit of time developing a couple of streams of income offline and online. My online income comes from places like Clickbank, Amazon.com and Google Adsense. All of these from a variety of sites. Adsense is a good example. When I started out with adsense I had one site that did REALLY well. It earned an average of $11 a day for a series of about 3 months. Then my site dropped dramatically in Google rankings (where most of my traffic was coming from.) After this I struggled to make $1 a day from the same site and my entire Adsense income had relied on that one site.
In that example you can see that I failed to do three things that are quite important. First, most of my traffic was coming from google. I know they’re the biggest search engine, but I should have been intent on diversifying my sources of traffic. That helps to protect you against a search engine being down, or a given site removing their link to your site, etc. You still may see a drop when things change, but hopefully not as dramatic. The second thing I failed to do was to develop income from a second site. I had only one site that was earning for me. If there had been multiple sites making $11 each and one dropped off the radar of google, it would have hurt, but it wouldn’t have taken all of my Adsense income. The third point is really that you should be looking to more than just one method of earning from a site. In this case the drop in traffic was what really killed off the income, but having sources of income other than Adsense are a good idea.
Currently my online earnings are a supplement to my offline income. I have one service that I do which accounts for 45% of my income, another that accounts for 40% (in each of those cases I have a variety of clients.) The other 15% of my income comes from online sources. I mentioned many above, but I forgot to mention lulu.com where I sell some products as well.
So, look to develop those alternate streams of income. Say for instance that you did use Adsense as another stream of income. Let’s say it made a dollar a day. That’s $30 a month. Now, would you rather have an extra stream of income that accounted for $30 or a bill? I remember reading once about someone complaining that they were ripping adsense off their pages because they only made about $60 a month and it just wasn’t worth the trouble. I really can’t comprehend that thinking at all. If it were a $60 bill and I was having to work to get charged $60 all right, but to have a stream of $60 a month coming in? That’s enough to cover one of our phone bills easily. The way I see it the next goal I would have is to either see if you can maximize that $60 a month or start looking for an additional revenue stream.
It may even be possible to use your online income and the online profit you earn from that to develop other OFFLINE income streams. That’s currently part of my overall plan.
So remember, diversification of income is good for any size business!
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