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Multiple Income
Streams: The Importance of Diversification
Once you start
making money from your web sites, be prepared for a wild
ride, especially if you rely on free traffic from the search
engines. The search engines constantly change their algorithms,
so a page that is number one on Google today can literally
drop to position #300 in the blink of an eye. (Or in some
cases be dropped out of the index entirely).
If you hang around
the webmaster forums like I do, every time there is a major
update at least a few people (and sometimes many people),
become, very, very upset because their free listings got
dropped and their income went to zero. Well, all I can say
is welcome to the always changing world of making money
from web sites.
People who are
successful with Internet businesses understand that it is
unusual for sites to stay in the same search engine positions
over time. New sites get added to the index, other sites
get dropped, your sites or your competitors sites may gain
or lose links from other sites over time, etc. which can
all impact rankings. Major changes in search engine listing
are inevitable. No search engine is going to have the same
index for a year or two. If they did, their results would
get stale and people would stop using their engine.
People who cry
and wail and gnash their teeth and worry about becoming
homeless when their sites get dropped were operating on
a very tenuous business model to begin with. As the saying
goes, change is inevitable. And those words of wisdom are
nowhere more apparent than with search engine listings.
If you want to
stay focused and try to make money from only one site, and
many people do, then that can be a valid business model.
However, with income from only one site relying on free
search engine traffic, you should always have a plan in
place of what you would do in case you lose your free listings.
If you didn't need the income from your site to cover your
day to day living expenses, then having your site lose traffic
is probably not great, but it doesn't mean your kids will
go hungry. Or if you have only one site it can work if you
don't need free traffic from the search engines to support
your site. Many sites can get traffic from paid advertising,
loyal readers who have their site bookmarked, newsletters,
etc.
For work at home
moms like me, the variability in income may not be much
of an issue. I was an unemployed stay at home mom before
I started getting any income from my web sites. So losing
my extra web income now would not be disastrous. I don't
rely on my web income for things like mortgage payments
or groceries - it's just too shaky. However, I still like
to try to diversify my web income streams as much as possible
so that I don't have any sudden income drops. For more on
this topic, see my next section on Tips
to Diversify Your Internet Business Income .
Topics
In This Section
Work at Home
by Developing an Internet Business
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