Diversify your income

By Ben on March 21, 2006

I posted about a company suing Google at my personal blog, College-Startup. I’m not going to rehash the story here, but for more information on it check out The Blog Herald. Basically, this company’s revenue dropped 80% because Google lowered their PageRank. I think this qualifies as a “big” oops.

My point in this post is to enforce one of the first rules of making money online: diversify your streams of income. A lot of people just starting out sign up for an AdSense account and start blogging. They don’t even consider signing up for the thousands of affiliate programs and other ad networks available to bloggers today.

Why does it matter? For a few reasons.

First of all, Google suspends AdSense accounts without any warning and it’s (nearly) impossible to get them back once you’ve been banned from the service. Since you provide tax information to Google, it not as easy as simply signing up again to get AdSense back on your website.

Secondly, for your topic, Google might not be the best way to go. Maybe you should explore affiliate programs - if you’re in certain industries (travel, gaming, credit cards, and others) the payouts for affiliate programs can be huge. There are people making hundreds of thousands of dollars through affiliate programs alone.

Third, you don’t want to base your success on the success of another company. What if your Google goes broke? Or one of the companies that your an affiliate of is sold and no longer has an affiliate program? You’re in trouble if you don’t have another way to make money.

As a general rule, I try to make sure that no more than 20% of my income comes from a company that I have no control over. That means that I don’t want 20% of my income coming from Google or any single affiliate program. You may need to adjust this depending on your goals. The money I make from the internet isn’t supporting a family or paying many bills - if I lose 1/5 of my income without notice, it’s not a huge deal.

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"Diversify your income" was written on March 21st, 2006.

4 comments to “Diversify your income”

Hi there,

I’m a new blogger (about 14 days only) and i’ve already received around 5,000 visitors in 2 weeks.

I found your site today when I googled problogging. I’ll definitely check out every now and then for tips :)

Thea on March 22nd, 2006 at 7:04 am

Hey Ben,

I would love to diversify, but I only seem to make any money from one advertiser.
My Blog is pretty one dimentional Working at Home, but you would think that is attractive to advertisers, (other than spammers).

Joe

ps Thea, must be some good keywords. 5k in 2 weeks? I hadn’t even gotten my template right by then.
J.

Joe on March 22nd, 2006 at 1:17 pm

Joe -

Have you looked at affiliate programs? Check out Commission Junction, Clickbank, etc. There are some great affiliate programs for entrepreneurs.

Also - your market is a tough one to get into. There are tons of great entrepreneurship blogs, so it might take a little while before you’re getting the kind of traffic advertisers want to see before they advertise with you.

Ben on March 23rd, 2006 at 5:39 pm

Hey Ben,

I’m already a member of CJ and Clickbank, also have Chitika (not right for WAH sites) and have just started with Text Link Ads.

I know there are a lot of entrepreneur blogs out there, but I think it’s the right thing for me.

So, I’ll just have to work hard and stick it out. Things are improving little by little. I’ve only been at it for 6 months, my game plan calls for a year to start making a profit.

Wish me luck, and thanks…

Joe

Joe on March 24th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
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