I work from home online and one of the ways I sometimes earn income from is site flipping. Site flipping is one of several methods of online income I’ve used, and I hope you are working on several methods too!
Luckily I realised early on, that putting all my eggs in one basket was a mighty risky investment no matter how golden those eggs appeared to be.
AdSense is one way to make money from your website but what if one day you woke up and received a note from Google telling you your AdSense account had been banned Forget about why and about defending your account. Many people have had their accounts banned and no matter how hard they fought to prove their innocence, many never get their accounts reinstated. All in all, I think doing the right thing will protect your AdSense account, but you should create a variety of income streams all the same.
Another example is putting all your eggs in the organic search basket. Let’s say you believe that all you need to do is rank high in the SERPs (search engine results pages) and you’ll have targeted traffic. So you work hard on SEO, analyse the competition endlessly, and slowly but surely claw your way to the front page of Google search for your targeted key phrases. Your traffic stats stabilize as does the income that traffic brings you, and you see yourself quitting your day job any month now.
You wake up one morning and discover your site has fallen off the radar. Your business has been relegated to page 100 and your competitors are still rooted to their positions. Does this happen? Yes. Can you recover from it? Of course. How long would it take to recover? It really depends, it’s up to Google.
There are plenty of other online business models that can be pulled out from under your feet from factors that are out of your circle of influence, whether that be economic trends, market trends or a simple thing as a slight tweak to the Google algorthym.
If you work from home online or want to, then you need to be sure you spread your risk. Once you’ve mastered one method, be sure to start working on another. Some methods are more risky than others but if you’re aware of them then you can make plans to counteract that risk with more stable business models, such as your very own list of subscribers.
Great post, Michelle.
I think part of the, “eggs in one basket,” mentality is that when you first start a new venture, there is so much to learn that if you don’t channel your efforts, you can easily go nowhere for a long time. It can be overwhelming to think about doing more when you’re already investing 10-16 hours a day.
You only scratched the surface of the many ways we can lose income. Personally, in the past two years, I’ve been laid off from a full-time job, had my hours cut from my part-time job that only pays a fraction of what I used to earn, lost significant money from a change in the TOS at CafePress, and had a run-in with Google Almighty that cost me hundreds a month.
I had recently started getting into domain investing, affiliate marketing, and working with more Print-On-Demand services when lo-and-behold, Google re-instated the AdSense stream on the site I blog for (not my own site). Hopefully, I can build on my new successes faster than my boss can close his doors for good.
If it weren’t for the obstacles, we’d rarely find new opportunities for greater success.
Edie your story is a reminder that a job is not all that secure these days. It’s becoming more and more important for us to find ways to generate income that we have more control over isn’t it.
Nice point about obstacles leading to greater success.