Things change at such a rapid pace online that it’s easy to get caught off guard while your business tanks.  If you’re relying on one stream of income, it’s easy for a change to come along and wipe you out. 

Examples:

• If you relied on Google AdSense income prior to 2006, you probably saw it all but dry up a couple of years ago due to changes in terms.
• If you rely on PPC advertising for most of your traffic, a change in Google’s terms can drive your costs beyond your break-even point.  This happened to a lot of site owners in the past year.
• If you rely on affiliate income from a single vendor, that vendor can change any of their affiliate terms and send you down the tubes in a split second.
• If you rely on income from the sale of a product or service, a bigger competitor with deeper pockets can enter your space and drive you out of business.

Any number of things can change to leave you scrambling to keep the lights on while you figure out which way to go.  The only surefire way to keep this from happening to you is to have income coming from several channels.  Get your traffic from organic and paid search as well as offline methods.  Set up affiliate programs to let others help you sell your own products, and promote products offered by multiple vendors.  Offer your services to other business owners for a premium and use that as an upsell behind your other product offerings.

You have to prepare before the storm hits so that you’re ready to go if or when it ever happens.  And if it never happens, at least you’ll be enjoying the benefits of multiple streams of income.  This doesn’t mean to jump around between opportunities.  You’ll only lose focus that way and never get anything accomplished.  But once you have one or more income streams running smoothly, you owe it to yourself to work on setting up 2-3 different cash-generating methods.

Making money online is easier once you know the secrets used by the top online business pros.  The truth is that the sites that you visit that sell ebooks or software products  – or that give away these products for free, are not what’s producing the majority of their income.  These products are simply gateways into their higher profit products and services. 

So the key to making real money online is to have a front-end product that’s attractive to a large number of visitors.  If you can produce a viral website that gets passed among friends, you can really profit.  The main thing is to have something unique and valuable to attract a large number of visitors.  From this, you can upsell the visitors to more profitable products and services.

If you capture the visitors’ email addresses or get them to sign up for your RSS feed or Twitter feeds, you can continue to offer them new products and services.  The first sale should never be the end of the line.  You should always have a pipeline of new product and service offerings for your visitors and subscribers.

You can make a little money online with your own product.  But if you’ll build sites that provide monthly income from subscribers, you can make much more in the long run.  In upcoming posts, I will go into much more detail about how to create viral campaigns and how to build sites to produce a continuous monthly income – so stay tuned.

It looks like I’ve fallen behind again.  I’d first heard about Twitter back in August of last year.  I signed up with an account, but I never did anything with it.  It seemed a bit mundane to me at the time.  Why would anyone want to know what I was doing throughout the day, and why would I be interested in what someone else was up to?  So, although I knew people who were using the site, I decided to forget about it and move on to other things.

But the talk about Twitter has been increasing in recent weeks, so I suppose I can’t resist any longer.  I have to join the “in” crowd and become a twittering fool.  Actually, I do see the tremendous benefits of Twitter clearly now.  Email marketing still has its place, but spam has really but a damper on it.  Blogs are great, too, but Twitter adds something a little more personal to the concept.  I can see that, with the right approach, Twitter could be used to make mountains of money online.

Just how could you make money with Twitter?  Maybe I’ll write a few posts to detail methods for using Twitter to make money online.  I certainly see the potential for it.  Once I put things in place myself to test my theories, I’ll report back to let you know how it all works.  For now, I can see that pulling together an audience of like-minded individuals with varying interests and ideas has more potential for profits than anything I’ve seen recently.  If you can build a solid following by providing good ideas and content, you’ll quickly establish a reputation in your niche.  You can then leverage this to sell your products or services, and your pool of potential customers is following you each step of the way.

It’s time to start Twittering…