Pursuing an online income can be quite a rollercoaster at times. The very first time you read about those who are really making it big and living the dream, you are inspired to act, and so you throw up a wonky website and patiently try to draw traffic to it. That’s often followed by a period of disappointment when you don’t make any money in the slightest. Then the thrill of that first Adsense click coming through – hooray! I still clearly remember receiving my first ever Adsense click arriving into my account. I had a Firefox plugin that displayed by Adsense income in my browser at work. It stubbornly sat at $0.00 for three whole days until one morning, sitting in the off*ce and staring zombie-like at the screen, it updated – to $0.05. I’d made my first passive income!
But what keeps you going after that? There’s a huge gulf between a 5-cent click and the thousands your favourite gurus are making per month. It’s at this point that some people throw in the towel, as they realise the absolute hard slog, day-in and day-out, that is required to get to the top of the mountain.
As much as I hate to sound like one of those bullshitting managers I left behind in the corporate world, your chances of reaching the top of the mountain are, in my opinion, greatly enhanced by setting achievable goals, month on month. So you made £100 this month? Well done! Aim for £150 next month. How are you going to make the extra £50? Write another website? Target these five keywords? Give a new affiliate program a go? Breaking your goal down into achievable tasks makes it so much easier to stay the course.
I’m at the stage where I can finally make out the top of the mountain. I haven’t quite made it yet, but I can damn well see how to get there. A few months back I set my ultimate goal: by the end of 2010 I want to be earning £5000 per month; more specifically, from five completely independent revenue streams each earning £1000 per month. A big ask indeed, but doable. I’m a little over halfway there at the moment, but still with a long way to go.
I cannot stress enough how diversification is absolutely key in the world of online income. You might be raking it in with a single site plugging an affiliate program bringing in £5000 per month, but all it takes is a Google algorithm tweak to send your money site cascading down the search engines – or worse, you could be banned outright by the affiliate programme for putting a foot wrong, and lose your whole income almost overnight. There are so many risks just waiting to nobble us, and I don’t believe it’s overly paranoid to be prepared for them. Simple steps such as not linking all of your websites together in some kind of easily identifiable chain for the Google Axe to cull in one go, not relying on a single niche to bring home the bacon (e.g. mortgage affiliates – not a good year for them, is it?), and varying your sources of income (Adsense, Amazon, eBay and so on) will help you dig deeper into the mountain and make it less likely for you to fall off.
Have a safe journey up there – and enjoy the view from the top :)
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