Do Not Even Think About Multiple Streams of Income from One Site

Perhaps you are planning to begin an online business. If so, you need to be sure to avoid the mistakes made by others. Don’t immediately assume that it’s a good idea to implement every idea that your hear or read about. Always gather multiple opinions.

Anyone who has been in Internet marketing for longer than a week understands that it is important to develop multiple streams of income. Some marketers who are just starting can take this admonition too far, too quickly. I have seen sites that have products for sale, links to affiliate’s products and contextual advertising all on the same site. Sometimes all three appear on the same page.

Before I describe a much more reasonable plan of attach, allow me to explain why a multi-purpose site works against a marketer’s objectives. Each site, and certainly each page within a site, should have one purpose. Eventually every visitor to your website is going to leave your site, but you want to be able to stack the odds concerning how that visitor will leave.

In a retail site, you want them to leave only after they have stuffed your shopping cart full of your products and completed the check out process. The last page on your site that they see should be your “thank you” page. All of the other time they spend in your store should be directed toward getting them to that page.

If you want them to purchase an affiliate product, you want them to get off your own site only by clicking the link to your affiliate. With contextual advertising, you have a similar purpose in that you want them to click one of the ads as they exit. However, the ways in which you assist your visitors in deciding how to exit your site is very different in affiliate marketing from the method you implicitly use in making an ad click the attractive option.

Your job as an affiliate marketer is to convince your visitor that this affiliate’s product can meet the visitor’s specific needs. You highlight those needs with your copy and point out the ways in which the product is particularly good at what it does. You know the product well and can write specifically with that in mind.

You don’t know (in most cases) what products or services are going to be offered on the contextual ads that are placed on your site. Indeed, those ads will change frequently. In your copy and design, you must meet the expectations of the visitor who came to your site with a purpose. At the same time, you must let them know that your content has not answered all the questions that they should be asking. Hopefully, one of the ads that appear on the page while your visitor is there will seem to provide answers to the needs that your content has stimulated within the visitor, so that she or he will click on it.

So mixing potential revenue streams on the same page and, I believe, on the same site, means that you are working against yourself. You don’t want your prospective customers putting your product into a shopping cart and then disappearing from your site to pursue an affiliate product or by clicking on an ad. Instead, consider eventually building three sites (but not all at once). Work on your own product site. Find products that are complementary with your own product and endorse those on a separate site. Finally, if you feel you must, build a site for contextual advertising. (Personally, I would prefer to put the articles in a potential contextual advertising site into either my product site or affiliate site to draw visitors to the virtual locale where I could make a bigger profit, exchanging dollars for the cents that I would make with an ad click.)

Here are two exceptions to my advice, above. On your product site, you might want to use your thank you page to promote an affiliate offer. I sometimes place contextual advertising on my links pages. My thinking is that any visitors visiting my links have already decided to leave my site anyway, so there is no harm having them leave me a little money on their way out.