Do Not Attempt Several Streams of Income from One Site
If you are starting an online business, one of the most important things you can do is to learn from the mistakes of others. Recognize that not all advice is necessarily good advice, especially if the tips are carried to the extreme. Habitually seek out multiple opinions.
As an Internet marketer, you have doubtless come across pre-made sites that incorporate several streams of potential income. Sometimes those prospective income streams will even appear on a single page on that site. You should wonder whether this approach, which seems so efficient on the surface, really makes sense.
Before I describe a much more sensible approach, let me 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.
If you have products that you want your visitors to buy, your goal is to have them eventually end up on your “thank you” page after checking out with their full shipping carts. Everything else that you do on that site 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.
A person involved in affiliate marketing knows the product’s strengths and weaknesses. The task is to highlight the needs of your site visitor so that it becomes obvious that the needs can be met by the affiliate’s product, or, at least, to leave the visitor wanting more information that can be obtained by visiting the vendor’s site (through your link to it).
In the case of contextual advertising, you don’t know what products or services will be promoted in the ads that are served to your site. You need to provide information that your visitor wants (based upon your keywords, page description, and so forth). At the same time, you let them know that there is other information (or even a product category) that they ought to be pursuing. Then, you just hope that one of the ads served on your page will coincide with the additional thirst you have created in your visitor.
Each form of generating income requires a different approach to your content. Any given page must have only one primary objective, if you are doing it well. Remember, though, that many of your visitors will visit more than one page on your site by following your navigation. If they encounter one page that praises your own product and another that advocates your affiliate’s product, all you are doing is adding to your visitor’s confusion and probably delaying any decision to purchase. Instead, then, I advocate multiple sites in order to have multiple streams of income. Do not try to build them all at once. Determine which option has the greatest (and quickest) potential cash flow in your niche. Begin with a site that builds that income stream whether it is to sell a product, endorse and affiliate product or deliver contextual ads. You can create those other sites, later.
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, so there is no harm having them leave me a little money on their way out.
Whether you have an existing business that you want to move online or are looking to start a new one, you should eventually try to develop more than one income stream. Just make sure that you don’t attempt to do in on the same page!
