One of the things that is written on the whiteboard in my office, and that is uppermost in my mind pretty much every day of my working life is this:

‘CREATE ANOTHER STREAM’

It’s possibly the main reason that I’m a full-time marketer when so many other people aren’t.

It’s no secret or anything – it’s just that my income comes from more than one source.

I’ve actually never sat down and counted how many income streams I have. The trackers and testers among you will be freaking out now I guess but my answer is ‘why do I need to know exactly how many streams I have?’

I know what they are and I pretty much know when any of them increases, decreases or stops generating profits. That’s because, like most successful online marketers, I have a feel for my business that goes beyond tracking and testing, which I actively dislike.

It’s no exaggeration that I can look at my Paypal and Clickbank accounts and almost read it in the way that geeky bloke in ‘The Matrix’ reckoned he could see an attractive blonde women in those green squiggles on the PC screen.

I can tell when it’s a slow week or that one website isn’t performing well or is having tech problems, just as I can tell when I get a surge of unexpected traffic and sales increase.

I’d guess that I have somewhere between 50 and 100 seperate income streams, including (and mostly being) ebooks sold from stand alone or mini sites, but including affiliate sales, adwords, offline book sales, niche markets etc (JV’s don’t count because they’re bonus income surges and I don’t like to reply on them as day to day income. This also means that if my business is successful without JV’s I don’t have to ass kiss as so many people do, afraid they’ll get kicked out of the JV circle).

I also have a number of hosting providers. I’ve considered time and time again moving everything to one huge server but it’s a question of risk – if I did and my server blew up I would lose my entire income overnight. as things are, being hosted on numerous different sites means that if one of them has serious downtime I still have the others to provide me with a living.

It’s a personal choice of course, but that’s what being in business is about – making your own decisions and not letting other people do it for you.

The more income streams you can generate the safer you are. People often ask how much I was earning before I knew it was safe to go full-time. Actually it wasn’t quite like that – it was more a case of how many income streams I had ( I had a few from online marketing and a few from offline).

Once you’ve set up an income stream in place (by which I mean it’s bringing money in, not just a pretty website) then build another one. Rinse and repeat.

You’re actually reading one of my fastest growing income streams – it’s this blog. People are becoming much more used to buying from blog than they were even last year. I also find it immensley enjoyable to write. A great combination for an income stream.

If you want to find out how I maked money from writing down my feeble personal thoughts have a look at www.blogyourwage.com

It’s free.

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