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I’ve been out of circulation for a while, so my apologies for not writing anything for a long time.

What have I been up to?

I’ve often mentioned that selling products to Internet marketers is NOT my main focus, and never has been. So although you haven’t heard from me, I have been extremely busy.

Towards the end of last year I found that I was spreading myself far too thinly, and was trying to manage far too many websites and projects, in far too many markets at the same time.

What I had was dozens of websites with anthing from a small to average income each. Collectively, they were providing me with a very good income, but most of them weren’t doing as well as I’d hoped on their own.

Itchy feet and withdrawl symptoms…

The trouble was I’d become almost addicted to jumping from one project to the next. If I hadn’t started working on a new website project for a week, I’d start to get itchy feet and withdrawl symptoms.

The situation actually reminded me a lot of my old school reports …"Jason continues to do the bare minimum to get by."

Unlike when I was at school, I was actually working flat out for long hours but the result was the same. I never really gave each website/project enough of my attention and time. I was doing the bare minimum to get them up and running before moving on.

Some perfectly good product ideas/websites didn’t even get finished. I’d get stuck on some minor issue half way through, but instead of sorting out the problem or sticking block, the attraction of starting another brand new project seemed far more appealing …and another great idea was sent to the big graveyard folder of unfinished projects!

Have you got one of those on your hard drive?

Something Had To Change…

So at the turn of the year I decided I was going to really narrow down my focus, and try and concentrate on just one new project at a time. 

I wrote an article a while back about ‘not overlooking the gold you already own’, and that’s where I decided to start. 

Instead of looking for a brand new project to focus everything on, I decided to look at the websites and projects I already had.

I picked out the websites that were doing the best, and that I was more interested in.  Then one by one, I started to go through each site and looked at how I could do more to..

• Get more traffic to the sites.
• Increase sales and conversion rates.
• Improve the product to cut refunds and support questions.
• Improve my search engine rankings.
• Get more sign ups for my opt-in forms.
• Add more useful content to the site.
• Get more links to the site.
• Get more affiliates promoting the site (on a site that I was selling ym own product).
• Make more back end sales, after the initial sale.

This made a huge difference to my bottom line very quickly, because it’s so much easier to increase the profits of an existing website/email list, than it is to start from scratch.

Before you consider jumping into a new project, you should definitely make sure you’ve done as much as you can, to maximise the potential of your existing projects/websites first.

On the flip side, if you haven’t got anything making you money so far, take a look over the business ideas and projects you started but never completed.

Why didn’t you finish them?

What’s stopping you from grabbing ‘one’ by the horns right now, and getting it done this week?

Try not to jump from one idea or project to the next. Make a pact with yourself to get a project done from start to finish. Give yourself a fairly tight deadline and stick to it! 

Jason Lewis

‘Multiple Streams Of Income’ is a phrase that is thrown around a lot in Internet marketing circles, and a strategy that many gurus suggest you adopt. The problem is; you could be going about this in completely the wrong way. Instead of helping you; your pursuit of this goal is what’s holding you back and leading you to failure.

The idea behind ‘multiple streams of income’ is that you don’t rely on one source to make you money. Effectively spreading the risk, in the event that your sole source of income should dry up or fluctuate downwards.

The other advantage is that you can increase your profit potential, by taking advantage of other opportunities in different markets.

However, if you get it wrong you can end up with: ‘multiple streams of next to nothing‘.

The big temptation is to move onto creating the next stream of income, before you’ve done everything you can to maximize and ‘protect’ the profit of the first one.

With the huge growth in PLR articles/ebooks and content site building software, I know lots of people are involved in many different niche markets (including myself). On the surface this is not a bad strategy, because it does provide you with multiple streams of income.

Unfortunately, the average profit per site is not always that great, so the strategy most people employ is to just keep throwing up more sites, in even more niches.

I know this is a way to make more money because I’ve done it myself, but it’s not necessarily a very good long term business strategy to have. What you are doing is creating a lot of weak money makers, that can potentially turn to dust overnight. Either from a small change in the search engine algorithms, or after being flattened by stronger and more savvy competition.

Here’s What You Should Do…

Spreading yourself very thinly across a lot of niches does have its advantages, because it can provide you with some first hand research data into how profitable certain niches might be.

If you’re building lots of content sites for AdSense, you probably notice that some sites make you a lot more money than others. The temptation is to keep building more sites for different niches, in the hope that you find more winners.

Instead of doing that, what you should be doing is taking a closer look at your more successful content sites, and see how you can make them even more profitable. You’ve practically got a big red flag telling you that you’ve found a profitable niche, so instead of trying to find another one, first do everything you can to make more money within the niche you have already found!

If one of your content sites is showing more promise than the others:

• Go out and get more articles ghostwritten for that site.
• Start adding more and more unique, original and useful content.
• Start capturing email addresses and work on building a strong relationship with your client base.
• Add a blog.
• Add a forum.
• Start creating your own products for that market.
• Step up your marketing for the site and stop relying on search engine traffic alone.

The same applies to any ebook mini sites you have out there. If one or two ebooks seem to be selling well, look at creating better and more expensive products to sell on the back end. Maybe set up some separate content sites for the same niche, to help drive traffic to your main money site.

In other words; if you happen to find a gold coin in a well, your first instinct shouldn’t be to go and try to find another well, but to see if that well has lots of other gold coins sitting at the bottom of it.

When you develop and build on your successful sources of income and traffic within a niche, you are also creating a wall of resistence that will frighten off and protect you from lesser competition, who aren’t propared to put in the work you have.

If you go about things the right way, you’ll end up with multiple streams of strong and sustainable income, and a ‘business’ that will serve you in the long term.

Jason Lewis

P.S. Back in 2004 I wrote about a guy who has created multiple streams of income for his business, and he’s a great example of how to do this effectively. You can read that article again here:

http://www.businessbrainwaves.com/archive_section/29.10.2004.htm