What the Stock Market Taught Me About Making Money Online

I have only dabbled in the stock market, but I have done a lot of research on the matter.  One thing I learned from investing in stocks is that you don’t want to put all of your eggs in one basket.  You might think a certain stock is a great investment so you put all of your money into that one stock.  If that thing ever tanks, you just lost a whole lot of money.

That’s why the biggest lesson I learned from the stock market that helps me make money online today is diversification.  If you diversify the niches you are involved and andspread out your websites across a wide variety of topics and issues, you are building a safety net.  If one site gets de indexed by Google or for some reason an affiliate network decides that don’t want you any more (which has happened to some pretty big names in the industry of affiliate marketing) then at least you will have other sources of income to draw from.

For instance, I am making a nice little chunk of change from the ebay affiliate network right now, but it is NOT the only program I am relying on.  Over the past 2 years a lot of affiliates have been dropped for one reason or another, and this has left a lot of people on edge about the program.  If this were my only source of income I would be on dangerous ground.  But by diversifying and making money with Adsense, Clickbank, Commission Junction, Chitika, Paydotcom, Amazon, Shareasale, Pepperjam and others besides ebay, I can always tap into another income source.

You see, your website is a lot like a piece of real estate (I’m full of analogies today).  There are many different things you can build on your land, but you want to focus on what will be worth the most to you in the future.  You may build something on your site and it falls to pieces in a storm.  But as long as your land is still valuable and getting good exposure you can make money off of it.  It’s merely a tool to make money, but it won’t make money by itself.

Say I have a website about dieting and I am promoting some dieting pills and other products from ebay.  Well if ebay decides to give me the boot, I can just go over to Clickbank and find a ton of diet ebooks and programs to promote.  In fact, I can use a whole arsenal of affiliate products from different programs to help me bring in some income with my site.  But it all comes down to having a site that is getting good exposure.  Show me any website getting a lot of traffic and I will show you a website that can make a ton of money.

So the focus in building your wealth online should not be on what product to promote, but on how to build exposure and targeted traffic to your website.  The products you promote can change all the time, but your website has to be the constant that steadily brings in more traffic all the time.  That’s why SEO and building backlinks should be a regular part of your daily routine.

So diversify the methods you are using to make money online and don’t put all of those eggs into one basket.  This is the one case where spreading your own wealth around can be a good thing.  As long as the government does not try to spread my wealth to other people who did not earn it.

Hope this helps.  Be sure to leave a comment if this post sparked a thought in your brain.