When you guys say "don't put all your eggs in one basket", what .

[crick]

mean by this? Do you mean one needs to expand the number of sites to ride out the flactuations of SERPS and traffic, or do you mean get other sources of income and not just rely on adsense to that one site? Perhaps a combination of both.

[DamonHD]

Hi,

Perhaps a combination of both, indeed.

Or don't give up the 9--5 job if you have just one site and its only monetisation is via AdSense.

Rgds

Damon

[Zygoot]

Both. There are lots of ways to diversify:

- create more sites
- create other types of sites
- focus on other countries/languages
- affiliate programs, promoting them with your website or PPC networks.
- check out other advertising services.
- get or keep a day job
- investments
- stocks
- sell stuff on eBay
- ...

[europeforvisitors]

do you mean get other sources of income and not just rely on adsense

Yes.

[Mohamed]

do you mean get other sources of income and not just rely on adsense

difently yes. Join Affiliate programm or other contextual programms like yahoo publisher, ad bright and etc. And also get permanent job.

[crick]

I already have a job. I work for an online company in the finance sector (work from home). Its a partime job (around 26 hours a week). They offered me a fulltime contract but I declined because I would have to commute to the office every morning. The current arrangement allows me to work a lot more on the site than I would be able if I were working fulltime.

[Khensu]

If you can eat from both worlds yor are way better off. I am 49 and haven't had a real job for 25 years, just contract work 3 days a week and the combo is great.

Apply to YPN or another, even if you only run them on a few pages you still have an alternate in case of a meltdown.

Start building more sites with a different appeal to a different audience.

Your in good shape.

[ronburk]

I mean: how many things have to happen to put you out of business?

Example: You're raking in $500/day from AdSense, and 90% of your income comes from free Google traffic arriving at 5 different pages. The only thing that has to happen to put you out of business is an algorithm change -- and you know that Google changes their algorithm on a regular basis. Another single event that could put you out of business is that a competitor starts click-frauding you and Google boots you from AdSense. That's putting all your eggs in one basket.

Counter-example: You used to get all your income from AdSense and 5 pages, but you did a lot of work:

• You got your free Yahoo!+MSN traffic up to about 25% of total instead of 5% of your total free SE referrals.
  
• You got links on a lot of decent sites, and they now account for 25% of your total arriving traffic stream.
  
• You built up an affiliate program so that 40% of your income is not coming from AdSense.
  
• You have formed relationships with major advertisers so that, if booted from AdSense, there's a decent chance some of them will want to advertise with you directly, or via a different service.