The beauty of the internet is mind-boggling. There are so many ways to get a piece of the pie. Most take a lot of work, and some, not so much. The best way to stay safe when monetizing your website is to use more than one source of income.

Here is an example: I will use AdSense because it’s one of the most popular services out there. – There are some real die-hard AdSense users out there, these users don’t have a job, their job is AdSense. They spend their time using AdSense to make cash, and some serious cash at that. I’m talking hundreds or thousands of dollars a week and yes, even a day. They are so successful at it that they make more in a week than someone else would working for another company officially employed. But then it hits, AdSense starts to hit a slump, or they get banned for whatever reason. Their only source of income is now gone, and possibly for good. That will mean starting from step 1 all over again. All their hard work is no longer valid and they are at a financial loss. That is not a good situation and thats why by not “putting all your eggs in one basket” is a great thing.

Exploring Your Options:
If you find other sources of income like Yahoo Publisher Ads, ClickBank, Chikita, Kontera, Text Link Ads just to name a few, then they can prevent 100% loss. I am a loyal member of DigitalPoint, more specifically, the AdSense section. Day after day I hear of people getting banned, or deleted or not being able to use AdSense anymore and all of their income is gone. Explore new ways of supporting your website try new things. There are some really cool services out there.

Google AdSense – AdSense is an ad serving program run by Google. Website owners can enroll in this program to enable text, image and, more recently, video advertisements on their sites. These ads are administered by Google and generate revenue on either a per-click or per-thousand-impressions basis. Google is also currently beta-testing a cost-per-action based service.

Yahoo Publisher Network – The Yahoo! Publisher Network (abbreviated YPN) is a beta network, launched on August 2, 2005 by Yahoo!. As the service is currently in Beta, it is currently only accepting US-Based publishers; it is believed that Yahoo! will expand this when the program comes out of Beta. YPN provides cost per click contextual advertising, similar to Google Adsense, as well as various tools and services to assist publishers in building and improving their websites.

Kontera – Keyword advertising refers to any advertising that is linked to specific words or phrases. Common forms of keyword advertising are known by many other terms including pay per click (PPC) and cost per action (CPA). There are multiple variations each starting with “pay per” or “cost per” such as pay per action (PPA), pay per cost (PPC), cost per mille (CPM).

TextLink Ads – Text Link Ads is an Internet marketing company which acts as an intermediary for websites to sell text links to companies, a form of search engine marketing.

As you can see there are many services out there, some CPC, some PPC, some keyword targeting and more. I learned that only relying on one source of income is a very bad thing, especially when your daily living is effected by it. Exploring new services will also give you more of a variety to learn from and another thing to master. I havent experienced a “loss” or total downfall of one specific product, but now that I am using multiple sources of income, its all that much better. Just some thoughts.