If you’re new to trying to make money online, then you probably don’t know what I’m about to tell you. Because it’s not something other entrepreneurs mention casually.

It’s not really a secret. Most people just assume that the new guys will figure it out eventually.

But a lot of people don’t figure it out or don’t figure it out until it’s too late.

So I’m just going to go ahead and throw the information out there. You need to build multiple income streams for any money-making endeavor. If you’re starting an online business, you definitely want to keep reading.

The Basics

If you’re building an online business, your website is your main attraction. This could be a blog you want to eventually monetize, a store that sells physical products through affiliate marketing or drop shipping, or your own company’s products or service.

No matter what you’re doing on your online business, the main focus should always be to keep your focus on what you’re doing. What I mean by that is that no matter how many income streams you want to build, you need to remember what you set out to do. If you’re a blogger, focus on the blog and creating content. If you’re running an affiliate marketing store, make sure you focus on the products your selling as well as introducing new products.

One of the worst things you can do is try to build too many income streams too fast.

In fact, you’ll probably find out how to build extra revenue in the pursuit of increasing sales for your original items or idea.

For the first six months to a year, focus on your main income stream. You want to build out a nice website, create great content, promote on social media, etc.

This will give you time to not just build your brand identity, but you also figure out how to tweak things and fix mistakes you make early on. For many people, this is marketing. They don’t understand how SEO works and they get frustrated when they don’t see results instantly. You can go to this website to discover more.

Mastering the OG Stream

Now that I’ve mentioned marketing, I want to stress how important it is to either outsource this aspect of owning a business or become a master of it.

No one makes money instantly. It takes time, patience, and hard work.

If you want to make money faster, then you need to master marketing. This includes social media, link building, and SEO. You also need to start a blog. This is huge and I’ve written on it before on this very website. Aside from running your business, marketing is the next thing you need to work on. It’s your #2.

When people say you need to “flesh out” your new business, this is likely what they’re talking about. On top of this, you can actually turn marketing methods into new revenues streams.

YouTube

Creating a YouTube channel solves a lot of your problems as a new business. Creating new videos is another type of content that will reach new customers and also gives you something to share on social media besides blog content.

Written and Video content have a lot in common. Most importantly, they need to have value. Not just an ok amount of value. You should strive to create content that is better than everyone else’s. This is a legitimate marketing strategy. You wait for the competition to make a certain piece of content and then you make a piece that’s better. It’s pretty simple in theory.

This is where things start to get a bit convoluted, right? You start stacking content on content, sharing content everywhere. You can’t tell right from left and up from down.

This is why it’s so important to focus on your main income stream first, hammer out all of the kinks, and then move on to bigger and better things.

And YouTube is just one example of a bigger and better thing. If you can amass a ton of subscribers and views, not only will you bring attention and sales into your business, but YouTube itself can become a viable income stream.

Example

Let’s break this down a bit to give you an idea.

You start a niche website. It has a couple of affiliate links throughout the content. The other pieces of content on the site all have internal links to the pieces that have affiliate links. But for the most part, they’re just there to create lots of value.

Next, you make appropriate social media pages and start to promote through them. You share your own content as well as other blog posts and videos that you think your readers and customers will enjoy. Then you create a YouTube channel. You start to build an audience, once again, through social media. You place links to affiliate products and to your website in the video descriptions.

Your audience grows on YouTube and social media, which in turn creates more traffic and sales for your website.

Then you place ads on your website and your YouTube. And this is where we’re going to stop for today. Let’s count the revenue streams.

1. Main product or service
2. Affiliate links on YouTube
3. Ads on YouTube
4. Ads on website

That’s four income streams right there. All you did was create an amazing website with great content and then created more great content on YouTube. Then you placed some ads. Then you promoted all of your content. And in doing so, created a total of four revenue streams for yourself.

Conclusion

None of what I wrote about in this piece is easy. It is, however, simple.

It comes down to creating a business and then scaling it, but scaling it in a much different way.

Creating so much content and a great website, coming up with business ideas, etc. takes time. So have fun with it and do your best.