It’s Michael Rasmussen with some advice for you about how to make your Internet Marketing business a HUGE safety net for your life.

Have you ever heard an investment advisor tell people to diversify their portfolio?

It’s extremely smart to do that, for a lot of reasons.

Well, it turns out the same advice applies to your Internet Marketing business.

I’ll give you some practical tips about how to diversify your business, even if you don’t consider yourself to be some kind of 7-figure superstar.

But first, let me explain why diversifying your business makes such good sense…

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Why Business Diversification Is Smart
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When an investment adviser tells you to diversify, he’s telling you not to put all of your eggs into one basket, so to speak. If one investment goes bad, you don’t lose everything.

The same thing applies to your Internet business.

Imagine if most of your online income depends on SEO. That means getting free visitors from Google because your pages rank high in the search results.

That’s a great business model, but now let’s say Google changes their rules and your page drops off the first page of the results.

If you don’t have any other way to get visitors and make a profit, you’re in big trouble.

It’s the same if your business depends on Google AdWords.

You might be just killing it with your PPC ads one day, and then Google decides to change something. Now your ads don’t rank anymore and you’re not getting any clicks.

Just like with SEO, if your business is entirely dependent on PPC, you’re going to be hurting pretty bad.

I could go on, but you get the point…if your business depends on one income stream, you’ll be out of luck if that one stream goes away.

That’s WAY too big of a risk to take with your livelihood. Fortunately, it’s easy to avoid.

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What It Means to Diversify Your Business
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Diversification sounds fancy, but it’s really a simple idea.

You want to create multiple profit engines in your business. If one goes away, you’ll still have several others to keep the cash rolling in.

What you’re doing here is building a portfolio of income streams, just like you build a portfolio of investments.

Actually, all of these streams within your business ARE investments. That’s how you should think of them.

And you want multiple investments out there making you cash.

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A Simple Strategy You Can Use Today
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First, don’t get stuck on having just one way to profit online.

Believe me, it’s easy to do, especially if you’ve struggled for a long time before finally having something work.

Once you find that successful thing, you can be so happy that you get stuck there and never do anything else…until you wake up one day and your income got crippled somehow.

Always be looking for new cash streams to start up.

I suggest a simple strategy:

1) Pick one cash stream that you’ll treat as the “core” of your business. This won’t be your only cash stream, but it’ll be your main one.

2) Once your main business is doing okay, immediately start looking for another one. Get that one producing profits too.

3) Find one new cash stream every 3 months from then on.

This gets easier as you do it. Pretty soon you’ll be seeing all sorts of opportunities as you do more.

And once you have a nice portfolio of streams for your business, you’ll have a TON more flexibility and confidence.

For example, let’s say one of your streams is affiliate marketing. If there aren’t many great offers to promote in a given month, you can focus on something else that month.

This happens a lot with affiliate marketing. There has been a lot of garbage coming out recently, so you wouldn’t want to be promoting much right now (notice that I’m not).

That’s the kind of flexibility you have when you build yourself a portfolio of streams.

To get you started, here are a few ideas you want to investigate more:

* Blogging – Blogs are easy to set up. You can do some quick no-cost keyword research and find a great niche to start blogging in. Then you could install several different cash generators into your blog, like AdSense, selling text ad space through ad networks, banner ads for affiliate products, etc. And you can use your blog as your central “hub” for pointing people to any other businesses you have set up.

* Affiliate Marketing – Promoting other people’s products is a great business, and you can get started for nothing. The key is to focus on promoting only high-quality products. If you establish a reputation for doing that, you can make a mint. Create a simple no-cost offer to start growing your list, then start promoting related products to that list.

* Flipping Websites – This doesn’t mean creating sites from scratch and then selling them. That can be a LOT of work. What it really means is buying sites with a bunch of potential for cheap, fixing them up, then selling them for more than you paid. You can look for underdeveloped sites at someplace like Flippa.com, then figure out how to enhance them. For example, you could add an upsell to the sales flow, or add a free offer to the sales page. Then you can turn around and sell the site for more. Flippa only costs $19 initially to sell a site (plus a percentage of the selling price if it sells), so this won’t break the bank.

* Creating Niche Products – Do some keyword research and find a niche with lots of sites currently selling inexpensive information products. Then Google for “[niche]+forum” and read what people are saying about what information they need. If you write a short report to give them that information, based on some free Google research, you can build a nice business very fast.

* Buying and Selling Domains – This is a lot like flipping websites. Do some research to find keywords that get some nice traffic (not a bunch, just stead). Then find domains that use that keyword. If you go to a site like Sedo.com, you can “park” the domain and earn some cash from free visitors while it sits there, and you can offer the domain for sale.

Those are just a few ideas. There are plenty of others out there to choose from.

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How I Diversify My Own Business
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I’m not giving you advice I don’t follow myself. I diversify my own business!

As you probably already know, one part of my business focuses on the Internet Marketing market itself. That means:

* Creating products to help people succeed online

* Promoting high-quality products to my e-mail list, and negotiating great bonus deals for my subscribers

* Doing joint ventures with other marketers to grow my business and help more people

But that’s not the only part of my business.

I also have been growing businesses in various other niches since 2001. These businesses give me multiple cash streams, some of which run on autopilot.

I often find myself switching my focus back and forth between these two areas of my business. Sometimes one requires more attention than the other.

And yes, I’ve had a few niche businesses disappear. In some cases the niche went away entirely, and in other cases the niche stopped being very profitable.

But here’s the thing…I DIDN’T CARE.

Well, I cared, but it didn’t cripple my ability to feed my family or live my life. That’s because I had other cash streams that still worked, and they picked up the slack.

You can do exactly the same thing in your business.

Just follow the simple strategy I gave you earlier, and you’ll find yourself fully diversified. Then you can live your Internet life without any worries at all.

I hope this helps.