Planning for Longevity as a Website Publisher
Stabilizing Revenue Sources
Stable traffic does not always result in stable revenue. The online advertising market as a whole could plummet as it did in 2000, or the ad networks you use could fail. There have been dozens of high profile ad network failures, and many times publishers were left blowing in the wind without ever being paid what was owed. If you use an affiliate program for most of your revenue what happens when that merchant discontinues their affiliate program? So even if your traffic remains stable or growing, what do you do to ensure your revenue doesn't plummet anyways?
The answer is to diversify your revenue sources. If your revenue is based on a single affiliate program, like many people who use Ebay's program or that free I-pod one, you're extremely vulnerable to affiliate program changes. How many affiliate markets were hurt when Google instituted their policy change with Adwords where they started allowing only one ad per merchant? Likewise publishers dependent on a single ad network, like Google Adsense, are asking for trouble. Luckily for those people both Yahoo & MSN seem to be coming out with similar programs, but that won't always be the case. Then there are also people dependent on a single creative type, such as a banner or a popunder, for most of their revenue. What happens if banner blocking becomes prevalent or pop blocking even more so? These people will be in trouble.
If you want to avoid all that risk what you should do is diversify your income as much as possible. Don't use just one ad network or ad type. Use text link advertising, banner advertising, paid sponsorships for forums, run a newsletter if you can. The more checks you get each month the better off you are, don't rely on a single check from a single source.
Another option is to break into ecommerce. You do not have to do ecommerce full scale, you can simply sell one or two products on your website. Your ecommerce operation won't take up any banner room, just a link on your menu, so you'll still get all advertising revenue you were getting. Even if you only make a few hundred a month or less off of ecommerce it can be worth it. Just use a payment processing service with no monthly fee and it won't matter if you only sell a handful of products each month.
If you wanted to get into ecommerce full scale that is an option as well. As I've discussed in a previous article, building an ecommerce site as a complement to an existing content site is a great way to make money, and it'll also diversify your income sources enough that if the advertising market dries up again you should still be receiving revenue from your ecommerce operations.
Wrap Up
The goal of this article is not to dissuade you from making short-term only sites, but rather to get you thinking on the long term survivability of your Internet enterprise. Its okay to have and to make sites with no long term prospects, so long as you also have long term prospects with other sites. Likewise, it is okay for a site to languish without much revenue now (assuming you can pay the bills via other means) so long as it has long term potential. If you recognize a site with long term prospects, and accept that it may take 10 years for that site to become a success, then that's a good site to have because in 10 years you may need the money that site provides. It's also worth keeping this information in mind when shopping for acquisitions. Often a site owner will sell a site with great long term prospects because it isn't producing much right now, you can usually get a good deal on such sites and reap the rewards a few years down the line.
If you analyze your current websites and realize that their long term prospects aren't what they could be, then realize that the key to longevity is diversity. Diversity in your content. Diversity in your traffic. Diversity in your revenue. Of course the ultimate level of diversity is in your websites themselves. The more websites you own and the more varied they are the great chance of your business as a whole surviving even if individual websites do not.
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