Around six months ago I posted a very timely question on a well known internet forum and got completely shot down for my efforts. The post was titled “What would you do tomorrow if Squidoo went bust?” In the post I asked the many people that were raving about their squidoo rankings in Google what their contingency plan was should Google suddenly fall out of love with Squidoo.

Well sure enough a week later Google performed the now infamous SLAP and squid lenses dropped like stones in the rankings and in many cases dropped from the site completely. In the replies to the original post people had said things like, “Move it to HubPages“, “That won’t happen to my lense!” and my favorite “I can’t see Google doing that to one of Seth’s sites!” Ten days later this post was buried right down in the 4th page of the forum after posts that read “WHAT IS HAPPENING MY LENSES HAVE ALL DROPPED AND I AM GETTING NO TRAFFIC!”

Basically and unfortunately the hard truth of internet and affiliate marketing is that there is always someone who is trying to abuse systems that work. This then means that the systems don’t work. Time and time again we have to revisit what we do in order to make sure that we go about things the right way. This is one of the main reasons I have made sure that I have a number of income streams that keep my business ticking along without depending on just one.

There are always new methods new techniques to stay on top of and a whole bunch of products that will keep you on your toes if you keep buying every single one (habit I used to be in). However if you sit down with a blank sheet of paper and write down how you currently earn your money and then split them into sections that do not rely on each other. For instance if you are using Yahoo Ads to promote products and 99% of your traffic is coming from there then what would you do if the Yahoo Ads system went offline for a week? Basically you are writing a disaster recovery plan for your own business.

No matter how small an amount you are earning from your business or just from your online efforts if you are serious about it then you should have some kind of plan that you have to fall back on should the dreaded worse happen.

Why am I writing such a cheerful post so close to Christmas? Well and affiliate network that was one of my 7 income streams went broke this week and with it has taken my Christmas commissions for three of my websites. Luckily for me I have others that have been earning and performing over the build up to the festive season but it did throw some sort of spanner in the works I can tell you. Be safe get a plan.