I’m sure you’ve heard the saying Don’t put all your eggs into one basket.
It’s been around for years and can apply to many areas of life.
So why is it then that so many people keep doing this? With their finances, with their business and with so many other things.
From a business point of view, I’ve heard too many stories of businesses that relied on:
- one client for the majority of their income
- one internet-based source for the majority of their online traffic
- one marketing source for the majority of their clients
- one popular product that brings in most of the profit.
Then when something changes and they lose that client, traffic or marketing source, their business struggles to survive, often either closing completely or coming to me for urgent assistance in how to turn things around … and quickly.
I know of several successful business owners who made 6 digits each year for several years relying on only AdWords Pay-Per-Click ads to send traffic to their sites. Then one day – about 3-4 years ago now – AdWords changed their policies and with no advance notice, the ads these customers were uses were no longer compliant with AdWords’ new policy.
Those ads were all banned and the business owners involved lost almost all of their sites’ traffic overnight.
One friend lost more than $10,000 in monthly revenue as a result of that change but thankfully he was able to quickly implement other effective marketing strategies that kept his business thriving. Others weren’t so lucky.
Another business-owner I know has relied on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) for the majority of his business for the last 7 years. However over the last 18 months he’s lost most of that business as a result of changes and updates to the search engines.
I know it’s easy to think we have it made when things are going well. We’re getting all the business we need from one source and may take our business’ marketing a little for granted.
But when it comes to long-term business success it’s so important to ensure that you have multiple sources of income, multiple sources of traffic, multiple effective marketing strategies … always have at least one backup plan. Just in case.
As a business-owner I’m sure you’re very busy however, for the sake of your on-going business success, I encourage you to allocate 1 hour sometime over the next week to looking at this part of your business.
Think carefully … is there any area (or areas) where you are putting all your business eggs in the one basket?
If so, how can you change that?
What other back-up plans can you implement?
Once you’ve completed this exercise you may need to allocate some more time to implementing the strategies you’ve come up with.
However sometime down the track you may well be extremely grateful for the effort you’re going to now, to help ensure your business continues smoothly if one of these sources is no longer available.
