I recently got asked that question and it’s a tough one to answer for a lot of reasons – I’ll do my best to explain what I’d suggest, why the question makes sense but also why it doesn’t make sense.

Which is probably clear as mud at the moment so let’s try to clarify things!

Before I answer the question itself, let’s examine the question:

The logic behind picking only one way of making money on the internet makes sense.

A lot of people are scatter-brained when it comes to internet marketing and try to run a hundred different directions at once. pulling themselves every which way but in reality staying stuck in the same spot.

So focusing helps enormously and is close to what I suggest to people who are just starting out in their internet marketing career.

The logic of learning one thing well rather than ten or twenty or a hundred things badly is actually very compelling.

But it brings us on to why the question doesn’t make total sense…

And that’s because it assumes several things:

• That there’s only one way of making money on the internet
• That you should be a “one trick pony”
• That things don’t/won’t change
• Probably a few other things that I haven’t noted

Let’s examine those thoughts in a bit more detail.

There’s definitely more than one way of making money on the web:

• Selling advertising space (either via AdSense or one of the advertising brokers or on your own)
• Selling products for a commission (real products via somewhere like Amazon or digital products or whatever)
• Selling your own products & services – on eBay, Amazon, your own site, via classified ads
• Selling services
• Acting as a lead broker
• Etc, etc, etc

What you need to do is work out which way works best for you – each way has plus and minus points and will fit with different personality types. Working out which has the best fit with you will help you succeed because you’ll be going with something that is congruent.

Being a “one trick pony” is never a good idea. If that “trick” or method changes or disappears, you’re left without an income.

Things won’t change…

This doesn’t just apply to the internet – a number of years ago, people were making a lot of money marketing with faxes but nowadays that’s almost extinct.

Anyone who had a web page on Geocities – which is estimated to have been 38 million pages – would have seen their efforts disappear. That kind of number means there’s not even a “safety in numbers” element to this if corporate decisions move against you.

MySpace was once the de-facto social network. It’s now been eclipsed by Facebook but who’s to say whether that will still be the case in 5 or 10 years time?

What that means for you is that you should always have more than one method of making money on the web.

Just in case!

That said, I’d suggest starting with one method. And then branching out so that you’ve got several methods over the course of a few months or a year.

The logic of starting with one method is that you’ll get better at it.

It’s like anything – practice may not make you perfect but it will almost certainly improve you.

It will also show you if the initial idea that seemed to be fun actually turns into something you don’t like. In which case, change!

I’d suggest that you focus on any new project for at least a month – anything less than that won’t give you any real figures and even a month is quite a short period of time. But at least it will show you whether you’re suited to the topic or not. I’ve expanded on this in my post here.

Once you’ve been working on something – something “live”, not something “behind the scenes” – for a few weeks then you’ll begin to have a feel for how it’s going.

If your stats aren’t showing you anything, you can maybe treat yourself to doing a few searches on Google to find out whether you’re in the first few pages of results. I normally go through the first ten pages if I’m doing that kind of research but it’s rare for me to do that unless I’m checking on behalf of a client.

More often I’ll just see whether I’m getting anything in my stats that comes via the search engines.

If I am, that’s good.

If I’m not, that doesn’t actually mean too much in a month. The search engines are getting slower to index most pages so unless you’re targeting a very obscure page or actively getting lots of backlinks to the page (not something I’d suggest – a handful of backlinks is a good start) then it’s not unusual for it to take several months before your site gets even a glimmer of traffic from the search engines.

Such is life and we’re not likely to be going back to the early days of search engines like Infoseek where you could get page changes reindexed and see the results of your SEO work in an hour or two.

All of which is quite a long-winded way of saying that I’d have difficulty picking just one way of making money on the internet and, even if I did, that way may not be the best for you. Or it could change in a few months or years.

Which is what it does on a regular basis.

It’s a bit of a cliche but the only real constant is change.

That said, since I started on the web in 1995. there have been a few constants:

• Having your own site with your own hosting is preferable to any other option. That’s unlikely to change. If you’ve not already done so, choose your domain name carefully – avoid hyphens, make it easy to read over the phone or face-to-face in case you ever need to do that, keep to one of the main extensions like .com, .net, etc.
• Getting backlinks is still important. Keep them varied in terms of where they’re from and the keywords that are used in the anchor text. If the source looks spammy, it probably is. And remember that Google’s rules and guidelines are written in quicksand.
• Today’s popular sites may be just distant memories in a few years time – I’m old enough to remember Alta Vista as a search engine (even when they didn’t own their own domain name!) and other long forgotten search engines like Inktomi, Magellan, Northern Light, etc. Not to mention eBay’s early rival here in the UK: QXL, which closed a few years ago.
• You need to keep people’s interest. There are more ways of doing this that are affordable nowadays. The video capabilities of even the humblest mobile phone would have been unheard of a few years ago, Use modern technology to your advantage but remember that written content is still likely to be with us (and has the advantage of being easiest for search engines like Google to index)

The other constant is that you actually need to do something.

It’s no good just drawing up lists of things to do if you never actually do any of them!

So start, even if it’s not perfect.

And keep track, so you can learn from any mistakes and adjust as you learn.

Good luck! And if you’d like help formulating what you need to do or making it happen, take a look at this page.

And feel free to add your comments below.