If you are an online home based business owner, you may have one, maybe even 2 products that you sell. While this is the way most business is done, if you own your own online home based business, it may not entirely be the best approach.

In the history of business, all businesses (successful ones) offer more than one product or service, unless they are in a highly specialized niche and they offer services that only they can provide. We've all heard of diversifying when it comes to brick-and-mortar businesses and the stock market. The same concept applies when running your own online business, even more so. The reasoning here is simple. What if your product tanks for one reason or another? In particular, online home based business owners are even more vulnerable to the whims of the market and adverse business conditions for the following reasons:

Online business can be fairly unpredictable

Lack of deep pockets

Limited resources

For this reason, only investing in one line of business is a bad idea. First, it sets you up to be dependent on that one product or service, which you are probably selling via the Internet. Let's look at some of the things that could happen to affect your income if you do business this way:

Your site gets banned by the Search Engines Your website goes down

Someone comes up with a product/service similar to yours (and markets it better), or

A larger company comes up with the same services you provide and can price it lower

If you have only one product or service, and one of the above scenarios happens to you, you are in big trouble. At best, you could lose sales. At worse, you could be driven out of business. This is why, as an independent, online home based business owner, you should always strive to diversify. In Internet lingo, we call this developing multiple streams of income.

You could develop complementary products, or you could develop several entirely different, unrelated products and services. Whatever you decide to do, the key to remember is that in order to remain financially viable you have go to have your income coming from more than one product/service. To invest everything you in have all in one product is not smart. By diversifying, if one income stream dries up for one reason or another, you still have a few others to rely on, and time develop another if need be. Do you see the logic here?

In addition to diversifying your online home based business, you should also take a few other things in account that are unique to the problems that home based business owners face. Below are a few problems unique to online businesses and their solutions:

1. Fact: You have 4 different websites

Solution: You need at least 2 different hosting companies

Why: What if one hosting company goes down or out of business? All your websites go with it. And what if all of your websites are linked together? Did you know that you get more points from the search engines if they are linked via different IP addresses? So do yourself a favor; if you have more than one website, get more than one hosting company.

2. Fact: You have several websites

Solution: You need individual IP addresses for each one

Why: Because if you are with a cheap hosting company, chances are that you are sharing IP addresses. Using the law of averages, at least one of your sites is sharing IP's with a spammer. Spamming is a search engine no-no. Search engines can and do ban entire IP's that they determine host sites with spammers. If your website happens to be sharing IP's with one of them, your site gets banned as well by default.

These are just a few of the reasons that you should consider diversifying your online home based business. Running an online business can be extremely profitable, but you need to be smart and protect your investment and income.

Copyright 2006 www.eliasg.com