{"id":28402,"date":"2013-11-27T03:37:22","date_gmt":"2013-11-26T16:37:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/?p=28402"},"modified":"2017-01-09T15:32:42","modified_gmt":"2017-01-09T04:32:42","slug":"the-day-i-almost-lost-my-blogging-business-by-having-too-many-eggs-in-the-one-basket","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/problogger.com\/the-day-i-almost-lost-my-blogging-business-by-having-too-many-eggs-in-the-one-basket\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day I Almost Lost My Blogging Business By Having Too Many Eggs in the One Basket"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was 17 December 2004 and my dream was falling apart, right before my eyes.<\/h3>\n

I had just celebrated the 2nd anniversary since I started to blog and I was on the tipping point of my part-time earnings becoming a full-time income.<\/p>\n

I’d quit my only other employment to devote 100% of my time to blogging and had recently started ProBlogger to share what I knew about blogging for money. I had just been interviewed in a national paper about my business and all in all, I was pretty happy with how my dreams were progressing.<\/p>\n

Then it happened. Most of my traffic disappeared, almost overnight.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I had been averaging 12,000 visitors per day to my main blog (a camera review blog that no longer exists) – around 80% of which came from great Google Search Engine rankings.<\/p>\n

That level of traffic was enough to make a living from using the Google AdSense program (which accounted for 95% of my income).<\/p>\n

I woke up on the morning of the 17th December 2004 to discover that my blog’s healthy Google rankings had disappeared overnight.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The result was that I was dropped to 2000 visitors a day (from nearly 14000) on my main blog and my other blogs lost even larger amounts of traffic.<\/p>\n

Here’s how my traffic looked on my main blog at that time.<\/p>\n

\"Statsdpb<\/a><\/p>\n

Of course, with only a sixth of the traffic I previously had I also saw my income from AdSense take a similar tumble. Rather than a full time income, I was looking at earning enough money to call it a 1 day per week job.<\/p>\n

I was devastated.<\/p>\n

I was confused.<\/p>\n

I was angry.<\/p>\n

I was also deeply embarrassed.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Not only did my friends and family know that I’d quit my job to become a blogger… so did the world because I’d talked about it here on ProBlogger<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Falling from the rankings in Google was the single biggest challenge I faced as a blogger. I didn’t understand why it had happened and I came very close to giving up blogging altogether.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thankfully I didn’t give up.<\/p>\n

I’m glad I hung in there because just under 2 months later I began to rank in Google again and saw most of the traffic that I’d lost return. I’m also glad because that that really tough period taught me a lot about blogging, and about business.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Biggest Lesson Learned: Diversification<\/h2>\n

That experience taught me many things but one of the biggest lessons was about diversification and becoming too dependant on any one area of a business.<\/p>\n

Thankfully I learned this lesson very quickly. In this post<\/a> (which I wrote 3 days after falling out of Google) I wrote about my mistake of having too many eggs in the one basket.<\/p>\n

I was too reliant upon Google for traffic and too reliant upon AdSense for income.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Rather than see this challenge as something to stop me I decided to see it as a hurdle – something to get over that would make me stronger in the process.<\/em><\/p>\n

I decided that I would not only keep<\/em> blogging but that I was going to work hard to rebuild my blogging in a way that was less reliant upon any one source of traffic or income stream.<\/p>\n

This mind-shift led to a range of decisions to diversify in the coming months and years.<\/p>\n

It also led me to regularly ask a simple question that helps me avoid this problem again…<\/p>\n

Is there a single thing that could kill my business right now?<\/h2>\n

I regularly ask myself this question (in fact our team discussed it the other day). By asking it on a regular basis I get a good sense for whether the balance in my business it out and whether I need to adjust my approach to spread the risk a little.<\/p>\n

In a series of posts in the coming days, I’ll talk more about some of the areas I’ve diversified what I do to help with this but in the mean time, I’d love to hear your own reflections upon this.<\/p>\n

Have you ever realised that you’re too reliant upon any one form of traffic or income stream? What have you done to diversify what you do?<\/p>\n

Stay tuned for some suggestions on how to diversify your blogging to avoid having too many eggs in the one basket by subscribing to our RSS feed<\/a> or to the ProBloggerPLUS newsletter below:<\/p>\n

UPDATE<\/strong>: I’ve since followed this post up with a post looking at how I diversified traffic to my blog<\/a> but do plan another couple of articles in this series in the coming weeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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