As you start building your online empire, you will typically focus on one primary area of revenue until it is maximized to its fullest potential. It doesn’t matter exactly what you start with – it might be a product, a membership site, or a service.

One big problem many Internet marketers create for themselves is having their hands in too many cookie jars. They get a great idea, launch and fiddle with it for a week or a month, and then get bored and try something else if the money isn’t pouring in and flooding their bank account. Truthfully, this describes the vast majority of Internet marketers.

As every successful entrepreneur knows, you have to give your all to one venture and help it get off the ground before you divide up your attention. You could give 25% of your time and effort to four projects at once, but none of them would ever amount to what they could have achieved had you given each of them, one at a time, 100% of your dedication until the peak performance of each project was automated and passive (hands-off success). Read that sentence again, because it is a concept that most would-be entrepreneurs do not grasp.

Priming Your Success With a Blueprint.

Whether you’re just now learning about online selling, or you’re an experienced marketer, you need to map out the road you intend to take on your journey toward increased profits and financial independence.

It happens time and time again – a newcomer gets so excited about the potential to earn that he jumps in headfirst without a plan in place, setting himself up for guaranteed failure. 

You don’t have to write out a task list for every single thing you do, like answering emails or processing payments. But you need the major projects organized so that you know what step you need to take next toward reaching your goals.

For instance, what major steps need to be taken to launch an information product? You have to brainstorm an idea, write the product, compile it, write the sales copy, design and launch a website, and submit it to search engines.

Those are just the necessities to get it off the ground. There are many other tasks that can be done within each item on your list. In the “design and launch a website” category, you might have tasks such as compile a keyword list or generate Meta tags.

Considering Your Next Move.

When you find yourself moving on to another project, stop and ask yourself if the previous project is able to run itself with minimal input from you. If it’s a service business, then you may have to devote 100% of your attention without ever moving on to another project unless you first decide to let the services go.

Another option may be to minimize your services and only offer them part time while you focus on your next money-making endeavor. For instance, if you’re a writer but want to pursue Internet Marketing, you might begin turning down projects so that you can concentrate on writing your own eBook and launching it for a more passive income.

Maintaining One Project’s Success While Moving on to Another.

As mentioned before, a common pitfall many ‘net marketers fall into is starting too many projects at once, or too soon. It doesn’t matter if your goal is money, time, or prestige – you want to make sure the current project is as perfect as you can get it before you move on to something else.

Let’s consider the possibility that you have an information product. You created an eBook, launched a mini site, and set it up in ClickBank. Then you heard about someone making a lot of money with an AdSense site in the health niche.

Instead of waiting to pursue that project, and continuing to get your information product off the ground, you put the eBook on the back burner and started designing your AdSense site and creating content for it.

What happens to the first product?

There was much more you could have done to foster the growth of its success. As it stands now, it won’t get ranked high in the search engines, it has no exposure, and no one promoting it. You’ve abandoned it so it is guaranteed to fail.

What else should you have done before you moved on to the AdSense site?

You could have created an affiliate center and toolbox to entice others to promote the product for you in exchange for a percentage of the sale. You could have created viral articles and teaser eBooks to get people interested in it.

Press releases would have been useful to increase the coverage the product received. You should have approached eZines and Joint Venture partners to see if they would allow you to introduce your product to them. Pay-per-click campaigns could have generated a flow of traffic, and the list goes on.

Only after you have exhausted all of these efforts should you move on to something else. Great ideas about future business ventures can always be filed away for later use. You can come back to it once your current efforts are underway.

Knowing When to Say When.

Would you rather be really good at one or two things, or be average at several? It’s better to position yourself as an expert in whatever field you choose to target. While multiple streams of income are a positive aspect of the many opportunities available with Internet marketing, it doesn’t mean you have to continue inventing new projects.

Instead of moving on to something completely different, why not interlink your projects together? If the eBook you launched was a health topic, then an AdSense site on the same subject matter, with hyperlinks pointing to the mini site, would be financially rewarding in more than one way.

If you have your hands full with a membership site, then it would be a bad idea to neglect it while you work to create a new income stream. You never want your existing project to suffer because of your new pursuits. Not only would your membership begin to dwindle, but your reputation would suffer, making any new endeavors pointless because people would not trust the source of the information.

Know when to stop branching out. If you simply must pursue another project, make sure you outsource as much as possible if you’re already too busy with other work. Use sites like Elance.com, Guru.com or Rentacoder.com to have others do the labor while you focus on current business needs.

Putting these rules into practice will ensure that your reputation remains solid and your income steady until your business can handle your absence while you pursue the next project.

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