One classic startup problem is relying on a single small segment of the market to generate 100% of your revenue. This is fine when your target market is doing well. But your ability to function is at the mercy of the performance of your customers.
Sometimes a diversification may not seem like “real” revenue diversification. Take Digital Envoy for example (you knew that was coming, didn’t you?). For a long time, IP intelligence technology may have appeared to be the company’s only revenue stream. The technology (NetAcuity) was the main source of revenue but the revenue was driven by customers in a number of different markets – advertising, content control, fraud control, etc. At Digital Envoy, we’ve seen that if one market was doing poorly, another was keeping us so busy that we could barely keep up. Digital Envoy has continued down this path by taking advantage of a large opportunity to diversify revenue by creating a business unit focused solely on helping financial transaction companies manage their businesses (see Digital Resolve).
The point of this post though isn’t really to talk about diversifying your corporate revenue. I’ve been thinking about how I should diversify my personal revenue or rather, my income. In the coming weeks I’ll be talking about some things I’m trying but the first one should be apparent to anyone visiting the web version of the blog. I’ve added advertising to the blog to see if I can generate any meaningful revenue from my random ramblings. I may add advertising to the RSS feed but for now, I’d like to control the changes so I can see how well (or poorly) each functions.
There is one other important note about the advertising. I’m currently using Google’s AdSense to supply the advertising. Yes, Google. As long time readers will know, I’ve had an issue with them based on things they did (or rather, we alleged they did) to my former company (in particular with AdSense). Perhaps I’m mellowing with age. Or now, two plus years later, I don’t care anymore. Or perhaps, Digital Envoy is doing well and so I don’t really care anymore. Regardless, I’m using Google for this now although I still don’t use their search engine. I’ll probably try out some other advertising networks too so that I can figure out which works best for me.
Let me know if you think the advertising is good, bad, well targeted, or not.
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