Can Your Money Making Internet Business Survive When Disaster Strikes?

Once you have a decent money making internet business, it is important to anticipate what can go wrong - and things do sometimes go wrong fast! - in order to safeguard your online income as well as possible.

Let's assume you have a blogging website with a decent amount of traffic, say 350 unique visitors per day producing 600 page views, and your AdSense income runs to about 4 cents per page view. That amounts to 24 dollar per day, which is a good sized income for a single site!

Let's try to anticipate some of these potentially crippling problems your money making internet business may encounter.

Firstly you will need to look at where your various streams of income are originating, and what can go wrong. For instance, say most of your income is thanks to great listings in Google supplying you with steady traffic to your AdSense ads.

What if you lose some of your listings due to the inevitable algorithm changes at Google? It is quite possible that you may receive 60% of your traffic from Google, and what's more, it can so happen that three-quarters of your Google traffic come from just a few strong keywords, giving you a couple of pages with top listings.

Unless you've been tracking everything closely, you may not even be aware that close to 50% of your overall AdSense income may be thanks to just a couple of strong keywords and pages out of many on your site!

If a Google algorithm change "slaps" your top listings for just those few pages, you can see a disastrous drop in income, practically overnight! Your money making internet business can literally disappear in an instant!

A secondly disaster - related to the first - is if your site pages intermittently throw up errors when visitors try to access them. This could be due to some kind of persistent overloading of your server, or even because of malicious script activity putting strain on your server.

The biggest problem here is not that your site visitors occasionally see an error page when they try to access your site. This will of course influence your page earnings to some extent, but not disastrously so.

The disaster waiting to strike is when the Google crawler comes along for a visit, especially to your best-performing pages. If it continues to find error pages instead of the real thing, it will simply start dropping your rankings in the search results!

I recently experienced page errors due to memory overloading on my server. For about three days access to my blog sites was very erratic, with my AdSense "takings" slowly falling.

By the third day some of my best number one Google listings started to show "error entries" instead of the real page description.

By day four disaster struck: Google dropped those top listings up to 30 places, which immediately cut my site AdSense earnings by a further 30 to 40%...

Later that day, after running a diagnostic scan of my server, my hosting company discovered a malicious script that ate up memory, putting a severe strain on my server. The script was deleted, and within minutes the error pages disappeared. I was also lucky in that my listings were restored to their former positions within a day or two.

How can you avoid these disasters? Well, there's very little you can do to avoid the occasional Google "slap" to your listings, apart from continuously expanding your site with good content and building links to your pages. This will help them recover more quickly after such an incident.

You can also try to prevent serious server problems by keeping a weary eye on the way your sites respond, and at the first sign of trouble ask your hosting company to do a thorough check of your server.

However, the best way to prevent these disasters is simply to avoid putting all your eggs in one basket.

One of the best ways to build up some eggs in another basket, is to seriously go for list building. Once you have one or more strong lists of prospects, you will have a viable second source of online income that can hardly be influenced by these disasters.

If Google drops your site listings, you can happily continue to use your list broadcasts to send traffic to your site.

Also, even if your server and sites grind to a complete halt, you can still generate an income through your list without having to send them to your own sites. In fact, in an emergency you can even quickly put up a temporary site on another server, and send your lists to offers on that site, while you work at resolving problems at your main server.

Your list actually has a two-fold purpose: It will turn out to be an invaluable safety net that protects your money making internet business when disaster strikes. And, as most internet marketers have discovered, your list is very likely to become your main source of income in time.

If you don't have this disaster management strategy in place, don't delay, start building your list today!