Developing Multiple Streams of Income

I'm doing pretty well in this economic downturn. I purchased a book titled The Four Hour Work Week. This book teaches a methodology of developing multiple streams of low-grade income that add up to compensate for your current salary, enabling you to quit and end up working only 4 hours a week managing and maintaining the revenue streams.

I started on this process about three years ago. Then I got distracted by my "real" job, and promptly lost sight of the goal. Don't let that happen to you, if this is your goal.

What he doesn't address in his book (or maybe he did and I forgot) is that multiple streamns of income are not going to provide benefits you get from a company, like health insurance. If you're halthy and qualify for insurance (i.e. you have no pre-existing conditions), you're golden. If, however, you're like me, you'll be screwed. My wife suffers from muiltiple chronic illnesses that would leave us uninsurable if it weren't for state underwriting laws related to employment. My company has to cover me and my family. Places like eSurance and Aflack aren't required by law to take you on a s a client if you have a long history of costing insurrance companies money.

So before implementing a project liek the one described in the Four Hour Work Week, be sure you understand the full scope of what you stand to gain and what you stand to lose.

That said, there's no reason we can't do something part time to qualify for benefits through a company, and then replace the wage slave job we have with multiple streams of income.

Once you've performed a discovery project on the viability of implementing something like this, you need to figure out what kind of things you'll do to generate your multiple streams of income. I use Google AdSense. I have been a member for three years, and have my ads up on my web site, and on my blog. I will be getting my first check in two months because I still haven't made my first $100. Eventually it will start making a difference, and if I had enough sites and enough traffic and enough clicks, I could make a fortune. To develop that I would need a lot more sites, which cost money, and a lot more time to develop content.

Speaking of content, the bottom line of any revenue stream is what are you selling? I write eBooks that make me a lot more money than I've made on Google's AdSense. eBooks don't have to be long, they can be as short as 25 pages. You have total control over how it looks, which is a good thing if you know what you're doing, but can be a really bad thing if you miss typos. The key to success is repeat business, and if you write crap, no one will keep buying your stuff.

All this content development takes time. Time spent developing multiple streams of income detracts from time spent with your family or your current source of income. While there is a great potential return on investment available to you, the initial investment is your time and energy. Remember to take this into account when determining how you're going to implement a multiple stream of revenue income model in your life.

I find the best thing to do is to develop things one at a time. I spend two or three hours a week developing a source of income, and then I launch it. Then I turn to the next thing. the goal is to have everything add up over time. It takes a while. In a year or two, I may be earning enough from the little things to replace the wage slave job. Maybe not. We'll see.