The days of having one job for your entire life are long gone. This is, after all, the era of gigs. Especially if you are an online, work from home mompreneur. While it would be nice to put all your energies into one thing, it’s not always the safest thing to do for your pocket book.

It seems when you just get comfortable in whatever niche you working in, something changes. Google corrects its algorithm and the traffic you counted on for your website has banished. Amazon wants you to sell lots of products until they change their minds. Advertisers come and go and customers turn fickle.

Ouch! What’s a work-at-home mom supposed to do?

Diversify Your Income-Earning Opportunities

The more variety of services and products, the more opportunity you have to make money. It doesn’t mean you have to work at dissimilar earning opportunities (although you can if you want to). No, what I mean is finding multiple ways to earn money within that one thing you want to do.

I learned the hard way by putting all my eggs in that one basket wasn’t a smart move. As a full-time Internet writer, I got very comfortable writing for one content company. There was always work… until one day there wasn’t because management made some changes about who should write what.

Another writer said to me she never had less than five ways to earn money as a writer. That way she would never lose more than 20% of her income at one time. Wow! So, I worked at finding other writing opportunities. Yes, I was crazy-busy but it was a whole lot less stressful than having to start from scratch each and every time I lost a writing gig.

Find More Ways to Make Money in Your Primary Gig

Working for yourself and at home makes it possible to increase the ways you can earn money. A virtual assistant can add other types of services to her portfolio. And she can increase her customer base. That way no one customer can devastate her by pulling out or not paying.

Bloggers have great potential for diversifying in the ways the ways they monetize their blog. Not only can they add advertising networks, they can also sell products and earn affiliate commissions. They can up their game by creating their own info products and not only sell themselves, they can earn more as other others sell those products as affiliates. See the potential for more income streams keeps growing.

Even online sellers, like myself, can branch out by selling a variety of products. I specialize in two to three product types on each of the platforms that I sell on. I do it for a couple of reasons. One, competition always has a way of finding you and inevitably starts a race to the bottom. Two, my motto has always been the more I list, the more I sell. And the more niches I see in,  well, you know the thinking.

Stream to Success

Branching out within your specific niche is great but what if you want to go above and beyond. You know, like writing books, running a website (or two or three) and selling all kinds of stuff online?

The answer is: nothing at all so go for it.

That’s what I’m doing. I’m building a number of streams that are independent of each other. Recently, I found a term for that. Streamers. It was coined by Deborah Conrad. She’s one of my gurus and someone I’ve learned a lot from over the years including how to set u my eBay store and how to thrift for profit to fill it to how to set myself apart on Amazon by selling bundled products. Just like that writer I spoke about earlier, Deborah always makes a lot of sense when it comes to a variety of money making sources.

This foundation is built on multiple streams of income, which means we never (ever) count on one piece of our business to generate our entire monthly (or yearly) income. We call it the Streamer Lifestyle.

See,  makes sense, right?

If you are ready to take control of your income, then maybe it’s time to think about becoming a streamer, too. You can create as many streams of income as you want as long as you can run them successfully. But that’s a post for another time. For right now, take some time to figure what multiple income streams are possible for you.

-Kate