Perhaps you are planning to start an online business. If so, you need to be sure to avoid the mistakes made by others. Recognize that not all advice is necessarily good advice, especially if the tips are carried to the extreme. Habitually seek out multiple opinions.

Anyone who has been in Internet marketing for longer than two days understands that it is essential to develop multiple streams of income. Some marketers who are just starting can take this admonition too far. I have seen sites that have products for sale, links to affiliate’s products and contextual advertising all on the same site. Sometimes all three appear on the same page.

Before I describe a much more reasonable plan of attach, allow me to explain why a multi-purpose site works against a marketer’s objectives. Each site, and certainly each page within a site, should have one purpose. Eventually every visitor to your website is going to leave your site, but you want to be able to stack the odds concerning how that visitor will leave.

In a retail or wholesal site, you want your visitors to leave only after they have stuffed your shopping cart full of your products and completed the check out process. The last page on your site that they see should be your “thank you” page. All of the other time they spend in your store should be directed toward getting them to that page.

In the case of either affiliate marketing or contextual advertising, you want to move them off your website. However, you want to move them in a way that brings you revenue, either in the form of a click on an ad or by going to your affiliate site in order to complete a purchase there. The way you encourage your visitors to move to the site with which you are affiliated is very different from the way in which you make it appealing to click on a contextual ad. Those two purposes can not be accomplished well on the same page and perhaps not within the same site.

A person involved in affiliate marketing knows the product’s strengths and weaknesses. The task is to highlight the needs of your site visitor so that it becomes obvious that the needs can be met by the affiliate’s product, or, at least, to leave the visitor wanting more information that can be obtained by visiting the vendor’s site (through your link to it).

In the case of contextual advertising, you don’t know what products or services will be promoted in the ads that are served to your site. You need to provide information that your visitor wants (based upon your keywords, page description, and so forth). At the same time, you let them know that there is other information (or even a product category) that they ought to be pursuing. Then, you just hope that one of the ads served on your page will coincide with the additional thirst you have created in your visitor.

So mixing potential revenue streams on the same page and, I believe, on the same site, means that you are working against yourself. You don’t want your prospective customers putting your product into a shopping cart and then disappearing from your site to pursue an affiliate product or by clicking on an ad. Instead, consider eventually building three sites (but not all at once). Work on your own product site. Find products that are complementary with your own product and endorse those on a separate site. Finally, if you feel you must, build a site for contextual advertising. (Personally, I would prefer to put the articles in a potential contextual advertising site into either my product site or affiliate site to draw visitors to the virtual locale where I could make a bigger profit, exchanging dollars for the cents that I would make with an ad click.)

I do offer a caveat to my admonition about mixing purposes within the same page or site. There are two types of pages on which you know that your visitors are likely to be one step away from leaving. One is your thank you page. The other type is your link directory. On your thank you page, you may wish to offer information about an affiliate’s product that is related and complementary to the purchase they just completed. If visitors are within your link directory, chances are that they are looking for an alternative to your site. You might as well offer them some contextual ads.

Whether you have an existing business that you want to move online or are looking to start a new one, you should eventually try to develop more than one income stream. Just make sure that you don’t attempt to do in on the same page!