Why You Shouldn’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

Internet Marketing, News / , /

You may know that alongside all the WordPress related things I do, I am also an Internet Marketer. I try to use different areas of the internet to promote my products, services and also other peoples goods as well.

One thing that I have seen in the limited time I have been doing this (a few years now) is peoples reliance on certain big players out there, and how businesses can crumble or at least take a big hit when those players decide to change the rules.

The Panda and Penguin updates from Google are well known; thousands of people lost livelihoods or at least a good chunk of change when those algorithm updates hit. To be fair, most of those people may have had it coming, as those updates were to try to stop people from gaming the system, but there was plenty of honest individuals who were also hit by those changes and were powerless to do anything about it.

Then there is the Amazon issues in America, where certain states added legislation that caused Amazon tax problems so they simply pulled the plug on their affiliates in those states, ruining plenty of peoples businesses.

I just read a blog post today about a company called Social Fixer, who have recently also had a similar issue. Social Fixer is a browser extension which “fixes” Facebook, to make it less sucky. As such they did most of there business – support, etc – on Facebook itself, as the owner says:

Since my application is tightly integrated with Facebook, it’s only logical that I would use the site to build my community of users, provide support, and make important announcements.

Facebook, firstly suspended his page and subsequently deleted it, all without a word of warning and so far without any other  explanation than citing spam, which the owner vehemently denies.

This tells me two things I already knew; that Facebook sucks and that being so closely integrated with a single platform is a risky venture.

For any self employed or part time online entrepreneur, it is well advisable to make sure that your business is diverse enough so that if one area collapses there is still enough left to keep you going while you pick up the pieces, because you just don’t know if or when the rules will change. You simply have to be flexible enough to take a hit and then adapt to the changing playing field.

You can read more about Social Fixer’s story on their blog.

 

 

 

Featured image courtesy of MicroAssist