I don’t know about you, but I’m very happy to start the new year.

2019 wasn’t the greatest year for me, so I’m very happy to turn the page and get a fresh start. I’m going to quickly share 3 things that 2019 helped solidify in my head.

Number 1 – relationships are key. I know it’s been said before, but this is very important. Not just in personal life but business as well. Over the years I’ve formed some great relationships and also have had some challenging ones. The great thing about relationships is you never know where they will take you or what they will offer. With that in mind, you need to also be giving to keep it reciprocating. These relationships have opened doors and opportunities that I had no idea existed nor would have thought I had a chance at.

Number 2 – Expect the unexpected and plan for it. Making money online can often be feast or famine and that’s when you are paying attention and babysitting everything. There are events in life that can change this and take away your time and attention. What would this mean to your business if one day, something happened and you couldn’t spend as much time working on your campaigns, or even worse, what if you couldn’t do anything online at all for a period of time? Would your business survive? Would you lose money? This is something that can easily happen to anyone and no one expects it until it happens. Build long term assets and these can help you make money even if you have to step away for a bit. The other unexpected is what if your sites are hacked, or there is some issue with hosting that causes you to lose your data and your hard work, how do you recover? Do you have a backup plan? More importantly, once your stuff is backed up, how do you get it back? Have you ever tried to do a restore? Backups mean nothing if you can’t restore them.

Number 3 – Diversification is very important. You’ve probably heard the phrase “don’t keep all your eggs in one basket” and it’s very important. If you are totally relying on 1 traffic source, 1 network, 1 niche, etc – you will eventually run into problems. With that being said – if you are just starting out, don’t go crazy trying to over-diversify, learn the ropes first. I’ve made this mistake in the past, many years ago Google Adwords was an amazing traffic source for affiliates and it was a very profitable one as well. At one point, I had the majority of my traffic coming from them, it feels like overnight that they took a hard stance against affiliates and small 1 page affiliate sites and quickly started banning them. This put me in a very difficult position. Don’t make the same mistake.

I hope everyone has an amazing 2020!