I Have Achieved My Diversification Goals! ??

I am proud to say that I have officially achieved my goal of diversifying my income streams and businesses and future proofing myself vs. any number of the apocalypses coming for businesses and niches! ??

Let me backtrack a little bit... At the start of 2020, like many other people, I suddenly felt a rush of panic. Whilst the pandemic was bad enough in itself, my consulting clients were suddenly cutting most budgets, I'd sold off my link building agency for a lot less than I should have due to medical problems that resulted in several surgeries at the time and there weren't very many clear pathways to pivot into that would retain profitable during a global shutdown.

Initially, I let the panic win. I looked for work in any nook and cranny I could find, and accepted jobs that were 1/4 of my usual fee, but I quickly realized that:

A) There was actually a lot of opportunity to be had, especially in online education

B) If my business was vulnerable to this, it was vulnerable to anything

And that second thought sent me down a rabbit hole! I figured out that I needed to look for revenue streams that weren't susceptible to rapid change and build multiple of them that weren't interconnected.

So, what did I actually do?

1 - I analyzed my entire site portfolio, sold off 80% of my sites (at an avg. 42x multiplier) and reinvested mostly into parasite pages and international CPA sites in non-English, high GDP per capita countries.

2 - I checked ALL my affiliate accounts, and double checked emails for any I'd ever signed up to - Spent days crawling through dashboards requesting payouts, ended up finding nearly $8,000 I was owed! As well as getting some old offers to repromote I didn't realize were so profitable.

3 - I reinvented my training business to focus on one, low ticket product via Gumroad - The SEO Side Hustle eBook... This ended up selling over $200,000 worth of copies (at an original $39 pricepoint) and led to the creation of what is now CFT, which does over $25k/mo profit.

4 - I started marketing my account on Twitter (I had under 2,000 followers), building free eBooks and downloadables to build up my email list (went from 10k to 50k in 2.5 years) and making sure I controlled my own personal brand more.

5 - I started building and investing in SaaS where I saw the multipliers being the highest for valuations and launching (cost and time) becoming far easier - This has lead me to now have a portfolio with multiple, million dollar+ projects with the flagship being Cuppa

6 - I created an emergency fund to take advantage of opportunities when possible - This massively helped me last year when parasite SEO started really taking off, and I had a $30k fund ready to deploy which made upwards of a 2,000% ROI! I also started doing more launchjacking and newsjacking.

7 - Earlier this year, I launched a recruitment agency to service SEO, digital marketing and AI vacancies (SEO.Careers) with very little competition and a huge ROI - We are already profitable just six months in.

8 - I realized that I was only making set money from my consulting calls, and whilst $1499 an hour is fantastic, passive income is even better! So I setup referral deals with agencies and services of all types to send consultancy clients thru and still be able to generate an ongoing income from them.

9 - I launched newsletters for ALL of the English language niche sites I had left (a grand total of 6) and had VAs create weekly emails using AI; I'd then sell sponsorships from these lists and simultaneously increase the value of my niche site, as well as somewhat protect it from any negative Google actions or updates.

10 - And finally, I massively leaned up my operations! I cut down my team to just my core 3 guys; everyone else is on contract and is only paid when needed. I checked my statements for any random sub costs and put every other sub on prepaid visa cards that I can limit spend and cut off at any time.

And that's it! There are some other bits and pieces I did, but they're more personal finance related... Are there any things you've done to diversify your income streams that I've not covered?