Perhaps you are planning to begin 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. Always gather multiple opinions.

Anyone who has been in Internet marketing for longer than a week understands that it is important to develop multiple streams of income. Some beginning marketers can take this admonition too far, too quickly. 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.

We know that eventually each visitor to your site is going to leave. The key to successful Internet marketing is to get them to leave in the way that maximizes your revenue. All paths out of your site, or off a given page of your site, are not equal. On a single page and within the site as a whole, your design, your content, your navigation system, and every element should be designed to get your visitors to leave you using that single method that is most beneficial to you.

If you have products that you want your visitors to buy, your goal is to have them eventually end up on your “thank you” page after checking out with their full shipping carts. Everything else that you do on that site should be directed toward getting them to that page.

If you want them to purchase an affiliate product, you want them to get off your own site only by clicking the link to your affiliate. With contextual advertising, you have a similar purpose in that you want them to click one of the ads as they exit. However, the ways in which you assist your visitors in deciding how to exit your site is very different in affiliate marketing from the method you implicitly use in making an ad click the attractive option.

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).

You don’t know (in most cases) what products or services are going to be offered on the contextual ads that are placed on your site. Indeed, those ads will change frequently. In your copy and design, you must meet the expectations of the visitor who came to your site with a purpose. At the same time, you must let them know that your content has not answered all the questions that they should be asking. Hopefully, one of the ads that appear on the page while your visitor is there will seem to provide answers to the needs that your content has stimulated within the visitor, so that she or he will click on it.

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.)

Here are two exceptions to my advice, above. On your product site, you might want to use your thank you page to promote an affiliate offer. I sometimes place contextual advertising on my links pages. My thinking is that any visitors visiting my links have already decided to leave my site anyway, so there is no harm having them leave me a little money on their way out.