It’s been told to me countless times. I’ve told this to people countless of times. Diversification is the key to success. Maybe not success, but online survival.

When I look for opportunities, I first take a hard look at myself. I try to visualize what I have, what I’m good at, and what I need to work on. I look at my affiliate network as if viewing a pie chart. I see where I’m thin, and I see where I’m fat. Ideally, we want to have many equal portion slices in our affiliate world. But reality says this is difficult. It’s hard to stop making the big piece bigger if it’s working. It’s hard to make the thin piece bigger when it doesn’t seem to work or if you’re not good at it.

There was a concept in programming a few years ago, not sure if it’s still around, but it was called XP or eXtreme Programming. It was a philosophy of programming where the programming task(s) was a spiral and you drove a straight line through it. Basically, the idea was not to treat a project as a linear start to finish approach which was the common convention, but to intersect points, repeating areas on the spiral for reevaluation and checking if things were done correctly. The theory was to reduce wasted time and to meet expectations of the client.

I really see using XP as way to diversify. If we take our affiliate goals, projects and techniques and sprial them, once we drive a straight line through it, we would be working on portions of our affiliate marketing network. We would work on improving EPN storefronts one day, the following week we would be working on PPC to offers, the following week we’d be working Adsense Arbitrage, etc. This would get us off the “Once I get my EPN sites working I’ll go work on PPC” attitude and give us opportunity to chip at other arenas. You could still ‘focus’ on hot areas, but if you’re disciplined, you would still be able to work on areas where you’re less experienced.

I never thought of applying XP to affiliate marketing until today, and I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes.