Diversifying Your Income Potential

If you are an entrepreneur or someone who desires to be an entrepreneur or self employed individual, diversifying your income potential is one thing that may make the difference between success and failure. Diversification can be great as long as you don't spread yourself too thin or get into areas where you lack competence.

Throughout the years, I have found some ways to diversify my income potential as it would relate to my own entrepreneurial ventures or self employment. I will discuss just some of them here in this article.

I would guess that my first self employment venture was music. I played out in night clubs, bars and coffee houses. I made some pretty good money and was able to score other opportunities along the way as well. I was able to diversify my income potential with that alone by increasing my song list. The longer the song list, the more places I was able to play and get more gigs in the future. Also, if you have enough material, you can tailor it to the type of crowd that regularly attends an establishment. Then if the crowd is happy, the owner is happy and they will happily have you back.

After I started doing the music thing, my next venture was an attempt at a local arts magazine. The venture failed but I took much of the content from the magazine and created a website with it. After a while, I got quite good at web development. That allowed me to do web development in exchange for additional income and opportunities. So the failure of the magazine led to something that allowed me to make money even to this day. Now there were two decent skills I had that allowed me to generate income. They were music and web development.

When I tried the magazine thing, I started to do a bit of writing. I wrote some of the articles. Actually, I wrote almost all of them because, since I was just starting out, I had a very SMALL staff. So then I started to write online. That's why you are reading this now. I have written for a few websites and have made some money doing it. I have also written some e-books that have generated income. That's three things now. Them being music, web development and writing.

I have always done some sort of drawing from the time I was a kid into my adult life. I started to do some cartoons and things on the computer. I never really had a chance to use them until I did the magazine and then the websites. Just a couple of years ago, I stumbled upon some 3D software and decided to try it out. So I started to experiment with 3D art and animation. The image included with this post is one of my creations. I have sold some art prints of my work. Not many, at the time of this writing, but some. However, I have also used my images with my articles and websites. Regardless, it is another means of generating income.

So now you get the basic point here. I have found ways to diversify my income throughout the years. You may have also noticed that some of those things were things I just stumbled across. That is the key to the whole thing, in my opinion. You have to keep your eyes open for new opportunities and your mind open to new concepts and ideas. If you do that, you never know what you might stumble into. I was LUCKY. I will freely admit that. because I know that not everyone is fortunate enough to stumble into opportunities.

As lucky as I have been, though, I do like to think that I was at least creative in finding some opportunities or at least had the ability to recognize them when they sprung up. I think that it is something that you get better at as time goes by. At least that's how I think it was for me. So keep your eyes open for new opportunities, develop your various skills, do your homework and don't be afraid to try something new. That's how you will be able to diversify your income potential.

Photo Credit: "The Vision" by Bob Craypoe, also known as R. L. Crepeau