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One rule for survival in business ... whether it be large or small ... is that there should be no single point of failure. A single point of failure is one spot in the chain of events that work towards making money for your business where, if it fails, your business stops making that money you need to survive.

The bigger the business the more chance there is to have multiple points of failure where the business will grind to a halt if something goes wrong. Of course, the bigger the business the more chance there is of surviving when one of those single points of failure live up to expectations.

On the other hand small businesses ... people like you and I ... may not have as many single points of failure as big businesses have but when one of those points fails then the chances of surviving the mess that's sure to follow is a whole lot less. We simply don't have the resources ... usually financial ... to survive a failure at one of those critical points.

Unfortunately many small businesses have never given any thought to where their single points of failure might be. Heck they've probably never even heard the term before and haven't thought enough about their business to realize that they may even have some points where, if something breaks, then their business is going to go dreadfully pear-shaped in no time at all.

So now is the time to stop and think. Where are your single points of failure? What can go wrong in the chain of events that flow together to make money for your business? Stop and think about it now ... even if things are working fine ... because later when something fails you could well be screwed before you have a chance to fix whatever the problem was.

Some of the points of failure that can affect webmasters like you and me are things such as a sudden reduction in Google rankings ... a major delay in the postal system so that our affiliate checks don't reach us ... a server crash that destroys all our files ... theft or loss of our computers ... personal injury or illness that prevents us from working.

Those are just some of the more common points of failure that exist for webmasters like us who work in affiliate marketing or provide content and services. There will be others that are unique to individuals so it's important for you to identify those failures that apply to your business.

Once you have identified them you can then set about building in some redundancy for as many of those single points as you can. I doubt that most webmasters doing affiliate marketing are ever going to be able to build redundancy into every single point simply because so much of our businesses depend on the individual who owns the business and that's a critical point of failure.

We can become ill, we can become lazy, we can be distracted by family matters and the list can go on and on. Sadly there's no way known that we can replicate ourselves to have a spare clone to step in and take over if we falter but for almost every other single point of failure there are redundancies that we can build into our business and to ignore them is definitely tempting fate.

For traffic to our websites we can build up traffic sources other than Google ... and that's something we must all be doing. Building a business that's based on Google's algorithm is like building a skyscraper on no foundations at all. At any moment Google can change its algorithm and your sites can drop so far back in the rankings that your traffic disappears.

Don't rely solely on checks for your payments ... even if the postal system is working fine checks can still go missing in the post. Wherever possible get your sponsors to pay your commissions direct into your bank accounts or an ePassporte account and don't focus on just one or two sponsors either. Spread your sales across a number of sponsors to ensure that if one fails then you will have others that will keep on sending you checks for the commissions that you have earned.

Keep backups of everything that you do. If you use a content management system to run your sites then be sure to backup the database every single day and keep a copy of those backups off the server. Use a cron job to download them to the computer in your office and then back them up from there.

And that's just the start of the work that's involved in ensuring that your business has as few single points of failure as possible. When you've finished ensuring that there are alternative options for each of the points of failure that you identified you really shouldn't sit back and feel comfortable about it because as your business grows more single points of failure will emerge and each one needs to be fixed as soon as it appears.

There's a lot more to surviving in business than you might have thought when you first started but if you work at it you will survive and you will prosper and that's why you started in this business isn't it?