How To Make Bad Economic Times Less Bad

March 13, 2009

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Expand into Growth Areas

Many industries have a niche that benefits from economic downtimes. In real estate, new home sales goes down but foreclosure goes up. In travel, international trips go down and local weekend get aways go up. Think about your industry and think what niche will be growing. Add a new section to your existing site and you can capitalize on those increasing areas. If you are an affiliate marketer you can open new projects that you will benefit in this bad economy, there are many niches which this “bad” economy will not be affected.

Cut out Middlemen

Often there are middlemen in our transactions. They are helpful and make life easier but they also take a cut of the action. If you remove these middlemen you can increase your profits. For example if you are using Adsense, try to convert those advertisers into direct advertisers. You can offer reduced rates to the advertisers and earn more money than Google was sharing with you. Also you can create your own product and start promoting it, without promoting clickbank products (for example). Another idea is about affiliate programs like Kontera & Chitika. You can sell your own keywords directly from you, of course that will need a well authority blog that receives many unique visitors.

Take Away Risk

During downturns people are scared of risk. Your website is unknown to new advertisers and therefore a potential risk of wasted advertising dollars. Identify good potential advertiser and offer a free trial period of traffic. Who will turn down free traffic? If your traffic is good it will convert into sales for your advertisers and they will then be able to pay for the second month of advertising. You can risk yourself also and contact advertisers directly to see if they want to advertise in your site.

Build Up Your Brand

When new clients come along they want to know you are the best option. It is hard to prove that without giving away too many secrets but think about getting certified by a third party or collecting testimonials. Maybe do some free charity projects in exchange for using them as public case studies of your skills.

Promote Yourself

In case you have not realized yet people do not go around trying to spend money. To get their money you need to get promote yourself. Get your blog out there and start making connections on twitter. When you attend a conference milk it for everything – attend it every day for the entire day. Each conference night make sure to attend all the social events. Now would be a great time to release results of a great research project to get your name more known. If you can’t afford to go to conferences you can start trying reviewme and those similar programs to get reviewed as much as you can.

Look Out for Bargains

Everyone is hurting or at least it feels like that. Take advantage of it! Ask for discounts with your vendors. If they dont offer them, then shop around for someone else. Now is a great time to get talented workers at bargain rates.

Minimize Your Losses

Identify where you are spending your time and money and then trace your revenue to identify which projects deliver your money. Be careful that you do not cut your costs without tracing your revenue. Now is the time to make sure you are using good analytics and asking your customers how they find you.

Barter Anyone?
For the millionth time everyone is hurting so do not be afraid & try to barter. You need a new blog design so offer to exchange an SEO audit in return. You need content but can not pay a writer then maybe offer them a link in return. Try to make it fair for all parties. Be careful that you do not sabotage your long term future (like turning your site into a spammy link farm just for some poorly written articles).

Give Discounts

Just as you should be shopping around for better deals, your customers will be so as well. Your competitors are cutting their prices to gain your customers- will you match the cuts?

Cut Costs

There are always costs that you can find to cut if you really look. High long-distance phone bills? Look into VoIP or even calling cards. Sure, calling cards may be a little bit of a pain, but the savings can be huge, especially for overseas calls.

Take Advantage of the Pain of Others

When companies shut down or severely downsize, they want to get rid of equipment and furniture cheaply. Desks, computers, printers, and inventory can be found for fire sale prices. In some businesses, a buy out offer from a competitor may be more attractive than sliding into bankruptcy.

If you have employees make sure they have more responsibilities

After years of the employee market the times of employer’s market finally came. Some people are losing jobs and other people are afraid of losing their jobs. Take advantage and put more responsibility on your workers. Now is the time when they will accept it.

Trying to sell more ads? Make sure all your people know they can have a % of sales if they get a customer OUTSIDE your time. I bet you will have at least one volunteer going for extra cash in the bad times.

Outsource smart

Make sure every piece of work done is 100% needed. Make sure you have detailed work reports from everyone, especially the low end employees. Do you really need a full time Office Manager controlling the cleaning company, securing stuff supply and doing IT helpdesk job? How about putting all cleaning responsibility on the cleaning company and controlling it yourself? In the end you visit the office and can easily see if it is clean. How about giving another $100 a month to someone for looking after stuff supplies? How about hiring a helpdesk company to look after your computers and react quickly on demand?

Realize you are the only person who can do non-core-business stuff properly

It is sad but no employee cares to save costs more than you. Especially if it comes to stupid costs such as office space, phone bills, print and fax paper cost, etc. You must figure out that it will cost you one full week of work only on these to optimise them for the next year or two. Just do it and then fire the unneeded costs. Proper cost optimisation campaign will definitely provide you with enough cash to pay one salary or take the whole team out for a beer.

It’s a buyers market

If you have the money, you would be surprised the kinds of discounts/deals you can get by offering to pay cash in full up front. A non-related example:

My brother who is an attorney offered the landlord of the house he is leasing to pay 6 months rent in full for “X” amount of dollars. Turns out that the landlord is hurting for money and tenants as well, so my brother was able to score a killer deal which effectively resulted in a $450 a month savings.

Some quotes from Andrea Hill:

1. 1. What if the economy corrected over night? Would you be rolling in $? Or have to work hard to achieve your business goals? Do that work now.
2. 2. Difficult economies favor those producing things of value. What is your value, to whom is it valuable, & how do they know? That’s marketing.
3. 3. Ask yourself: “If I was paid strictly for what I do, how much money would I make?” Self-honesty earns you a big dose of earnings insight.
4. 4. Stop viewing the economy as an unbeatable force.Treat it as you would a formidable competitor. Look for opportunity, and sell your benefits.
5. 5. What can you give your customers, of value, that costs nothing & they don’t have to pay for? In troubled times everyone appreciates a gift.
6. 6. Ask your 10 best customers “if you could change one thing about my business, what would it be?” Cheaper than a pro survey, & very effective.
7. 7. In good economies consumers spend on unneeded features. Not now. What product/service features can you cut to drop prices & preserve margin?
8. 8. Businesses are not suffering equally. Those that cut marketing are suffering most. Go find those shrinking consumer dollars! Market & sell.
9. 9. If you were to put your money where your mouth is right now, where would your money go?

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