21 Business Success Ideas for Excelling in a Recession by the Rich Sage

Anytime there is a slowdown, which was brewing for nearly a year, it’s the best time to gear up for the best of times. This is how you can take control of your future, by planning well. Times may be tough, but take control of the situation and you’ll sprint ahead when sales start to rebound. We’ve been in a recession for a while, at least in the US. However, this is also the time to plan, streamline operations, cut extra ‘fat’ and build a lean ‘n mean operation that is ready to sprint out of the gate when the economy bounces back. This is the time to develop new ideas and improve on old ones.

With those thoughts in mind, these are my 21 suggestions to get your make money online operations in good order and facing the right direction so that you’ll be ready to run when the times are right!

First of all, a quote that’s in my e-book:

“The problem with most failing businesses is not that their owners don’t know enough about finance, marketing, management, and operations — they don’t.

but those things are easy enough to learn — but that they spend their time and energy defending what they think they know.

My experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more.“

- Michael GerbeR

If you are online Internet Marketing, now is the time to learn. Now is the time to experiment. Now is the time to plan and put those business ideas into action, albeit, slowly until the economy is back. Following the below advice, you’ll make money online in no time during the recession and after…

1. FOCUS!

Do one thing at a time and you’ll get more done. I try to close just about all browser windows and tabs when I am writing. I try to block everything that is not important to my writing. This is NOT easy at all. Most of the day I am in an office setting. I also have MSN (messanger) open. I have about a dozen email accounts. Then I have to get my writing done.

Add to that multiple writing projects and it can be a mess. Just focus on one at a time, and things get done! It’s just that simple.

In your own business, plan your day according to what you need to get done to generate revenue first –the first action of the day should be to get that objective done. Make sure you follow each and every element of revenue production that I have outlined below. Keep in mind that the only way to do that is to *focus*!

2. LEARN ABOUT OPEN-SOURCE

I don’t mean operating systems! I mean programs such as WordPress and Joomla, that can do wonders to your online business building. Take for example, Joomla, which can easily manage a membership site, and do it all for free. If you want to expand to a membership area, Joomla is the way to go. What’s unbelievable is that all the benefits of Joomla, including the membership setup, is FREE. All you need is hosting. There are no less than 10 other highly-effective programs that do vital online operations, but are free. Take for example, phpBB (forums), OpenX (banners) and even PHPList, which runs on linux maintaining a mailing list. Learn about what these free programs can do to expand your online business. Remember, you can setup these programs for a few dollars, while revenue generated from ads and membership sales can be in the hundreds if not thousands of dollars!

3. START to TRACK YOUR READERS and BUYERS

Solutions like Google Analytics can greatly increase profits by tracking visitors from advertising, to your sales letters to the final product purchase. Google Analytics will even deposit a “cookie” that tracks a potential buyer who clicks on Google’s Adwords ads and tracks that visitor for 30 days –giving you even more accurate data. Knowing where the visitor originated, and tracking that visitor through to the buying point is the key to converting sales. Use these slower days to optimize your advertising return on investment.

Usually, the sales process involves setting up landing pages >> that lead to sales pages >> that lead to a shopping cart. Use Google Analytics to examine the “flow” generated by your buyers. Spot where the buyer is dropping off. Obviously, the buyer is reaching your site through pay-per-click advertising. What is the buyer doing next? Using Google Analytics you can spot where the buyer is “dropping off” and work to resolve the situation.

4. DEVELOP a ‘LEAN TIMES PLAN’

Make a plan to get through the lean times and stick to it. Make sure the plan identifies your goals, while taking into account less sales, why you may be having less sales, and other factors that are eating into your bottom line. Where should you cut back the most? Where should you increase spending when it has a direct effect on sales? What parts of the sales & marketing process have I not optimized? All this is information that you can extract from the analytics program when you know what your visitors are doing.

5. TAKE CONTROL and WATCH YOUR DEBTS

Are you borrowing to meet cash flow assumptions that you made last year? This may be time to see what is working and trim your losses. Don’t get into greater and greater debt based on cash-flow assumptions that are from last year when things were going nicely. Revise your sales forecast and make sure that you are allocating enough capital for sales expenses. Often the sales costs ’sneak up’ (increase) and sales go down, while you don’t realize it until the bills come due. Keep up with what your debts are running. Many advertising companies allow sales campaigns to run on “automatic” –Make sure to restrict them or just turn off the auto-funding feature.

6. START OUTSOURCING

One of the best ways to plan for the future is to develop new products that you can start selling to address the current situation or devise new products that are ready to “run with the times” when things come back. When you are outsourcing, make sure that the effort put fourth results in immediate increases to cash-flow.

Are you running an Enterprise filled with PRIDE? Where Profits, Revenue, Increased quality of your products and/or services, Decreases in expenses and at last, Everything else is taken into account in that order? By following such a plan you can put your resources to focus on what adds to sales and business revenue.

No matter how you pursue it make sure that you cash flow is quickly impacted with each product or project. To find people to work with I turn to the Warrior Forum and freelance sites such as Scriptlance.

7. HAVE YOU LEVERAGED YOUR TIME?

Learn to leverage your time with Other Peoples Efforts (ope). Keep in mind the acronym “T.I.M.E.” which is when you leverage your time with outsourcing to gain the benefits of Time, Intellect, Money and Experience. No matter what you do online it’s easy to get projects started using open source software and a little help from many sites that help you find tech help. As I pointed out above, freelance sites are full of people worldwide ready to help you build your business, especially at times like this.

8. LET YOUR PASSIONS DRIVE YOU

You may have been swimming in the cash and didn’t even think about a slowdown, but it’s often when you pursue your passions that you can quickly get out of a mess. Dwelling in something that only made you money when the times were good will drain you daily when the cash flow hits the wall! Make sure that you stick to a business that you are passionate about. Sure you can do any type of business when the times are good. However, when times are tough you better have a good plan to survive it or else. Being in a business that you like and are passionate about is the first step in that success.

9. REVIEW YOUR BUSINESS PLAN

Take out your business and marketing plan and review it –especially, the part where you’re spending money to drive sales. Lower cash-flow will impact many of your objectives. Make sure to stick to the ones that keep improving in a slower economy.

10. BUILD CASH ON HAND

Make sure to have sufficient capital. Start the business with access to more capital than you think you need –make sure to have at least twice what you called for in your business plan. Access to capital can include cash, trade credit, investors and/or credit lines. Don’t try to live off your credit cards which can get very expensive, very quickly.

Keep in mind that the most business credit comes from trade credit sources. If you have paid your bills on time, many of these sources will allow ample credit for you to pay current bills and even “float” your payments a few weeks to build your business.

11. Think BIG, VERY BIG!

Don’t give in to a trend that may seem never ending. Keep exploring ways to create new business, expand existing lines that are doing well, and overall, look for ways to overcome existing sales downturns.

One of the best ways to explore new opportunities is to look at what your competition is doing. I regularly visit and read 4 other blogs to look at trends, learn ab0ut what they are talking about and asses their business practices.

One trend that I didn’t like in 3 out of 4 of these blogs is that they had “gained their readership” but now they were turning to tabloid type of updates that were of little use to their readers.

Stick to your mission, and stick to what has gotten you to a successful point. Then expanding is much easier.

This is where a business plan is a good reminder to stick to what has worked, and what you planned on doing.

12. ARE YOU RUNNING a BUSINESS?

If you never formally incorporated or even setup as a sole-proprietor, this may be the time to formally setup your operation. The advantage is that you’ll find many local resources to network with. You’ll also have access to more capital with newer types of lines of credit at the bank. Lastly, you can start your work to expand your business credit lines.

Keep in mind that if your main goal is to make money online, any advertiser or potential business partner will look at things much more professionally when you are doing business in a professional manner. By formalizing your operations you may be able to even charge more for your services.

13. DUPLICATE YOUR CREDIT PROFILE

Once your business is setup, the next step is to create a separate business credit profile. This will protect your personal credit and continue to separate you from the business. I’ve run a site called Business Credit Building to test the effectiveness of pay-per-click ads, and the site features some writing and many ads that can help you build business credit. This site evolved from my own experience working on building business credit.

You too can learn a lot about building from $10,000 to even $1,000,000 dollars in business credit from banking sources to credit cards. And as I mentioned, from trade sources, which provide the majority of business credit.

14. UPDATE YOUR MARKETING PLAN

Develop a well-researched and through marketing plan. Make sure that you know where and how your customers are getting to know you. Often I have been to businesses where they simply ask the ZIP Code (postal code), and that tells the business owner exactly where the customer is coming from. How can you do that online? Well, you don’t even have to ask. Just install Google Analytics, as I mentioned earlier and you can watch your customers from the initial advertising click to the sale of your product.

It’s amazing what you can learn from installing a simple Google Analytics code on your website and sales pages. Knowing that information will help you quickly update your marketing plans.

If you are new to online marketing, make sure to visit sites such as the Warrior Forum, which is my favorite for marketing advice, and learn what you can do to build traffic and entice customers better.

15. ARE YOU USING SOFTWARE to TRACK EXPENSES?

Manage your cash-flow better! One of my all time favorite software programs is QuickBooks simply because it almost automates the process of inserting sales data, printing checks or making online payments to generating reports. If you haven’t used such a program, now might be the best time to convert your many banking statements and various other files to a program that will help you track everything.

Additionally, what is special about QuickBooks is that you can hand your Accountant a file at the end of the month to file all of your tax reports. Usually this process will take a day out of your work or an entire weekend. However, with an updated QuickBooks record set, you’ll be able to check your number and output a report in a matter of hours at the end of the month!

16. CREATING FINANCIAL REPORTS

Now that your financial records are organized with QuickBooks, your left with the dreaded financial statements that help you look at your income and expenses. With QuickBooks reports, you’ll have those reports in seconds! Don’t know heads or tails about a P&L (Profit and Loss) Statement, or a Balance Sheet? Or how about Cash Flow Statements? Well, all this will be handled by QuickBooks.

Even if you are in a country where you cannot find good accounting program, I suggest QuickBooks to resolve the data keeping issue.

17. OPTIMIZING PAID ADVERTISING

You may not realize this but there are several ways to optimize paid advertising –especially pay-per-click ads. The best way to optimize such ads is to use “split testing”. This is simply the effort of driving visitors to two similar promotional pages and observing the overall results of your sales.

Then you use the best of such pages and optimize again to see if you can improve further. Keep in mind that there are a lot of differences between advertising in search engines and social networking sites. Often the search engines will deliver serious buyers as oppose to social network sites that just deliver “tire kickers”.

My last tip about optimizing your advertising is to use key words in your promotional campaigns that attract BUYERS –words like discount, coupon, rebate, etc. deliver buyers who are almost ready to purchase.

18. TRANSITION to CPA ADVERTISING

We all know that massive traffic can be generated using pay-per-click advertising. However, that can cost a bundle. And if you don’t keep strict focus on your ROI, your spending can get out of hand very quickly.

The solution may be to transition into the Cost-Per-Action (CPA) type of sales model and utilize an advertising network such as AdToll or even Google to make your sales. The advantage of a CPA ad is this: You don’t pay for the advertising until you have a sale. Again, by using Google Analytics and CPA advertising, you can easily calculate your best ROI for advertising!

19. ARE YOU RUNNING an AFFILIATE PROGRAM?

Your next natural progress in the advertising ladder is to setup your own affiliate program. If you haven’t already looked into it, networks such as ClickBank will help you sell e-books and memberships and it will cost you very little to setup such sales. If you have more than a product or two and as I do, have a sales funnel of products and services you can setup your own Affiliate program at a time when many people are looking to make money online.

Running your own affiliate program may consume a lot more time, but the flexibility that it provides and the exposure that it creates is worth all the trouble. Even after you pay sales commissions, you’ll be pleased with the results of a sales force and their efforts, which you couldn’t duplicate in a 100 years.

Lastly, if you have the money and want to use a commercial operation to run your affiliate program, consider an outfit like Commission Junction (CJ) to run your affiliate program. Not only will that free you to run your own business, but you’ll be exposed to hundreds of thousands of affiliates from around the world who will help add to your sales. This route is a bit expensive, but if your business has the deep pockets to complete, this is the best way to go.

20. CUTTING OFFICE COSTS

If you are setup in your own office like I am, then take it easy on spending and no-nonsense extras that take away from your focus and end up costing a lot of money. I had a plan to erect my 1,000+ liter (300 gal) aquarium, which would have taken about 80 hours of my time just to get the floor ready for all the weight. Then I asked myself –what would bring more pleasure near term: 2,500 hits per day or a fish tank? At this point, I would like the hits per day. I can setup a tank anytime.

I think we are faced with decisions that take away from the focus and end up costing a lot of time and money — stick to your goals and you’ll see the light at the end of the tunnel rather quickly.

21. ESTABLISH LEADERSHIP

When you are done with many of these steps and show that you can conquer your business goals, at a time when others are slowing down or deflating in their enterprises, you will be looked upon as a leader.

Pure and simple, success leads to more success. Indeed, success begets success.

Carpe Diem, Rich Sage