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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.
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 moeny than Google was sharing with you.
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.
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.
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.
[edited by: LifeinAsia at 4:41 pm (utc) on Mar. 3, 2009]
Advertising is important now more than ever. As competitors are cutting back on advertising, now is the time to increase your presence to customers as much as you can. When the economy does pick back up, you'll be more ahead than your competitors who are trying to build their share back up in the market.
A related note is that some advertising companies are discounting their prices, so be sure to try bargaining with them.
You may want to really think through offering discounts. While cash flow is certainly helpful, customers may come to expect discounts in the long term if you give discounts now (this would mainly apply to products/services that are recurring instead of just one-time purchases).
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.
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.
Take advantage and put more responsibility on your workers. Now is the time when they will accept it.
And when the job market improves they will remember how you treated them and work for someone less mercenary.
[edited by: Jane_Doe at 4:35 am (utc) on Mar. 12, 2009]
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.
great point! i would add to invest with your time instead of your bank account to promote yourself. make connections online that you can solidify offline that can help you. find the platforms on which the people with whom you should be connected interact and communicate how you could help them spread their names or grow their business, so they would be more than glad to help yours.
My approach: Now is a good time to reassure staff that their jobs are secure and the steps your business is taking to ensure everyone's future is as strong as possible. Rather than piling on the pressure, see the business of an economic downturn rather as an opportunity to get close with your staff. A happy staff member is a productive one. Once you build strong staff morale and engage with them properly, they'll want to save company funds as much as possible, and will be proactive in their policing of your brand outside company time.
:)
I would like to ask you for ah honest opinion :
Can an Ad Agency survive this Economy and the Internet related shift in media perception by giving work for free ?
Can an Ad Agency survive this Economy and the Internet related shift in media perception by giving work for free ?
Build a base.
I am thinking as in Volunteering more often.
