subject: How To Save Your Business [print this page] We're probably mid way through the greatest recession/depression our generation will ever see, fact. If you're running your own business I want to congratulate you for having the initiative to get it going in the first place.
Initiative is important. It means that you're prepared to take action, and without that critical ingredient, stuff just doesn't happen. However, initiative by itself just isn't enough, and over the next two to three years people who have been taking initiative for years, are going to be closing their doors.
Its no longer going to be enough to just do what everyone else is doing, to try to compete, market and sell in the same way that everyone else is.
Typically, there are three ways to make more money when you're in business.
1) You raise your prices. Usually happens when times are good and traditional demand exceeds supply, think building materials during a property boom
2) You increase sales volumes to your existing customers, ie selling more of your stuff to the customers that you already have, one example being mobile phone contracts where a talented salesperson convinces you to upgrade your phone and sign on to more expensive contract where you buy a greater volume of units, or consider cigarettes, once sold in singles, and popular in ten packs, but now rarely sold in less than a 20 pack,
3) You grow your market and explode sales. Do you remember the old mobile phone or car phone of the early 90's, that resembled a brick in shape, weight and aesthetic beauty. Fast forward to 2008 where nigh on 90% of the western world have at least one mobile phone.
Brilliant, so how can you apply this to your business?
In one word, the "internet." By using your initiative to transform your business, by beginning to do things radically different than everyone else, you will significantly increase the probability of reshaping a successful and profitable business.
By developing an intelligent internet strategy you will be able to capitalise on each of the above strategies to explode your sales and profits. Not to mention the incredible marketing efficiencies of email, access to a worldwide market, and store/website that never closes, and runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week rain, hail or shine.
Internet marketing of services and products simply is the key to the future, and master it you must.
