How To Sur­vive (Even Thrive) Dur­ing This Recession

From Willie Craw­ford.

We are in a real re­ces­sion, de­spite all of the emails that start out with, „What Recession?” 

Tons of my sub­scribers have de­clared bank­ruptcy, or lost jobs or homes.

U.S. un­em­ploy­ment is creep­ing past 10%.

Lots of my sub­scribers have sim­ply given up - many of them were mar­ket­ing to the wrong niche - some­thing I’ll dis­cuss later.

As much as a year ago, I saw more and more peo­ple on dis­cus­sion fo­rums an­nounc­ing sales or ask­ing for hand­outs to pre­vent los­ing their homes.

The BIG ques­tion is „How do you sur­vive the re­ces­sion and emerge with a busi­ness that’s stronger than ever?”

A sec­ond ques­tion is „What should you be sell­ing now?”

Both ques­tions are things I’ve been asked a lot lately, and some­thing I’ve done a lot of think­ing about. The an­swers of­fered here ac­tu­ally came to me when I stopped con­sciously strug­gling with the ques­tions and sim­ply passed them ques­tions off to my sub­con­scious mind. In fact, many of the an­swers came to me in a se­ries of rather strange dreams.

I know, that sounds quirky, but it’s true. For sev­eral nights in a row I dreamed of be­ing in bat­tles with strange crea­tures, or with rov­ing gangs of thugs. I faced at­tack af­ter at­tack and was some­what baf­fled that they kept com­ing (seem­ingly un­per­turbed) but I suc­cess­fully de­feated them all.

While sit­ting and think­ing about those dreams, and re­flect­ing upon con­ver­sa­tions with some of my men­tors on the topic of how so many on­line mar­keters are strug­gling, it be­came clear to me.

Like the at­tack­ers in my dreams, this re­ces­sion is un­like any­thing most busi­ness peo­ple have ever faced be­fore. Like the at­tack­ers in my dreams, the chal­lenges are VERY persistent.

Deal­ing with this re­ces­sion will re­quire a lot of re­source­ful­ness, a se­ri­ous look at what as­sets your busi­ness has (and how to best use them), and tak­ing mas­sive proper action. 

Ex­actly how to do that is what I hope this spe­cial re­port brings into very clear focus!

First of all, your cus­tomers are re­ally tight­en­ing their belts. They are more hes­i­tant to buy things than they’ve been in re­cent his­tory, mak­ing it harder for you to make sales. That means that you must sell those things that they aren’t hes­i­tant to buy - those things that they view as “must haves!”

In­ci­den­tally, even your wealth­ier prospects are tight­en­ing their belts.

For MOST mar­keters that I’ve dis­cussed the topic with, email re­sponse rates are at an all-time DISMAL low. 

For even the biggest sem­i­nar pro­mot­ers (the house­hold names) sem­i­nar at­ten­dance is no­tice­able down.

The belt-tight­en­ing is painfully ob­vi­ous to those pay­ing attention.

This means that you ab­solutely must of­fer the right prod­ucts to your cus­tomers. You must of­fer them qual­ity prod­ucts that they re­ally need and want. 

As has been hap­pen­ing for far too long in the in­ter­net mar­ket­ing niche, just throw­ing to­gether shabby prod­ucts and do­ing prod­uct launch af­ter prod­uct launch will no longer work. That kills off your cus­tomers, and also even­tu­ally kills off your business.

I get a dozen emails many days from peo­ple invit­ing me to take part in prod­uct launches. Those in­vites gen­er­ally come with a free re­view copy of the prod­uct. There are not enough hours in the day for me to look at them all, so I po­litely de­clined 99% of them.

All of these prod­uct launches seem to be a sign of the des­per­a­tion! More and more in­ter­net mar­keters are buck­ling down and crank­ing out „me too” prod­ucts that are of­ten of hor­ren­dous quality!

Ok, so we know what the prob­lem is - what about the solution?

Let’s ap­proach this by get­ting you to ex­am­ine a se­ries of crit­i­cal questions… 

1) Who are your customers?

This is some­thing many on­line mar­keters never re­ally seem to have nailed down. You should ac­tu­ally build an in­ter­net busi­ness by iden­ti­fy­ing who the core group of cus­tomers are that you’re go­ing to serve. Then, you iden­tify what it is that they re­ally want and are will­ing to pay for.

As an ex­am­ple, my core prod­uct is web­site traf­fic gen­er­a­tion, and my pri­mary cus­tomers are other in­ter­net mar­keters. When I first de­cided to en­ter the in­ter­net mar­ket­ing niche, I asked the ques­tion, „What is it that EVERYONE in this niche needs?”

The an­swer was and con­tin­ues to be traf­fic. That’s why my core prod­uct is https://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com

2) Are you fo­cus­ing on cus­tomers with money?

The for­mula is that you sell a prod­uct that peo­ple ac­tu­ally want, to those who can and are will­ing to pay for it.

Many in­ter­net mar­keters miss that sec­ond part. They ei­ther try to sell a prod­uct that peo­ple are un­will­ing to pay for, or they try to sell it to peo­ple who can’t af­ford it.

As the re­ces­sion caused no­tice­able shifts in my sales to in­ter­net mar­keters, I ac­tu­ally shifted slightly, and started fo­cus­ing more on lo­cal of­fline businesses.

Lo­cal of­fline busi­nesses of­ten have web­sites too, they need more traf­fic, and most im­por­tantly, they have bud­gets set aside for ad­ver­tis­ing. My only chal­lenge was to point out to them that spend­ing their ad­ver­tis­ing dol­lars with me was gen­er­ally MORE ef­fec­tive than many other forms of advertising.

While it’s very no­ble to want to help out peo­ple who are strug­gling, you do need to ask if this can make you any real money. Tar­get­ing the wrong cus­tomers is why many in­ter­net mar­keters are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing dis­mal sales!

3) What do your cus­tomers re­ally need to sur­vive this recession?

Given that your cus­tomers are tight­en­ing their belts and of­ten spend­ing only on ne­ces­si­ties, you need to make sure that you are sell­ing ne­ces­si­ties. Get­ting back to my traf­fic ex­am­ple, an in­ter­net busi­ness ab­solutely must have traf­fic to sur­vive! They can af­ford to cut costs in other ar­eas but they know that they still need traffic. 

4) How can your cus­tomers ac­tu­ally grow their businesses?

Sales are down for many busi­nesses and some are even in dan­ger of clos­ing their doors. Any­thing that you can of­fer that your cus­tomers can clearly see will make a real dif­fer­ence is some­thing that they should log­i­cally buy. 

Your cus­tomers are look­ing for so­lu­tions to stalled busi­ness growth - due partly to the re­ces­sion. Find and of­fer those so­lu­tions - real so­lu­tions to real problems.

5) What products/services are in­dis­pens­able for your cus­tomers right now?

As pointed out with the traf­fic ex­am­ple, there are cer­tain things that your cus­tomers must have. Look closely at your cus­tomers, and fig­ure out what those things are. If you can’t fig­ure it out on your own, sur­vey your cus­tomers or ask your mas­ter­mind group! 

6) Where are your cus­tomers and how do you reach them?

Your cus­tomers con­gre­gate some­where on­line. The for­mula for get­ting them to your site is to fig­ure out where your cus­tomers are and to stand in front of the traf­fic. I do that with con­tent (ar­ti­cles, pod­casts, press re­leases, videos). 

By dis­trib­ut­ing my con­tent in ar­ti­cle di­rec­to­ries, video shar­ing sites, etc., I stand in front of the pools of peo­ple who visit those site. Since I gen­er­ate a LOT of con­tent, I use au­to­mated sub­mis­sions to get my con­tent in as many places as pos­si­ble. I use https://EasyPushButtonTraffic.com for that.

An al­ter­na­tive to con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion would be us­ing pay-per-click ad­ver­tis­ing, but that can get very ex­pen­sive, and most mar­keters that I’ve dis­cussed the topic with never got a pos­i­tive return-on-investment.

Pay-per-click re­quires too much time and ef­fort re­ally mas­ter­ing it to be vi­able for most mar­keters. That’s why I’m so big on con­tent dis­tri­b­u­tion. It of­fers tremen­dous lever­age with no risk.

Your cus­tomers go on­line look­ing for so­lu­tions to their prob­lems. You merely cre­ate con­tent that solves those prob­lems and through the search en­gines and di­rec­tory sites they will find you. 

7) How do you com­mu­ni­cate with your cus­tomers in a way that lets them see that your products/services re­ally are the answer?

At it’s sim­ples, you merely need to talk about your cus­tomers most painful prob­lems, and then show them why your prod­uct is an ob­vi­ous solution.

By talk­ing to their pain, you prove that you un­der­stand them, and reach them on a deep emo­tional level. 

It is very im­por­tant that you do this in a way that leads them to con­clude that your prod­uct is the ideal so­lu­tion, rather than yelling „buy my prod­uct” at them. That method of sell­ing has been de­scribed as im­pli­ca­tion rather than specification.

Just re­mem­ber that peo­ple like to buy, but they gen­er­ally don’t like be­ing sold to.

What do you of­fer to strug­gling cus­tomers who of­ten re­ally are cash-strapped?

De­pend­ing upon your mar­ket, your cus­tomers may re­ally have very lit­tle cash. Even with large com­pa­nies, cash­flow is of­ten a problem. 

Of­ten with the above sit­u­a­tion, price is not the is­sue as much as cash­flow. Of­ten the so­lu­tion to mak­ing more sales is as sim­ple as con­ve­nient pay­ment terms. 

The re­ces­sion has af­fected dif­fer­ent groups of peo­ple in dif­fer­ent ways though, so you do need to ask if you’re mar­ket­ing to the right group. You may be able to con­tinue mar­ket­ing the same prod­uct, only of­fer­ing it to a dif­fer­ent seg­ment of the mar­ket. My ex­am­ple ear­lier of of­fer­ing „traf­fic” but shift­ing my mar­ket­ing slightly to of­fer it to lo­cal busi­nesses is the per­fect example. 

You can even seg­ment your mar­ket and of­fer es­sen­tially the same prod­uct to dif­fer­ent seg­ments of the mar­ket at dif­fer­ent price-points. 

9) Are there other ways to mon­e­tize your traffic?

The rule is that you should al­ways of­fer your cus­tomers other „back­end” prod­ucts. It makes no sense to work hard at gen­er­at­ing a cus­tomer only to of­fer him one prod­uct, and then go off in search of an­other customer.

In in­ter­net mar­ket­ing you cap­ture your cus­tomer’s con­tact in­for­ma­tion, and you pe­ri­od­i­cally email him about other re­lated prod­ucts. Sim­ple enough.

If you have a web­site that’s largely a con­tent web­site (per­haps a blog) then you sub­tly in­te­grate rec­om­men­da­tions for other prod­ucts right into your content.

One sys­tem that I re­cently tested al­lows you to au­to­mat­i­cally gen­er­ate web­pages that have your Amazon.com, Ebay, Click­bank, Google Ad­Sense, etc., links au­to­mat­i­cally in­serted. It’s finds prod­ucts re­lated to the topic of the con­tent, and adds your links.

Es­sen­tially, just by shar­ing use­ful con­tent, your site au­to­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates in­come for you. That sys­tem is called Profit Mart, and you can check it out at: https://budurl.com/ProfitMart

As you gen­er­ate web­site vis­i­tors, you must ac­knowl­edge that the ma­jor­ity of them will leave with­out mak­ing a pur­chases. The key to mon­e­tiz­ing that traf­fic is send­ing them some place where you get paid. Profit Mart does that nicely.

We’ve just cov­ered tac­tics to sur­vive, and even thrive dur­ing this re­ces­sion. All of the is­sues men­tioned above are im­por­tant, and over­look­ing any one of them could have a sig­nif­i­cant impact. 

There are many mil­lion­aires made dur­ing every recessions/depression. There’s no rea­son that you can’t be one of them. The se­cret is tak­ing mas­sive proper ac­tion - all the way through to completion. 

To help you suc­ceed Willie has cre­ated The In­ter­net Mar­ket­ing In­ner Cir­cle, a mem­ber­ship site where he fre­quently brain­storms so­lu­tions to prob­lems such as those dis­cussed in this ar­ti­cle. Join that dis­cus­sion for your suc­cess at TheIn­ter­net­Mar­ketingIn­ner­cir­cle.