Plan For The Worst... While Hoping For The Best!
By Derek GehlIn the end, it could have been MUCH worse...
On Monday morning, hurricane Gustav blasted across Louisiana and surrounding states, leaving behind a trail of destruction estimated to be in the billions of dollars.
But despite the extensive damage, the one thing people feared MOST never happened...
New Orleans was spared.
Gustav made landfall 100 miles to the south, and the city avoided a repeat of the devastation that Katrina brought three years ago.
But it's not like the city wasn't ready for the worst!
In the days leading up to Gustav's arrival, over a million people were evacuated, and massive emergency shelters were set up in surrounding areas.
Drawing on everything they learned from Katrina, New Orleans planned for the worst... hoped for the best... and were rewarded with the best possible outcome.
Now, without minimizing in any way the human and financial costs of Gustav, it's a lesson we can ALL take away for our own businesses.
Plan for the worst. Hope for the best.
You're probably already planning for success, right? We all spend a LOT of time projecting our future sales and revenue, figuring out how to improve our business processes, and generally making sure we continue to profit.
And obviously, that's good! Hoping for the best is what makes us successful as entrepreneurs.
But how much time do you spend preparing for unexpected surprises?
Do you have a plan in place for things that could go wrong? When the market you've been successfully selling to suddenly dries up? Or there's another major change in the search engines and your traffic DIES?
Here are FIVE things you can do to make sure YOUR business is prepared for the worst... and sails through nearly any crisis:
1. Pursue Multiple Markets Using Small Niche Websites
Say you own a website, and with it, you've pretty much cornered the market for your single product. Sales are excellent, and the money is rolling in day and night, without you barely needing to lift a finger.
You're in the perfect position, right?
Well, assuming that nothing EVER changes, then yes, you'll be fine...
... but what if there's a sudden shift in the market, and the product you're selling, which was HOT just a few months ago, is suddenly something you can barely GIVE away? (Think it can't happen? Just ask anyone who sells large SUVs for a living!)
So how do you prepare for the worst?
I always tell people that the BEST way to protect yourself against fickle markets is to have MULTIPLE small niche sites up and running.
Get one started, and once it's converting, use everything you learned from that process to start another. And another.
Before you know it, you'll have multiple sources of income, so if one of your products goes out of fashion, or falls out of favor, you won't take a BIG hit to your revenue.
But remember: slow and steady wins the race. Don't try to put together five different websites for five different niches all at the same time.
Work on one, get it converting, put it on "auto pilot," and then move on to site number two.
2. Target Multiple Markets Within Your Niche, Using Custom Landing Pages
Just as it's a good idea to have multiple niche websites in place, it's ALSO a good idea to make sure each individual website is targeting many different keyphrases using custom landing pages.
Don't just create a single landing page for your best keyphrase, then call it a day!
You may get good traffic initially, but some day, that particular keyword or phrase is no longer going to be popular, or competitors will move in and start targeting that same keyword... and your sales will be LOST.
But if you do your research, and understand ALL of the main keyphrases your visitors are using to find you, you can create custom landing pages for each of the main phrases.
That way, if one of the keyphrases stops being productive, you're still getting plenty of traffic to the other pages.
So to prepare for the worst, stay on top of your keywords -- they often change over time -- and make sure you're always targeting as many as possible.
3. Make Sure Your Traffic Is Coming To Your Site From Many Different Sources
Are you getting most of your traffic (and sales) thanks to one or two #1 rankings on the search engines?
There's NOTHING like free traffic from the search engines, right?
But have you considered what would happen if Google (or one of the other big search engines) suddenly decided to make significant changes to their algorithms (the formulas they use to rank websites), and, without warning, you found yourself on page 37 in the search results?
It would literally be the END of your traffic!
And if you think that will never happen, it already has! Not that long ago, Google made some significant changes to the way they rank sites, and there were a LOT of websites that literally fell off the radar!
So if you're depending solely on the search engines to drive an endless stream of traffic to your doorstep, right NOW is the time to diversify.
Of course, you can always turn to pay-per-click advertising if there's a sudden change in your free traffic, but that can be costly, and to be honest, you won't get as many visitors with a paid listing as you would from a top ranking in the natural search rankings.
So make sure you're always thinking about other ways to drive FREE traffic (both online AND offline).
Submit your site to as many relevant web directories as you can... participate in online forums (and make sure there's a link back to your site in your signature line)... give away LOTS of free content (again, with links back to your site)... issue press releases... and so on.
What's really cool about all of these strategies is that, not only will they help you get traffic from other sources, they'll actually help you in the natural search rankings, too, so now you have TWO good reasons to do it!
4. Actively Recruit Multiple Affiliates
Got a super-keen affiliate who is responsible for a BIG chunk of your sales?
That's great, but what happens if that affiliate decides to retire, or try her hand promoting someone else's product.
You could see your sales dry up literally overnight, and it can often take a LONG time to find another affiliate with the necessary skills (and customers) to replace the lost income.
Don't wait until you NEED another good affiliate to find one!
Instead, start recruiting a stable of affiliates, so you'll always have a few solid earners, no matter WHAT happens.
And while it can be tempting to open your affiliate program to anyone who's interested, you may find that you'll have more success hand-picking specific candidates.
That's because a wide-open affiliate program can often draw a LOT of people who don't really have experience selling online.
So to make sure you always have TOP affiliates working for you, start with a web search of sites that cater to your target market.
Focus on the sites that appear right at the top (or near the top) of the results. These are the savvy marketers, and chances are, they'll have what it takes to sell for YOU, too.
From there, it's just a matter of contacting them personally to discuss the possibility of promoting your product.
5. Find Multiple Suppliers For Your Product
What would you do if you discovered one day that the drop shipper or wholesaler who supplied you with your top-selling product could no longer get it? Or they'd gone out of business altogether?
If you haven't been planning for the worst, chances are you'll sit there in disbelief, as your revenue drops to zero within DAYS!
But if you had been preparing for the worst, you'd be fine...
... because you'd have backup suppliers for these same (or similar) products. so that the transition from your old to new supplier would be seamless.
Your customers will never know the difference, and your revenue will continue to flow uninterrupted.
Hoping for the best AND preparing for the worst is actually something POSITIVE you can do for yourself and your business. It's the BEST way to prevent surprises, stay calm when potential disasters hit, and react to income-threatening situations quickly!
Think about it... is there an easier way to make money online?
The Internet Marketing Center is a team of experts who help people make money online by starting an online business. -- and growing it. Since 1996 thousands of successful small and home based businesses have found success using IMC's comprehensive courses, software tools, and personal training packages. Visit the Internet Marketing Center for more free resources.
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