We all know that the economic downturn has been affecting all types of businesses. So, if you manage an ecommerce site or lead generation website – what can you do? Here are some tips for busting the recession:

1. Add products – This is the number one thing we have been doing for ecommerce sites AND lead generation sites. Instead of selling 1000 products start selling 2000 products! If you offer 5 services think of unique ways that you can offer 10 services. This will naturally increase your sales overall then just wait till the slower economic times are over and you might pleasantly find you doubled your bottom line.

2. SEO-When you add these new products or services make sure you SEO all your new pages very  well while constructing them. Additional optimized content will mean additional traffic and possibly higher ranking in valued keywords or high rankings in new targeted keywords.

3. Email Newsletters- Offer weekend sales, cut prices on inventory/services that are not moving. Get people to your site via newsletters to make purchases.

4. Start a forum or blog- This may enable customers both past and present to share ideas, photographs, talk about how they used your product and even write reviews.

5. Send out a print catalog- Print catalogs are relatively cheap to produce and carry huge returns. Pick your top products and use your customer database to mail out catalogs. People change their email addresses, so emailing newsletter does not reach 100% of people. Sometimes people move as well, so if your catalog delivers to an address where a new person is living you might have just picked up a new customer. A well designed catalog will lay around someone’s house for much longer than an email or a simple direct mail piece.

6. Write additional technical details about existing products and services. Make some how to do videos and post them to You Tube. Not only will your customers love the videos but you will also find traffic on You Tube as well. Make sure you link your videos to related pages on your website and to service pages as well. If you make good videos people might blog about them giving your website extra links and traffic.

7. Get involved with message boards in your industry. Become the subject matter expert and the go to person on message boards that relate to your industry. Answering questions will help bring in traffic and sales.

8. Make a lot of “Do it yourself” instruction pages for products that are complicated to install. Remember, if someone can save $1000 from hiring a contractor verses doing it themselves, that might make or break a sale.

9. Keep an eye on your inventory. If it slows, replace it with something that sells better. Keep experimenting with different products. Test new products, analyze the results and make changes if necessary.

10.  If you are not taking advantage of free marketing things such as Google Base then you should spend some time there. There are other free shopping engines you can submit products to as well.

11. Take advantage of tough times. Buy merchandise from failing competitors. We have seen this happen more often lately. Recently one of our clients was able to buy the books from a failed competitor. It was a lot of business and they even hired several of the former competitor employees saving them further training costs. The company that has cash is able to purchase customers at steep discounts.

12. Keep an eye on your competitor websites. If one of your competitors goes bankrupt and they let their domain go, buy it up when it becomes available and 301 redirect it to your site. We find this is happening more and more lately. This should bring some of our competitors repeat traffic to us.

13. A/B Split Testing. It seems that few Web sites take an experimental approach to their conversion rates. I have found that many times you can increase sales/leads by changing, testing and analyzing seemingly small elements on Web pages. Split testing is a cost effective way to increase the bottom line.

14. Push hard and build.  A falling economy is an opportunity for those that look carefully. Businesses that make it through tough times generally are the industry shakers on the other side of the recession. The weak fail and the strong end up being stronger than ever. So whatever you’ve got to do to keep going-  do it.

15. Pick up the phone. You don’t need a storefront to pick up the phone and call people. This is a proactive way to earn business – rather than just waiting for the phone to ring. Don’t sit around and wait.

16. Call all recent contacts. Reach out to all the people that contacted you in the last 90 days but didn’t make a purchase. In many cases people don’t buy right away but they do after 90 days. You may have been their first contact, but if you’re still there in 90 days to touch them again you may get the sale then.

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