One of the most useful tools on LinkedIn is the ability to ask and answer questions. If you ask a question, you get free business advice - sometimes from people who are experts in their fields.
I'm going to give you some more ways of using LinkedIn as a business tool, but first I thought I'd start out by showing you one way to use it.
I'm writing an article about "How to Recession Proof" your business - and I wanted some new sources. So I asked for advice using the "Questions" on LinkedIn - you can see my question - and read all the responses - by clicking the link.
In less than a week, I got 18 answers - and several of them are so good that I'm sending emails to the writers, to interview them for the article. Other tips I'll be posting on this blog - and I may write a special report about it - I'll let you know.
But let's get back to you and your business.
Are you worried about the recession? Do you have a strategic plan in place for how you will keep your sales on an even keel - or even increase them? What's your marketing strategy for the rest of 2008?
Read the answer that I chose as the "best answer" (and let me tell you, it wasn't easy making that decision!) and see if any of Michelle Dunn's answers resonate with you:
If you plan ahead you can survive the recession with a positive outlook and some specific actions.
1. Invest in education:
2. Network and make contacts online and offline:
3. Follow the market: Read the papers or watch the news, know what is happening and stay on top of it.
4. Pay off debt: If you can pay off any debt, now is the time to do it.
5. Cut back on extras: Seems simple, but do you need all the bells and whistles you have on your business or home phone or even your cell phone? Do you need to get Starbucks twice a day? Can you bring your lunch? Can you carpool to work?
6. Build your online presence: With a website, blog, newsletter or articles.
7. Have your clients sign a long term contract or review their existing contacts and renew them or extend them.
8. Specialize in something: Make yourself valuable, employers are more likely to keep an employee who can do more than one thing.
9. Turn your hobby into a part time business: for example selling items on ebay.
10. If you don’t have to sell your home or any property, don’t. You won’t get top dollar and will end up losing money.
11. Update your resume now, just in case.
12. Learn more about jobs that are recession proof, industries such as food, energy, vices (tobacco), entertainment, medical services, debt collection, security or alarm services.
13. Don’t cut prices, but reward your customers: During a recession business owners may think that cutting prices will help them and their customers. Don’t do it. Keep your prices as they are but offer your customers a coupon or a rewards program, to reward them for sticking with you during tough times.
14. Build value: Offer a buy one get one deal or buy one get something at 50% off. This increases your sales, where someone might have only purchased one item, with a deal like that it seems almost foolish to them not to take advantage of the deal and therefore purchase more from you
15. Get in contact with past customers who have not purchased from you in a while, this can activate a dormant account and possibly create more sales for you.
16. Follow up on any new leads and all old leads: Call them and see if they have a need for anything you offer.
17. Offer Outstanding customer service: To keep your customers you want to give them more than what they pay for.
18. Aggressively work on your marketing plan: send out press releases, keep yourself in the eyes of your target audience during the recession.
19. Tighten or update and keep on top of your credit policy: now is not the time to extend credit blindly, and it is the time to collect from any customers that owe you money.
Want more? Stay tuned, because in my next post, I'm going to tell you how you can create your own strategic plan in under an hour!
3 comments:
You could also suggest that the real key to surviving a recession is to diversify. Surprisingly companies often don’t follow the age old marketing idea of having a "product mix" and typically base whole businesses (and futures) around just one product or service.
Diversification can of course be a very easy thing to say, but more difficult to implement when the business is small and struggling to develop a market place for themselves at all.
For instance, a recent client of mine primarily based their business on providing a uk business directory service, ultimately competing against countless other directories. With diversification however, they have been able to tailor their services to reach multiple niches, such as directory services for pr companies or printing companies.
A recession could hit any number of these markets, but it is highly unlikely hit all of them at the same time! Such diversification can bring solid stability.
Good point Amstore. Not putting all your eggs in one basket is a strategy I teach my clients too.
I think to continue your idea, if a business is small or struggling to create a place in the market, it's a good idea to start out small - and try selling different products or services based around their initial offering...
The example you gave of your clients creating a uk business directory is a great one...they're still making the same offer, but they've expanded their reach into different markets.
If you're a small business owner and you offer a product - let's say it's an e-book for example..your next step could be to create a workbook that goes along with the ebook.
And the step after that could be to turn the ebook into an audio book.
And then you could add a few "how to" videos, a weekly email assignment, the audio book, the ebook and maybe make a few more workbooks - and you've got home study course.
Action Step for readers of the blog:
The trick is to see how you can take the information you've just read and apply it to your own business.
Absolutely. I’d say the key to diversifying your business, or ‘spreading risk’ (which is of course what we are essentially trying to go) is to take very small, slow sideways steps from your core product or service. For instance, the core of my business was selling usb flash drives, or memory sticks as they are commonly referred to these days. When I say business, it was more of an eBay operation to begin with before I setup a website to gain a more ‘professional’ look.
It soon became apparent that there was a market for this product in niches I had never even considered when I first encountered the product. Maybe I could actually copy these things for people? If people want them copied, then what about printed? The point is, before I knew it I had taken sideways steps away from my core business, while still very much understanding the industry, products and customers. Selling flash drives, and then car tires for instance, would have been too much of a diversification in the wrong direction!
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