{"id":1021,"date":"2008-12-15T14:30:00","date_gmt":"2008-12-15T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/?p=1021"},"modified":"2016-09-27T14:09:47","modified_gmt":"2016-09-27T19:09:47","slug":"what-to-do-when-sales-are-down","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/smallbizsurvival.com\/2008\/12\/what-to-do-when-sales-are-down.html","title":{"rendered":"What to do when sales are down"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sometimes the best advice comes from other small business owners. Mark Hayward<\/a> asked on Twitter,
“Small biz owners, are your numbers down? Ours seem to be off quite a bit from this time last year…How are you compensating?”<\/p>\n

In the course of our conversation online, we came up with two suggestions:<\/p>\n

1. Diversify – What else do you have to offer? \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark owns a guest house on a tropical island and maintains a great online presence for it with a whole bunch of different social networks, etc. Mark has considered doing some consulting with other small businesses, to help them market using these same tools.<\/p>\n

What skills do you have you could use to either expand your business, or possibly start a side business? Have you developed any tools, software or skills you can offer to other small business owners?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

2. Refocus your time to do more outreach.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark said it this way, “ahh, next, step away from Twitter …and focus more on some travel sites. :)”<\/p>\n

When you have less business to do, it can be either tempting to do relaxing or distracting activities, like Twitter, or it can feel odd, not knowing what to do.<\/p>\n

Focus your time on reaching more people you can serve.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

More ideas from other small biz owners:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Gabriel Pagan @gabopagan<\/a>\u00a0added several points:<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n