10 ways to grow your business and beat the credit crunch

How to expand your business in a harsh economic climate

To undertake any one of these ways to make your business recession proof could really be as simple as adding a new page to your website and marketing it. With so little to lose and so much to gain, this has to be the perfect strategy for growing your business during harsh economic times. Do this agressively and you can beat the credit crunch and stick two fingers up at recession.

1. Use geo-targetted webpages to capture business in new geographical areas. You can either expand around the margins of your current coverage, adding more local towns and cities that you provision. Or, you could even market further afield - the way to do this is to find people in those areas that offer the same services as yourself and ask for cut every time you pass work on to them. Before long you could grow from a local to a national company by adopting this strategy.




2. add new products and services to your portfolio.




3. target new demographics, expanding your appeal to different age groups, genders, income groups, cultures or ethnicities or industries, or even bigger or smaller businesses than your usual target market.



4. product cross placement. Highlight relationships between your products and services and the ways in which they might complement on another and let your website upsell for you.




5. re-package existing advertising for your products and services. Extend your appeal by displaying what you offer in different ways in different places.




6. harness the skills available to you to offer new services



7. Identify synergies with your competitors and strike deals to pass business between you.



8. find new sales channels. There are ever increasing numbers of free places online to showcase your products or services and with a little research you can identify some of these social shopping websites and multiply the visibility of your goods online to well targetted potential customers.



9. sell advertising from your website. You can do this either on a business to business basis or look at advertising schemes such as Google Adsense or an affiliate marketing package. In hard times you will welcome the additional revenue stream.




10. jump on the eco bandwagon. Tell people what your business is doing to help the environment and let them know about any eco-friendly aspects of your products and services. You can also introduce eco-friendly cost saving working practices to help lower your overheads into the bargain.