Economic conditions have been brutal. Almost every small business and small business owner I know has been dealing with sales far lower than expectations.

NFIB released their monthly survey this past Tuesday which showed some interesting results. Actual sales changes,which is net percent of small business owners with higher sales, minus small business owners with lower sales, the last three months compared to prior three months is at -34%. This is the worst ever score since NFIB started doing this monthly survey since 1986.

So if you are a small business owner seeing falling sales you have a lot of company. As an online marketing company we get asked by small business owners on how we can help. Unfortunately there is no magic wand. Here is what some of what we’ve done.

There are four options:

1. Lie low and tide it out: Don’t make dramatic changes. Keep up the good customer relationships you always and stick to the knitting. This shall pass. Look at low cost options that can help build the relationships further. Maybe this is the time to create that online newsletter that you always wanted to do. An e-mail newsletter to your customer is not expensive. We do some work with customers there and the costs are end to end including copywriting are less than $150.
2. Cut costs aggressively: Survival is the key. People are predicting an imminent turnaround of the economy. But timing a recovery is difficult and you need to first remain in business to take advantage of the predicted eventual recovery. We’ve looked at this aggressively in our company. Internet has been very helpful in looking at deals for everything. In fact, we’ve done so much of it that we’ve decided to use our own research to create a new site called SmallBizExtras.com where we list all the savings we see- which brings us to the next point.
3. Growing through new products and services: There are services that you can add on to the business at very low cost. You may be 90% there and then just need to add a few bells and whistles to get extra revenue. SmallBizExtras is a prime example. We are already scouring the internet very heavily looking for deals. Using internal resources and very little cost, we are creating a small business savings website – SmallBizExtras.com which will help other business owners and generate some revenues.
4. Growing through new markets: While the market here in the US has been hit hard, elsewhere things are not as bad. There are markets like India and China that are growing, albeit more slowly. So if you can look at a low cost entry into these markets, this may be the time. Online marketing helps you offer your products across the globe. We’ve done the same launching SBXi.com as a site to offer services in India.

So this is what we’ve done. We will lay no claim to spectacular success except that we are not giving up and doing something about dealing with the economy.