Remember the 2008 crash? I saw many independent retailing folks who had no defense against the unexpected revenue drop from the bankers wagering their customers’ money. Those people lost their businesses; they needed to prepare for a decline in top-line revenue. When their brick-and-mortar-based revenue was cut down, they needed more time to develop new income streams. Unfortunately, that time didn’t exist. So the person you might have gone to sponsor your kid’s TBall team, or talked to in church on Sunday, is out of business.

Here is another thing: the history of lax banking regulations leads to a mess every twenty years. That doesn’t count things like Covid; it happens every twenty years or so when no one is paying attention to what the bankers are doing.

We are all about helping the small guys trying to protect themselves. It needn’t be expensive. The route to fantastic digital marketing (on a budget): SEO. Search Engine Optimization. You don’t need paid advertising; you need more traffic, and if you can wait for the results to grow organically, you can make yourself a secure, low-cost revenue stream. Since you won’t be paying rent and utilities on another brick-and-mortar storefront, you can afford to be patient.

To help you understand how SEO works as opposed to paid ads, consider this: If you pay for an ad, the potential client sees it once or twice. They may have been looking for your product, or they might not have been looking for you. Investing in optimized SEO will work for you 24x7x365, not just the one time someone sees it. Also, to find you, they needed to be looking for someone who does what you do. These two elements combine to create a compelling and reasonably inexpensive solution.

The second piece you need is to monitor the numbers to know what is working and what isn’t. We use Google Analytics and Google Search Console. So every month, we issue a report that shows what is working and what isn’t. We can even use AI to publish information that helps you see trends and what you can expect. The metrics are important here; you need to watch the numbers to do marketing; otherwise, you have an expensive hobby, not a marketing business.