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Times are tight in the US economy, and no one is more aware of this fact than small business owners. But do not despair! Here are 9 expert-tested ways to keep the cash flowing even in an economic downturn.

1. Raise Prices. This is a no-brainer, right? If you need more money then just charge more for your product or service. The ideal result of an increase in prices is that nothing happens. Your customers keep purchasing what you have to offer and you do not hear anything about it. The less ideal scenario is that some customers may go elsewhere, but do not let that stop you. Increasing your prices by 5 percent or 10 percent provides more profit and an increase in cash flow.

2. Find Old Customers and Invite them Back. Once you have gotten contact information on your customers, contact them regularly. Invite them to do business with you again, and give them incentives for doing so. Make an offer they can not refuse, request their presence at a private sale, send a newsletter, or call them and let them know that they will receive a free gift simply for returning the call.

3. Pay Slowly. The key to a slow payout is maintaining a good relationship with your suppliers, so find out what time frame is acceptable for them. If you are currently paying on a 30-day basis, ask your suppliers if they would accept payment on a 45-day or 60-day basis. If so, you have just gotten 15 to 30 extra days to use the money you have!

4. Sales Checklists. If you have salespeople working for you, instruct them to ask every customer to add on to their purchase. To make it easier, give every salesperson a checklist of things to offer customers.

5. Payment Checklists. Provide your administrators with a list of each customer and when that customer s payment is due. Have your administrators set up email reminders for each customer, letting them know that their payment is due.

6. Change Your Terms. The key to positive cash flow is getting money in as quickly as possible and paying it out as slowly as possible. Consider modifying your trading terms so that you get income quickly. If it is currently 30 days, try changing to 7 days or 14 days.

7. Be Picky About Your Customers. Only deal with customers who will cooperate with the trading terms that are most beneficial for your business. Sure, it may be uncomfortable to cut off relationships with slow customers, but you will notice a huge difference if all of your customers are fast-paying customers.
8. Get Endorsements. Find another business owner within your market niche who has a database full of customers that would potentially be interested in what you have to offer. Work out a deal with that business owner that is mutually beneficial and that gives him the opportunity to endorse you to his customers.

9. Evaluate Your Marketing. Analyze each one of your marketing campaigns to determine whether or not it is ultimately profitable. Eliminate any campaign that results in a loss and use only those that are profitable. If you do not currently have a marketing campaign, pick a tactic or two and see how they work out for you. You might start with flyers and emails. Your ultimate goal is a profitable offer within a profitable advertisement. Test everything, no matter how time-consuming it is. You will see a huge difference when you eliminate things that are not working and put more time and effort into the things that are.

An increase in cash flow means an increase in the growth of your business. Start off with one or two ideas and see how they work for you before moving on to others. You will find that you get results within minimal tweaking of your business strategy, and you will love the results!

Seomul Evans is a SEO expert with a leading internet Marketing Services company specializing in Internet Search Engines and a contributor of SEO marketing articles.

[tags]seo,internet marketing,marketing,business,technology,cash flow,entrepreneurs,search engines,finance,[/tags]

The Internet is no doubt, the most cost effective, result oriented and up-to-date sales and marketing channel any hotelier and hospitality industrialist can use to take the business to a higher level. Now, the issue is not getting your hotel and hospitality business on the internet, it is in perfectly understanding current Internet marketing trends, so as to enhance your web presence, attract traffic, inform the world and your prospective clients about what you have to offer and get them to make arrangements to use your hotel and tourism services.

The concept of hotel and hospitality internet marketing started when hoteliers became aware of the importance of the internet in getting more bookings. This made them to start creating websites for their hotels, introducing the online reservation booking system. With a website, a hotel can display their pictures for prospective guests to have a feel of the interior and exterior of the hotel, virtual tours and extensive reviews.

Today, with the economic situation and the fierce competition in the hospitality industry, it is only the understanding of the hospitality internet marketing trends and methods that will set you apart as unique in the industry. Now here are some basic actions you need to take to enhance your hotel’s web presence:

1. Campaigns: your internet marketing activities need to be specific. Let your campaigns be value based, focusing on specific events or seasons. You can think about running paid search campaigns, supporting seasonal offers, managing a late deals page, promoting the best available rate and so on.

2. Be flexible with your rates online: knowing that certain days of the year or of the week are slower, flex your rates on your booking engine online and with your online travel agents.

3. Invest in your website: your website should accurately reflect your product. You must have heard guests saying that a hotel is much nicer on the website. It is what they see in your website that will make them click or pick the phone to make reservations. Your site should include an image gallery featuring the rooms, the bathrooms, some onsite facilities, events and local attractions.

4. Optimize your web site: You should optimize your site in such a way that when someone types your hotel name in the search engine, it appears first. Focus most on brand and location. Though it may be difficult to rank your hotel in popular cities, do your best to get your site among the top 5 results. You can either take on a full blown SEO program or identify to get listed on travel portals that are specific to your region.

5. Use Email Marketing: This is one of the most cost effective methods of internet marketing. You can effectively communicate with your clients using the two elements: a growing database and quality messages. Develop a process of capturing email addresses. There are very many ways and sources of gathering data. With a system in place to capture these leads, use emails to further buttress the services of your hotel.

6. Protect your brand: if your brand is that important to you, protect it. You do this by constant monitoring and restrictions where necessary. For example you can restrict some OTA from using your brand name for sponsored advertizing with cynical and anti-progressive remarks. Another way to protect your brand is through monitoring reviews. Always check user reviews online and place managerial responses where necessary.

7. Channel Management products: These are systems that offer the ability to manage your hotel rates with OTA’s. With this system, you can control your rates, as well as save some time. Offer the best rates through your online booking system and advertize this on your website.

8. Analyze well with a good analytics package: A good analytics package is worth it. It will help you know how profitable your website has been to your business. A good analytics package will record your visitor sources, as well as inform you of the amount of revenue generated by your campaigns, giving you clear details of the ROI on travel sites paid listings, paid searches, and analyses of terms user used to find your business. This will help you in future plans.

Nick Nikolis is working in Atlantica Hotels and Resorts as It manager in Rhodos Greece. Atlantica Hotels and Resorts is a Europe Hotels chain currently offering accommodation holidays in Cyprus Greece and Egypt. Check here Greece hotels and hotels in Cyprus.

[tags]Hospitality Industry,Email Marketing,hotel,Management,rates online,internet marketing,hoteliers,bran[/tags]

Search engine marketing isn’t just about optimizing your website for the search engines. Search engine marketing is a complete marketing strategy including search engine optimization, as well as marketing with pay per click.

Although pay per click is optional, if you want to market using the search engines, you need to develop a complete and ongoing strategy for ranking well. You need to give constant attention to your search engine marketing efforts. This means creating a marketing plan to market in the search engines and analyzing the results.

These three principles will help you get started:

1. Do your keyword research.

Keyword research goes far beyond just finding keywords to describe your topic. You need to search for keywords to optimize your website, as well as write other promotional content like articles. Finding the right keywords is also important. You don’t want to optimize for keywords no one is looking for.

The best way to find the right keywords to optimize your website is start with keyword tools and do a comparison of the words you find. Compare the number of searches to the amount of competition. Putting a particular keyword phrase in quotes and searching for it in the search engines will tell you how many sites are optimized for a specific keyword phrase.

This will help you choose the right keyword phrases for your site. Use longer keyword phrases when optimizing your site. This is because those who search using longer keyword phrases are looking for solutions. What you offer on your site is more likely to solve visitors’ problems.

2. Submit to the major search engines manually.

Although some search engine marketers will tell you to wait for the major search engines to find you, there are so many web pages and sites on the internet now that search engine spiders may never find you, or it may take months for them to find you.

The way around this is to do your submissions manually. Google is especially good at indexing sites quickly provided you create a sitemap. A sitemap is simply a file that lists all of the links on your site in a format that is more accessible to search engine spiders.

Eighty percent of your search engine traffic will come from the major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN. With Google and Yahoo, you need to sign up for an account, but it’s free. Both offer some form of statistics to help you find out if your site is being indexed or not. It’s worth it to submit manually.

3. Use linking to make your site relevant.

Linking is a strategy where you build back links to your websites. It’s like a referral system. The more back links you have pointing back to your site, the higher your site will rank.

You don’t want to get links from just anywhere though. You want links that are relevant to the content of your website.

To find relevant link partners, search for sites that are related to yours and ask for a link exchange. Look for directories related to your topic and submit your site there. Write articles on your topic and submit them to article directories. Build an affiliate program using affiliate program management scripts that include your domain name in the link.

Link building is an ongoing process, and it should be something you are doing all of the time, even if you only build one backlink per day.

Continue to add content to your website. Your ultimate goal is to provide relevant content, as well as related products and/or services that solve your visitors’ problems. Then you will make the sale.

Like these tips? Then check out my internet marketing blog for more free tips, strategies, and tools to help you make more money from your marketing. Sign up for my free internet marketing teleseminar.

Jinger Jarrett is the author of “Internet Marketing for Free: The GUIDE,” available on Amazon.

[tags]search engine marketing, search engine optimization[/tags]