Are You Ready To Go Fulltime?

The summer is upon us and a lot of the surfers leave their PCs and head for the nearest beach to get a glance of the babes.

Unfortunately this effect our business as traffic and sales suddenly drop quite aggressively. To make things even worse most sponsors do some heavy summer-shaving to compensate for their lack in income and to pay their overhead.

This leads to a lot of pessimism among webmasters and the most desperate ones leave the biz permanently. We all wish, we worked harder in the winter-season, so we could leave the PC and the depressing sales for a month or two and head for the beach as well.

Take advantageInstead of mourning over dropping income, start taking advantage of the situation. The numbers of surfers have decreased a lot, but so has the amount of active webmasters. Exxxploit the summer in the following ways:

1. Gallery-submissions at TGPs have a higher chance of success, since the number of manual submissions also drop during the summer. Also at the very largest general TGPs. This is your chance to become a trusted partner.

2. Content prices are down and you can expect 20-50% discount on purchases above USD 1000. Why waste valuable time on buying content and building galleries in the winter, when you should optimize sales, trades and network? Buy your content in the summer and save your money.

3. Maybe you hate building and submitting galleries to TGPs, but it’s better than doing nothing at all. If your finances can tolerate it, build 50-100 galleries now and submit them as from mid September/early October and onwards. At least make some new gallery templates. If you can't afford to buy new content now, ask your primary sponsors for some free content. Maybe they are also more willing to co-operate now.

4. Squeeze your hosting-company and bring overhead down. Complain to your hosting-company and compare their prices with their competitors. Tell them they need to lower prices, or you will be out of business, within a few months. If they don't drop prices after you explained them Moore´s Law etc., really do consider shifting hosting company.

5. Clean up! It's hard to give general advices, since webmasters are involved in all kinds of adult projects. But maybe it was about time that you optimized those buttons at the webmaster- and submission-pages and replaced them with some converting ones. Do you need new recip's?

6. Do you need a new logo? Some designers are sitting on their fingers just waiting for the webmasters to come back from vacation. Now they will take the time to listen to your ideas.

7. Swap submit-links with other TGPs.

8. Send your surfers an e-mail and ask them for improvements to your website or do a survey. Did the surfers overall improve their feelings for your website since January?

9. Evaluate the last six months. Log in to all your sponsors and evaluate the result. It will take some time, but the work will pay off many times. Check the PR at Google. Did it increase? Do you trade with many websites that have a PR of 0? Are your meta tags updated? Benchmark your websites with your competitors.

10. Make plans for the next six months. Which projects should be skipped? Which are important?

Finally remember that the summer is the period, where you should recharge your mentally batteries. Do take some extra time off and relax. If you are 100% business attitude: participate in the webmaster gatherings, where you can learn and enjoy at the same time.

Have a nice summer!