Are You Taking Advantage Of All Your Opportunities?

In the last week I generated an extra $100 USD from a brand new income source. I’d seen advertisements for a company called Text Link Ads, essentially a broker for website publishers and text link advertisers. I’d known about the service for many months as they have an extensive campaign running across many websites I frequent every day.

Whether out of laziness or simply because I had other priorities I never tried their system but just last week I decided to give it a go, mostly on a whim. I expected nothing since my experience with services like this is that the money is rarely much more than a few dollars a month, but a week later I’ve sold six text links and made more than $100 and have not had to do anything but sign up and place the code on my site.

This example isn’t exactly a case where I made a lot of money but it does demonstrate a very important point relevant to anyone running a business – are you taking advantage of every opportunity available to you?

It’s All About Testing

As business owners we know the only path to success is to firstly take and action and then to test those actions against other actions to see which works the best. Many business owners get caught up with the core functions of running their business that they can’t think out of the box, or don’t have the time to consider opportunities that might be under their noses and are very easy to test.

Here’s some inspiration to help you think out of your box and potentially come up with some new money making opportunities –

• Can you sell someone else’s product or service through an affiliate arrangement to your customers? If you have a list of targeted customers who already have purchased from you chances are they will buy complimentary products. All you have to do is find something they might be interested in and arrange a commission/affiliate deal for each sale.
• If you have a website are you using all your virtual real estate effectively? Have you considered placing some advertisements on pages that are not too important? For example you may have a section with articles related to your industry that are not specifically for selling your products or services. You could try Google AdSense, Text Link Ads, affiliate products or cross promotions with other parts of your business.
• If you have spare space in your office or retail premises have you considered renting it out to a tenant? If you are in retail often small coffee shops or newsagents are great additions that provide extra value to your customers and rental income for you. Perhaps you could sublease a room or two in your office space to a small start-up or micro-business?
• If you have an established distribution network with excess capacity have you considered partnering with another business to make use of the excess capacity and reduce your distribution costs? Perhaps you could arrange to split the cost of shipping if you both send products to the same location.

These ideas look for areas where you have potential to further make use of the resources you already have. Your established customer lists, intellectual capital, real estate, distribution networks and relationships are all potential opportunities. All you need to do is stop for a second to think about it, take a little action to test your theories, and you can reap rewards.

Yaro Starak
Small Business Owner