My business, and the business of most of my friends and colleagues, seems to be turning around. Everyone in my circle has become more optimistic and encouraged as business picks up in websites, marketing, publishing, advertising and similar fields. But why?

The economy is stagnant, the stimulus by all accounts but Joe Biden’s has not done anything but waste a lot of our money, unemployment is still rising, the stock market appears to be in a wait and see mode, and yet, companies are spending again.

As we all probably know, recessions are in large measure psychological. Yes, there are other economic factors, but when the media says there is a recession coming, businesses stop employing and slow manufacturing – and that in turn leads to the recession. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And this recession is largely no different. Business has been sitting on the sidelines waiting for things to turn around, but there is no turnaround coming. But when a business, one that needs to grow to survive, sits idle, management gets antsy to get things moving again. And that, in my opinion is what is happening right now.

Businesses cannot wait any longer for a government program to work, and most now know it won’t. So all across America businesses are starting to tick up their spending in order to get their businesses growing again. You see dollars being spent in marketing and related fields, Internet services like SEO and optimistic entrepreneurs plowing ahead with the better mousetrap, spending on services and products. And that in turn starts the money flowing through the economy again.

And as the money starts flowing, more people become optimistic and start to spend as well, and the upward spiral of economic grow begins.

This is a true capitalistic movement, one not borne from government bailouts, one-time spends like cash for clunkers or multi-million dollar government stimulus grants for the migration habits of wilderness ants. Nope, this is a capitalist resurgence. Businesses need to grow to survive and can no longer sit on the sidelines waiting for things to happen. So they are making things happen themselves.

That that resurgence is a self-fulfilling prophecy as well. Only this time the media is no where to be found. Until the election draws near…

As we approach the 2010 elections and businesses have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and the economy beings to bloom again, the party in power will take all the credit. “See, we told you the stimulus worked.” Or “See, we told you the tax cuts would work.” But the reality is, it’s capitalism that works. The drive and desire to make money, lots of money is what pulls us out of recessions.

Now, as the economy turns, it is incumbent on the government to get out of the way and let capitalism do its thing. And when it does, it’s a beautiful thing, and we again become the envy of the world.

Every day it seems the economy is getting weaker and slower. As that happens, high ticket item sales will become smaller and smaller as customers focus on the “important” things and hold off large purchases for another day. It’s a great learning experience for all of us who have not gone through a downturn like this (which no one alive has).

This has been especially true in my business, web development, branding, advertising and marketing. Where I used to rely on a few large projects per month to make a nice living, those big projects are getting smaller and fewer and farther between. Lucky for me, I have a small, nimble business that can change models quickly with a little retooling. The key is recognizing what my business strengths are, available to exploit, be able to choose a strategic direction and move forward with all my energies.

The strategic leap I made, and you might find this to be true as well, is that it is easier to sell an low priced quality product to more people than an expensive product to a few people (who aren’t buying right now anyway). The underlying model is based on social networking, but you can take that model and stretch it in all kinds of ways to make it work for your revenue model. So I share this change in the hope of providing some ideas you might consider as the market continues to soften.

One of the things I have been doing over the past 5 years is buying domain names. After a year or 2 I realized I wasn’t focused on the right model, but ended up with about 1000 pretty decent names. I was hoping to land the big one and hold out for millions, but that hasn’t worked out quite how I planned.

As luck would have it, several of the names were perfect for new internet businesses. But instead of selling them to others to develop, I am moving forward with the development myself. With the design expertise, and a few good programmers, getting the sites launched would be affordable. So off we go.
Right now we have 4 properties in development built on different internet business models, one that we expect to have very high traffic on that will be free, generating revenue from advertising, one is a B2B  sellers paid / buyers free model, one is an inexpensive everyone pays for the service model and one is an off-beat charity site for “grownups.”

Although different  revenue models, the one thing they all have in common is social networking. 

Whether B2B, B2C or C2C, the place to be is social networking. What we have done is thought outside the box – beyond “sharing stupid human tricks” online and building revenue models based on the social networking platform that are not available right now.

We expect live launch in the coming days, one at a time. As they launch, in addition to posting the information here, we will be sending out press releases, posting on facebook, linkedin and other social media sites and starting to build a network of users inexpensively but quickly over time. I will let you know here, how each one is doing as we move forward.

So good luck with your own business process shift, and I hope you find new ways to generate revenue in this down market.