How Will The Changing Economy Affect Offliners?

Background

The other day I noticed that there were zero banner ads here on WF. I'd never seen that. I also saw WF cut the price of their sticky, so I assumed demand (traffic) was down. It turns out that it was a Holiday and it's likely marketers opted to not advertise on a Holiday. However, that aroused my curiosity and I got to thinking...

I went to SimilarWeb and I reviewed the traffic of many many sites where there is a motivation to make or get money. Example; job sites, forums where folks go to learn to make money, sharing economy sites, non government small business funding sites, etc.

I saw one trend across the board. Traffic was down at 100% of all these sites from August 2015 till now. 75% of these sites experienced peak traffic in July, which created a new "top" in August that has steadily declined.

I then was just confused. "Why is it that these sites have all shown the same pattern here?" "What is or are the drivers?" So I got to looking at the DOW day to day and saw that July - August we hit the peak of the "bull market." The DOW hit it's all time high. as it was climbing there, everyones' traffic was rising commensurate with the rise in the DOW; more business owners were seeking capital, job sites were receiving more traffic, the sharing economy was vibrant and so on...

This year has started out exactly as I predicted last year. The DOW is down and has taken a nose dive today. The worst is not over because the Iranian oil hasn't hit the market. Low oil is driving down the price of commodities...

Nonetheless, here are a couple of simple things ACTION TAKING offliners can do to protect their business interests and most important your families. For those of you looking to flame, flame on.

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1. Cash Out Big Contracts Up Front: For instance, you can charge a guy $20,000 for a job spread out over 12 months. You can offer him financing at a modestly lower price and have a finance company pay you up front. There are more and more companies popping up who specialize in this all the time... If you're really good at providing REAL value to folks, it may be wise to spend allocate 10-20% of your time towards landing whales where another company allows you to cash out dumping the risk on them.
   
2. GET THAT DARN PROCESSING ACCOUNT!: Did you know you can earn $50-$500 per month per business by serving as their merchant processing rep? You can trade this for your hard work. That's $600 to $5,000 per year. The most important thing to realize is that the business owner is being knocked for this "invisible fee" regardless. You'll be the only processing rep to actually put more money in his pocket without digging in his pocket. It's a sunk cost. You'll have that money coming in for as long as you keep the relationship strong. It will be tough for anyone to steal it away because they can't provide the additional value your provide. Did you know that if you have a bunch of processing accounts that there are firms that will cash you out if you don't want your money over time?

Anyway, these are my ideas....