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One of the crazy things about running a business ... any kind of business whether it be out there in the real world or here in cyberspace ... is the impact that things totally beyond your control can have on the business.

You can set all the goals you want, you can manage your risks and even allow for glitches and hiccups and you still fall in a heap because something totally unexpected and/or beyond your control impacts on your business. But sometimes there can be some good tucked away in a situation where things have gone wrong and you really need to look for those good points.

For example, a friend of ours decided a while ago that it was time to take his business online. He saw that the future for him and his business was online so he spent a lot of money having an online store built. He invested a lot of time and money in sourcing and buying extra stock and then, just as he was about to launch his online business, the world's financial crisis hit and now he's struggling.

And it's not just his new online business that's struggling. I just saw a well-known mainstream marketer complaining that their traffic had seen a huge spike over the last month but revenues had dropped considerably. I expect that's a trend that many of us are seeing here online ... more and more people are looking but fewer people have any money to spend. Unfortunately that's a trend that's probably not going to go away any time soon and it's going to impact on anyone who is involved in affiliate marketing.

But hidden in those trends that I quoted just a moment ago is a silver lining. You may not think that there could be a silver lining in a situation where your costs are increasing while you income is decreasing but in this instance there is.

The silver lining comes in that first trend. Sure, their costs are going up because they're getting much more traffic to their websites but more traffic looking ... even if they don't buy ... can be a good thing. The more people who look now will translate into more people who are buying online when the economy gets back on track and when they buy they'll buy from those sites that they used to visit when times were bad.

While 'getting back on track' might be a year or more ahead of us that gives us time to develop our sites ... whether they are mainstream or adult ... into resource sites that people will come to and keep coming back to and eventually buy from. So if you're thinking of giving up and trying something else just because your sales a dropping then maybe you should think again.

Now isn't the time to give up, it's time to consolidate, build some more foundations and be ready when the economy does start to improve.

Of course that doesn't mean that you're not going to make sales now ... because you are. No matter how bad the economy gets there will be people out there who do have money to spend or how simply must purchase the product that you're selling. So in times like this you need to make sure that people can find your website and that making a purchase from your site is easy ... simple ... a breeze.

Don't make them jump through hoops to make a purchase, give them all the information they need to make a purchase when they first hit your website. Tell them your payment options and your shipping limitations right there on the front page.

On Saturday Steve decided that he wanted to buy a hobby item from a new online store. The item he wanted to buy was unique to that store so he wasn't going to get it anywhere else.

With plastic in hand and a glint in his eye that only a crazy hobbyist can have he hit the site. The first thing he looked for was whether or not the business shipped to Australia and then he wanted to know what his payment options were. After some digging through several pages he found that the business did ship to Australia ... but we still don't know what the payment options for the site are.

Steve had to register before he could access the shopping cart and the registration process was several pages long. We presume that the payment options were given on the other side of the registration process but we don't know because half way through the registration process Steve decided that he really didn't need what they were selling if they were making the buying process so difficult. Instead of jumping through all the hoops the site wanted him to jump through he just closed the browser window and went down to the local store and bought something else.

So even though we may be living in strange economic times when people want things ... and go looking for them ... even though they may not be able to afford them ... now is not the time to take a backward step. Now is the time to swallow those increased costs and look at it as an investment in the future.

Build up your sites and web presence now and encourage people to keep coming back because once they have spare cash in their pockets your sites will be the ones that they buy from. And make it easy for them to make a purchase when they do have money to spend.