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Here we are at the end of another week and at the end of the month ... the first month of summer for you guys in the Northern Hemisphere ... and that's the perfect time to get out and enjoy life ... but I'm sure that there are some of you who are just not having a good time right now.

Of course the going gets a little tougher at this time of year ... or so the story goes. Summer slowdown used to be something that people talked a lot about and the fact that lots of people went on holidays or spent a lot more time outdoors at this time of was often given as the reason that traffic dropped off.

But then a few of us began to notice that traffic wasn't really dropping off at all and some of us even began to wonder if the summer slowdown was something that had maybe passed ... but these days I still see people complaining about a slowdown of sales in summer.

If you're one of those people who are seeing your sales drop off then maybe now is the time to look at ways of making sure you're in a better position to keep sales happening next summer. There really is no better time than right now to start preparing for next year.

There are a number of things you can do to keep your sales happening next year but none of them are quick fixes ... all of them are going to require you to do some serious work over a long period of time ... so start now and you won't be caught short next summer.

One the things that you can do to keep sales happening is to diversify ... look beyond your niche at other areas that hold some attraction for you ... look at what you might be able to do over in mainstream to keep the cash flowing during the summer months. I think that the guiding principle here is that instead of trying to get a lot of income from just a few sites/niches you need to start thinking about getting smaller amounts of income from more sites/niches.

But I need to stress something that I said a few moments ago ... the results that you're hoping for are not going to happen overnight. This is not a quick fix to your cash flow problems but if you can hang on this summer and build for next summer then you're on the right track.

One area that might not be a good area to move into as you diversify is pharmacy. There's a headline in today's Wall Street Journal that is probably sending a shiver down the spines of just about everyone who relies on pharmacy websites for a large chunk of their income.

The headline is 'Authorities Shut Down 1600 Fake Pharmacy Websites' so guys if you're into selling pills and potions then the authorities may be coming to get you ... or at least take your business away from you.

And if you're really relying on the search engines for traffic to your websites then you're probably feeling more than a little concerned right now.

A couple of months ago Matt Cutts announced that Google was going to do some interesting updates during the summer months and of course Penguin 2 arrived right at the start of summer. I guess a lot of us hoped that would be the most important update that Google had for us because, for many of us, the results weren't all that bad.

Unfortunately that wasn't the only major update that Google had for us this summer. Now it seems we are in the middle of a rolling update to Panda. In the past there have been a number of Panda updates but they have all worked through the system in just one day ... but not this time.

This time the Panda update started around June 25 and it's going to go on updating right through until July 4 and what the final outcome will be is anyone's guess ... it's also anyone's guess as to why the update is going on for 10 days. Are they releasing a huge update in increments and then reviewing the changes that have occurred before the next bit is unleased on us?

Who knows ... but what we are seeing is major upheavals in many verticals and it will be very interesting to see what the search results look like on July 5. In some ways it almost reminds me of the Google Dance of years gone by but they never lasted for 10 days. So all we can do is sit back and wait till it's all over and we can review the wreckage.

As luck would have it we had a new client rush in yesterday and demand that we do some major SEO work for him "right now". He hadn't heard about any changes to Google's algorithm ... he had just found that he had a serious competitor in a mainstream niche where he had ruled for several years.

Trying to explain to him that now was not a good time to rush in and make any changes was almost impossible. It doesn't matter what time of year it is ... so many people out there simply can't grasp that Google is definitely not their friend.