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Ack! It's Monday and after a week of working at only about 60 per cent capacity Steve and I are back to 100 per cent plus. While one more sleep-in and easy day might be nice the office door is open and we're really ready to jump back into the New Year.

So what are your plans for the New Year? More of the same old same old or are you looking at branching out into new areas? Steve and I are trying something new from this today ... we've seen a real demand here in town and we have the skills so we're going to give it a go.

At the end of last month we lost one of our overseas clients and while that loss may not be permanent it certainly has meant that one of our sources of income has dried up so this new project may prove to be quite handy. Steve and I had talked about it last year but didn't think that the time was right back then. However now the time is right and we're going to jump into it.

So what about you? Have you even thought about doing anything different this year? If you haven't then I would seriously suggest that you do look at what you're currently doing and see if you can't add in some extra income streams.

While the world's economy is slowly moving out of recession your finances aren't going to improve overnight. Even when your finances do improve you should still want to diversify so that when things go bad next time you won't have just one or two sources of income.

If you want to think about diversifying then here are some areas that I would seriously be looking at.

Cut your dependence on Google
Stop for a moment and compare the way Google did business five years ago with the way it does business now. I could be wrong but I see Google as gradually moving away from its desire to index the world's information and now only index the information that might make it some money.

There was a time when Google indexed everything and getting a listing only depended on your search engine optimization skills but that's changing. Currently there's some serious discussion going on in several places about the way Google has changed the way it displays information at a local level.

Google has decided not to display block listings for search engine specialists, web designers and advertising agencies in some countries for no apparent reason. Google claims people don't want to see those listings but that's just a very weak excuse ... instead it seems apparent that Google has decided that, for whatever reason, it just doesn't want to display those listings in the way it did in the past.

So what might happen to your business if Google decides that it doesn't want to display listings for the industry you're involved in at all?

Go mobile
A mobile marketing expert recently suggested that the mobile market could be summed up in two words ... "it's everywhere" ... and she's right.

Mobile is everywhere and it's going to be even widespread in the months ahead. And don't think that mobile is something that's only being taken up in some of the younger demographic groups. Older people are getting the hang of surfing the web and getting information via their mobile phones and even in countries, like Australia, with absolutely crappy data plans mobile web surfing is on the increase.

And while you're thinking about going mobile start looking at QR codes too. It's an incredible pain to type a long URL into a mobile browser and it's much easier to point your phone at a block of QR code and have the phone access the URL automatically so now is the time to see where QR code can work for you.

Diversify
While you may have been focusing on just one area of interest here in adult in the past now is the time to diversify ... to look at other areas. Think about running your own adult shops linked from your adult sites ... think about other adult services that you may be able to provide and do some testing and costing for those ideas too.



Also think about diversifying outside of adult ... I know that this is something I've been suggesting for years but maybe now the time is right for you to try that. Here in adult you will have gathered a lot of skills that are in demand out there in mainstream so why not do a little bit out there as well.

One of our major sources of income developed when we took our web design skills out into mainstream and offered it commercially. The new business that starts today is another skill that we learned here in adult and has plenty of applications out there in the real world ... and plenty of demand too.

So look at what you can do here in adult and see if you can't use those skills in mainstream and in the bricks and mortar world too.

There's no doubt that the year ahead will be another one that will be challenging ... but it will also be rewarding if you're up to those challenges and cope with the new things that the new year will bring.