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Well there's just no way that we can fool ourselves for too much longer. Times are definitely getting tough here online and sales are decreasing. For those of us who have diversified into other areas of online business it's still easy to stay positive simply because our business is diversified and we're not reliant on just one income stream but if you're relatively new to the business your income streams are very limited and then it's coming down to a matter of survival till the good times return.

Knowing what to do to survive can be hard ... especially when you're right there in the thick of it and things look bleak. The bills are mounting up and the checks aren't arriving as quickly as they once did and making informed decisions that will help you survive can be hard.

Obviously you want to cut your costs and boost your income but if the big car makers can't do that what hope does a small adult webmaster have? Well actually you have a lot of hope simply because you are small. It can take weeks or months for the big guys to make a decision about anything but small businesses are nimble and they can make a decision that can improve their bottom line in just a few minutes.

So don't despair and don't give up. Accept the fact that things are going to be tight but believe that you can survive if only you take the time to cut those costs without reducing your chance of making money.

Now that may sound a little strange but if you want to survive these times then the last thing you should do is cut back on your marketing. By all means look at the costs of that marketing and maybe cut back in areas that really aren't performing but don't do as some big businesses are doing and make huge cuts in the money you're spending on marketing.

If you're buying in traffic then by all means look at whether that traffic is turning into sales for you or just making your web stats look impressive. If that traffic is making you money then be prepared to spend some money on buying traffic.

If you're buying gallery spots and those spots are making you money then don't stop buying those spots. But if those gallery spots have stopped producing sales then it's time to stop spending money on them

And the same thing goes for your sponsors. If they're not converting for you anymore then it's time to move on to others that will ... you may have been with those sponsors for a long time but this is business. While a little loyalty is a good thing your sponsor isn't going to put food on your table if you've run out of money so don't feel that you're tied down by loyalty.

Once you've taken a look at reducing your costs it's time to start looking at the way you work. For some people survival will be all about working harder while for others who are already working to their full capacity it will be about working smarter.

Explore ways to increase your output by automating repetitive tasks that you currently do manually. Look at using scripts to do those repetitive tasks so that you will have time to go on and do other things. Use an image manipulation program that will let you resize and reduce the images you need via a batch process so that you can set it to run while you go on and do other things.

Make your content work harder and smarter too. Buying fresh content all the time can be very expensive so make sure that you use your content more than once. Use it for a free site, use it for a gallery, use it for an AVS site ... yes there are some of those out there still ... use it in one page sites that include a bit of a story that is keyword rich so that the search engines will pick up on it. Use it in some blogging software too and feed traffic into those one page sites and your blog from your other sites.

Look around for other ways to re-use your content too. There are plenty more ways to do that than what I've mentioned here.

Working smarter and surviving these tough times is all about using your brain to find new ways of getting your marketing message out there so use your brain ... think of new ways of doing things and don't let yourself fall into the trap of thinking that you won't survive these times.

Stay positive, stay focused and be smart and you will survive.