Do not personally guarantee any loans or long term leases! There is almost always an alternative.

Take a hard look at all possible means of cutting expenses. Make tough adjustments sooner rather than later. Don’t wait until you have no choice.

Don’t be too proud to get advice! Ask other, possibly more experienced, successful business people. Talk to an attorney. Hire a business consultant.

Consider taking in a partner or selling your business. Again, plan ahead, ask a reasonable price and don’t wait until you are desperate.

I hope I’m wrong but I believe there is a good chance that economy is going to get worse before it gets better. Now is time to get lean and mean. Take necessary steps now to weather storm. In a year or two things should be better. If you can survive or even show some growth now, there will be a great opportunity to prosper ahead. Recessions weed out a lot of weaker and shady competition. They tend to clear muddied waters.

Weathering a recession tests your patience. It is very frustrating when sales are sliding or stagnant despite your best efforts. Here in Florida we have rip currents at beach. Swimmers who drown try to swim straight to shore against current, survivors ride with current until it ends and then swim to shore. Don’t fire all your help and try to work 16 hours a day to offset economy or you will burn out and drown. Think twice before you double or triple your advertising budget. Get back to basics of what worked when you first started. Try to relax, anticipate and do best you can. This too shall come to pass.

Problem #3 - Thieves Don't Need to Know The Name Of Your Download Page

You may feel that because you have placed your product downloads in a seperate directory you are safe.

Unfortunately this is not necessarily case. It is possible to list contents of a web site directory directly from any web browser. A thief could then see your product download files and just...well...download them.

Problem #4 - Your Recommend A Friend Feature May Be Losing You Traffic

A growing trend on web sites is use of a recommend a friend script to encourage visitors to recommend your web site to typically five of their friends, who in turn recommend to five of theirs, and so on.

A common accepted practice is to give away valuable free gifts to encourage people to come up with five email addresses and increase your web site traffic and hopefully product sales.

Whilst this system in theory can generate some traffic, system can also be abused by allowing would-be thief to get your free gift without providing you with any email addresses.

You, therefore, not only lose potentially valuable traffic, but also your free gift gets downloaded for nothing in return.

Problem #5 - Your Affiliate Commissions Can Be Hijacked

With incredible success of affiliate programs as a source of income, so too comes possibility of abuse and theft of your affiliate commissions.

It has been well documented that ClickBank affiliates are particularly at risk. A person visits your web site, sees a product they are interested in buying and replaces your ClickBank nickname with their own. They then get commission when they purchase product.

In fact it is not just ClickBank users who are losing commissions this way. Any affiliate link can be modified quickly and easily effectively losing you valuable commissions.

WHAT CAN YOU DO ABOUT IT?

Each of these 5 areas can cause a potential loss of profit that you would find very hard to detect. If you are concerned about any of areas I have highlighted in this article I suggest you get hold of my comprehensive report entitled "WARNING: Your Products May Be Being Stolen".

This report is available from http://www.yourowninternetbusiness.com/warning.html .

It contains a step-by-step description of how a thief can steal your products using each of techniques I described above and shows you how to protect yourself from these problems quickly, easily and effectively.

Go protect your profit.

Thanks for reading.

Greg Spence

---------------------------------------- "35 Ways To Increase Your Profits Online"

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