We have been bombarded and blasted by the media on how bad the economy is. The stock market is starting to show some signs of life, yet the unemployment rate is at an all time high. Businesses are “hunkering down” in hopes to weather the economic storm. You may be thinking that now is not the time to spend, spend spend and YOU’RE RIGHT.

Instead, you should be looking at how you can invest and capitalize on the opportunities that are out there. Banks are severely scrutinizing anyone who applies for a loan. My wife and I recently bought a new yacht simply because the right factors were in play for us to do so. Things like the stagnant economy, a glut in the market for discretionary purchase items and here in south Texas, an over abundance of insurance claims against property made for a fantastic market for yachts. We literally had our pick of some beautiful vessels at a fraction of the standard retail price.

Unlike our friends and relatives, we are out spending our money. Not foolishly mind you. Yes a yacht is an item that isn’t necessary in the grand scheme of things, but we were able to purchase this beautiful boat for almost half its value simply because the owner needed to get it off of his hands and because it came out of Hurricane Ike as a “damaged” asset.

The owner was a local business man here in south Texas who had picked the boat up through an insurance auction, repaired it and sold it at a profit. And we only paid a little more than half of its stated book value. A true win-win for all.

How does this example relate to business?

Most business owners have been in a holding pattern for months, since the economy tanked. They are waiting for this recession to come around and for the country to start creating a positive cash flow. But the wiser business owner is looking at the landscape and saying: “What can I invest in now, that I wouldn’t have necessarily invested in before this economy tanked”

Those that are waiting around for a change will miss the opportunity to create an environment for their business that will be able to take advantage of the market as it picks up. Those that

Social Media Marketing is the big buzz in the Internet Marketing world right now. I have recently been testing some new ideas behind driving targeted traffic to my sites and found a simple process revealed recently by Michael Campbell in his IMS newsletter. Anyone can make this work and pick up good traffic. Here’s all you do:

1. Create a new post on your blog or add a new page to your website
2. Go to Digg, Propeller or any combination of news aggregation sites and submit a snippet of your post
3. Go to Del.icio.us, Reddit or any other social bookmarking site and bookmark the URL of the snippet you created when you submitted it to the news aggregator (an example of this would be http://www.digg.com/my-new-snippet)
4. Ping the social bookmark RSS feed and watch the traffic roll in.

With this technique you are filtering for traffic that is interested in the post and notifying the search engines of your it in almost real time. If you are targeting specific keywords then make sure they appear in the title of the post, the title of your snippet and in the social bookmark as well. When I started using this technique I saw my targeted traffic triple. What would that do for your blog?