What if everything fell apart?

Every once in a while it’s a good idea to ask yourself how you would keep your company going if all your existing sources of revenue disappeared.

So, for example, let’s say you publish a magazine and all of a sudden nobody buys magazines any more. What assets do you have, and how can you create a new product to keep your company going?

You may not be in the magazine business, but the concept applies to any revenue stream. What if advertising dries up, or subscriptions disappear completely, or …. You get the idea.

Here are some crazy thoughts to get you started.

Email search — Provide a service where your subscribers can send an email with search terms and you reply immediately with an email that contains articles related to those terms.

Why would a subscriber want such a thing? Why can’t they just search google?

Google gives all sorts of results — the good and the bad, the trustworthy and the garbage. You’re offering carefully researched articles from a trusted source.

So then, why can’t your subscriber just log in to your website and do the search there?

Who wants to do all that? Open a browser, type in the URL, find the search function (which your web designer moved last week), enter the terms, sort through your crappy search results page and then click on individual articles (that are cluttered with ads)? No thanks.

Sending an email is simply easier.

Imagine that Kathy is one of your subscribers, and she’s an HR manager. She’s sitting in a boring meeting and some personnel topic comes up. She knows there are HR implications, but she’s not positive she has all the details right. She quickly sends an email to your service. Five seconds later she has well-researched, professional articles that address her situation. And she didn’t even have to get out of her chair.

Short guides, formatted for the smart phone — The tablet is becoming old news. People are doing more and more on their smart phones. But so far the smart phone hasn’t been a great option for reading — mostly because documents aren’t formatted for that size device.

Change that. Create short, easy-to-read and easy-to-skim articles formatted specifically for the smart phone.

But how will you make the sale and deliver the content? Forget about Kindle and iTunes and all those guys. They keep the purchaser’s information, and you need that as an asset to grow your business.

Sell these reports yourself, deliver them by email and give your customers extensive help on how to get the documents into their preferred reader –whether that’s Kindle, iBooks, Nook, Evernote or whatever.

(Yes, you can get documents into those readers without going through the vendors’ walled gardens.)

Give away content, but track how readers use it — This article will challenge your ideas about the value of content. What We Got Wrong About Books.

What’s more valuable, a $10 magazine subscriber, or the fact that you know he reads every one of your articles about DIY home repairs, and he lingers on photos of Italian sports cars?

Imagine a future where all content is free, and then imagine ways you can still monetize your content by collecting data on the people who are reading it.

I know it’s creepy, and I’m not comfortable with all that data collecting either. I’m just trying to stretch your mind here.