Here’s a bizarre but true thought for your weekend: A recessionary economy is the ideal time to aggressively promote your business.

Why? As this post by Barri Carian at the Get Slightly Famous blog puts it:

The brave entrepreneur sees a recession as an opportunity and takes advantage of the contrarian flow. The reality is that the competition is retrenching. That means that what you do now to grow your business will have a much more significant impact. Anything you do is wholly differentiated, not marginally differentiated as in hotter economic times when everyone is spending on marketing and promotion.

It’s human nature, when cash flow gets tight, to want to rein back in on so-called “soft” costs like advertising and other marketing efforts. Even if your cash flow does require a scaling back of high-cost marketing tasks, such as print and radio advertising, why not take advantage of the opportunity to bolster your online marketing?

Here are some suggestions:

• Take a good, hard look at your blog and website with a critical eye. Do necessary spring cleaning and tweak your site’s SEO.
• Engage in a blogging spree. Use an application like Journler or Notebook for Mac, OneNote or even Word for PCs, or Google Docs or RustyBudget for an online option to collect blog fodder and rough draft notes. Then schedule some time to plow through the assorted links and notes, and turn them into several blog posts.
• Visit other blogs and leave comments. Not just any comments, please — you must play nice, leave substantive comments, add honestly to the discussion, refrain from directing people to your blog (except through the comment form’s entry for URLs), and keep your brand identity in mind. That is, remember that you’re writing as a lawyer, not some random person surfing the web; this is commenting with a purpose.
• Introduce yourself to your local newspaper reporters, especially those who write about issues related to your practice area. Make contact with an eye towards offering them assistance, by providing background information or ideas — not convincing them to write about you and your practice. Bonus: check out and comment on their blogs, thereby killing two birds with one stone.
• Now’s a good time to plan, write, and present a freebie seminar on some aspect of your practice area that’s unaffected by the recession — or brought into sharp relief by economic downturn. For instance, estate planners can talk about living wills and advance directives. Business lawyers can discuss succession plans and preservation of assets. You might have to do some out-of-the-box thinking but chances are, you can come up with an angle that will play well in penny-pinching times.

How are you going to market your practice through the downturn? Leave your comments below!