The Top 10 Ways Small Businesses Can Make Money This Year Experts share the small business trends they believe will make a difference to entrepreneurs' bottom line.

There's plenty of financial uncertainty this year, with inflation still dogging the economy, and small business bakruptcies on the rise. But there are also reasons to be optimistic about small businesses profitability, including innovations in AI and evolving business models. Here, we talked to a range of experts to learn about the top trends driving small business sales this year.

1. Direct-to-consumer will be a bigger piece of the marketing pie.

For years, brands with new products had a simple playbook: Drive sales on Amazon. 1. That's where customers were, after all. But now, small businesses are renewing their focus on direct-to-consumer (DTC) strategies, instead of trying to win the Amazon game. "There is huge, huge competition on Amazon, and new entrepreneurs are finding it's really hard to invest all this money to be in the first pages," says Hope Khoury, a cofounder of Go Vertical, which has worked with over 250 inventors on developing their products and launching their small businesses. "They are relying on [other] sources so they can boom and have brand awareness elsewhere."