Always a pleasure to lend ideas to the mix:

  Get familiar with Ancestry.com and get listed on their professional service providers space for things like document look-ups.  These can range from acquiring copies of vitals, to taking pictures of gravestones at local cemeteries.  This is a good introduction to genealogy research which you, as an abstractor, will find quite easy and intuitive. Join professional genealogy associations and get to know their standards and rules and you'll do well.

  Get your notary license and offer signing agent services.  In our area (Calif.) it's expensive to get all the license and insurance, but also quite lucrative for the agent fees.

If you don't already do so, think about becoming a landsman. In your neck of the country, researching rights to oil, gas and minerals is a natural thing to offer. It's a bit more complex than the standard title research, but a very rich field for new knowledge and experience.

Touch base with and make friends with local building and planning departments (city and county). I've gotten dozens of referrals from them. People need title chains in many areas before building permits are issued. With title companies prohibitive in cost or wholly unavailable for the guy wanting to build a mother-in-law unit to his home, you can offer the needed product.

If you're running a home business in abstracting, why not use your name and home to offer agent services as agent for process of service for various domestic corporations and LLC's. Our Calif. Secretary of State has us listed on their commercial service provider page for those seeking such service and we get a few new clients every year. It doesn't take that many years before you build a large, annual client base, trust me.

In the same vein, offer filings and recordings of a variety of other sorts: fictitious business statement filings, state corporate filings, etc... Any added service, including the research of those same records, is an expansion of your business offerings, so don't be limited.

In California, we can do up to 10 process services annually without a license. The license is relatively cheap, so going over 10 is not a problem. We concentrate on high-end clients (like law firms in corporate cases), so we avoid doing more dangerous, private resident process serving. Just a thought.

Final thought on diversification for profit: Debt collection, skip tracing and private investigations. States regulate (or fail to regulate) differently and sporadically. For instance, PI's in Alaska have no licensing requirement, but are heavily regulated in California. Look into the laws of your jurisdiction (they're all online) and see what sorts of work might dovetail with your talents.

I'd admonish any business person to remember that you don't profit by cutting costs, but it does make lean times more bearable. With that said, consider your overhead in these matters:

1. Email: use free services like GMail or Yahoo! or HotMail. They're as good as any paid service and allow you to archive your messages for years for free.

2. Get a digital camera and take pictures of documents. If you are paying public agencies for copies, then you do yourself and your clients no service. A 10+ megapixel digital camera lets you take super-high definition pics of docs that you can email to people, or review later at home on your own computer.

3. Drop the land line. You have a cell phone, so don't pay for an unnecessary rotatary-dial tether. Replace your fax with your digital camera (above). There are no papers that you need to “scan and fax” that you can't do the same with a digital cam and email for free.

4. Get rid of the brick and mortar store. Research and abstracting means that you should be in the field every day at the public records office. Go in at 8am (or whenever they open), set up your laptop at a public work station, and stay until closing. A laptop can be taken anywhere, so use that to your advantage.

5. Free Wi-Fi hotspots offer free internet access. Use them. All the coffee houses, public libraries, book stores, big box stores, fast food joints, and downtown merchants have them. Get online and search out maps of places in your area, and get on the internet for no cost.

6. Learn to use freeware. Open source programs like Adobe Acrobat, Open Office and Bit Defender provide you with free word processing, image manipulation and computer security, so why pay hundreds for Microsoft or others when compatible programs are free for the downloading?