Choppy Waters Ahead, How Prepared Are You? -October 2007
Choppy Waters Ahead? How Prepared Are You?
Welcome to this month’s APD newsletter. If I thought September had crept up on us
suddenly, it sure ran out the other side pretty quick! Mind you, this morning was one
of those beautiful crisp blue autumn morns that I yearned for last month!
Whilst that was nice, and I took time to take it all in as I went out for a morning
coffee, I was soon down to business. I guess we ought to get down to it as well as
there is a lot to talk about this month.
Firstly…a run on a UK Bank? The first one for a hundred years, who would havethought it, eh? But, I told you back in August that the US sub prime crisis would hitother markets and so it has proved.
Funnily enough it caused my ‘phone to ring hot with lots of calls from my old
recruitment buddies. You see, I worked selling IT personnel to the Investment Banks,
and to a man, they have all been making their large sub prime losses public this last
couple of weeks.
Deutsche Bank $1.5 billion, Citigroup a similar amount. Credit Suisse, UBS, Bear Stearns, they are all having to admit to hundreds of millions of pounds of losses in the US sub prime market.
You see, they brought CDO (Corporate Debt Obligations) which were basically crap
sub prime loans wrapped up in “little” multi million dollar packages. The problem
was that by the time they had been wrapped up, chopped about a bit, re-packaged, re-
financed a few times, and derivatives made out of them…
…it was difficult to see where the final obligation lay! So, the Banks didn’t check them properly and just brought these CDOs assuming they were “good” debt…which clearly they weren’t! In fact, most of them were very, very bad debt. So, now the Banks are having to admit the
liability and enter the losses on their balance sheets.
The effective translation of that for my old recruitment chums is that many see their
jobs as being in jeopardy. Most of the Banks have now got a complete freeze on
recruitment activity and that has an immediate effect on the recruitment agencies.
Boy, am I glad I left all that behind!
At the moment, the Banks all expect “robust” trading conditions for the last quarter,
but that remains to be seen. If the market doesn’t bounce back, a lot of my old friends
will be finding life very difficult.
It would appear that the wider economy is still doing OK, well, even, but the full
impact has yet to filter through, in my opinion. Retail sales were up last month but the
full force of recent interest rate rises has yet to be felt.
The full impact of the credit crunch has yet to filter through as well. And…there will be (again in my opinion) some serious fallout from the U.S Fed cutting half a point off of U.S interest rates to
try and stave off recession. That is one very inflationary measure they have taken.
And…if the U.S economy does decide to crash land, being the driver of world trade
(whether we like it or not), it will have serious global consequences.
So, a real curve ball of a question for you this month…if the economy does go into
reverse, how safe are you?
What would happen if you lost your job because your company hit bad times and your
number came up on totally the wrong sort of lottery?
How many months could you survive without income? Ouch! That one hurt as well
didn’t it?
It is an absolute truism that you will never be rich working for someone else.
The only way to make money (in any worthwhile amount – unless you want the stress
of being a CEO with a very finite shelf life) is to have your own business.
And, the only place to have that business is online.
Why?
Simply because your costs are negligible compared to running a “bricks and mortar”
style business. So, having given you some ideas about product development last
month, I thought I’d go a step further this month and give you a blueprint for gaining
some more great ideas and then how to go on and develop an affiliate niche online.
This is powerful stuff. So sit tight!
Firstly, if you are just starting out, set yourself an achieveable target. Don’t shoot for
£10,000 / week for starters.
Start small and replicate! Replication is a key idea here.
To start with, target a small amount, say, £50 profit from ONE promotion. Just aim to
make £50 in a day.
Once you are making £50 / day, it opens all sorts of doors. For example, you can now
afford to hire a writer to write products, marketing material and web sites for you.
How much time will that save you? How much more quickly could you replicate if
you had a person to do all of your writing? And that’s just for starters!
You can find writers on Elance and Craigs List.
You see, most people try one thing and if it doesn’t work immediately, they move on
to something else, and when that doesn’t work after 5 minutes, they….well, you get
the picture.
Work on your first promotion until it is delivering at least your target figure. Once
you’ve understood how to make one project work - replicate! This one piece of
information is worth a fortune on its own. I know, I suffered from it for many years.
So, focus on one promotion at a time and get it right and profitable at your target
level.
Now, last month I gave you some ideas on locating niches. If that wasn’t enough for
you, here is a huge list of niches…
http://ezinearticles.com/category-guidelines.html
Have a browse. If you don’t find at least one niche market you can attack after
looking at this little lot, please…unsubscribe. I’m serious.
Dig deeply into your areas of interest and expertise, read the articles, get ideas and
write them down. You’ll find gem after gem in here.
Once you have found an area that you are interested to pursue, go to Clickbank and
search for products in that niche.
Having done that, have a search on Adwords, YSM and Adcenter and see what other
products are out there in the same market.
If you’ve never written an ad before, simply look at the ones near the top and copy
them. Easy isn’t it?
Search Google on related keywords and see what comes up and note down the ones
that bring up the right ads. This will become your list of keywords. Remember to use
“buy” phrases.
Join the relevant products affiliate programs and then create a pre-sell website. These
are so simple to create it’s untrue.
Here’s an example of one of mine for eBook Wholesaler…
http://www.apd-marketing.co.uk/ebwreview.html
Then set up your Adwords campaigns and send traffic to your pre-sell page.
Make sure you track conversions so you know what not to waste money on and make
sure you analyse your results.
Wash, rinse and repeat in another niche or variation of the same niche.
By the way, the templates I’ve started using are part of Stewart McKay’s Adwords
Excellence (AWE) product. It’s still hanging on there as a free membership, but I’ve no idea how much longer he will keep it open. (editors note 2009, sadly Adwords Excellence is no longer with us)
Just a reminder, get along to www.apd-marketing.co.uk/apdrecommendsawe.html and
get signed up. New facilities are being added all the time. I’ve no idea how Stewart
keeps this free, but I’m sure he will start charging soon – he has to!
By the way, that’s three months in a row I’ve mentioned AWE, it is such an
outstanding resource, if you are serious about an online business, you have to have a
membership.
Yes, I know I’m repeating myself, but…it’s important!
Moving on, ultimately you really should aim to develop your own products, but if you
want to get a good start online, affiliate marketing is the way to go…and it’s so easy.
You just have to take action. Get something done, even it it’s not right. Once you
have something “up” you can work on it, tweak it and ultimately get it right.
But…you HAVE to do something! Get something out there, don’t just sit on your
backside hoping something will happen, make it happen. The chances of the lottery
finger pointing at you are 14 million to 1, sorry, but you can’t rely on your numbers
coming up. If they do – good luck.
However, I’m not prepared to trust to luck. I’m not prepared to trust to the vagaries of
the economic cycle (even though, in reality, they are only little economic ripples). I’m
not prepared to rely on the whim of a boss who doesn’t give a toss about me.
I’d rather rely on myself thank you very much. This may make you feel uneasy, but
no apologies given, you need to know (and understand) this stuff.
Over the last two months I’ve given you a great insight into how you can get an
affiliate business off the ground and earning. I don’t like pleading, but I will. Please
use this information and make yourself safe!
Choppy waters may well be ahead, so protect yourself now. Enough said.
That’s it for now. I thought it important to get this content out to you this month in
view of what seems to be happening on the economic front. I’ll try and lighten up a
bit in November!
As always, to your success…
Cheers now and have fun.
Derek
If you feel this information may be of use to someone else, please feel free to pass it on.
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