There has been a tremendous response to the first article on what to sell during a recession and it has sparked a number of interesting conversations. One of these conversations revolved around the topic of how people who have filled their lives with luxuries like expensive cars, clothes, club memberships, etc. satisfy their urge for luxury when they lose the means to support the habit.

The answer to my question is: Little Luxuries!

My wife calls it “Lipstick and Lacy Underwear Time.” When women who normally buy Coach handbags and Prada shoes fall on hard times, they console themselves with ‘affordable luxuries’ like expensive lipstick and lingerie. They are able to buy something expensive for its product category, but the category itself is far cheaper than what they have been buying - so they can still lead that life of mini-extravagance without going bankrupt.

There are hundreds and thousands of these ‘affordable luxuries’ that people will turn to during the hard times. Gourmet coffee and candy treats tend to do well. Magazines about expensive lifestyles also sell. Memberships in places like CostCo will be on the rise as people look to get a little more for a little less. Trader Joe’s affordable gourmet foods will satisfy the urge for many. And other low-cost luxuries like sunglasses, watches, and (of course) lipstick and lingerie will become the focal point for people looking to ‘treat themselves’ to a little something special.

How To Capitalize On The ‘Little Luxury’ Mindset

The best way to capitalize on this mindset of ‘little luxuries’ is to simply rewrite the marketing copy for the things you are selling right now. Position your existing products and services as ‘affordable luxuries’. Encourage people to ‘treat themselves’ to your products because they are far more valuable that what is being charged.

Simply re-framing the perception of your product can shift the mental gears of your customers and give them permission to spend a little money with you.

Of course, you can also create products that are designed to supply many of the feelings of luxury at reduced costs. Or, you could simply reduce the costs of buying your products.

Another tactic that may work instead of lowering prices is to allow payments to be made in installments so that the initial cost of purchase is much lower.

I am responding to the recession with a special low-priced offer of some of my best selling products designed to help people create and grow their own information publishing business.

Instead of waiting until ‘things get better’, I want to help people develop the skills to ‘make things better‘ by starting a new business. Information publishing is a very inexpensive business to start and the profit potential is significant. I make money from it every day - so I know what I’m talking about.

The ‘Recession Buster’ Package is On The Way

I’m working on a special “Recession Buster” package that is going to put together an amazing collection of products for walking anyone through the process of starting up their own information publishing business. It will be available to subscribers of the IM Insights newsletter in a few days. (Only newsletter subscribers will receive this offer, so subscribe to the free course using the form on the right side of this web page to get the sale announcement. You’ll get an awesome e-course too!)

Keep watching your emails, the ‘Recession Buster’ package will only be available for 4 days. So, you’ll need to move fast to take advantage of this amazing deal (over 75% off of my normal sales prices.)

Real value is created in our economy when people like you and me create new and valuable products and sell them to others who need them. As our businesses grow, we pay for things like payment processing, web hosting, and software. We also hire bookkeepers and other folks to manage our business. We purchase computers, video cameras, audio recorders, and more to create new products to sell. And, the list goes on.

In short, it’s people like you and me getting to work that will ultimately start rebuilding this shattered economy. I hope, through the “Recession Buster” package, to help you get a jump start on doing your part without breaking the piggy bank in the process.

Don’t let a recession get you down. Let it inspire you to create instead.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us on the web at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com to sign-up for the newsletter and receive our powerful e-course titled “The Six Secret Weapons of Power Persuasion.”

The financial news is pretty clear these days: The United States economy is in a deep recession and the world economy is coming along for the ride. To many, it seems like a bad time to try and sell products online - but they couldn’t be more wrong.

An interesting thing happened on ‘Black Monday.’ As the bottom fell out of the stock market and trillions of dollars in investor wealth vanished into thin air, I actually had a pretty good day in my information publishing business. I made sales as an affiliate, I sold some products from my own product line, and I earned income from ads on my various blogs and websites. (Of course, I lost plenty of money on my investment portfolio!)

People may change their focus and priorities during a recession, but they don’t stop buying things.

When people are feeling ‘rich’ and there is plenty of cash and credit floating around, you don’t have to try hard to sell products. Even lazy marketers can make a few bucks riding trends and copying other people’s marketing methods.

But, when fear grips the markets (and people’s wallets) you have to have spend a little more time and energy to find or create the products that will sell.

What Will People Buy Right Now?

Think for a minute about what your friends and family are discussing right now when it comes to the economy and their jobs. Many are probably trimming back spending on ‘luxury’ items. Others are trying to stretch the useful life of products they have been just throwing out and replacing in the past.

Instead of a new car, it’s new brakes on the old car. Maybe you know someone who is learning to cook and bake from scratch to avoid the cost of expensive pre-packaged foods in order to stretch the grocery money a little further each week. You may even know people who are scrambling to trim their lifestyle and sell off non-essential items in their homes to keep up the payments on a house after their spouse lost a job.

In every one of these cases and more there are opportunities for smart marketers. Information about car repair, selling on eBay, and meal planning are easy sells in a difficult economic climate. You can also teach people how to make things for themselves to save money (think knitting, sewing, crochet, woodworking, etc.)

There is also a huge market for ‘frugal living’ resources. These folks may not like to spend money on store-bought cleaning products, clothes, and packaged foods, but they will buy inexpensive info products that teach them how to make their own versions of popular products for pennies.

Plenty of people are in desperate need of credit and budget counseling too. It is amazing how few people actually know how to create a household budget and use it. I don’t know many. You can get away without this kind of knowledge when times are good, but when the money pool dries up, these are the skills that keep you from going bankrupt. If you know anything on the subject, now is the time to get that information into a product.

The ‘Recession Buster’ Package is On The Way

I’m working on a special “Recession Buster” package that is going to put together an amazing collection of products for walking anyone through the process of starting up their own information publishing business. It will be available to subscribers of the IM Insights newsletter in a few days. (Only newsletter subscribers will receive this offer, so subscribe to the free course using the form on the right side of this web page to get the sale announcement. You’ll get an awesome e-course too!)

Keep watching your emails, the ‘Recession Buster’ package will only be available for 4 days. So, you’ll need to move fast to take advantage of this amazing deal (over 75% off of my normal sales prices.)

Real value is created in our economy when people like you and me create new and valuable products and sell them to others who need them. As our businesses grow, we pay for things like payment processing, web hosting, and software. We also hire bookkeepers and other folks to manage our business. We purchase computers, video cameras, audio recorders, and more to create new products to sell. And, the list goes on.

In short, it’s people like you and me getting to work that will ultimately start rebuilding this shattered economy. I hope, through the “Recession Buster” package, to help you get a jump start on doing your part without breaking the piggy bank in the process.

Don’t let a recession get you down. Let it inspire you to create instead.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, visit us on the web at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com to sign-up for the newsletter and receive our powerful e-course titled “The Six Secret Weapons of Power Persuasion.”

The Underachiever Method is an Internet marketing system developed and taught by Frank Kern and Ed Dale.You can now get the Underachiever Method training absolutely Free - keep reading to find out more.

A little background info first. I was one of the folks who waited by my computer with credit card in hand and rushed to send Frank Kern $2k when the Mass Control training course was offered in early 2008. Once inside the course I discovered a lot of very cool bonuses including the complete video training from the Underachiever Method seminar that Frank Kern and Ed Dale held in Australia. Frank used the promotion for that course as one of his case studies in the Mass Control course, and threw in the full content for fun!!!

In addition to plowing through the Mass Control content, I made some time to watch the Underachiever Method training as well.

Fast forward to today! I’ve been following along with Ed Dale’s free 30 Day Challenge course and I discovered something pretty cool…

Ed Dale’s 30 Day Challenge is essentially the same process he and Frank Kern used to taught in their Underachiever Method course - with updates, of course!

The basic Underachiever Method process is this:

• Find niche market to test
• Test the marketplace
• Create product or choose a primary affiliate product
• Sell your product with a sales page

Ed tweaks some of the basic steps and also integrates the huge number of networking and syndication tools now available on the web, but the core process is identical.

The lessons on finding a niche market are basically the same. The videos in the 30 Day Challenge are very detailed and there is no ‘missing information’ that you have to buy in order to make the process work.

The original Underachiever method recommended putting up an “ask campaign”. You bought traffic and sent it to a website with a short survey on it. If there was enough traffic and interest to validate the market, you went and made a product. The current refinement of the process involves quickly building a blog and promoting an existing affiliate product on it. Then, you use social bookmarking and other web 2.0 tactics to direct traffic to this site rather than pay-per-click ads.

Like the original training, if the test performs well, you then build a product of your own for the niche and start selling it.

In addition to this core strategy, Ed also provides an amazing series of lessons on the subject of social marketing. He demonstrates, in detail, how to use tools like Friend Feed, Facebook, and Twitter to develop a huge network of connecting points where your audience can connect with your messages. He shows you how to use each social networking tool for the task it is best at performing. This content is worth check out on its own.

You are probably wondering (like I did) why in the world Ed Dale would give away all of this training for free. Well, get a few days into the training and you start to see him promoting different tools and services - all of which he’ll get a commission from, I’m sure. But, he always shows you how to get the job done with free tools, so you are never stuck if you choose not to buy something. Plus they also provide several free trials for critical tools so you can use them during the challenge and then later pay for them after you achieve your initial success. I downloaded the trial version of Marketing Samurai and wasn’t required to give away anything more than me name and email address.

Another bonus for Ed is that everyone he teaches is connecting to his network of RSS feeds and email lists. So, that valuable collection of Internet marketing newbies will surely be worth many dollars in the future - particularly when they credit Ed Dale with their first real business success online.

So, if you’ve missed out on all the big product launches this year because you didn’t have the thousands of dollars required to get onboard, jump on the 30 Day Challenge training. There is great content here for the intermediate marketer and it is absolute gold for the novice.

I still recommend it for the advanced marketer as well, but more for the purpose of watching how Ed Dale uses the YouTube video platform to pull in new participants, how he organizes a highly polished presentation of the content on his website, how he builds a subscriber base by teaching people how to use the tools, and how he uses Twitter and his blog to keep the story going during the 30 days. It’s a well designed and operated program.

The 30 days is already underway, but you can go back through the previous content and get caught-up pretty quickly. Your effort will be rewarded.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this review, visit us online at www dot go-to guy enterprises dot com.

Jeff Walker is launching the 2.0 version of his “Product Launch Formula” and you can be sure that he is employing the principles of “Mass Control“.

One of the things that has become appearant to me as a student of Frank Kern’s “Mass Control” course is that he is very closely connected with the biggest names in the Internet Marketing world and people like John Reese (Traffic Secrets) and Jeff Walker (Product Launch Formula) come up frequently in the conversations. These guys all seem to work with each other on their launches and their personal marketing processes are interconnected. As a matter of fact, one of the bonus videos I got as a student of “Mass Control” is of Frank Kern presenting the core concepts of “Mass Control” at one of Jeff Walker’s “Product Launch Formula” seminars.

So, you can be sure that Jeff Walker will be using “Mass Control” techniques during his launch (he’d be crazy not too!)

You can learn a lot from watching the launch sequence he uses and then reverse engineering the process. I recommend you sign up for his lists and save any emails he sends you in a swipe file (one of the training resources that Frank Kern uses in the “Mass Control” course are the email sequences he used for some of his big launches - very enlightening.)

Like a lot of launches you have seen recently, the first public communication in the process is a free video designed to stimulate your desire for the results promised by the “Product Launch Formula” course. His core affiliate/JV network (I’m an affiliate myself) quickly blasted emails out to the Internet Marketing community driving visitors to the video and encouraging them to sign up for the mailing list to get more case studies and free info about the “Product Launch Formula.”

In all honesty, I was disappointed with this first video. The Stomper launches and Frank Kern’s “Mass Control” launch all gave very practical and actionable content in their desire building videos. Jeff Walker mostly focussed on case studies and talking about results. I was waiting for him to drop a big insider tip and it never came.

Watch the first video in Jeff Walker’s launch promotion and sign up for the mailing list. Then, study the emails and videos that follow. There is a very specific and well thought out sequence happening. Every email and video has a specific purpose. As you watch and read the launch information, ask yourself what Jeff is trying to do with this email. Is he stimulating your desire for the product, is he revealing his personal side so you feel like you know him (and get to like him), is he reminding you how many people are waiting to get the few copies available, is he giving proof that his system works? Each communication is designed to stimulate a psychological sales trigger and move you through a decision making process that leaves you making up your own mind that you ‘must have’ the “Product launch Formula” course.

This is precisely what Frank Kern did during the “Mass Control” launch and it was the reason why I felt I ‘must buy’ the course when it went live. This stuff works.

If you are a fellow “Mass Control” student, Jeff Walker’s “Product Launch Formula” launch will give you a chance to see the process in action. If you are not a student, I recommend you purchase a copy of the “Mass Control Revealed” interview that I have for sale on this site. Listen to Frank Kern explain the core concepts behind “Mass Control” and then study the “Product Launch Formula” launch sequence and look for the techniques that Frank Kern talks about at work. Chart out the sequence and what each email and video is doing. Then, when the launch is over, you’ll have a good outline to use to build your own launch sequence.

Be sure that there is much more to the “Mass Control” training and Jeff Walker’s “Product Launch Formula” than what you will learn through this reverse engineering exercise - but you will experience a massive shift in your marketing knowledge just the same.

So, go watch the “Product Launch Formula” free video and sign up for the mailing list so you start getting the emails. Then, study what you get. Remember, no matter what the emails say, nothing ‘just happened’ and nobody ‘just thought of something’ to tell you. Every communication you get is part of the plan.

If you are listening to the podcast version of this article, we invite you to visit our website at www dot go to guy enterprises dot com for more valuable Internet marketing insights.

Product Launch Formulas

My online business continues to grow and mature. I’ve been making a number of investments in infrastructure over the past few months (new hosting, aweber autoresponder service, etc.) and today I purchased a copy of Roboform to store my passwords and login info for all of the affiliate sites, payment processors, blogs, and other accounts I use on a regular basis. I’m already benefiting from the increased speed created by not having to manually type in login data over and over.
More on RoboForm Saves Me Time And Money

Clickbank has long been a favorite marketplace for selling digital products. Apart from managing the sale and delivery of e-books and software for publishers with very little upfront costs, they manage an army of affiliates who will promote a publisher’s products for a commission on the sale. Now, they have added recurring billing to their services!

More on Clickbank Now Offers Recurring Billing