Avalanches, Blizzards and Why I Was Ignoring the Recession

Mostly, I was ignoring the recession. I’m just not having a recession-like experience. Mostly by design, but in general, I simply refuse to do it. You have the same choice, though you may not know it.

Why? Because you can choose to have a life that doesn’t correlate to the things that cause recession panics.

The entire market is based on two things, fear and credit.

Why did the stock market plummet? It’s quite literally a public expression of fear by potential investors. I’m no expert there, but look it up. It’s quite fascinating. If you don’t live on a credit basis and you don’t have fear about money, you’re not in a recession. That’s why I’m not in one.

To start with, I changed my life to run on a cash basis this time last year. So either I have cash now, or cash is on the way. I don’t worry about things like credit because I don’t need credit to live.

It can be volatile, sure. Last month, I had a $10K a month account and we stopped working together in a fairly amicable split. This month I will still make about the same amount of money, just from other means. It can be worry-some if you’re not on top of your expenditures, but I don’t live like a miser either. It’s no less stressful than having a 9 to 5 job or a business that relies on credit.

(For disclosure’s sake, I will say much of my money each month is currently sucked up in health costs and paying down two year old business debt. But I live simply so my bills are miniscule. When I have the desire to buy something or take a vacation, I work, market or advertise more, when I’m up to it. But I digress.)

What about fear? If anything the traffic, marketing and publicity business booms in recession because people want to get more out of the dollars they have. Even though it’s lucky that I picked such an area to work in, even if you’re not in industry where recessions cause booms, there’s so many things you can do to survive and even thrive in these times.

But I’m finding more and more that I’m not the only person who came to this knowledge late in the game.

So I’m now paying attention to the recession – because people I care about are paying attention to it.

People like you.

People like my customers.

People like my family and friends.

Notice I said paying attention to it, not worrying about it. For my own situation, and even the fate of the nation, and the world, I refuse to worry. It can’t cause change. I think about what DOES cause change and then I do that.

And all I can think about now is what I can do to change people’s experience of the current financial condition of the world into the type of experience I’m having. Or better, ideally.

So I started to do research. I found something excellent that matched my positive attitude about things. That was Darren’s post about How to Recession-Proof Your Blog. And I realized what I want to do with my “retirement”.

I’m going to refocus my other business blog on businesses that are booming during this time of uncertainty, and point out what they’re doing right.

I’m also going to start the how-to resource on traffic I’ve spoken so much about, likely next week. It took me this long because honestly, all of the knowledge I have will never fit into just one book or even a series of book. It HAS to be a membership site. And I knew I wouldn’t have time to sustain one of this size until I retired from consulting and the internet marketing game.

The site will be focused on two things.

First, I’m going to teach you how to quickly inject massive traffic into your site at first for short term gains.

If it’s one thing I keep hearing, it’s that everyone needs traffic Right Now. Because traffic online is money in its potential form. It’s as taboo to talk about traffic as it is to talk about money. But as you can see, that doesn’t shut me up, and I have lots more to say than I do here.

Secondly, I’ll give you how-to steps for building your own traffic SYSTEM, far beyond what I cover in the Evergreen Traffic System. (Though if you start with that, you’ll have an incredible head start, one that you can get up and running quickly.)

One reason I’ll be doing both is to show what most of us experts on marketing and promotion fail to tell you. I would say the biggest problem I’ve had is in exposing this little known fact. In truth it’s something I assumed everyone knows.

But then I worked with a few people who I thought knew EVERYTHING. And you know what?

Almost no one knows about this. Then there’s a couple of people who think they do, but make one HUGE critical mistake that throws their entire campaigns off.

If you’ve ever suddenly had a traffic drop and can’t figure out what happened, this could be really important for you.

Here’s a quote about the germinating idea:

The fact is, no matter what you’re learning about generating visitors, every traffic method falls under one of these two headings, the Avalanche or the Blizzard.

It’s really important that you know which traffic tactic to target for and how to get the most out of each. If you can’t identify which one you’re using, you will have no idea how to tell if it’s working or going to work, how long it should take, and whether the effects will be short term or long term.

I’m going to talk about the Avalanche and the Blizzard next, and then end with 8 or so things you can do Today to increase your visitors for free. We’ll move the discussion over to the other blog in coming days, and discuss both long and short term tactics for promoting yourself and your business, on and offline.

When I give you the address to the other blog in the next few days, make SURE you sign up. All the information there will be free and may give you ideas of what to do for your business, whether it’s online or not.