Issue #2250
- WEALTHY: 22 startling predictions (Michael Masterson)
- HEALTHY: Another reason to load up on blueberries (Kelley Herring)
- WISE: Dick Clark on trends
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- "Ready, Fire, Aim" marketing (MaryEllen Tribby)
- Tap into this powerful human emotion to get more sales (Clayton Makepeace)
- It’s Good to Know… about the air we breathe
- Add "pugilism" to your vocabulary
Confidential Report: Disillusioned Trader Opens "Money-Floodgates" to YOU…
Rob Banks Legally… With an Inside Job!
Are You Ready for a "Smash and Grab" on the World’s "Hidden" Money-Mountain?
Great! The getaway car’s leaving…
"I don’t set trends. I just find out what they are and exploit them."
Dick Clark
22 Startling Predictions for 2008 and Beyond
January is a time to look ahead and make predictions.
As I look ahead, I can see one major trend. And it’s one that will have repercussions for the economy as a whole. That trend involves baby boomers. Boomers have been a major factor in consumer spending, saving, and investing for 50 years. So it’s likely they will continue to be. In fact, they will probably affect the economy for the rest of their lives – for the next 20 to 25 years.
If you accept this premise, the following 22 predictions may make sense to you:
1. Baby boomers will get poorer this year. They lost half of their retirement nest egg when the tech bubble exploded. And they have been losing much of the rest of it as real estate prices come down. This will continue in 2008. Credit will be harder to come by. Banks will get tougher with loans. And the many businesses that took stock in the real estate boom will continue to implode.
2. Scared by their shrinking wealth, some boomers will make one final, frenzied attempt to "get back" the wealth they never really had. They’ll scrape together their last dollars. They’ll borrow money. And they’ll use it to make high-risk, leveraged financial investments in such things as currencies and commodities. The greediest sectors of the financial services industry will benefit, temporarily, from this short-term trend. Later, they will suffer from it as their customers disappear.
3. As 2008 ends, boomers’ speculative investments will fail to rescue them. So they will grudgingly accept the fact that they will never be as wealthy as they wanted to be. They will feel defeated, and they won’t have the energy to start anew. As a result, they will drastically decrease their discretionary spending.
4. Following the boomers’ lead, consumer spending in general will slow down. The Fed will do what it can, but it won’t be enough. Lower credit rates won’t be enough to stimulate the economy. Growth will slow. Businesses will continue to go bankrupt at record rates.
5. With decreasing revenues on one side and increasing fixed costs (related to real estate) on the other, retail will be especially hard hit. Many, if not most, medium-sized retail businesses that exist today will be defunct within 10 years.
6. On the bright side, Internet spending will continue to grow. But the growth will be much slower than in the past. Lots of opportunities will allow people to make money by marketing products and services on the Internet. But many of those who are in business today will go bankrupt as the market becomes more competitive.
7. Estate homes and multimillion-dollar condominiums will tumble in value, even below current prices. Many will be left vacant. It will take at least seven years for many of the properties that have been built in the past two years to be occupied. Investors in these properties will be wiped out.
8. More than 80 percent of the existing real estate development industry will go bankrupt.
9. Following real estate development will be the larger part of the banking and financial services industry. Thousands of young investment bankers and hedge fund managers will be out of work. This could happen as early as the middle of next year.
10. As the U.S. economy slides into a protracted recession, baby boomers will recognize that they are poorer than their parents were when their parents were in their early sixties. Without the appreciation of a house to cash in on, they will give up their long-held dreams of retiring comfortably at 65.
11. Luxury will be uncool. Understated elegance will be in.
12. The campaign against conspicuous consumption will accelerate. Twelve-cylinder cars will be ridiculed and possibly outlawed entirely.
13. Hippie values will return. Peace and love and blue jeans will prevail… simply because baby boomers won’t be able to afford to indulge themselves materialistically as they have been doing for 40 years.
14. Technology and the baby boomers’ shrinking wealth will favor products that are simple and small.
15. The wristwatch will begin a 20-year disappearing act.
16. Yoga, meditation, and Pilates will continue to increase in popularity. Aerobics, weight training, and kickboxing will diminish.
17. Yachts, luxury automobiles, and Learjets will stand in warehouses, unused.
18. Migration to the Sun Belt will slow because of hurricanes and high prices. Local Sun Belt municipalities will be forced to lower taxes. Services will decline.
19. Technical jobs will continue to be outsourced to India and Latin America. And in the U.S., boomers will start to agree to work phones and read X-rays for minimum wage.
20. The information-publishing industry – particularly the specialized information-publishing industry – will continue to grow, outpacing the general economy. Entrepreneurs who understand the difference between information, advice, and opinion will make fortunes.
21. Direct marketing will continue to grow as general advertising declines. Businesses that are unskilled at direct marketing will have a tough time staying competitive. Many will fail.
22. Boomers will "decide" to continue working during their retirement years. But many of them – lacking the skills to contribute to the Internet, information-publishing, or direct-marketing industries – will go unemployed.
Those are my predictions for 2008. But what good are such predictions? Can they make you any money?
I don’t know. I do know a few things about investing in trends, though. Lessons I’ve learned from a lifetime of starting all sorts of businesses. For example:
- You can make the biggest money on a new trend that emerges quickly and grows strongly… if you get in early.
- It’s difficult to predict new trends with precision. You can sometimes see that a certain change is inevitable, but it is often difficult to know when it will happen. Usually, it happens later than you expect.
- For any given day or week or month, chances are good – some studies say 70 percent – that things will remain the same the following day or week or month. That’s why it doesn’t usually pay to play trends in the stock market. Unless, that is, you know what you’re doing or are getting good advice from someone who does.
- The sensible way to invest in trends is to buy into good businesses that provide neutral or positive cash flow. That gives you a Plan B. You can sit out short-term fluctuations while you wait for the long-term trend to take hold.
- Sometimes even medium- and shorter-term trends are more obvious. This is especially true on the downside. Such is the case with the baby boomer driven economy today.
Emmett, a friend and business partner in real estate development, doesn’t like it when I speak negatively about the future of the economy, and real estate in particular. He feels like I am being disloyal to the businesses he is running. He would rather have me encourage him to go full steam ahead. He seems to feel that if I were more positive, things would get better.
"I hope you’re right," I tell him. "But no amount of hoping is going to make the U.S. debt go away. And no amount of positive thinking will get people to buy property if they don’t have any money and can’t get credit."
"Anything you can conceive, you can achieve," he tells me.
"So long as you achieve it before you go broke," I reply.
Hope for the best. But make your business plans based on a realistic assessment of current trends. Hoping against hope works in fairy tales. But in the real-life world of business, it’s better to put aside the rose-colored glasses.
If I am right about the future for baby boomers, it won’t be the end of the financial world. People who are smart enough to put their time and money into developing industries (such as direct-marketing, information-publishing, and Internet-related businesses) will do well. Others, like my friend Emmett who lives in Never-Never Land, will get poorer.
[Ed. Note: One of the best ways to find financial freedom is to start your own business. In his brand-new book, Ready, Fire, Aim: Zero to $100 Million in No Time Flat, Michael Masterson shows how veteran and rookie entrepreneurs alike can take their businesses to the next level. You'll learn how to identify and solve the problems that crop up during each stage of a company's growth... and how to take advantage of profit opportunities along the way. Click here to order your copy now.]
An Opportunity To Skyrocket Profits In Your Business
I’m talking about the opportunity for you to profit massively. I’m also talking about a once-in-a-lifetime chance to learn fortune-building business secrets.
Jay Abraham knows nearly 100 different ways (that you probably don’t know) to more successfully sell your products or service – offline or online. He knows over 50 ways to make more money from the same effort, time and opportunity just by changing the marketing strategy and approach you follow.
Anthony Robbins says, "One idea Jay gave me in the first hour increased our company’s marketing effectiveness by more than 100%."
If you want to start making a ton more money and have a clear, direct path to real prosperity and business wealth, you owe it to yourself to look into this program.
- Patrick Coffey
Marketers: Tomorrow Is Your Enemy
By MaryEllen Tribby, ETR’s CEO & Publisher
Every time I ask Connor, my seven-year-old son, to pick up his bedroom, his reply is the same: "I’ll do it tomorrow."
Unfortunately, this way of thinking is not only innate in seven-year-old boys but in many business owners. And it can single-handedly kill a business.
Speed is crucial when it comes to making money. Yes, you need to give yourself adequate time to plan your marketing campaign. But once you have set your launch date, you have to keep to your schedule.
It seems like such a simple task, yet most marketers simply can’t do it. They believe that by tweaking the headline, the offer, or some other aspect of their copy, the marketing effort will pull in more customers. But guess what? It doesn’t.
All they have done is delayed getting orders in the door.
A mail date is like a hotel room. If you don’t fill the room today, you lose the money you could have made on that room today. Same thing with your marketing campaigns. If you aren’t selling today, you can’t make the money you could have made today.
Now I’m not saying you should send confusing, unclear, or boring copy out the door. Nor should you pay anything less than the utmost attention to detail. But there comes a point of diminishing returns… and that’s when it’s time to say "Let’s roll."
Here’s what you can do the next time your copywriter says, "If you just give me until tomorrow, the promotion will be so much better." I want you to take the copy EXACTLY as it stands at that moment. Then test it against the copy he submits a day (or a week) later. I can almost guarantee you’ll find that the response is practically the same – and the only thing you will have accomplished by waiting is lost sales.
Ready, Fire, Aim. It’s not only the title of Michael Masterson’s new book… it’s the marketing philosophy we live by at Early to Rise.
The Astonishing Power of Guilt and Absolution
Most of us do things we know we shouldn’t. Or don’t do things we know we should. Same is true of our prospective customers.
And most of us (as well as our prospects) are pretty sure that, sooner or later, we’re going to get what we deserve. So we regret our sins – and that feeling of regret is called "Guilt."
Now guilt, as it turns out, is one of the most powerful of all human emotions. And every prospect is a walking, talking bundle of guilt. He feels guilty that he hasn’t always eaten right or exercised. That he smokes or drinks too much. That he doesn’t provide well enough for his family (conservative guilt) or that he earns "too much" (liberal guilt).
No matter who we’re selling to, these guilty emotions are resident in almost every one of them. When he thinks about these failings (or when our sales copy gently reminds him), his remorse turns to fear and becomes dominant – a driving force capable of moving him to action. And when we show him how our product absolves him of his sin and suspends the consequences of his shortcoming – the urge to buy can become almost irresistible.
[Ed. Note: Clayton Makepeace has spent the last 35 years creating direct-mail, Internet, and print promotions that have sold well over $1 billion worth of products. He publishes the highly acclaimed e-zine, The Total Package (www.makepeacetotalpackage.com) to help business owners and copywriters accelerate their sales and profits.]
A Berry Smart Way to Prevent Colon Cancer
New research indicates that pterostilbene – which is found in blueberries – shows promise for the prevention of colon cancer.
Researchers at Rutgers and the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS) teamed up to investigate pterostilbene’s cancer-fighting effects. In the study, rats were given azoxymethane – a compound that causes colon cancer. Half of the animals were then given a balanced daily diet, while the rest were given the same diet supplemented with pterostilbene.
At the end of the eight-week study period, the rats that were given the supplement showed 57 percent fewer pre-cancerous lesions in their colons than those in the control group.
Make delicious, antioxidant-rich blueberries a mainstay in your diet. A great way to keep them on hand is to buy them frozen. Then just thaw and enjoy!
[Ed. Note: Kelley Herring is the founder and CEO of Healing Gourmet (www.healinggourmet.com), and is editor-in-chief of the Healing Gourmet book series. Learn more about how simple lifestyle choices can improve your health by reading ETR's free natural health e-letter.]
It’s Good to Know: What’s in the Air We Breathe?
Take a deep breath. You just took in life-sustaining oxygen. But that’s not all. Air is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, and less than 1 percent carbon dioxide. It also has trace amounts of other gases and, depending on your environment, several contaminants. These can include exhaust fumes, factory smoke, or smog, which contain cancer-causing formaldehyde, benzene, and ammonia. With each breath, you could also take in minute quantities of insect pieces, dust mites, space dust, fungal spores, human skin cells, paint particles, fabric fibers, and much, much more.
(Source: Sixwise)
Turn A Single $100 Investment Into A $2,000-A-Week Profit Machine
In the next seven days, 4,589 people will leave their jobs, never go back… and have all the money they will ever need.
I would tell you that these people are “very lucky,” but the fact of the matter is that there is no luck involved.
It’s happening everywhere. Ordinary people – including people who never finished school – starting their own businesses… and making in the neighborhood of $40,000… $60,000… even $100,000 or more a year.
Even though all these people are “ordinary” in some ways, one thing is certainly “out of the ordinary” about them:
Many used the same secret to start a business on less than $100. You can do it, too. Here’s how.
- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Pugilism
"Pugilism" (PYOO-juh-liz-um) is a fancy way of saying "boxing." The word is derived from the Greek for "fist."
Example (as used by Gordon Marino in a New York Times review of A Life in Boxing by Angelo Dundee): "As this book attests, being a professor of pugilism can be a stressful way to make your daily bread, since there will be contests in which you have to ponder not only strategy but also the health and perhaps life of your fighter."
[Ed. Note: Become a more persuasive writer and speaker ... build your self-confidence and intellect ... increase your attractiveness to others ... just by spending 10 VERY enjoyable minutes a day with ETR's new Words to the Wise CD Library.]
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2008
Similar Articles:
- Christmas Predictions for 2009 – Builders make plans. Entrepreneurs make goals. Gamblers make bets. Fools make predictions. I am qui…
- Dear ETR: Will Baby Boomers Cause a Stock Market Crash? – “As the baby boomers retire, will the selling of their 401(k)s for retirement income have a downward…
- Follow That Boomer! – The two surefire ways to make money off boomers is now down to one. But that one way looks stronger …
- A Boomer Industry That Could Make You Rich – Aging baby boomers are driving a multibillion-dollar market, according to a recent study by MarketRe…
- Consumer Spending Is Going to the Dogs – There are 65 million pet dogs in this country; 77.7 million cats. 39% of U.S. households have a dog,…
- Unhealthy Investments Are Best – What trumps a stalled economy? Demographics. And what are the two biggest demographic trends today? …
- Attention Dog and Cat Lovers: This One’s for You! – I’ve been trying to persuade my sister, who loves pets, to get into the pet business. There are so m…