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Last September I held my now-famous “Autoresponder Seminar” in Chicago, which as it turns out, was only days before the stock market went into free fall:

Here’s a video from the very first 10 minutes of the seminar, talking about “Let’s say a bunch of big banks and stuff start going out of business and let’s say people are getting on TV on a presidential debate and they’re saying, “This is the worst thing since the depression!”

I go on to talk about how online marketers will go on to survive and thrive:

Do you have a sales page that’s not doing as well as it was a year ago?

In my professional opinion, even a sizzling sales letter written by a pro copywriter only packs 25-50% of the punch that you actually need to get the job done.

On April 15 my wife contacted our accountant to make sure he’d remembered to file an extension for our taxes.

Three days later she got an email back from him that said, “Yes, I did file the extension, and of course I went home at 6pm on April 15.”

An accountant who goes home at 6pm on tax day?

Are you kidding me?

That sounds like a punch line to some kind of stupid joke.

“Chinese Water Torture” is the term I affectionately use to describe the drip-drip-drip of a great autoresponder.

A powerful autoresponder carves deep grooves in your marketplace. It leaves permanent, indelible marks.

Chinese Water Torture eventually gave us the Grand Canyon.

It will give YOU the Grand Canyon, too.

The #1 asset in your business is your customer list.

Therefore your #1 business tool is the software you use to manage and talk to your customer list.

Choosing a platform for this job is no trivial decision. The importance of this cannot be overstated. The ease and profitability of everything you do in your business over the next few years rides on it.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a huge industry: SAP, PeopleSoft, Goldmine, SalesLogix, ACT!, Oracle, Salesforce.com, SAS. Big companies.

Online, there is the whole issue of sending emails out to customers. Managing and delivering email is a whole world unto itself. That’s why companies like Constant Contact and Aweber exist. Those companies are email-only CRM and they’re growing like crazy.

Why? Because keeping yourself off spam blacklists and getting your email delivered is a full time job.

Yesterday I heard an interesting statistic that jobs are being lost at a clip of 600,000 per month…

AND new businesses are being started at exactly the same rate: about 600,000 per month.

Uncle Sam is not going to save anybody’s bacon, despite all the claims to the contrary. There are a lot of dying industries in America and all the duct tape and bailing wire in the world won’t save ’em.

You know what’s going to save peoples’ bacon?

My “professor of harsh reality,” Dan Kennedy, was a great teacher of marketing techniques when I was an up-and-coming Marketing Maniac.

Most people can learn most of the marketing techniques they really need to know in a few years.

The reason I still hang out in Planet Dan after 12 years is because Dan is also a great business philosopher.

Some Dan-isms that have deeply affected my own thinking about money, wealth and prosperity:

A student asks:

“How can one get experience with ppc campaigns, in order to help real brick-and-mortar companies afterward, if you don’t have your own product to promote? I already have the knowledge about Adwords, but i need where to apply it.”

“WANTED: Slightly obsessive ADHD person with 2-5 years experience in as many of the following fields as possible: Alchemy, Multi-Tasking, Creative Writing, Strategic Planning, Project Management, Salesmanship, Website Design, Pay Per Click Advertising, Direct Marketing, Quality Control, Purchasing, Product Development, Management of Psychotic People, and Herding of Cats. Apply between 10:30 pm and 2:30 am any weeknight….”

As best I can guess, that’s pretty much YOUR job description right now, as it would appear in a classified ad.

Right?

Only an entrepreneur would be crazy enough to apply for such a job.