The world financial situation is getting worse and worse each week, and each day seems to bring even more bad news. There is a huge crash on the horizon which is probably going to make the GFC of 2008 seem pretty insignificant.

Here is an article from yesterday which covers some interesting points:-

Will the bad financial news ever stop?  A lot of people in the financial world were hoping for a much better fourth quarter after an absolutely disastrous third quarter.  Well, if Monday was any indication, October could end up being a really rough month for global financial markets.  So much bad financial news keeps pouring in that it really is a challenge to try to keep track of it all.  Greece seems to get closer to defaulting on their debts with each passing day, and it appears that Germany is not going to contribute any more bailout money beyond what they have already committed to.  Major banks on both sides of the Atlantic are on the verge of collapse, and investors all over the world are afraid that we may have another “Lehman Brothers moment” soon.  Shares of American Airlines dropped a staggering 33 percent on Monday as rumors that they will soon be entering bankruptcy swirled.  Yes, things certainly are getting interesting.  Back in 2008, the governments of the western world saved the financial system with gigantic bailouts that were absolutely unprecedented.  If the financial system crashes again at some point in the coming weeks or months, will the political will for more bank bailouts be there?  If not, what is going to happen to the banking system?

On both sides of the Atlantic, the big banks are highly leveraged, they have taken on a ton of risk and they are very deeply exposed to derivatives.  It is as if virtually nobody learned any lessons during the financial crisis of 2008.  Once again we are facing a situation where if a couple of financial dominoes fall it could send dozens of others tumbling to the ground.

Some very significant things happened on Monday.  But the media has gotten so used to reporting on tremendous financial instability that Monday’s events mostly got brushed to the side.  Instead, Amanda Knox captured most of the headlines.

But the reality is that some really, really monumental stuff has been going down.

The following are 14 facts that just might scare the living daylights out of you….

#1 On Monday, the Dow was down 258 points.  Lately it seems as though the Dow has been going up or down by several hundred points almost every single day, and that much volatility is not a good sign for the health of the financial system.

#2 Shares of Wall Street banking giant Morgan Stanley fell by another 8 percent on Monday.  Overall, shares of Morgan Stanley have declined by more than 50 percent since February.

#3 Bank of America stock dropped down to $5.53 a share on Monday.  Just a few years ago, it was trading for more than $50 a share.

#4 There are reports that Goldman Sachs may actually show a loss for the third quarter of 2011 and that yearly bonuses for employees may be slashed to next to nothing.  Yes, not too many people are going to have sympathy for Goldman Sachs, but this just shows how bad things are getting out there for the big Wall Street banks.

#5 Normally Goldman Sachs is quite upbeat, but lately they have been coming out with some really frightening reports.  For example, a new report from Goldman Sachs declares that there is a 40 percent chance that we are entering a “Great Stagnation“.

#6 Shares of European banking giant Dexia plunged by about 10 percent on Monday on rumors that it will soon need a significant bailout.  The stocks of major banks all across Europe have been getting absolutely hammered for weeks.

#7 Shares of American Airlines fell by 33 percent on Monday on rumors that the airline is about to enter bankruptcy.  Amazingly, trading in the stock was stopped 7 different times on Monday.

#8 It is being reported that approximately 240 pilots for American Airlines have retired in the last two months alone.  All of those pilots are retiring so that they can shield their pensions from the upcoming bankruptcy filing.

#9 Nearly the entire airline industry got hit really hard on Monday.  Shares of United Continental, U.S. Airways and Delta were all down more than 10 percent.

#10 Overall, U.S. stocks fell by 14 percent during the third quarter of 2011, and now the fourth quarter is off to a very rocky start.

#11 The incoming head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, has publicly admitted that major European banks are having “funding problems“.  Just like back in 2008, we are rapidly heading for a giant “credit crunch”.

#12 A shocking new Bloomberg survey has found that approximately one out of every three international investors expects a “global economic meltdown” within the next 12 months, and 70 percent of them believe that the global economy is “deteriorating”.  Perhaps they have been reading The Economic Collapse Blog too much.

#13 Financial markets in Europe were rocked on Monday when it was revealed that Greece is not going to hit the deficit reduction targets set for it either this year or next year despite all of the severe austerity measures that have already been implemented.  Needless to say, a lot of financial authorities in Europe were very displeased by this news.

#14 German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble is publicly declaring that Germany will not contribute any more money to the European bailout fund.

The truth is that the political will for more bailouts has totally dried up in Germany.

The recent vote by the Bundestag to approve money for the European rescue fund should not be misinterpreted.

That vote simply approved money that was part of a deal that was agreed to over two months ago.

What is more important is what many major German politicians said after the vote.  Essentially, the overwhelming consensus is that Germany is done contributing money.  Once the money is gone from the current bailout pool (which is not anywhere close to what is really needed), there will be no more money from Germany.

That means that the era of the bailouts in Europe is drawing to a close.

In a recent editorial, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard described the situation in Germany in this manner….

The furious debate over the erosion of German fiscal sovereignty and democracy – as well as the escalating costs of the EU rescue machinery – has made it absolutely clear that the Bundestag will not prop up the ruins of monetary union for much longer.

Horst Seehofer, the leader of Bavaria’s Social Christians, said his party would go “this far, and no further”.

Let that last phrase sink in.

Basically, what politicians all over Germany are saying is that Germany has now done all that it is going to do.

The implications of this are huge.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard recognized this in his editorial.  In fact, the usually reserved journalist actually used all caps for six straight sentences and broke out some very strong language that is very uncharacteristic for him….

Repeat after me:

THERE WILL BE NO FISCAL UNION.

THERE WILL BE NO EUROBONDS.

THERE WILL BE NO DEBT POOL.

THERE WILL BE NO EU TREASURY.

THERE WILL BE NO FISCAL TRANSFERS IN PERPETUITY.

THERE WILL BE A STABILITY UNION – OR NO MONETARY UNION.

Get used to it. This is the political reality of Europe, since nothing of importance can be done without Germany. All else is wishful thinking, clutching at straws, and evasion. If this means the euro will shed some members or blow apart – as it almost certainly does – then the rest of the world must prepare for the day.

Basically, this is his way of saying that “the sky is falling” and that the financial system of Europe is doomed.

If you have followed the writing of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard for any length of time, then you know that he is one of the most respected financial journalists in the world and that he is not prone to indulge in much “doom and gloom”.  For him to say what he did is very significant.

But even if there were no financial problems in Europe, the United States would probably be slipping into another recession anyway.

Right now our economy is a total mess, and all kinds of people are coming out of the woodwork and are trying to take credit for “calling” the upcoming recession.

Some of the pronouncements are so bold that you would think that some half-crazed blogger wrote them.  For example, just check out the following quote from a report recently put out by the Economic Cycle Research Institute….

“Here’s what ECRI’s recession call really says: If you think this is a bad economy, you haven’t seen anything yet.”

But do the American people really need some experts to tell them that we are going into another recession?

The American people know what is going on.

According to one recent poll, 90 percent of the American people believe that economic conditions in the United States are “poor”.  According to another recent poll, 80 percent of the American people believe that we are actually in a recession right now.

So perhaps the American people are actually ahead of most of the so-called “experts”.

In any event, economic conditions in the United States continue to get worse.  The average American family is having a harder and harder time getting to the end of each month.  According to a Harris Interactive survey taken near the end of last year, 77 percent of all Americans are now living paycheck to paycheck.  In 2007, the same survey found that only 43 percent of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck.

At least Barack Obama is not talking so much about an “economic recovery” these days.  When asked recently if Americans are better off today than they were four years ago, Obama said the following….

“Well, I don’t think they’re better off than they were four years ago.”

Finally, something that we can all agree with Barack Obama about.

Sadly, things are about to get even worse.

Pay close attention to all of the bad financial news that keeps pouring in.

Just like in 2008, something really big is happening.

When the current bailout fund in Europe runs out in a few months, things could really start to unravel.

If Greece (or any other eurozone nation for that matter) defaults, it could set off a chain of financial events so catastrophic that it just might scare the living daylights out of all of us.

Let us hope for the best, but let us also prepare for the worst.

Tremendous fear and panic has gripped the financial world, and the underlying problems causing this crisis are not going to be solved any time soon.

We are about to enter unprecedented territory.

Hold on tight.

~~~~~~~End of article ~~~~~~~~~~

The European financial markets are all holding their breath whilst Greece is in the throes of another possible bailout. The Greek PM has a no confidence vote today, of  which the outcome will affect the markets, and could spark off a chain of events. Several other European countries such as Spain, Italy and Portugal are having major financial problems.

The USA  is at the end of QE2 and Bernanke is going to have to continue printing money to keep the markets afloat, or they will no doubt go into a fast downward trend and that is the last thing the Fed wants.

They are caught between a rock and a hard place, they have to keep printing which will most likely bring on hyperinflation in the near future or if they don’t keep printing and decide to go into austerity measures , the cutbacks will need to be so severe that a depression will be imminent.

Either way they go the outcome looks grim, and the only real protection for the average person is to buy gold or silver which will rise in value in either situation.

So please take action to insure your future during the next few years, build passive income streams online, and invest in silver or gold.

Getting visitors to your website is one skill that internet marketers have to master, and this is an area that you will be constantly working on.

Once you get the visitors to your website, this is where you need to be effective in a totally different skill set, that of writing a sales page that will convert.

I’m not talking about a squeeze page now, but a sales page that is actually selling a product and not an opt in. If you are promoting affiliate products initially, you will not need to write a sales letter, but eventually you will most likely want to create your own products and then you need to sell them.

Writing good copy is an art in itself, and copywriters spend years developing this skill, so how can you shortcut the learning process and write your own salesletter?

There is a formula to all good salesletters and the formula works.

You can find good salesletters and study them to see what the ingredients to the formula are and as an internet marketer this is really time well spent.

However to get started, there are a couple of systems that you can tap into to make the process much faster, and less painful.

The first system that I have used is one by Brett McFall who is a professional copywriter and has written thousands of salesletters for clients and himself.

This is a piece of software that will guide you through a salesletter and you simply fill in the blanks as you go along, and at the end you have a completed salesletter. It will take just a couple of hours and you are done.

Another system is an eBook by my friend Randy Smith, a successful internet marketer who has outlined how to write your own salesletter in a step by step system. You can check it out here.

Once you have written a few salesletters you will get a handle on the formula for them and it will become easier.

After learning this skill, you can then adapt it to make a video salesletter which can be more engaging and effective, test and measure with different styles to see what works best.

If you are just starting out online, one of the quickestways to get your own product created that you can market is to interview an expert.

Generally people get started by writing an ebook, which is a great way, but it takes a long time. I have written a couple of ebooks and they take weeks to write.

If you can find an expert to interview instead, you can have a product created in hours rather than weeks. It may take a little while to locate an expert who will agree to doing an interview, but if you ask enough of them you will find someone who agrees.

One area to find experts is people whose products you already know and like, if you already have a relationship with them this will make it easier and they are more likely to agree.

If you don’t know anyone, then you can find experts from places like Amazon, people sell books on Amazon and are not always making as much as they would like, and would love to be promoted.

There are websites such as www.RTIR.com where there are listings of experts who are wanting to be contacted.

You will need to make the interview attractive to the expert by offering joint ownership rights to the interview, and also tell them how many copies you will distribute and how you will do it. They want to know “WIIFM” – what’s in it for me. They will get publicity and you need to spell it out to them, and obviously follow through with your promotion.

Once you get the interview, make the most of it by planning your questions and give the expert a copy of the questions in advance of the interview, so he doesn’t get any surprises.

You can use the content of the interview to create more than one product, it can be an audio, you can have it transcribed into a manual, you can also make a video with a powerpoint slideshow to go with it.

Please leave a comment below if you have any.

Have you ever wondered why there is a printscreen button on your keyboard, or have you used it, copied into paint and been disappointed with the results? The paint tool reduces the quality and you end up with a low res image.

Well if you are running vista there is a snipping tool that does a far better job, and much easier, but if you still run your computer on XP as I do, then you don’t have that capability.

A little tool I found and have been using has been giving me excellent results, it’s called Greenshot. You can get this tool free from sourceforge here.

Greenshot will let you capture as much or as little of the screen as you want, and then allow you to edit it before saving to a usual image file, or simply copying and pasting to your document.

You can edit your screen capture using drawing tools to add text, arrows, highlighting, blurring, circles etc. that will make your image useful to your document reader.

For instance you may be writing a report that needs an illustration with the major points highlighted so your reader doesn’t miss it,  see the image below which shows what it can do.

Have fun.

When I first began marketing online, I had a chosen product and had set up my systems, and things were ticking along very slowly.

Leads were not coming in as fast as I wanted them to. You can probably relate to this

After a month or so of very poor results I began to get really focussed on what it was that was going to make me the most money in the fastest possible time.

Essentially I realised that I had to create a growing number of leads, or opt-ins, and that I must focus my energy on ways to continually drive more traffic to my site. I set myself a target of x number of leads for the following month.

Now if you have been around internet marketing for even just a short time, you will know that there are a multitude of ways to get traffic to come to your site.

I realised that I could spend a lot of time trying to generate traffic with free traffic strategies, or I could just bite the bullet and start buying traffic.

Because I am an impatient type of person, I decided to focus my energy on Google Adsense pay per click ads, and by focussing on one particular strategy I could really get to fine tune what I was doing.

With my energy totally focussed, I soon reached the goal that I set for myself, and the leads began converting into sales, which then allowed me to be able to afford to set a larger goal for the following month.

I kept repeating this process and before long my online business was making huge profits that I had never imagined possible.

If I had not focussed my energy into one strategy, then I don’t believe I would have experienced the early success that I did.

I could have ended up spending a lot of hours trying to write articles,  setting up ad swaps, doing all the different strategies that the gurus teach, and not really achieving the goals that I wanted.

My message from this is that you really need to have a good look at what you are spending your time doing, what results are you achieving, and what can you do to improve your results.

Facebook fan pages are a way that you can create some extra interest in whatever you do, whether you are a famous act or football team, or just a small business looking to get some more eyeballs on your website.

With the way Facebook is growing at such a massive pace, it will be a good move to jump on the bandwagon and get even just a tiny piece of the action.

So how do you go about getting your own Facebook “like” page or “fan” page?

It’s not so hard when you know the right people who show you exactly how to do it step by step.

I have just been through this exercise and set up my own Facebook like page, and I am giving away the same information on my page that I used to build it. The best part is it won’t cost you a penny.

Even if you don’t have any experience whatsoever in  building web pages, this step by step system with videos showing exactly how to do it will help you have your own fan page live in just a matter of hours, or much less if you have some website experience.

So here is a link to my Facebook page where you can get the free report and then access the live videos to show you step by step how to build your own fan page.

Facebook page click here

P.S. the system has a built in way you can make some extra money as well.

Did you hear the recent news that S&P have downgraded the US financial system?

The US dollar has been dropping like a brick and it’s been well orchestrated by the Federal Resesrve (which isn’t Federal) and it’s chief Ben Bernanke.

During the GFC crisis trillions of dollars of taxpayers money were handed in secrecy to the banks, and they were the ones responsible for the cause of it. The banks have continued since to hand out massive bonuses to themselves using our dollars.

The dollar is being diluted due to the Fed printing more and more of it, and the Fed are lining the pockets of the super rich, because it’s they who own the Fed.

Normal people are going to really suffer the effects of all this extra money in circulation, because it is driving inflation higher and higher which means your dollars buy less and less each week and month.

What can you do about it? If you do nothing, your standard of living is just going to keep going down. You will not be able to afford those luxuries anymore, and many will struggle just to buy groceries.

There are a few things that you can do.

I have already talked about insuring your future by investing in silver in other blog posts, and this is a great way to protect your assets and also profit from hyperinflation. But you may not have much cash to be able to invest it in silver. (at least buy a few coins…please)

The next thing that you can do is to start creating multiple income streams that will bring in extra cash, by setting up websites that will be automatic sales machines. You can learn how to do this and start to make them produce income before the inflation gets out of control.

My blog is dedicated to helping people get started making additional income streams online, you will find all the tools you need here to create your own online business.

Invest in your future by learning how to build your own online business, a business that is not restricted by geographical boundaries, and a business with unlimited potential for growth.

Don’t get suckered by the hype of those ads claiming you can learn to make millions overnight, the only people who get rich from those are the people selling them.

It takes time and study to build a real business, but if you have the determination, then just do it.

Both Gold and Silver have gained a lot of ground this week, have a look at this daily chart of silver below, which closed the week on 22nd April.

In my opinion silver is the best investment opportunity in the current market cycle, with a view to hold until it has a huge blowoff top, that will be when you can buy a median priced house with maybe between 200 oz and 400 oz of silver, possibly within the next 2 years.

Since I began sending silver updates to my subscribers in November last year  when it was around $26 an ounce, it has now gone up to $46.70 an ounce, in just 5 months.

Thats a growth of 80% in 5 months.

Silver is starting to pick up momentum, and has a long way to go,  even though it looks high. Once it breaks through the old top at around $50 it should start to go up a lot faster, but there will be a lot of volatility with big swings in price, where you will be able to buy on dips.

Subscribe to my blog for more updates, and don’t forget, you can start investing in silver with just one ounce, and keep adding to it.

Have you had a hard time getting Adwords to be profitable?

Driving traffic from pay per click ads is probably the fastest way to get traffic to your new website, and so it’s really worth while trying to make it work, but it can also get very expensive if you don’t optimise your ads very well.

It’s not an easy way to get low cost traffic using Adwords text ads, it takes a lot of testing and measuring, fine tuning, and patience. It can get very frustrating trying to make it work at a cost effective rate.

A faster way to get affordable traffic from Adwords ads is by using Adwords banner ads. These are different sized banners you produce which link back to your site, and Google display them throughout their content network.

You simply get a few different sized banners made, then create an Adwords ad using an image ad instead of a text ad. You load up some keywords, Google then gives you some website options to display on, and you choose how much per click similar to normal text ads.

The main advantage of these ads is that you will quite often have no competition where your banners get displayed, unlike the text ads where there is always hot competition. So your ad will stand out and get attention.

I have found that I can get a lot of traffic using these banners at very affordable rates compared with text ads.

There are a few banner sizes which work really well in these ads, some of the smaller and medium sizes, square and rectangular, but not the larger ones that go across the top or bottom of the page.

Make your banners attractive to get peoples attention, but not too flashy as in flashing buttons etc because Google might not approve these. Put female smiling faces on them, arrows and buttons with a call to action, and always give a free offer.

Your keywords when setting up the ads need to be relevant, but not so closely grouped around your seed keyword as in the text ads, so you can actually use a really big list of keywords. So use the Google keyword tool, or any other tool, to get together your keyword list and drop in a big list.

You can build a big list of websites  to display your banners on using the placement tool inside the ad builder, and then test and measure the results as you would normally do with text ads.

I use a professional company to get my banners made and they will create a range of sizes quickly and affordably for about twenty bucks a banner, click here for banner details.

Have fun with this strategy, it’s a really cool alternative to the text ads.