smashing times
If you’re a long time reader you’ll know that I’ve always been accident prone.
According to research reported in New Scientist magazine I’m not alone: 1 in 29 people have a 50 per cent higher chance of being involved in an accident than the rest of the population, and I’m certainly one of them. Though strangely I walked away without a scratch from the craziest, most dangerous thing I’ve ever done, which was crouching down in the middle of the Ball of Death (back in my newspaper photography days) while stunt riders raced around and above me at high speed on motorbikes.
In the past 15 years, and this is in no particular order, I’ve been:
# drenched in acid (luckily a diluted one) and raced to hospital where I had the embarrassment of my clothes disintegrating and falling off in front of dozens of people while I stood there screaming in agony.
# bitten by a vicious fish which wouldn’t let go and had to be cut off my body with a knife, and also badly stung by a jellyfish.
# stepped backwards into a freshly dug grave and nearly stayed there for ever.
# fallen out of a helicopter which was flying almost on its side so I could get better photographs of a crashed fighter jet. Sounds dramatic but I was on a 6 foot safety rope so all it did was jolt me around and terrify me and the pilot.
# attacked by bats in a cave in the Borneo jungle, and had to be tested for various bat borne diseases. Why the bats ignored my companions to zoom in on me is a mystery.
# gassed by fumes from ancient disintegrating negatives in a newspaper office after attempting to carry them out of the building to protect my colleagues (after I collapsed the building was evacuated and it took 3 firemen in full chemical protection suits to remove the negs) and had to be raced to hospital where I was given three sponge baths by nurses but was too out of it to enjoy the experience 
and spent several days there recovering.
# ended up in hospital yet again when I got my head sliced open by a high-speed ceiling fan and fell to my knees with blood squirting everywhere. Many stitches later, and after a night in bed, they decided I was well enough to go home but I fainted before I’d left the hospital and they had to keep me another night
# suffered severe whiplash while riding on the hood of a speedway car.
# tossed and then crushed by a rodeo bull. This was my worst injury and put me in intensive care for a while, followed by 6 weeks unable to get out of bed.
So why am I telling you all this?
Well, why not? :) And I’d like you to get to know me better
But the main reason is that I had another bad accident. Just a few days after writing my previous newsletter I fell off a ladder and smashed myself up quite a bit, and I’ve hardly been able to do anything for the past two months.
Luckily my feet were only about five or six feet off the ground when the ladder tipped backwards, and I landed flat on my back on the lawn (lawns are hard in Australia because of the dry soil). But I still couldn’t get up for about 10 minutes, maybe longer. I guess I’ve got no idea how long I actually laid there. And I couldn’t stand up, I had to crawl to the house.
Even though I landed on my back/shoulders and banged my head, it’s my front that got hurt. I self-diagnosed myself with cracked or broken ribs and didn’t go to the hospital because I know from past experience that there’s nothing they can do about them. A few weeks ago I finally gave in and saw a doctor, who told me off for not getting attention earlier, and discovered that I’d ruptured ligaments where my ribs attach to my sternum, cracked a couple of ribs, and tore muscles around my left shoulder and in my side. ( my back, strangely enough, has been fine )
Anyway, I’ve hardly done any work since I fell, because of the pain, and from being so tired all the time (whenever I turned over in bed the pain made me wake up).
But now, at last, I’m recovering.
I can see now how people can get killed falling short distances. I’d hate to think what would have happened to me if I’d fallen just twice as far.
So what’s all this got to do with internet business?
Well nothing actually
Except, perhaps, my own theory that I have so many accidents because I’m always willing to try new things. Even though I might not look it, I’m an action man :) A life is for living, and never say no if I think it will be fun, person.
And it’s the same online, where I’m always testing new methods of earning. Always trying exploring new, or undiscovered, niche markets. Always trying new tools and new techniques. The Internet changes and the bottom line is that you need to adapt with those changes or be left behind.
Important Note: having said that, I’d also like to add that it’s very important that you don’t just jump from one new trend to another so fast that you never achieve anything. So do take time out to try test new methods, but keep your core business running, and only devote part of your time to exploring different ideas or new trends.
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Speedppc - pay per click marketing at warp speed
Two years ago, give or take a couple of weeks, I was sitting in a Starbucks on Pennsylvania Ave in Washington DC, with a ‘guru’ Internet marketer I won’t name, and a young unknown called Jay Stockwell.
We’d just seen a presentation on PPC (pay per click marketing) and you could see in Jay’s eyes that a fire had just been sparked, and that he was burning with enthusiasm and eager to get back home to Australia to start work.
During that presentation, something had just clicked, and Jay already knew that his destiny lay with PPC.
Since then the un-named guru has gone underground, vanishing from the public eye because of his huge PPC success, and Jay has gone from nowhere to a pay per click millionaire, and creator of SpeedPPC, the best PPC software in the world.
SpeedPPC was publicly released in the middle of last year to critical acclaim, and a few months later, when Jay flew back to America to a PPC seminar, 8 out of the 9 speakers used and recommended SpeedPPC, most of them openly during their presentations.
Today Jay, and his business partner the legendary affiliate marketer Allan Gardyne, have released the next generation
of the software.
And based almost completely upon user feedback from those PPC masters, they’ve taken it up several notches to previously undreamed of levels of automation and speed.
If you’re already into pay per click (and the vast majority of successful affiliates and product owners are) you’re almost certainly already using SpeedPPC, so make sure you upgrade immediately because it’s got some brilliant new features.
And if you’re new to pay per click, or you want to try your hand at it, I’d go as far as saying that without the automation and speed that this software delivers you just can’t compete.
It gives you the ability to turn pay per click professional in one swift step. It’s that good.
And this launch week there’s the added incentive of $100 off the price, and also 12 months access to Jay and Allan’s private in-house Clickbank data mining tool.
This is an unreleased tool that they use themselves to follow the trends in CB, to see what products are emerging and getting popular, and then lets you export that data directly into the SpeedPPC landing page datafeed software.
Sounds complicated doesn’t it?
But just about everything in SpeedPPC is automated, and what it means is that it finds the next successful product in CB, sucks it into it’s robotic innards and creates an advertising campaign around the product, and then automatically builds a landing page/squeeze page and puts it all up online for you, while you think of making yourself a cup of coffee but then realize you don’t have time because SpeedPPC has already finished its work and raced off into the kitchen to put the kettle on.
(note: SpeedPPC doesn’t just work with Clickbank products. That’s just a bonus )
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my brother the writer
My younger brother Richard has just written his first book. It’s called High Density Gardening, and it’s all about no-dig, deep-bed backyard vegetable growing. If you’ve ever thought of growing fruit and vegetables in your back yard this is a perfect book. Even if you only have a couple of square feet to spare.
As far as I recall, gardening is a subject I’ve never written about before. That’s because it doesn’t fit in with the general theme of this newsletter, and also because gardening is something I have little interest in.
Perhaps that’s because gardening is so easy here in the sub-tropics. As easy as throwing a half eaten tomato, or just about
anything else with seeds, off the balcony into the garden and then a few months later going down and picking the crop.
Anyway, if you’re a gardener in less hospitable climes than mine, I’d like to recommend it to you. It’s well written, and gardeners are enthusiastic about it.
Well known Internet marketer and gardening enthusiast, Martin Avis, says:
"I sat down to read and was immediately absorbed. Your writing
style is very personable and down to earth, (pardon the pun), and I
was hooked from page one.I learned a lot from your book - things that I knew but hadn’t really
understood and things that I didn’t already know. I even learned a
whole new way of laying out a vegetable patch that I’d not even
suspected before - but will put into action on my plots right away.
The only problem with your ‘High Density Gardening‘ was that once
I started reading I couldn’t stop - and lost several hour’s gardening
time this afternoon! Still, with what I’ve learned, it will have been time
very well invested."
Martin Avis.
By the way, Ric is looking for affiliates, so if you have a well trafficked gardening site (or you use SpeedPPC ) you can get in touch with him at highdensitygardening AT googlemail DOT com
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Facebook friends
John Reese caused quite a stir recently when he emailed his super-sized lists inviting his subscribers to become his friend on Facebook, and in just a few days reached Facebook’s self-imposed maximum of 5000 friends.
As a spin-off other Internet marketers on Facebook gained new friends, as people new to the site started using the Facebook tools to send out their own invites, and I got dozens of requests .
The whole thing has been an excellent example of how viral marketing works. Personally I’ve been on Facebook for around 6 months, after joining out of curiosity, and although I haven’t embraced it as passionately as some of my fellow Internet marketers I must admit that I find it fascinating at times and spend longer there than I should.
So here’s a little invite from me: if you’d like to become my Facebook friend you’ll find my page here.
