How We Cracked The Credit Crunch

One unexpected bonus, or side effect, of selling lots of information products via eBay was that I was also, unknowingly at the time, advertising myself to like-minded people. People who were already selling information products, or intending to sell information products, suddenly got in touch with me. Sometimes it was to do a deal on multiple purchases, others asked me if I could locate ebooks on a particular niche. I was starting to become the Mr Fixit of resale rights stuff on eBay….

One such person was Garry Short, as mentioned in a previous post. After exchanging a few emails we started chatting on Skype. We were both interested in creating and marketing our own information products and were bouncing different ideas off each other – this was back in August 2008.

In one of those chats we got talking about the coming recession and the “credit crunch”, how we both saw it coming, how it was going to catch a lot of people out who thought the good times were never going to end. Most people in the media and general population believed the then Chancellor Gordon Brown when he claimed to have “abolished boom and bust” in the economic cycle!

Laughable but……that was our product right there – how to survive the coming economic crisis. At the time the talk was of a “credit crunch”, i.e. the banks wouldn’t have money to lend to keep fuelling the so-called “boom”. Even if they did, the days of 125% mortgages and self-certified mortgages were drawing to a close. We kicked a few ideas around, and settled on a product title of “Crack The Credit Crunch”.

Garry’s background is in the stock markets, mine is in business, i.e. running my own business but I did work a few years in banking before that. So both of us were pretty clued up about this subject, but we both had a quality that our leaders in politics, economics and banking seemed to have forgotten – common sense.

Common sense tells you that if you’re earning £20,000 a year it’s not the best decision to buy a £50,000 Range Rover Sport. It should also tell you that if your own 95% mortgaged house has supposedly increased in value from £150,000 to £180,000 in the last 12 months this does not equate to cash in your pocket. If you sell your house, and it does indeed go for £180,000 AND you go and live under a canal bridge instead of buying another house, then yes this scenario DOES put cash in your pocket.

It is truly frightening the number of people who saw an apparent rise in the equity of their house, then went and borrowed even more and “bought” a nice foreign property. Here in Turkey the coastal resorts are full of such properties, they are now pretty much unsaleable. Anyone who HAS to sell their Turkish dream property in the next 3 years can count on a minimum loss of 50% – I’ve seen the figures and they don’t make pretty reading.

So, back to “Crack The Credit Crunch”. We had enough knowledge and material between ourselves to come up with a pretty good product. My collection of Resale Rights products on my hard drive was then approaching 5,000, including more than enough material about debt management, finances, saving money etc.

We took existing Private Label Rights products, and either rewrote them, combined 3 into 1 or wrote our own brand new product. Since we didn’t want to hand over £5,000 to a copywriter I wrote the sales letter myself. We put the actual web site together ourselves, set up the payment processor, etc. The only thing we outsourced was the graphics – fortunately Garry’s sister is a graphics designer.

This is the result:

Crack The Credit Crunch

(link opens in a new window)

Have a look and see what you think. Although I haven’t written this post to promote this product, I will say this – if you’re struggling with the effects of the credit crunch, if your finances are not the healthiest, buy that product. It’s a quality product and it does work. There’s nothing in there that I haven’t personally applied myself, and that hasn’t benefitted me.

As you can see it’s a 3 part “study course” – covering what we considered to be the most important elements in overcoming the credit crunch – making a budget, improving your credit score and using energy more efficiently to save money.

The whole thing took about 5 weeks from start to finish; I’m sure if we’d known every step needed we could have finished it in less than a fortnight. The copywriting took the longest to do, that was my first real go at writing sales copy. It was a task that I had been dreading but it was actually quite fun to do.

But that’s the beauty of resale rights/private label rights material – the possibilities are literally endless. Someone else could come up with the same idea, even use the same resale rights material we used (highly unlikely) and their product would end up totally different to ours!