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Chapter 7: Types of disasters that may occur and how to deal with them.

There are many different types of disasters that may occur. Whilst a disaster can happen anywhere, some areas are more prone to a particular type of disaster than others. This chapter provides a list of the more common disasters that happen in most places and how you can effectively deal with them.

Floods: Characterized by increasingly rising water levels, generally do to heavy storm activity. Floods can happen just about anywhere in the world. If you feel a flood is likely to occur where you are living, ensure you stay up to date on the current situation by monitoring news reports on the television or radio.

If you must venture out in the midst of a severe storm, be aware that flash flood may occur. Flash floods are characterized by large amounts of water that appear almost instantaneously (i.e. an instant flood with no warning). If a flash flood occurs move to high ground immediately.

If a flood becomes excessive, you may be required to evacuate your home. If you have the time, try to bring in and outdoor furniture or possessions, and place furniture in the highest possible point in the house (ideally this would be upstairs in a two story house). Unplug all electrical equipment from the wall.

If you are walking through a flood, ensure you do not walk through any flowing water, regardless of how shallow it is.

If you are driving, do not drive into or through flooded areas, if you find that floods waters begin to rise around your car abandon the car and make your way to higher ground.

Areas in which flood waters are rising are extremely dangerous. There are many instances in which people have been swept away and consequently drowned.

If you happen to see a person in danger of being swept away, help to the best of your ability without jeopardizing your own safety. Try to help them out of the water by holding out a long rod or stick.

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Another way to distribute your product is to advertise for a student on campus to represent you on a commission basis and be your dealer. Usually there are several students who would love to have the opportunity to make some extra money. A good way to find the right person is by resume qualifications or actually calling them on the phone and talking it over with them. Finding the key person could result in many easy dollars in your pocket.

In the past, some of the biggest sellers on campus have been radio and stereo equipment, music tapes, car repair manuals, study aids, self-improvement booklets and tapes, school fads of various natures, and any kind of special or different steins for drinking beer. Any new idea or product you may be able to come up with could be very advantageous to you in the form of increased sales.

Advertising in college bulletins and newspapers gains more results during the first three days of the week. When ordering advertising, it is best to specify that your ad appear in the Monday-Wednesday editions. Thursday is okay, but Friday is definitely out; minds seem to drift toward plans for the weekend, leaving little interest for purchasing.

Write to the enclosed list of publications. Ask for their rates and circulation. All of them will respond to your needs and many of them will call you and discuss whatever plans you have for advertising. They will work with you to try to see that you get the most response from any type ad you may run.

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Now here is the fun part! Advertising your PPCSE on a budget...

I'm going to tell you straight out, the best way to get new advertiser, new general visitors is to give away free accounts, or free credit with your search engine.

Whether that is a few dollars, or $100, it all counts.

Another idea is to have a free trial period where all accounts are free for the first month, and then you make them pay for their listings the next month. If they were happy with the results they were getting, then they will stay.

But there are two battles for a starting PPCSE: Getting just normal visitors that are there to search and of course the advertisers. Both are just as important as the other.

Just because non-advertisers are not lining your pocket with money, doesn't mean you can neglect them. Without them, you have a useless search engine and advertisers will pull out quicker then you can say Mississippi.

However, when you run a specialty PPCSE, you don't get as many advertisers, but what you do get are larger sums of money. So, please for the love of god, do not treat advertisers like they are a dime a dozen.

If they need help setting up their account, HELP THEM ANYWAY POSSIBLE! When they are happy, you are happy, that is your motto.

Running a PPCSE is really a people person job and while I doubt you will ever see one of your advertisers face to face, you need to have great customer service.

So how do you go about finding not only advertisers, but also the non-advertising crowd?

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After serious contemplation, you’ve written your goals, broken them into sub-goals, charted your action plans and started implementing the carefully planned steps. However … but … still … yet … there are those mixed feelings, distractions, or some stumbling blocks you are facing that are casting doubts … should I go on … is something wrong?

Here’s Carol’s experience with this; something you might easily relate to. What did she do?

Carol had enrolled for a German course. Her objective was clear. She was working at a firm, which had its corporate office in Germany. Employees with fluency in German get a chance to work at the corporate office for a year. An opportunity, if used properly, that could result in a promotion.

The language course was six months long and it involved giving up on some precious weekend time both for classes and coping with assignments. And, Carol was a very popular girl.

In the first month, everything went okay. But in the second month, those invitations she had been rejecting looked more and more appealing. In the third month, the German course became a real pain. She was also not doing well in her classes.

Finally, her friend who had been silently observing her distress pointed out, “Do you really want the certification or not? If not, forget it. It’s better to waste three months than six months.” Carol’s instant response was, “You do not understand…”

“Well, I might not but in the last month, you have been taking out your frustration on everyone around you. Your classes are also suffering. It’s either letting go three months more of weekend fun or the German course. At this rate, I do not see you getting the certification. It requires an honest effort to study languages if nothing else,” her friend replied.

It was decision time for Carol, and she understood. She opted for finishing the German course for the chance to work in Germany and the opportunity for promotion looked more attractive.

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Another way to co-op deal in mail order is by co-op advertising. High Mountain Advertiser and Popular Advertiser are both long running co-op publications. You place your ad the first time through a dealer and all future ads are 50% less. Then you have the option of mailing pre-printed copies with your name in the publisher's block as an authorized dealer. When other people order advertising, they will send their orders to you. You keep 50% of the money and send the rest (along with the order) back to the publisher. This way, you can have your 8 1/2x11 circulars printed and mailed in a publication at a 50% savings.

Coal Publishing, 27 South 4th Avenue, Highland Park NJ 08904 also offers co-op advertising in their "Small Business Keeps America Growing" tabloid. For the low cost of $35 per tabloid-size page, you can have your 8 1/2x11" circular along with four 2-inch ads printed and mailed to a whopping 5,000 circulation. All you are responsible for is the mailing of 200 of them. Any beginner can handle mailing 50 per week to a mailing list or to their own customers. Besides, no one can offer you a 5,000 honest circulation for this price. This is a real money-saver!

If you market the direct mail method, it's a good idea to send a good circular you plan to keep around for awhile to a mail order printer and have 1,000 printed on 1 side. Then, you can use the back of 100 or so for testing purposes of other circulars. Run down to the copy shop and run the circulars through the copier by printing on the back side. Only run 100 or less and send them to the best names you can find. If they pull orders, you may have a winner and can have 1,000 printed. Nothing is more annoying than being stuck with 1,000 circulars with something you want to mail on one side and something outdated on the back.

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Affiliates. At a commission rate like we set for your smaller product, it's very likely that yesterdays joint ventures started to pull in some affiliates for you. What great about this is the people lists that you've got often contain people just as successful as your existing affiliates for the simple reason as keeping track of what’s going on and seeing all the new products first, getting in there early for promotion purposes, and so on. Understand that you don't need a massive number of affiliates to promote for you to start pulling in some real numbers and some real resources for yourself.

Think about this. Every affiliate that effectively promotes for you increases your promotion power by one hundred percent. Just twenty five good affiliates pulled in over a few products totally excluding your joint ventures, increases your promotion power by 2500%. When you look at things this way, you can start to see how even people with limited resources, and small numbers of people flowing through their systems make so much money in short periods of time, and why their resources grow at such an incredible rate. You've now formed a new base for your future promotion-people to make money for both you and themselves. What could be better?

You now also have the start of a list. Again, this will form the base of any of your future product launches. Depending on how successful your joint ventures were, you may find yourself with a thousand subscribers after a couple of weeks, maybe two, three thousand, maybe five, ten or more. Finally, your own media outlet. It’s becoming clear how people get their large lists in short periods of time. Granted, some spend many years building them up, but a short sharp burst per product launch is always nice. Keep doing this every launch and your numbers will never go down.

Not only that. Yet you should now have some customers coming through your smaller product, again, depending on the quality and number of your joint ventures- the numbers will vary greatly from business to business. At this point, I highly doubt that you'll come back with no sales at all. If you have, you should first check to make sure your ordering process is working correctly, then check your ad copy, and then question the quality of your joint ventures. With a 100k circulation to quality personal lists, if you get no sales, I'll be shocked to say the least.

These people buying your smaller intro product are going to take some time to read through and head over to your larger product, and of course not all of them will buy your larger product anyway, but still, you have the start of a list of people ready to buy your products and ready to pull their wallets out for a quality piece of work. These will eventually go on to form the basis of your long term customers.

So you see how your resources are starting to build themselves up. Through a few simple joint ventures (or not so simple, I've seen some rather strange deals go down in my time), you've started to build your future business, the affiliates have started to build your future business, so has your list, and so have your customers. You've got a lot going for you at this stage, and we haven't even mentioned joint ventures as long term deals that will inevitably come from those, so let’s get back to the business days and finish sorting things out.