Learn how to be Successful on Ebay with PlanetSMS Monthly

PlanetSMS Monthly by John Thornhill is a new mentoring program with a difference

Many new online marketers are joining programs and sites that claim to 'mentor' people to success, So is PlanetSMS Digital Monthly Mentorship any different to so many that don't provide value, Or is is one of the few that do?

I may be slightly biased in favour of this program - because I have bought products from John Thornhill in the past and he always over delivers and offers great support for those, You might want to check some of his products such as Auction Profit Streams to get an idea of the quality of his products before commiting to a monthly fee...


The first thing I noted from reading his site is that John Thornhill, known on ebay as planetsms, isn't just promoting it as another 'make money from ebay' type of product. He does use his Ebay id as part of his credentials as a person qualified to teach others, as well as the fact that he has authored some best selling ebooks and is an ebay powerseller.

What he says about 'the secret to success' being to follow someone who is successful at internet marketing can't be argued with, (provided they are teaching what they know and do to make money on the internet)

This monthly membership goes a lot further than just the mention of selling on ebay though.It claims to teach exactly what John does to generate multiple streams of income from the internet marketing arena in general.

What is included in the membership?

Audio/Video Training - to show and 'walk us through' what he does and the strategies he employs.

A Digital Newsletter Delivered to Your Inbox Each Month - in which he reveals methods he actually uses to make money, and admits many of them are not just from ebay.

The Tools Required to Help You Succeed - he includes in the package the tools and private label/ brandable material he says will be needed for some one to start their own online income.

A Monthly Question and Answer session - this promises to answer any marketing related questions

The Opportunity to Get Personal Help - offering to have direct contact with subscribers/members to help them where needed (but only on a limited number basis) - so I would assume this may be removed at some point?

And Also - Almost Guaranteed Income. Where he is offering to promote members products to his subscriber base, in order to help generate them some sale. (I note he does have some small print in there - only promising to promote appropriate products)This presumably covers him against any obligation to promote poor quality or non related products?

Finally his price for membership is set at $10 per month. (this is where I believe he differentiates himself from many mentoring programs I have seen - most go for the higher end price ticket - this does seem exceptional value if he lives up to his claims) For which he also offers a money back guarantee. (presumably with it being a clickbank product - he will have had to offer such a guarantee) Never the less it is comforting that one can 'Try' him out without risk or fear of loss, knowing that if he doesn't provide quality and value he would soon be out of pocket.

See the site for more details

So that's the sales page and claims outlined, with a few comments from myself where appropriate. As a brand new service - time will tell if he continues to provide value...But I can say this much - I have had access to his first Video Newsletter and can confirm that he does go into great detail of a strategy he is currently using. He gives details of exactly how to set it up for maximum profit, with a step by step follow along video that any new marketer could easily follow. Clear and simple and with a full explanation of where he did what he did, how to do the same etc.

He then went further than expected and showed exactly how much income and sales this strategy provided from his own business and also for comparison, a new marketer with a smaller list and less experience and no product of his own.

I do believe this will help many and was sufficient to justify the first months subscription without any of the other benefits quoted.

I genuinely believe this could be a valuable resource and it certainly looks as though planetsms digital monthly mentorship will be a keeper for me.

My recommendation would be to join and try it out. with the money back guarantee the small $10 risk is removed. I believe new and intermediate marketers will find value and benefit in the first issue.

Visit PlanetSMS Monthly Mentorship for more information.

Please feel free to post your comments if you found this review useful.

Where have I been for the last couple of months?

I have been neglecting my blog over the last couple of months for various reasons. In February I had the misfortune of being selected for jury duty, which ended up lasting almost 6 weeks, then the accused decided to plead guilty! A wasted 6 weeks for me, especially since I am fully self employed and prefer to spend my days working online! After that I had a week of fun and shopping in Orlando.

I have also been involved in numerous new projects over the last couple of months which have been taking up a most of my time.

My friend Ken Troyer launched the PIPS Power Group back in February. This is a membership site that provides online coaching and training for owners of the Plug-In Profit Site and I am one of the six mentors. We provide our members with personal coaching via an online forum, lots of bonuses including phone consultations, discounts on co-ops and services, free ebooks and reports, a step by step plan of action for success and we also try out products and services to save our members wasting money on things that may not work. If you have ever fancied being coached to success online then pay a visit to the PIPS Power Group to see what other members are saying about it. You will also be surprised at how affordable our coaching is.

Another project I have been working on, which is also related to the Plug-In Profit Site is Website Update Services. On this website I provide affordable website customizations and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) services.

All of this has kept me very busy, but hasn't given me much of a chance to update my blogs ona regular basis. This is all going to change and I hope to be back to blogging normality from now on!

How to Create a 301 Redirect

For SEO purposes you may want to ensure that if someone types in the URL of your website without the "www", that it will redirect to the URL with the "www". E.g. I may want to redirect http://homebiz-direct.com to http://www.homebiz-direct.com

This will ensure that search engines see each of these links as the same and may boost your link popularity.

It is quite easy to make this change. All you need to do is edit your .htaccess file. This file can be found in the main directory on your web server.

Just add the following four lines to this file:

For a 301 redirect you will need to edit your .htaccess file. This can be found in your webepanel in the file manager (or in the main directory if you are uploading by ftp).

Edit this file and add the following lines to it:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebsite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/$1 [L,R=301]

In each case replace yourwebsite.com with your own domain name. The third line does not have the "www" but the fourth line does.

Happy New Year and Making Money with Autoresponders

Happy New Year! It's the 3rd of January and I am still recovering from the all the New Year celebrations! To save me thinking for myself today, here is a guest article from Stone Evans, otherwise known as the Home Biz Guy. In this article you can find out how to use autoresponders to make you money on autopilot.

The Home Business Marketing Strategy That Has Never Failed
Copyright © Stone Evans, The Home Biz Guy
Plug-In Profit Site

Today I'd like to share with you the strategy I used when I first got online many years ago to generate automated income from home. This strategy still works today. You can use it to sell your own products or you can use it to sell other people's products as an affiliate or partner. It can work in practically any niche market.

The theory is simple. Build a list of people who have given you permission to email them about a particular topic and then send relevant information and special offers to those people promoting products and services that you are selling. This is a very easy way to make money.

The first thing you need to do this is a tool called an autoresponder. An autoresponder is simply a tool that collects subscribers for you and gives you the ability to email those people in mass. For example, with an autoresponder you can type an email message saying anything you want, load it into a field that looks just like the text area you type any normal email into, click Send, and your message will be delivered to all your subscribers instantly addressing each one on a first name basis. This could be just 10 people or it could be thousands, even millions.

When you use an autoresponder to send a message promoting a product you are selling to a targeted group of subscribers, you have a very good chance of making sales if what you are offering is something that your subscriber database is interested in.

From my point of view, a lot of the information and systems available online which try to help people make money are over-complicated and often mis-guided. The same simple formula for making money online that worked for me (someone with no previous experience) almost 10 years ago is still working today and it's very, very simple to apply. In fact, I'll walk you through the steps I use (and so do many, many others) to pull in automatic profits 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year like clockwork.

The first thing you need is an autoresponder. You don't even need your own website for this. There are many good autoresponders on the market. One that I use is called GetResponse which you can take a look at:
http://www.freegetresponse.com/

This is the autoresponder I use to deliver my Home Business Secrets Mini-Course at:
Plug-In Profit Site

As you'll see if you subscribe at the site above, my free mini-course will be delivered to you automatically by email as if it's written to you personally. This takes no effort from me (other than writing the messages in the first place) to deliver this mini-course to you and thousands of other valued subscribers using an autoresponder.Another autoresponder I use is called AutoResponse Plus. You can check it out at:
http://www.autoresponse-plus.com/

The difference between GetResponse and AutoResponse Plus is that GetResponse does not require you to have hosting. It's hosted for you. AutoResponse Plus requires you to have your own hosting account where the company will install the software for you directly. Also, when it comes to building a mailing list, GetResponse provides an in-house service to build your mailing list for you called Get Subscribers which you can see at:
http://www.getsubscribers.com/

If you are using AutoResponse Plus, you would need to use a third-party service such as List Builder Pro to build your mailing list:
http://www.prolistbuilder.com/

This brings me to the next step of the process of making money on autopilot with an autoresponder. You need subscribers. The fastest way to build a permission-based list of subscribers of people who are interested in what you have to offer is called co-registration. That's what the Get Subscribers and List Builder Pro services provide. All the details about how these work can be found at:
http://www.getsubscribers.com/ and http://www.prolistbuilder.com/ respectively.

Once you know about these services, the steps to make money online are really very simple.

Step 1) Get an autoresponder.

My 2 favorite autoresponders are:
1. GetResponse: http://www.freegetresponse.com/
2. AutoResponse Plus: http://www.autoresponse-plus.com/

Step 2) Order subscribers.Here's 2 reputable co-registration services:
1. Get Subscribers: http://www.getsubscribers.com/ (works exclusively with GetResponse)
2. List Builder Pro: http://www.prolistbuilder.com/ (works with AutoResponse Plus and most other autoresponder in the market, not GetResponse though)

Both of these service can be setup to add subscribers to your autoresponder automatically without you needing to lift a finger. Just go through the guided setup process when placing your order and they will take care of the rest.

Step 3) Make an offer.
Send valuable information and special offers to your subscribers on a regular basis. This is a simple process for making money on autopilot that has never failed me.

In the beginning, I didn't have a lot of money to invest in advertising. That was a good thing. It forced my mind to think about and discover what technique had the lowest risk associated with it. You see, I figured that if I purchased 500 co-registration subscribers, all of these people were mine to contact as often as I wanted until they either bought something from me or unsubscribed. So in the case of Get Subscribers, today I need to pay $189.95 to get 500 guaranteed subscribers. That's 500 people who have given me permission to email them as often as I want. Do you see how powerful this is?

In my niche market, I promote home business products, services and opportunities as an affiliate which all pay very generous commissions. If I email my list of 500 people a few times and just get 5 (1%) of them to sign up for one of the products or programs I promote, I've already made a profit. But the real beauty of this type of advertising is that even after I've made a profit on my initial investment, I still have my complete list of subscribers (minus the few that have unsubscribed) to continue emailing, building a relationship with and promoting different products to. If I'm even the slightest bit creative and consistent with sending offers to my list, I can make a small fortune with this single asset.

What I've described above is EXACTLY how I started making money online many years ago and how I still earn a healthy percentage of my money today.

Maybe you're thinking that setting up an autoresponder and building a list is easy, but you don't know what to email to your list to make money. If that's the case, I invite you to consider that nearly every affiliate program or business opportunity you can join provides pre-written email marketing letters that you can simply copy and send to your list. In most cases, these letters are proven sellers which is why the affiliate programs and business opportunities provide them to you. They have tested them and experienced positive results already.

That said, in my own experience, I usually find that I can get improved results with letters I write myself to my list when I am sincere and offer my own personality, point of view and value to an offer I am promoting.

But the bottom line here is that making money online can be very simple. You don't even need to have your own website, you don't need to attend any seminar or buy any expensive marketing courses, or pay for one-on-one personal coaching, etc. You just need to look around and watch what other people (the big dogs) are doing to make their money.

In most cases, they are simply building list and emailing that list special offers and announcements to promote products that generate revenue for them. Instead of being on the receiving end of this one-way marketing barrage, put yourself on the delivering end of the emails and receiving end of the commission checks and bank deposits that arrive when you setup your own autopilot online marketing system.

All you need is an autoresponder, subscribers and an offer.

What are you waiting for? You can do it!


About the Author:
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If you don't want to do it all yourself, The Home Biz Guy can setup your autoresponder for you and load it with that same pre-written email marketing campaign he uses to pull in automatic profits with 24/7/365. All you need to do at that point is supply the subscribers. Complete details and signup instructions are available for you now at: Plug-In Profit Site

Has 2007 Been a Good Year for your Business?

It's New Year's Eve, or Hogmany as we call it here in Scotland. Before I venture out to celebrate the bells or the arrival of 2008 I am reflecting for a few moments on the successes of 2007.

I prefer to look forward rather than back, but it is always good to reflect a little bit and take pride in your successes.

I decided to do a little bit of looking back on my internet business revenue over the last two years. I checked my spreadsheets and compared each month of 2007 with the same month in 2008. I am pleased to say that I hadn't actually realised just how much my business has grown over the last year. My revenue for each month in 2007 exceeded the revenue of 2006 by an average of 50%. In some months I actually made 100% more than I did in the same month of 2006, but the average was 50%.

I also quit my day job in May of 2007 and on a personal note, got married in October of this year, so it has been quite a good year.

I am not a fan of new year's resolutions, but my main business goal of 2008 will be to increase my monthly revenue by at least 50% by mid 2008.





I can now head out to my party in Edinburgh feeling good about the achievements of 2007 and looking forward to an even better year in 2008!

Free Multi Media Course on Blogging

I'm evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they're letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I'll let you know what I think once I've had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it's still free.

PPP - Pay Per Play - a new way to make money from your website

You will have no doubt heard of PPC which stands for "pay per click" (e.g. Google Adsense) and perhaps PPA, which is pay per action, but what PPP, which stands for "Pay Per Play".

This is a brand new way of advertising and a great way for webmasters or bloggers to make money from their website or blog. It is similar to TV advertising or radio advertising and is launching in February 2008.

Basically it allows advertisers to get their 5 second audio ads played on a huge number of targeted websites around the world. For us webmasters and bloggers it allows us to earn money on 100% of our website traffic as we will receive a payment for every audio ad that is played on our site.

The ads are short (5 seconds), will be related to the content of your website and they will only be played once per visitor.

If you would like to learn more you can sign up for pay per play ads now and get ready for the launch in February 08.