Update: We're going with Sherm's suggestion and meeting on September 23rd 2010 from 4:30PM to 7PM at:

Melody Bar & Grill
9132 S Sepulveda Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90045
Neighborhood: Westchester / LAX

Who will be there: Robert Plank, Lance Tamashiro, Sherm Cohen, Wal Gifford (chunked out), Robert Vance, Rodney Daut, Evelyn Brooks, Dennis Barakos.

You guys voted for where we should meet for my 26th birthday and the majority said: Los Angeles!

Now my question for you is:

1. Are you "probably" coming, or "definitely" coming?

2. What bar in the LA area should we hang out at?

Preferably I want this near the airport, and there is no set time... people can just come and go throughout the evening.

Go ahead, answer those 2 questions for me right now so I can at least have a head count.

My 26th birthday is coming up in a few weeks, on Thursday, September 23, 2010. I'm having my "real" birthday party a few days before because on Thursday I'm going to be traveling to JVAlert Live in Denver.

Here's my question to you: what major city close to you, can you get to on Thursday, not for anything major, just to hang out at a bar where I buy you a drink?

I don't want to fly into the northwest, southwest, midwest, northeast, or deep south, and I'm staying in the United States... so that pretty much leaves these choices:

Update: Here's what you guys voted...

• Los Angeles, CA (17 votes)
• San Francisco, CA (10 votes)
• Las Vegas, NV (7 votes)
• Salt Lake City, UT (3 votes)
• Denver, CO (6 votes)
• Dallas, TX (9 votes)
• Austin, TX (9 votes)
• Atlanta, GA (12 votes)
• Orlando, FL (6 votes)
• New York, NY (7 votes)
• New Orleans, LA (2 votes)
• Washington, DC (2 votes)

Which of these cities can you be in to meet me on Thursday, September 23, 2010? Go ahead and vote with your comment below.  I'm not sure if I'll be doing it yet, it depends on the votes.

My new iPhone 4 showed up a day early (Wednesday)... some lucky people even got theirs on Tuesday!

I did have to wait a few minutes for it to activate with AT&T, and for it to sync my iTunes movies and songs... but once that was all done... well you check it out!

Check it out... ability to use FaceTime for video calls, you can choose the front or back camera when taking photos... it's thinner, lighter, faster, and better looking.

Apple already introduced multitasking to the old (3G and 3GS) phones on Monday, so I've already been able to stream music from a radio station via Pandora while checking email or browsing the web on my phone.

• iBooks (book reader) is new, even though we already had the Kindle app
• Netflix app is coming so you can stream movies to your phone (like you already can with iPad)
• iMovie is coming out soon which will let you edit videos with all the features as the desktop version
• Farmville is coming to iPhone pretty soon as well

What phone do you have?  (Come on Droid people, let me have it!)  Are you getting this new phone?

Quick question:

Should I delete comments from people on this blog who post with names like "Affiliate Store" or "Forex Business Credit"... a handle instead of their real HUMAN name?

When you do that on my blog, I feel like I can't use your name when I reply to you... I feel like you're only here to get linkbacks to your site, and it messes with my search engine relevancy.

You market the most effectively when you can show you're a real person... that's why so many people put their picture on their sales letter, create video, use their real names on forums, post blog comments with gravatar images, and sell using webinars.

Should I delete those comments, yes or no?

I mentioned this in passing in a couple of blog posts recently, but after meeting Joe Lavery in Orlando, he had no idea I'm now doing internet marketing full time, so here it is:

I Quit My Day Job on March 25, 2009!

I should have quit a year ago, or even sooner.  The only things holding me back were: health insurance (my self-employed plan is now $125/month), money reserve (I have enough to last me a couple years), and pissing off the people who trained me (which was a stupid reason anyway).

March 26, 2009: Immediately after quitting my day job, I stepped on a plane to Dallas, Texas for AM 2.0 to meet Armand Morin, Ryan Deiss, Ray Edwards, Ryan Healy, and Mary Wilhite for the first time ever.

I was totally ready to tell Armand that I quit my day job so I could attend as Jeanette Cates's guest, but the only interaction we got to have was him yelling at me for pricing my stuff too low.  At least I got to tell Ryan Deiss that fact, even though I'm not sure he knows who I am.

The next two weeks after returning included knocking out as many points as possible for Armand's AM 2.0 Platinum 100-point checklist, launching our most profitable webinar ever ($17,000 on the launch), and updating Action PopUp, WordPress Crusher, 47 Hour Report, creating Split Genie, and running a couple webinars with Ryan Healy and Derek Franklin.

April 17, 2009: Back on the road... flew out to Austin, Texas for Eric Louviere's MemberSnap seminar after super-programmer Henry Fuentes invited me.  I brought my business partner Jason Fladlien along, especially because Marlon Sanders had been e-mailing us but liked him way better, so I figured the three of us could hang out.

We sat in the seminar a grand total of 25 minutes all weekend, and talked with Marlon most of the time.  He taught me most of what I know now about "branding" (yuck) and positioning and basically made me paranoid about everything going on with internet marketing.

April 23, 2009: Mass Control 2.0!  I only had a couple of days to stay at home before waking up early Thursday morning and heading south on California Highway 99 through Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles, and finally to San Diego, California... six hour drive from Turlock.

I wasn't registered for the conference so I made sure to stay far, far away from that conference room.  I chilled with Lance Tamashiro most of the weekend, and got to meet David Risley (who confused Frank Kern for Kid Rock), met Jason Moffatt for about ten seconds (who was busy macking on some chick), met Alex Jeffries (who I'd never heard of but he was a big hero of Lance's), Ryan Wade (ViralTweets), Joe Lavery (long time customer) and who could forget Dale Maxwell the colon cleanser.

April 29, 2009: Time to co-host my own workshop at the Impact 100 event in Orlando, Florida.  Through a strange twist of fate I stayed at the same hotel I stayed at ten years ago when I was in high school for the Future Business Leaders of America.  Jason Fladlien, Mary Wilhite and I hosted the "Niche Riches for Beginners" workshop.

Jason talked about the niche selection system, Mary presented on webinars, I dissected list building and traffic, Jason explained copywriting, I talked about product creation and basically got in everyone's face and made sure all 16 participants gave me their name, phone number, webinar topic, and time and date they were going to present that webinar.  We presented from 9AM to 5PM (with breaks).

Joe Lavery was there again, so was Charlie Fry from the Video Sales Tactics class... he flew out from Philadelphia just to see us which I thought was cool.  All theparticipants in that class were AWESOME... and the three of us had so much fun that we are hosting another workshop, the "Action Seminar" in Dallas, at the end of May:

Dallas Embassy Suites
4650 W Airport Fwy
Irving, TX 75062

Friday, May 29, 2009 from 9AM-5PM (Workshop)
Saturday, May 30, 2009 (Networking Breakfast)

I'll have more info about that later including where you can register.  It will only cost $97 to attend and we'll have Jeanette Cates (the Tech Tamer) and Marc Harty (PR Traffic) onboard as guest speakers.

That's what I've been up to for the past month and a half since I retired from my day job: four seminars in a month.

I heard once that if you quit your job, the LAST thing you should do is immediately sit in front of your television set... either get a new job or go on vacation, so I went on vacation.

But now for the more important question: how do I manage my time now that I don't have the day job to hold me down?  How do I make sure I get enough accomplished, still have enough free time, and don't goof off with my newfound free time?  I've already got that covered, and I'm ready to explain my day to day system to you for free, but I need something from you first:

1. Ten comments under this blog post.
2. Ten tweets about this post (Twitter icon is on the bottom of the post)

Once I those those two things from you guys, I'll spill the beans about exactly how I manage my time and how I maintain my business day to day.  Thanks guys!  Leave your comment below...

As some of you noticed, I was banned from YouTube. No reason given!

That account had 160 videos, 50 subscribers, has been around for 2 years and responsible for a couple of extra accidental sales per week.  Some of the videos on that account had over 2,000 views.

Long story short: the Thursday morning of April 23, 2009 I drove from Turlock, south down Highway 99 and then Interstate 5 through Fresno, Bakersfield, Los Angeles then finally San Diego to meet a few people who were in town for Mass Control 2.0.... Jason Fladlien, Lance Tamashiro, Dale Maxwell, David Risley, and Bryan Blyss (Faceman).

Tragedy Strikes!

We check into Jason's room at the Hard Rock Hotel, break out the laptop like usual internet marketing nerds and check out our Video Sales Tactics blog.  Try to play the latest YouTube video I have posted there... and it's been "removed for terms of use violation."

That's weird, I say... and try to play another YouTube, same message.  I load my YouTube profile... it says, "This account is suspended."  Try to login to that account, same deal.

YouTube never sent me any e-mail about any videos being a problem or about the account being taken down.  YouTube has no phone number of e-mail address, but after filling out a 10-part form I was able to get this canned response:

Hi robertplank,

Thanks for your email. Your "robertplank" account has been found to have violated our Community Guidelines. Your account has now been terminated. Please be aware that you are prohibited from accessing, possessing or creating any other YouTube accounts.

YouTube staff review flagged videos 24 hours a day, seven days a week to determine whether they violate our Community Guidelines. When a video or account is brought to our attention we investigate and take action if necessary.

We are unable to provide specific detail regarding your account suspension or your video's removal. For more information on our what we consider inappropriate content or conduct while using YouTube, please visit our
Community Guidelines and Tips at http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines and our Help Center article http://help.youtube.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?answer=92486.

Regards,

Roberto
The YouTube Team

So YouTube tells me my account violates their community guidelines, but won't tell me which ones, and it's obviously none because their community guidelines refer to copyright infringement, anything illegal, hate speech, etc. of which my account had none.  It was ALL talking head and PowerPoint how-to videos.

The icing on the cake is that being "suspended" from YouTube not only means your account is gone, but you aren't allowed to create any new accounts.  (The guys from Traffic Geyser told me to create a new account at a friend's house, but there's no way I'm doing that.)

That Sucks!

The lesson to all this is: post videos in Camtasia format on your blog so you aren't stuck with a bunch of "this video has been removed" links all over your blog.  I have the originals of all those videos and YouTube only accounted for 5% of my traffic, but it still sucks.

Build your own site, not someone else's. You shoud be posting your YouTube videos on your OWN blog, including hosting the video itself.  It's just like how you should be posting your own articles to your blogs, and not just EzineArticles.

Matt Levenhagen responded to my tweet on Facebook and mentioned sxephil (Philip DeFranco) who is one of my favorite YouTubers, who does this too.  Use your videos to get people offsite and on your list so you can continue posting videos on your blog.

As far as why I was banned? The only thing that makes sense is Traffic Geyser. It looks like I was wrong, other internet marketers not using Traffic Geyser have been banned for the same reason...

What Does All This Mean?

The moral of the story is YouTube throws great parties, but is not trustworthy enough to watch your kids.  Use YouTube as a traffic source, not a place to store all your content.

That's the true story of the last YouTube ever posted by Robert Plank... what are your thoughts on this?  Make sure to comment below!

Some of you guys have been asking how I did on the $30K month for February... the answer is: I passed with flying colors!

I made it past $30K on Thursday the 26th, with two days to spare.  Here's a breakdown of it:

• Day job: $2,500.00
• Launches and trickle sales: $22,207.03
• Affiliates: $4,846.44
• Membership site: $869.06
• Webinar future payments: $2,000
• Total: $32,422.53

Affiliate sales are way up, just about quadrupled.  I planned to a product launch, resale rights offer, price increase, and e-class per week... but the two product launches went very well and I took a little bit of Eric Holmlund's advice and focused devoting 80% of my time to marketing.

I hit $30K with just two product launches that went VERY well, two resale rights offers that went VERY well, and one e-class.  Here's a list of my accomplishments for the month:

• Made 986 sales.
• Wrote 5 sales letters.
• Wrote 6 blog posts.
• Sent 33 e-mails to my list.
• Paid nearly $1000 in PayPal fees!
• Recorded 50 videos on one Sunday.
• Wrote 2 guest posts, a 9-part guest video series, hosted a 90-minute webinar with a stranger and appeared on 2 interviews.

Tell me why I work a day job again?  When I just made more in one MONTH from internet marketing than I make a whole year the day job?  Oh right, "health insurance." (rolls eyes)

Instead of going on and on about myself, I'll leave you with a few lessons I learned from the $30K month that you can apply in your business right now:

Lesson #1: Focus on what makes money first. If freelance makes you the most money, freelance first to hit your daily goals and then work on long-term stuff like product creation or joint ventures when you're ahead.  Personally, I got a product launch out of the way and then I was free to go about promoting it.

Lesson #2: Have a weekly goal. $30K broken down into 4 weeks is $7500 per week.  So each week, all I had to do was think, what did I need to do to get that $7500?  Usually a couple of product launches and affiliate sales.  $7500 in a week is much less intimidating to me than $30K in a month.  If you're not on that level yet, try for even $750 in a week.

Lesson #3: Have an accountability partner. I couldn't have made it this far without Jason kicking my butt every step of the way, and Jason couldn't have made it to $20K without me asking him why he hadn't launched anything that day.

Lesson #4: Never complain. Another big timewaster and a great way to waste the entire week feeling bad about yourself.  If you have time to complain, you're not busy enough.  This doesn't mean giving up your personal life or anything like that.  But if you sit at the computer 3 hours a day, you had better be working on internet marketing all 3 hours instead of complaining!

Lesson #5: Do as much with the time you have as you possibly can. Get an early start to the day if possible, and NEVER EVER do any internet marketing work at your day job unless it's before, after, during lunch or on breaks.  My girlfriend wakes up at 5 AM most mornings to babysit, so I got her to wake me up before she left so I could work without any distractions.

What did you think? Do you have close-ended monetary goals for each month and each week?  An accountability partner?  If not, maybe you need my Time Management on Crack productivity report and videos to get you where you NEED to go.

What's my goal for March 2009?  $31K.  What's your goal for this month? Please comment below with your goal and how you plan on getting there.

A while ago I dealt with a guy on a public message board (not the one I usually frequent) who said something along the lines of this:

I've never seen a sales letter actually implement any of this JavaScript or PHP interactive sales letter stuff.

Every time I see one of these sales pages, I check out the site for every person leaving a testimonial.  The truth is that nobody is actually using this stuff... is it a case where the emperor has no clothes?

What a dumbass question!

What proceeded was, several of us replied to him but he seemed to be off in his own little world.

Guess what, if you go to the Clickbank marketplace and choose the top sellers in ANY niche... most of them use some sort of pop-up, lead capture, survey, peel away ad, walk on video, or chat agent setup.

Most of what goes on is invisible to you because they'll use all kinds of personalization, landing pages, dynamic autoresponder follow-ups, sublisting, and all that.

If you are trying to tell me that adding PHP has no affect on your sales, or hurts them?  Gimmie a break!

You can still sell a product with good copy and no PHP and JavaScript tactics.  But good copy plus PHP scripts?  Unstoppable!

You could add an exit pop-up to turn lost sales into opt-ins.  Or simply add a countdown timer or interactive sales letter... it's up to you.

One thing I forgot to mention the other day about my Camtasia PowerPoint process is that I now have a dual monitor setup:

On the left is my new computer that came this week.  It's one of those iMac ripoffs where the whole computer is contained within the monitor.  It's an AVERATEC F1 D1002UHCE-1.

2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo E4600, 2 GB DD2 memory, 320GB SATA hard drive, 22 inch monitor, Nvidia GeForce 8400 256 MB graphics card, built-in wifi, memory card, DVD burner, webcam, TV tuner.  I upgraded from a Shuttle, little toaster shaped computer I bought a couple years ago.

I like tiny computers... less clutter.

But I plugged my 19-inch monitor from the old computer into the back and now I have a second monitor.  Great for recordnig those Camtasia PowerPoints as you can see in the picture.

I configured PowerPoint to display the actual slide show on the right monitor, and show "presenter view" on the left so I can see what slides are coming up next.

Yep, if you go to "Set Up Show" in PowerPoint you can not only specify which monitor will display the presentation, but also what resolution to resize it to... I tell it to resize to 640x480 for the presentation.

What's more, if you use the REAL PowerPoint (not OpenOffice like some people named Jason) and you install Office first, then Camtasia, they will add a little button to the "Add-Ins" tab of Camtasia to start the slide show and start recording with one click.

I click ONE button, it resizes my second monitor to the low resolution for recording, starts the slide show, and starts recording.  As soon as the slide show is finished, it resizes the monitor to the old resolution and asks where to save the Camtasia recording.

Super cool, right?

The one-click thing might sound stupid, but I'm recording so many videos for the Daily Seminar that I'm at the point where I need it.

I've used dual monitors at work for over a year now and it makes you way more productive in other ways.  You can code in one window and read instructions in the other... edit graphics in one window and write in a document on the other.  But Camtasia recording is by far my best use for dual monitors.

Do you have a dual monitor setup?  If you don't, why not?  What desktop setup do you have to get the most productivity?

What are you working on this week?  I'm cranking out a bunch of content for a new membership site...

Lots of marketers the past couple of months are using the economic recession as a hook to sell their stuff.  "This system will help you profit in a recession..."  I'm sure you're tired of it.  You can't have a Unique Selling Proposition if it's not unique!

It's not just the internet marketing niche either.  I got this e-mail from Experts Exchange (a programming forum) a few weeks ago:

"If you had invested in the S&P 500 just before Thanksgiving 2007, and cashed out just before Thanksgiving 2008, you would have lost 41% of your money."

Boo-frickin-hoo. I lost $30k in cash to the stock market the first month of this year.  The value of my home has dropped $137,000 in the past 5 months on a city block where at least 30% of the homes were in foreclosure when I moved in.

One of my relatives was laid off this month, and you know what he immediately did?  He didn't feel sorry for himself -- he started looking for another job.  He has a savings account that will last him a little while and doesn't have a ton of debt that will eat him alive.

Another friend of mine just bought a brand new car and a house for his wife and kid, neither of them are college educated, they work "average" jobs and they can actually afford the payments.

For my business partner and I, 2008 was our most profitable year ever.  I just made close to $5000 selling a 7-pack of PHP scripts, and another $4000 before that selling a 23-page PDF report, using minimal outside advertising.  It was almost 100% in-house e-mail marketing.  He is close to $100k in income for the year.

We both bought homes this year, and we're both taking our girlfriends to Hawaii for New Years at the end of December.

I don't have to tell you about how there are more cars on the road, more people in lines at stores and in the movies now than ever...

The whole point of a "recession" is to weed out the weak businesses. You can either watch the news way too often, believe the world is going to end tomorrow, and let it depress and demotivate you.  OR you can realize that there are people out there giving up (just because they hear bad news) and you can get ahead of them.

You might have already read the story below.  It's "The Man Who Sold Hot Dogs!"

There was a man who lived by the side of the road and sold hot dogs.

He was hard of hearing so he had no radio.  He had trouble with his eyes so he read no newspapers.  But he sold good hot dogs.

He put up signs on the highway, stood on the side of the road and cried, "Buy a hot dog, mister?"  People bought.  He increased his meat and bun orders.  He bought a bigger stove to take care of his trade.

He finally got his son home from college to help him out.  But then something happened.  His son said, "Father, haven't you been listening to the radio?  Reading the newspapers?  "There's a big depression.  The European situation is terrible.  The domestic situation is worse."

The father thought, "My son's been to college, he reads the papers and he listens to the radio, and he ought to know."  He cut down on his meat and bun orders, took down his advertising signs, and no longer bothered to stand out on the highway to sell his hot dogs.

His hot dog sales fell almost overnight.  "You're right, son" the father said to the boy.  "We certainly are in the middle of a great depression."

D'oh!!

Do you belong to any clubs or memberships to network and get more ideas, do you know what you want in 2009 and do you know what you have to do to get it?  Heck, what can you do differently in the next three weeks that hasn't worked for you this year?

Please comment below, and let me know what you are working on for the remainder of this year.  And guys, PLEASE don't turn this into a political or economic discussion.  The whole point is that politics and economics won't affect your business unless you let it. Your bad attitude will KILL YOU if you let it.