Glasses Direct… If you ask most people they will be wary about buying spectacles online after all, they are usually very expensive so you need to trust a high street optician, right? WRONG! Read on…

Each high street optician pays for expensive stores, medical equipment, display stock and staff. As a result, after every eye test, they aim to sell a pair of glasses at a high margin. You’ll typically be passed over to someone - not an optician - whose job is to sell you the most expensive pair of glasses they can convince you to buy.

By law, an optician must – following your eye test – provide you with a written prescription, regardless of whether you plan to buy glasses from them.  A fact worth keeping front of mind if you begin to be pressurised into parting with your money there and then. You shop around for the best deal on everything from your mobile phone to car insurance - why not your glasses?

Your prescription

To buy glasses online, you need a copy of your prescription - which must be less than two years old. You will need to give your prescription details to order your glasses. For the majority of prescriptions, especially printed ones, this is a simple matter of copying the numbers into an online order form. However, some handwritten or more complicated prescriptions may need some translation.

Is buying glasses online safe?

Both online and on the high street, the optical market is regulated by the Government’s General Optical Council to ensure medical health standards are adhered to. In addition you’ll find that most of the online opticians and many of the biggest high street chains use the same laboratories to have glasses made, so the quality is likely to be high wherever you buy them from.

Will they fit if I buy online?

This question is more complicated – simply because most glasses are very adjustable – so really, most glasses can be made to fit, once you’re happy that they suit you.  There are two simple ways to be more sure that a pair of glasses will fit:

1. Check the measurements of an old pair of glasses you find comfortable or that really suit you.
2. Online stores show measurements for every pair on offer so you can compare them for a close match. and of course aim for a store that allows you to try the glasses on at home with a home trial before deciding to buy.

The worlds largest direct glasses retailer is Glasses Direct and with frames starting at just £15 including lenses you’ll never buy your glasses in the high street again.  Click here to visit Glasses Direct

So, if you are not sure what it is you want to buy, but you know you want to buy something, read on for a random selection of gift ideas, who knows, you might just see something you like

Or perhaps you’ve never been to the UK and have no intention of visiting, but you still want to be able to make cheap phone calls? If any of these scenarios are close to you, you’ll be happy to hear about a new member of the Selfless Mind family, www.cheapophonecards.com

No matter what country you are calling from Cheapo Phone Cards will have a card that will suit your needs, you want to call Iraq from the USA? How does 5.1c per minute sound? What about calling a UK cell phone from Spain? The current cheapest rate is only €0.09 per minute.

So, forget about settling for the limited selection of phone cards that your local vendor sells, by logging on to www.cheapophonecards.com you’ll have access to the worlds best rates instantly so you can buy and start saving in under 60 seconds!

The American Gardener provides over 150 pages of helpful gardening how to information, and tips that will help you grow plants with ease without them dying like they did on me!

Even if you’re a professional gardener, you’ll find many tips to help better your growing success!

This ebook has a retail price of $37, which many would say is a small price to pay for the wealth of information it contains. Here at the Soopa Store we believe the information should be more readily available after all, gardening is not an inexpensive hobby. So, we don’t want you to pay $37…not $27…not even $17!! We’re sorry if you bought your copy of The American Gardener somewhere else because only at the Gardening Soopa Store can you buy your copy for $7!!

Here’s What You’ll Find In The American Gardener:

* Choosing the right location on your property for growing plants. You’ll find in depth information on slope of your land, and what spot is best for growing successfully.

* Preparing the soil properly to provide nutrition for healthy plants.

* Fencing techniques for your garden. I LOVE this section. The author provides humorous techniques for using hawthorn trees as fencing, to keep troublesome lads from stealing their fruits and vegetables! You do not need to spend hundreds for a chain link, wooden or brick fence. Use hawthorn trees and with a little love and time you’ll have a fence that will make your neighbors green with envy!

* Designing, or laying out, your garden so that it’s pleasing to the eye yet functional as well.

* You’ll learn how to make hotbeds, so that you can start your vegetables earlier in the season and have edible produce as many as 15 days earlier than normal! This can be a moneymaker if you sell produce. Be the first in your neighborhood to have fresh green tomatoes and watermelons!

* Learn the benefits of operating a hobby greenhouse, and how it can be beneficially to your household.

* Learn about true seeds and the soundness of seed. You’ll learn how to test seed before you plant them, to determine if you have good seed or bad. Some seed will not grow if it’s bad, and by using a simple technique you can throw out the bad instead of laboring with planting them only to find no lovely sprouts growing where they were sowed.

* Learn proper methods for saving and preserving seed. I find this the most fun of gardening! I now save seed regularly and have a yard full of beautiful blooms from seeds I have saved and sown.

* Learn proper sowing methods to improve your seeds germination rate, and to ensure healthy plants. Proper spacing and depth can mean success or failure in the garden!

* American Gardener provides proper transplanting methods, to ensure your plants survival when moving from one area to another. This is the chapter that covers the information I was looking for, to ensure my Japanese Maples survival. I now have two Japanese Maples growing successfully in my yard, and what beauty they both bring!

* Cultivating your garden properly and methods for tilling, trenching and sowing to ensure your gardens success.

* Learn propagating methods so that you can grow many more plants form just one stock plant. Learn propagating from cuttings, by grafting, by using stock tress, by budding and by layering. All of these are easy and fun methods that you and your family are sure to enjoy!

* There is a nice section on growing grapes in minimum space while producing so many grapes that it’ll make your mouth water!

* Learn how to successfully grow 81 different vegetables and herbs, 26 tasty fruits and nuts and the most popular flowers and shrubs with the most gorgeous blooms!

You are sure to love the information, guidance and tips provided in American Gardener!

The American Gardener is available for the incredibly low price of $7, a $30 discount on the suggested retail price. To get your copy, visit the Gardening Soopa Store.

You place product listings in the eBay marketplace, buyers bid, you pay your eBay seller fees and what you have left is your profit margin… that is so last season!

There is another, more profitable way, to build a business which still revolves around eBay but which doesn’t involve you selling a single thing in the eBay marketplace. Curious? Then read on…

This “other way” is based on the eBay affiliate program and a great tool which makes entry into this opportunity not only possible but also super easy. This tool is called “Build A Niche Store” or BANS to those in the know

Now if you don’t know – an affiliate program enables you as an individual internet entrepreneur to promote the products of a company in exchange for a commission on all sales that you refer. You are basically operating as an internet middleman and connecting internet browsers to particular products and companies through you own network of websites and marketing methods.

If we return to the eBay affiliate program, eBay actually invites you to promote all of the product listings in the eBay marketplace and in exchange for your efforts will pay you up to 75% of the revenue they make from each sale you refer plus up to $35 for each new active eBay member you refer.

You can have a read about the eBay.com affiliate program here

What this means is that you can earn up to three quarters of eBay’s revenue simply for connecting people to the products listed in the eBay marketplace.

Not only do you get to partner with the best branded marketplace in the world, you also get access to and control over ALL of the products listed in this marketplace. The eBay product inventory becomes YOUR product inventory and yet you do NOT have to stock items, deal with customers, organize shipping or process refunds.

You are no longer limited to selling only those products which you can buy and sell for a profit margin. You can choose ANY niche market and promote those eBay products relevant to your chosen niche outside of the eBay marketplace, funnelling targeted traffic through to eBay and into your own affiliate commissions.

Golf clubs, sewing kits, laptops, dog collars, diamond rings, Florida real estate…

If you know eBay you know how BIG it is – there are NO limits.

At this point you might be thinking - well this sounds interesting but in reality is there any money in it? Well, here’s the shocker – eBay’s top affiliates make over 1 million dollars a month. That’s right… 8 figures a year without stocking, selling or shipping a single thing!

Now eBay does provide some basic free tools to help you succeed as an eBay affiliate and build an affiliate business BUT it has been the development of a tool outside of eBay that has really opened this up as a legitimate business opportunity.

The tool, as I mentioned earlier, is called “Build A Niche Store” and what it enables you to do is build eBay affiliate websites targeted to any eBay niche you want. These act as the medium through which you funnel targeted visitors to eBay.

Here’s an example of a store selling Clarice Cliff Pottery - Clarice Cliff eBay Affiliate Website

As you can see, it’s a professional looking website containing all of those eBay products related to their target niche inside a searchable store format, each of which automatically contains your eBay affiliate id.

These stores then automatically update as new products are listed for sale and old listing expire from the eBay marketplace and the software has built in development features which enable you to create new store pages, add content to these pages, create content pages, modify your template etc etc.

Basically, in the space of about 10 minutes (once you are familiar with how the software works) you can create a fully functional eBay affiliate website targeted to the niche market of your choice. Make no mistake, your first attempt might seem a little ‘ugly’ but once you’ve played around a bit and tinkered with the settings there will be no stopping you!

Your store content is all search engine friendly which will provide the foundation for attracting targeted traffic from the search engines and you can then use the development features to attract more targeted visitors which will in turn mean more eBay affiliate commissions.

It really is a brilliant concept and the guys behind the project are great. I regularly log on to the member forum which you get lifetime access to when you purchase the product and let me tell you, it’s second to none, if you have a question, no matter how stupid it might seem, within a few hours, someone will reply with an answer or a solution.

Build A Niche Store comes with a step by step user manual which will walk even the most technically inexperienced through setting up their eBay affiliate website, 9 professional template layouts which can be customized (from inside your admin panel) to match your target niche, lifetime member forum access, comprehensive product support and possibly most importantly – an UNLIMITED domain license which means you can build as many of these niche websites as you want for the small one time fee.

Think about how many niches eBay caters to! How big could your eBay affiliate business be?! This product gets Mr Omneo’s full recommendation – YOU should check it out today…

Click Here To Read More About Build A Niche Store

Of course there is nothing to stop collectors visiting and buying from either site, though it has to be said that there seems to be far fewer auctions taking place outside the UK but if shipping is an issue, it is now easier to see what is available ‘locally’

Then I found cFaresand discovered they have a ‘members only’ set of prices which I was a little sceptical about. Usually I’ve found you’re expected to pay a stupid membership fee which is often more than the saving, fine if you make a few flights a year abut pointless if you are an occasional traveller.

Well, the platinum membership is US$50 or approx £25 in real money and the flight? Well, travelling on the exact same United Airlines flights as I was prepared to pay £491 for, cFares.com
gave me a price of… £391.50 and if I add the £25 membership fee that brings the total to £416.50, a saving of £74.50 or approx US$149 in funny money, which covers the cost of 2 tickets to see Dave Matthews and his band! RESULT!!

So, if you’re thinking about flying anywhere, check out cFares.com for Cheap Tickets to your favourite destinations!

You simply send a text to purchase your card, either a £3 or £5 card and then use your inclusive minutes to call an access number, which is a standard UK land line. The best thing is you’re not restricted to using your mobile phone either, the virtual card comes with a PIN which allows you to use ANY phone.

What’s more with the superb 1st time users offer of FREE credit you have nothing to lose and lot’s to gain. Actually that’s over three and a half hours extra talk time on a £3 card and a whopping five hours on a £5 card!

So, head on over to Selfless Mind Calls and start saving money on all your international calls and don’t worry if you are not in the UK, they also have a wide variety of International Phone Cards.

Getting that perfect sound on any MP3 player can be as easy as doing one simple thing and no, I don’t mean buying a new MP3 player!

One of the simplest things you can do is replace the headphones that came with your player, no matter how much you paid for the player, be it £30 or £300 I can assure you the headphones in that shiny box probably cost less than the paper used to print the instructions on

Anyway, do yourself and your ears a favour and ditch those tinny headphones and buy something new, for little more than £10 you will be amazed what deals you can find. I’ve just replaced an old set of headphones that I bought 18 months ago with a pair of Sennheiser CX300 Stereo Earphones
that I picked up from Amazon.co.uk for only £12.49 inc postage.

Now, this is what Sennheiser said about them, “The CX 300 are high-quality stereo ear-canal headphones with powerful, bass-driven stereo sound for listening ‘on the move.’ Ear adapters in three different sizes ensure a perfect fit, high wearing comfort and an excellent attenuation of ambient noise. The CX 300 are ideal for use with MP3, CD, MD, or DVD players and many other portable devices.”

Sounds pretty impressive doesn’t it? Well of course it would! It was written by the guys that make them. SO, what’s a guy (or gal) to do when they want to find out what something is really like? Simple, Google reviews and before you know it you have zillions of things to read…some good and some downright terrible, so be prepared for that dream item, that you spent 5 weeks researching and decided gave the best bang for buck, suddenly gets ripped to shreds by the actual users, sure you expect the few gripes but if you start seeing a stream of negative comments…ditch it and look again and perhaps the reviews are the ones to trust.

I’m sure by saying that there will be a flurry of activity in the conspiracy camp who will be writing messages to let me know that manufacturers agents (marketing) pay people to post nice reviews, it’s OK guys I’m aware of that fact and so is everyone reading this now

I did a bit of reading and the first two paragraphs I read of the following review sold me on my new Sennheisers (but the 3rd put me off when he waffled about his mate in the music industry, using that logic the 15 years I’ve spent drinking in Soho, London qualify me as having, quite possibly, the biggest collection of muso mates out there!)

“I have been struggling with the iPod supplied earbuds for quite some time, they truly are awful. I switched to a Phillips set which sounded good but broke within 3 weeks. After searching Amazon and various places for reviews on the net Sennheiser came out as the best again and again, so I went for it. Glad I did, they are great. Brilliant sound, very comfortable with a great seal - in fact, so good that when I’m doing my housework I can’t hear the vacuum at all and have to keep checking it’s actually on and unfortunately missed numerous phone calls. I’ve also had it confirmed that no one else can hear the music at all while I’m listening to it either so it would be great for trains/buses etc.

I also really like the way they have designed the actual connection plug where it sits in the iPod - it’s solid, sturdy and it’s angled so the wire is running to the side rather than straight down. I’m positive this will limit the likelihood of the wires becoming broken or unstable as happened with the Phillips set.”

Once you’ve found your perfect headphones be sure to shop around for prices, I used Kelkoo to find great value online, fast! and never forget the MP3 Soopa Store