1) Either George Stern, David Washington, or Pilar Plater (my sister) will become President of the United States.

2) A pay as you go electric system, much like our cell phones, will govern how we operate and pay for cars (see Betterplace.com)

I am sure I will have other prediction posts like this later.

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If you see a celebrity in front of you, you obviously can’t use a normal, “Hey your [name], how’s it going”, you can’t even use something like that with just a hot girl/popular guy or in both cases you’ll get blown out of the water. There’s plenty of literature on how to talk to hot girls and guys out there (The Game) and though with celebrities even this knowledge won’t work initially.  Most people who are good at talking to people tend to have base or core lines they always reach for first or revert back to for most initial conversations.  For example with a guy I tend to ask where he got his shirt and can go into a number of little stories from there.

I wanted to create a universal line I could use, such as ‘where did you get that shirt’ that could be used on most celebrities.  The line is, “Do you [blank] in the shower?”  You would need to say before hand something like, “Hey real quick, I’ve always wondered…”  You fill in the blank with whatever they’re famous for, if they’re a singer you say ’sing’, if they’re an actor you say ’say lines’.  It’s a question that will almost always get their attention without offending them, which is your goal.  Right after asking the question, while they are looking at you slightly surprised and puzzled (perfect!) you say (if they’re a singer) ‘I just always wondered if someone like you still sung in the shower’; or if they’re an actor it’d be more like, “I just always wondered if actors said their lines in the shower like singers sing in the shower”.  At that point if you seem quite sincere and harmless they’ll probably chuckle and actually answer you.

Now when apply this I first split celebrities in to two groups, alpha celebrities and beta celebrities.  The alphas are the celebrities that you really can’t pretend not to know because they’re just that famous such as Beyonce, Will Smith, or Robert DeNiro.  Beta celebrities are those that might not be known to everyone such as the star of a hit TV show.  Sure you watch that show but it’s perfectly acceptable to the celebrity that people wouldn’t know who they were.  Also say you’re at an event where a beta celebrity is giving a speech, they are now a known beta, meaning you can’t pretend not to know them, and pretty much must be treated as an alpha.

For alpha celebrities you start initially with the in the shower opener.  Then right after you get them to actually answer the question you can now start with the core or other openers you have, such as my where’d you get that shirt.  You now seem like a fun, harmless person that they might actually want to get to know and thus you have some runway to continue the conversation.

If they are a beta celebrity start with your normal core openers like they were any other hot girl/popular guy.  They’ll be testing you to see if you really know who they are so don’t mind them being reserved at first.   If they happen to reveal they’re celebrity status then go into the shower opener to show you’re harmlessness and slightly funny side.

And there you go.  A cool little opener that can be use universally and should be pretty adaptable.

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faxZero is dead simple and fast. It requires no sign up and actually lets you send faxes for free. There are two options Free Fax and Premium Fax. With the free fax option you can send up to 3 pages, twice a day for free. The catch is that the cover page has a huge advertisement on it, so I wouldn’t use it for anything important. The premium fax option allows you to send up to 15 pages for $1.99, which considering the our other services is a good deal as long as all your faxes are between 11 and 15 pages.

Fax It Nice offers three options. The first is a quick fax service like faxZero’s premium service except it costs $4.99 for up to 10 pages, so it’s not that good a deal. The next two options you have to sign up for and one lets you just send faxes and the other lets you send and receive faxes. Neither of these two have a monthly fee, they charge by the page at a starting rate of $0.18/page and it gets lower if you buy more pages ahead of time. You get a free number with the send and receive service while just the sending service lets you fax from your email. You can also send fax’s from the website itself.

Rapid Fax is a monthly fee service that starts at $7.95/month. While a similar service eFax may be more popular, Rapid Fax does everything they do for less. At the first payment tier you get 150 free pages a month and are charge $0.09/ extra page. You receive a free toll free number and the faxes are converted and sent to your email where you can also send faxes from. Rapid Fax even provides a cool little Microsoft Office plugin for a ’send to fax’ option.

So, these are three different services that can each fill a different niche depending on your circumstances. For me I never need to recieve faxes, only send out a few a month, and those few are important, so I choose to use Fax It Nice.

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This page breaks down website creation with conversion and selling in mind. It uses the simple and old AIDA process (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action). I really like how it gives three great examples of this process being used.

Link: http://zygote.egg-co.com/designing-to-sell/

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So lets say our goal is to sell Widgets. We have decided to price the Widget at $50 and it costs us $10 to make and ship each Widget individually (we’ll talk later more on price points and how to find them). Now the two biggest things that matter regarding Adwords or any CPC advertising campaign are the clickthrough rate (the number of people who look at your ad and click your ad divided by the total number of people who look at your ad) and the page conversion rate (the number of people who look at the Widget’s website and buy a Widget divided by the total number of people who look at the Widget’s website). For now we’ll use internet norms and assume both of these numbers are 1%, with tweaking and work you can get the clickthrough rate over 5% and the page conversion rate over 10%, though these are high percentages.

So it’s one big tunnel going from however many people who look at your ad to however many people buy a Widget.

Total Ad Views –> (Clickthrough Rate) –> Total Page Views –> (Page Conversion Rate) –> Number of Widgets sold

So since we’ve estimated the two rates we can make some estimates and figure out the rest. We need to estimate how many people total will see our ad. This is where Google and AdWords comes in. We can find out how many peope each month are searching for your specific keyword. We can go to Google’s keyword tool and type in Widget. Let’s say it shows that 10,000 searches are made for Widgets each month. So this means if we show our ad to all 10,000 people with a clickthrough rate of 1% then 100 people will view our Widget website. Then with our page conversion rate we estimate that 1% of those people will buy, so every month we sell 1 Widget. This means at the $50 price and $10 cost we make $40/month. But wait there’s more, we didn’t factor in the advertiseing costs from AdWords.

Through Adwords we pay per each click and depending on how competitive the keywords are your are trying to get your ad to show up for you could be paying anywhere between 5 cents to 75 cents. Let’s pick 20 cents for now. Remember this is just estimating, once you actually start running the ad campaign you’ll quickly find what the right click price is to show up. So say we have our 10,000 searches and our 1% clickthrough rate and thus our 100 clicks. Since were paying 20 cents per click we pay $20 for those 100 people every month, which yeilds the one sale. So at our $50 price with the $10 producting and shipping costs plus the $20 advertisement costs we make $20 per Widget sale and subsequently $20 per month since were only selling one a month right now.

Now $20 per month may not sound like a lot, probably because it isn’t but there are a whole lot of things to tweak and change in this system. For one the conversion rates are really important, any rise in those and sales go way up. Also you probably won’t be just bidding on one keyword, there will be many many others like Blue Widgets and Red Widgets which increase the number of views your ad can get from 10,000 to who knows what, sending even more people down your tunnel. Also as you choose more specific keywords which are less competitve their click costs will go down so you save on the advertising. In addition, Google only own about a 68% market share of search so there’s even more places to put your ad like Microsoft search and Yahoo search. Then there’s the actual ecommerce sites like Amazon, Buy.com, and specific sites to your Widget.

Basically you can tweak this tunnel around to try to figure out if your product has some legs before you stock up on inventory. Hope it helps.

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I taped three pieces of paper up to a wall and surrounded it with three hallogen lamps.  I used a normal digital camera as well.  The results were acceptable / pretty decent:

It probably could have been better if I had put tin foil as light boards or something like that, but after cropping and photoshopping it ended up working out well.

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I know, I know .info domains are worthless and blah blah blah.  The domains aren’t judged any different by search engines than .com’s so that’s all I care about, plus for this type of site it probably would be beneficial.  The site autoupdates with information from different feeds pertaining to skin redness, rosacea, ezema, acne redness and others.  I am doing the SEO work for it now and hopefully in a bit it will rank high in the SERP’s for the keywords I am pushing.

The groundwork is already laid out for my PPC campaigns, so I should have most my bases covered.  A sample Espada Toner is in the mail, which will allow me to take product pictures.  After that, the first batch will be ordered and shipped to Amazon for fulfillment and during that time I will build the website.  Hopefully by the end of July products will be selling .

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For blackjack there are numerous techniques and I’ve decided to go with two and combine them; the basic technique and progressive 5-level betting.  Let’s start with the progressive betting.  All this means is that you have a 5 tier multiplier for your bets (1, 2, 3, 5, 1).  So say your first bet is $5 and you win then you go to $10, and if you win again then $15, then $25, until you win the 4th time when you go back to $5.  You also go back to $5 anytime you lose.   This betting system takes advantage of the fact that in blackjack you are more likely to have winning and losing streaks than to go back an forth winning and losing each hand.   So if you lose three hands in a row and then win three hands in a row, you’re actually up $15.

The betting is the easy part, the basic technique is a little more time intensive.  Basically it involves memorizing 28 card combinations and the their required actions depending on the face up card of the dealer.  For example if you get an Ace and 2, the required action is to double if the dealers face card is either a 5 or 6 otherwise to hit.  This may sound daunting at first but, I just put the 28 combinations into a flashcard program (it’s embeded below) and just memorize them over the course of a week or so.

By combining both techniques you’re bound to come out on top against the house.  Other interesting note I learned; counting cards isn’t actually that awesome, it gives you about a 1% advantage against the house and the only way to make that 1% count is to make huge bets when the deck is favourable and of course this will attract the attention of the pit boss and have you thrown out.

Also this basic strategy mostly only works on 4,6, and 8 decks, if you’re regulary playing in the casino at tables with less decks than this you’re probably beyond this tutorial.

Blackjack flashcards from maplater on FlashcardDB.

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Production
FIrst I had to actually shoot the DVD and edit it. This took a loooong time, at least the editing did. The shooting of the DVD was done on a school camera that I checked out in two days in one of our dance rooms. The editing was done on campus in our computer lab on Macs using FInal Cut Pro. This was a horrible experience. First I hate Macs, second I hate Macs. The process took about a month of steady work almost everyday. Throughout the experience I was forced to learn Final Cut Pro, iDVD, and VirtualHub. This learning curve among other things forced me to start over once and gave me plenty of set backs. But I dredged on until finally out popped an .iso. I promise you I would not have been able to do this without the constant help from the lab attendants. I am no novice to searching online in tutorials, websites, and random forum posts for help but this almost broken me.

Marketing
In the beginning I wanted marketing to be through MikesMoves, AdWords, and online retailers like Amazon and Buy.com. MikesMoves was easiest to set up, since it was just another page on the site. The retailers were a different event. I started with Amazon and ponied up the $39.95 for one month to insert my own DVD in the catalog. The are no upfront costs to sell items already listed in Amazon. The problem with Amazon was that I could not figure out how to get my DVD to show up high in the search results I wanted. That month I sold 0 on Amazon, since nobody could find my DVD. I probably could have looked harder around the net to try to solve this problem, and I probably will later, but at the time I was fed up with Amazon and cancelled after the first month.
Along with Amazon I tried Buy.com, which luckily didn’t have a set up fee but however did require a UPC (the little barcode number on every product). After some research I found out the legit way to get a unique UPC was to sign up for some membership and pay around $300-$500 a year. This would not do. The non-legit way, also the route I took, was to buy a not very unique UPC for $25. UPC’s are split into two parts, the first part is unique to the registered company, the second part is unique to the product. Basically I was paying for the second part. So after all of that I ended up getting rejected from Buy.com for some reason that I have yet to figure out.
In contingency with these methods I was running an AdWords campaign. I quickly learned that DVD’s simply don’t have great absolute margins. They have very good relative margins, mine is around 70%. However this amounts to a little over $10. Let’s assume you are doing CPC campaign, your landing page has a conversion rate of 2% and profit per sale is $10. That means 1 person out of every 50 that come to your site will buy. At zero-profitability that means you can only pay 20 cents per click and 20 cents is normal sometimes even low depending on the keywords. It is true that if you can get really specific keywords then you won’t have to pay as much but then you just might not get enough people searching for your product to begin with. And let’s not forget this 20 cents is for zero-profitability meaning you have to pay less than that to actually make anything. It’s tough for a DVD. However the experience really did get me in the mindset of finding products to produce with large absolute margins, which is good for the future. I now have a campaign running and it works, I just suffer from low search numbers due to specific keywords.

Distribution & Selling
I distribute both a physical version of the DVD and an electronic version. The physical one sells more and has higher absolute margins. The electronic version is sold using bytecommerce, which is a great service. It integrates with paypal and just works. When it came to distributing the physical DVD I was a couple months fresh off reading The 4 Hour Work Week and instantly started looking for DVD fullfilment companies. I found one that I like mostly because it was the only one that does everything from packing, labeling, shipping, and everything else per order rather than me have to accrue inventory, though I created the actual cover art. The only problem was they sucked. They just didn’t follow through (I think it was a one man show, but without a motivated one man). So with my pride tucked away I turned to burning and shipping the DVD’s myself which is actually not as bad as I thought it would be. I pay for and print out the shipping labels through paypal, burn and print the DVD and insertion slip from my laptop and ship USPS at my school. I buy the packaging at USPS using a paypal debit card.

So I don’t think I left anything big out but yeah, that’s how I am selling my DVD. I won’t produce another one again due to plenty of reasons listed above but it gave me great insight into a number of business development mechanics. Probably sometime in the future I’ll end up switching to having an inventory and letting a fulfillment company handle that, as well as sell on Amazon again, but for now I am happy.

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Instead of taking the time to learn what every line and bump means in relation to all of the moons and planets, which is a lot of work, we can take a short cut and just memorize four types of palms, the water palm, earth palm, air palm, and fire palm.  Each palm is dictated only by whether the hand is square or rectangular and if the fingers are long relative to the hand.  It’s usually pretty easy to tell if the palm is sqaure or rectangular, just do a quick look at the length from the bottom of the middle finger to the top of the wrist vs. the width from one side to the other just above the the thumb.  The fingers are long is the middle finger is at least 7/8ths the length of the palm.  So just gage, maybe using your own fingers, if the middle finger is at least 7/8 ths of the persons palm.  If it is shorter than they have a short hand.  Once you know what type of palm they are just say the description for that palm:

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