Michael Plater II

So I finished a little ago the first step in marketing for Espada Cosmetics which was to create a purely informational site that can try to take advantage of organic search traffic and rank high in SERP’s for certain keywords.  Since the Espada Toner is made to help facial skin redness, the informational site is called SkinRedness.info.

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 :).

So I love to play poker and am pretty decent at it, I would highly recommend the book, ‘Harrington On Hold ‘Em‘ for anyone interested in that.  However now I’ve decided to learn a new beast, Blackjack.  Like most things I become interested in I tend to consume as much information as possible and distill it into a few simple rules or methods that yeild the greatests results for the least amount of effort.  Later I’ll explain my techniques for poker.

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.

This post is to show what I did to create the Official MikesMoves Instructional Hip Hop Dance DVD. It was my first experience in selling something physical online and I stumbled my way through it to the end, but came out alright.

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.

Reading palms is nice little skill to have and can be an easy way to tell people about themselves.  Since everyone loves people describing themself this is an easy way to seem interesting and to display a DHV (for those who know what that means).

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:

So I figure I’ll let everyone in on what I am doing for the summer and what I have done so far.  School let out at the beginning of May and I have been in Greensboro since then with my family.  On June 1st I am going to Baton Rouge for the research program.  I’ll be doing some agricultural engineering work at LSU.  It’s interesting stuff and they pay me to be there so it allows me to be out of the house and working on my own stuff.

Now for my own stuff.  I have two main projects for the summer, Espada Cosmetics and CrowdFund.  Espada Cosmetics will be selling a facial toner that helps reduce skin redness.  I kind of see this as a culmination of a lot of the internet and business knowledge I’ve gained over my college time and playing around with MapJak, my web development company.  Skin redness was choosen due to specific keyword and advertising research and analysis.  The hip hop dvd gave me some insight and experience in selling physical products online and now I have found a great market and plan on applying all I have learned into creating a bread and butter business.  I have been in contact with a manufacturer and am now having the labels created.  I should have products ready to ship by the end of June or early July.  As that continues to unfold I’ll have a post about more of the logistics including marketing and fulfillment.

CrowdFund is a non-profit I am working on that allows individuals to aggregate their small donations into one large fund which is donated to a voted winner of a group of non-profits.  So people can go there and vote and donate until the fund reaches a certain amount, right now it’s $1000, and then the fund is sent to the non-profit with the most votes.  The site is built and up and right now I am working on some of the marketing stuff.  One of the tough parts is trying to figure out the true motivation for people to use CrowdFund.  It’s like a raffle for a non-profit, most people when they buy the tickets don’t care as much about the cause that the money is going towards but what the prize is they could win.  Since CrowdFund doesn’t have a prize I need to figure out how to connect with people, mostly young people’s true motivation for wanting to join the CrowdFund movement.   I’ll make a post later about what I figure out and more of the marketing.

So that’s what I am up to for the summer, I’ll keep you posted on how things move along.  Also I’ll be in New York and Boston for the end of July and beginning of August.

We all want to be able to tell if someone is lying to us.  It would be a huge boon to our productivity and relationship management (probably).  I’ll go ahead and say it’s not really as easy as you would think, there isn’t one or two things that tell if a person is lying, in fact something that means one person is lying could very well mean the opposite on another person.

So what can we do?  Well the most tried and true way of telling if a person is lying is by looking for deviations.  Deviations from their normal behavior.  This could mean the cliche thing that if they normally look at you while talking then on one statement look away, they could be lying.  It could also be the exact opposite when looking at you is the deviation.

There are general body language areas to look for deviations in; eyes, hand positions, facial expressions, etc.. The research part comes from studying a book about general body language  to get a handle on which expressions to look for and where to look for these expressions.  

The most important thing to remember about reading people when it comes to lying is you’re never 100% right.  Think of it this way, when someone says something you want to evaluate their statement starts and being 50% true.   As you read them and watch for devaitions, the percentage goes up or down, however the percentage never goes above 90% and never below 10%.  This means at best you can say there is a 90% chance they are telling the truth or a 10% they’re telling the truth.

These techniques are just basic stuff and you can definitely get way more into it.  Some hardcore stuff would be Paul Eckman’s FACS, METT, and SETT systems, which I have and will be trying soon.  I’ll definitely write a post about it.

Here is an example of an email I recently sent that goes through the conversation framework (the names have all been blanked):

Hi Professor Blank,

Michael 

This email goes through the framework and even has a small loop between the Value and Vulnerability.  Hope it helps.

So after reading Never Eat Alone I have realized the importance of small talk.  Thus I wanted to create a framework that could be applied to all conversations where the end result is the other person thinking “Cool guy, I’d like to keep in touch with them”.  So by taking a few points from Never Eat Alone and adding a bunch of my own I have created the following conversation framework:

N - Name
C - Credibility
V - Vulnerability
V - Value
C - Close

Name
- Always great with your full name, not just your first.
- Always smile 
- A body language technique is to raise both your  eyebrows, this automatically incites a sense of freindliness in the other person.

Credibility
- Inciting the friend that introduced you to them.
- Mentioning a mutual interest
- Mentioning an institution you both know of or share in common

Vulnerability
- Openly show your premeditated interest in meeting the person
- Mention mutual friend’s praises
- Show your knowledge of the person, everyone is interested in themselves and thus interested in people who know about themselves.  This of course takes premeditated work.
- Show that you trust them.  It is a common known fact that the easiest way to create trust in someone is to show that you trust them.  An example from the PUA community is if you leave something of yours with a girl you just kind of met, like a necklace or hat, one of the things it does is show that you trust them, thus when you come back they will automatically trust you a bit more.

Value
- Reveal qualifications about you.  This can be similar to creating credibility if you are saying something like a prestiges college you went to or some interesting research you’re working on.  Though normally these qualifiactions would come up right after your name, so they come up here.
- Give introductions to other people, be a connector.
- Share a different point of view on something.
- You can also create value from just generally having interesting conversation.  This is easier to do when you have a solid identity, which is something I am working on and will write on later.

Close
- Getting the persons number.
- Setting up a future time to meet. 
- Just stating that you should meet up later.
- The close also includes the follow up, which should be done within 24 hours of meeting the person, the closer to 12 hours the better.  In the follow up be sure to mention meeting again later. 

I consider this framework not complete and I dare say it might never be complete and that I will continually add pieces that fit different parts.  It is also important to say that as the conversation gets longer all you would be doing is staying in the Value area and looping everynow and then to Vulnerability.

The philosophy Stoicism was first introduced to me by Tim Ferriss and Ryan Holiday’s blogs. I was drawn by its appeal to the opportunist and its idea of deconstructing destructive emotions and eliminating good and bad perceptions. I still do not know a whole lot about the philosophy but I am intrigued enough to start reading two of the main primary texts; Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and Letters from a Stoic by Seneca.

One of the most interesting parts is that Stoicism was revealed to me right when a number of things I have been reading have really emphasized the need for a strong identity and being able to brand yourself. I think this is extremely important as well. We need to be able to control peoples perceptions of us, from the way we talk to how we think to how we dress. I want to create a base of ideaologies for myself, core values and ways of thought that I can always draw from. Then from there I want to pursue learning various tools that allow me to interact in different situations. I will go into all of this in more detail in another post.

But basically stoicism fits in creating a base ideaology for myself. Once I read these books and a bunch of other texts and writings I’ll sum it all up in my own form and post it here. I am still working on how the base and tools all fits together and what fits in each part but I’ll work it out.

Since I sell both physical and virtual products I’ve needed to accept credit cards for a while now.  Thus comes the need for either a merchant account or PayPal.  I did quite a bit of research into merchant accounts and was amazed at the amount of complexity there can be.  On the basis of costs I decided to use PayPal and have never looked back.

I’ve heard from a number of sources that the standard is to use PayPal up to $1000/month in sales then one should switch to a more professional looking merchant account.  This is because there is the perception that PayPal isn’t respected among purchasers and you wouldn’t be taken seriously.  I’m going to call bullcrap on that one.

On the grounds of seriousness and professionalism, I’d say that PayPal has become enough of a household name that in fact the general public is MORE at ease if they are taken to a PayPal page for checkout.  Think about it.  If you are on some random site making a purchase, don’t you think you’d be more comfortable if PayPal was thrown in there rather than the process all be done on the companies site?  I would.

PayPal has its own merchant account service which is separate, however when compared to other similar options it’s overpriced.  It’s API is also available for integration.  Currently I don’t see myself switching from PayPal at any point.  Perhaps I might tap into their API later for site integration but it would still most definitely be PayPal.