Michael Plater II

So it’s been almost three weeks or so and found out some interesting things. First that I really need to get better at kicking. I’ve always known I suck at kicking since my base style is boxing but I went against a kick boxer with probably about 50lbs on me and he just keep doing a low kick to the side of my quad right above my knee. I was virtually helpless against this and was definitely limping the next day. I realized then the real power of the kick and that I both needed to harness this power and learn to defend against it. So I’ve been incorporating the kick more and more into my fighting and it’s definitely tough but making a big difference.

The second interesting thing I found out was when I weighed myself yesterday and measured my body fat percent. Before I started my training I weighed 163lbs with 9.3% body fat. I have loss 4% body fat and am down to 5.3%, which is kind of weird since my body fat percent never changes, but it must be from all the intense cardio and muscle endurance I’ve been doing. Unfortunately that 4% also correlates to a loss of 4% weight and when I weighed myself I cam out to exactly 155 which is an 8lbs or 4% loss in weight. I haven’t been 155 since like 10th grade, but the thing is I don’t look any smaller. So I’ll take this all to mean I’ve gotten more efficient and that now I need to focus more on nutrition and up my calorie intake to start growing muscle. I was hoping to get to 170 before the fight, not sure if that’s possible anymore though.

So today concludes the first week of training for me on my way to fighting in a cage fight in April. Fittingly today I actually got my first bloody nose from MMA which I’ve been doing since September. I figure I don’t get bloody noses that often because of my boxing background which I did for two years but today that didn’t really matter. I actually got two bloody noses with the second one just reopening the first, though the first was actually from a girl. She’s good.
Unfortunately I truly did underestimate her, combined with the fact that I’m always a little hesitant about sparring with a girl and wala bloody nose.
The rest of the week was accompanied by the normal muscle pains from working out but what was really apparent was my lack of endurance both on the cardio and muscle endurance side. Though I’m hoping my training regiment fixes that up; my body usually reacts to any work I give it pretty well so by April my endurance should hopefully really good. Along with doing MMA three times a week I do muscle endurance with the boxing team and stadiums/sprint work. I’m mostly doing work that increases my VO2 Max through interval training and not really worrying about long distance work since I really just need to be able to go all out for three three minute rounds. Sure if I was doing professional boxing and was going 12 rounds then yeah the long distance endurance stuff would be way more important but that’s not the case here.
So far I’m happy with how things are going and I’ll let you know how things progress.

So I have made the decision to enter into a MMA cage fight in the spring probably in April. I have done boxing in the past and have been doing MMA since September, the beginning of the school year. I don’t want to actually become a MMA fighter at all but I want to have a physical prowess that comes from knowing I can take care of myself in most situations. This was the reason I started taking MMA to begin with and a fight seems like the logical end goal.

I will be training/working out six days a week as follows:

Sunday (2:30hrs) – MMA training with instructor and extra training with MMA Team Leader
Monday (1:30hrs) – Muscle Endurance and Running with the Boxing Team
Tuesday (1:30hrs) – MMA training with instructor
Wednesday (1hr) – Weight Training in the Gym
Thursday (1:30hrs) – MMA training with instructor
Friday (30-45min) – Interval Running and Stadiums
Saturday – Rest

I truly feel maintaining this regime will result in me being in the best shape I can get in come April. I’ll keep updating my journey as new stuff happens and describe my various workouts.

I have some predictions for the future and I just wanted them down in hard writing for when they come true

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.

So I’ve spent a bunch of time learning how to interact with and talk to people with greater ease and efficiency. I love being able to converse with anyone and truly create a relationship, even quickly. However when it comes to celebrities things are different. Everyone wants to create a relationship with them and you unfortunately are everyone.

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.

So when starting your business online more than likely you will have to fax something somewhere. Normally just to incorporate your business you’ll need to fax the right documents if you are using some online service (I used ActiveFilings). For some of us, including myself, we don’t have a fax machine or hardwired phone line at our disposal and thus need an alternative. Hince my hunt for a good online fax service. While there are a bunch of services I will review three here that I think solve different problems pretty well.

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.

Credit: Yong Fook from zygote.egg-co.com

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/

When it comes to selling online it is hard to ignore Google Adwords. Google has the dominant market share for search and thus their advertisments are looked at the most. This becomes very important when calculating clickthrough rates.

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.

So in my on going process to create Espada Cosmetics and market the Espada Toner I had to take product photos for the website.  I’ve never done this before and all I really knew was that I needed a white background and lots of light.  I could have bought one of those portable light boxes but I didn’t feel like spending the money nor wasting the time.  Hince my homemade option:

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.

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 .