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Never Be Afraid To Talk

February 15, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Talking is like breaking through the walls imprisoning you.

I used to be the kind of guy who was scared to say what he wanted.  The more I liked someone, the more I hid away what I really wanted in an effort to keep them happy.  It’s a stupid habit and it’s one of the things that caused my first marriage to implode.  Well, I’m not that person anymore and I recently had proof of that when it came to my healthy lifestyle.  You can read about it on my fitness blog but I’ll give you a quick recap here.

Basically, my wife and I were spending too much time in restaurants which caused me to eat too much.  One quick conversation later and we came up with a much better lifestyle which is working out great so far.  It wasn’t hard, it wasn’t scary, it was just a conversation and it led to a great solution.

Bottom line, if you can’t tell your partner (or best friend or parent or…) what you want, you’re in trouble.  Either you need to overcome your fear of communication or the person you’re trying to communicate with doesn’t belong in your life, either way, you have a problem.  You should never be afraid to talk with someone in your life, ever!

Filed Under: Communication, Honesty, Relationships, Step 3 - Communicate Tagged With: , , , ,

I’m Asking For Your Help

February 6, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Help wanted sign

I'm hiring!

As you all know, I’m currently trying to launch Diamonds or Dogs.  As you’ll see in Wednesday’s post, my next stage involves generating traffic for the site before I try to raise some venture money.  In order to that, I need your help.  How can you help you ask?  Well, I’m glad you asked!

First, I would really appreciate feedback on the site itself.

  • Is anything broken?
  • Is anything misspelled?
  • Any technical issues?

I’m aware of the current issue with recommendations (you may also like…) sometimes recommending things they shouldn’t. Anything else?

Second, what do you think of the site’s content?

  • Would you use a site like this?
  • How can I make it better?
  • What’s missing?
  • What do you think of the items and reviews?

Third, would you like to be a reviewer? That means you’d need to send me a profile and then 1 review every two or three weeks, and yes, you get a cut of the profits if your items sell well. Does that sound like fun? If so, contact me and let me know.

Fourth, assuming you like the site or a specific gift review, I’d really appreciate some free publicity. That means:

  • Like one of the items features on the site on Facebook. I’ve tried to make that easier by including “like” buttons on the bottom of every item review.
  • Share the site with your friends who may not see this post
  • Tell people about the site or about specific reviews
  • Retweet reviews

Essentially, spread the word about the site and any specific item you may like. Who knows, maybe someone in your life will get the hint and buy you the item you “liked” :)

Thank you all very much for the help and I look forward to helping you with your own endeavors in the future!

Filed Under: Communication, Starting A Business, Step 3 - Communicate Tagged With: , , , ,

Starting My Own Business – Quick Update

January 25, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This entry is part 3 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

Quick update on Diamonds or Dogs.

I added the “Diamonds” side of the site over the weekend, set up the landing page and moved a few blog posts over. I also added more posts and a few new female reviewers.

A few points:

  • I’m actually not an engineer, I learned most of this just by doing. The things I didn’t know I hired people to do.
  • Hiring people is easy these days. You can find qualified folks all over places like eLance or just by asking your network. My graphic designer was a girl I dated a few years ago and my developer is someone I’ve never met who I hired through a website. Total costs for both of them so far are around $700.
  • Total costs for the rest of the site are less than $100. That includes domain registration ($50), hosting ($10 a month), WordPress CMS (Free), Outbrain recommendations (Free), various Google tools (Free), Share This plug in to allow people to “like” posts and share them (Free), Feedburner plug in to allow people to subscribe to a feed of new items (free) and pizza for my first feedback session where my friends told me what they thought of the site ($30).
  • No complicated business issues so far. The only relationship I had to form was an affiliate one with Amazon. They’ll take care of actual ordering and fulfillment and then pass along a share of the profits. Sometime in the future I might work directly with drop shippers but that’s too complicated right now.
  • I’ve gotten amazing support through my network of friends and family. I’m about to publish my dad’s profile and first review plus one of my close friend just got his mom to sign up as a new reviewer.

Next!

My next goals are to start marketing the site.

  • AdWords campaign
  • Facebook campaign, which I’m hoping you, my readers, will help me with
  • eMail campaign
  • YouTube video. Yes, I have a good idea for a YouTube video about gift giving.

###

Best of all, this has been a ton of fun and I’ve learned a lot.

Special thanks to my wonderful wife who keeps testing things, making sure what I write makes sense and giving my great ideas for how to improve the site.

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Goals, Making More Money, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , ,

Products Don’t Need To Be Perfect, They Just Need To Be Good Enough

January 18, 2012 By 1 Comment
This entry is part 2 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

Steve JobsPerfection sucks. It’s the enemy of invention, it’s the thing that holds you back. Trying to reach it might be an ok goal but never finishing a project until it’s perfect is the work equivalent of dry humping, it feels good but you never really get to the point. Sorry, but perfection can go to hell, I’ll take good enough any day of the week.

I say all this because I’m struggling with finishing up Diamonds or Dogs, my gift site. There are so many things I want to do. I need more reviewers, more reviews, a better landing page, a better “about us” and more information on why the site is the way it is. That’s just the beginning of my to do list. However, the more I try to get the site perfect, the more I push off the important task of starting to drive traffic to the site. Yes, I want the site to look good but I also want to start doing marketing for it. I want to start linking to it, telling people about it, running an AdWords campaign and the dozens of other things I will need to do in order to get people to my site. I’m not doing any of those things because I’m working on the landing page… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Achieving Success, Making More Money, Optimization, Perfectionism, Step 1 - Priorities Tagged With: , , , ,

Starting A Business

January 16, 2012 By Leave a Comment
This entry is part 1 of 3 in the series Diamonds or Dogs

lemonade stand posterWhen I was a freshman in college I came back home for the summer and my dad and I started a business selling chia pets. We made them in our garage and shipped them to stores around California. Actually, they weren’t Chia pets (because that’s someone else’s trademark) so we called them Green Heads, but they were essentially Chia Pets. We bought pantyhose from Target, filled them with saw dust from a lumber mill close by and grass seeds from Home Depot and then sold them to gift shops. It was fun and it made us a few hundred bucks. I also learned a lot about retail and manufacturing.

My senior year in college I started a comic book shop with a couple of friends. Actually, to give credit where credit is due, my friends did most of the work since they weren’t actually in college but I helped with everything from manual labor to business relations. It was pretty rough but doable with a minimum of resources and a lot of hard work. The store did well and you can still find Alternate Realities in the Lincoln Mall in Rhode Island (thank you Sue and Howie so very much for the wonderful experience). Again, it was a learning experience for me and I came out of it with a healthy respect for the power of accounting and inventory management. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Family, Friends, Goals, Making More Money, Step 2 - Make A Plan, Step 3 - Communicate Tagged With: , , , ,

The Plan For 2012

January 9, 2012 By 1 Comment

2012 !Earlier I wrote about my plan for 2011 and how that went, this post will be devoted to 2012.

Each of the items below is something I want to do or accomplish this year.  I’ve gone ahead and created a project for each one of these (nothing fancy, I just use tasks in Microsoft Outlook to track these).  Each project has various items under it that represent to do’s or tasks.  Accomplishing these tasks may lead to more tasks.  For example, when I figure out what I want to build from scratch I’ll have more to do’s around buying materials and making blue prints.

Each of these projects has measurements attached where possible.  These measurements are used to indicate success or failure.  for example, the blogging goal has a measurement of 1000 users per day to indicate success.  I then take this measurement and figure out what I need to do in order to achieve it.  Some goals, like children, have no measurements attached but in such a case I usually make a note to myself about why is it that I’m tracking this goal.  For example “I want to be a good parent”.  This will help me figure out what I need to do.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to my grand plan for 2012! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Family, Goals, Losing Weight, Making More Money, Starting Out, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , ,

How Did I Do On My 2011 Goals?

January 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

Happy new yearBack in January I posted these goals as the things I wanted to accomplish in 2011.  Looking through them now, I’ve accomplished a lot.  Yes, some of these goals failed and some only partially succeeded, but I aimed really high in 2011.  I also learned a lot about setting goals and creating plans; information which I am going to apply to 2012 goals. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Finance, Goals, Health, Jobs, Life Lesson, Perfectionism, Relationships, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , ,

How Can I Change The World? Or At Least My Country

November 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Darwin - Very gradual change we can believe inSo, if I think both the OWS and the Tea Party movements suck, how exactly would I go about changing the world?  It’s an interesting questions because one of my goals in life is to leave this world in a better condition than I found it.  Whether or not I have kids, I want my impact on this world (and on my country) to be positive.  I don’t need to be the next Abraham Lincoln or Tim Bernars Lee, but I would like to have a net positive impact.  This is especially important to me these days when the world seems to be in a bit of trouble all around.  We have environmental issues, economic collapse, political instability, leaders who seem clueless and politicians who seem completely out of touch.  In the face of all this, it’s easy to feel powerless and just give up.  However, there are still plenty of ways in which one person can have an impact and I’m going to use this post to list a few. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Communication, Decision Making, Goals, Honesty, Responsibility, Step 1 - Priorities, Step 2 - Make A Plan Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Why Occupy Wall Street Sucks

October 31, 2011 By 14 Comments

Occupy Wall Street: Day 14I don’t usually get into politics on this blog because I find that it’s too divisive.  People either believe or they don’t, sort of like religion, and trying to hold an intelligent conversation over a matter of faith is silly.  Today I’d like to change that a bit.  I’m going to talk about politics and the occupy wall street phenomena in particular.  However, I’m going to avoid talking about the political opinions expressed and just focus on the actions.  That is, I’m not trying to say whether the OWS movement is right or wrong, I’m simply going to look at how they’re conducting themselves.

First, a little background for those of you who might be reading this five years from now or who might have been living under a rock for the past five years.  OWS is a bunch of folks who are camping out in a park near Wall Street in protest of the current economic situation.  They have a variety of messages but most of the them revolve around the idea that current income distribution is unfair due to the fact that the top 1% of earners take home far more than 1% of the income.  That’s fine and if that’s your belief, good for you.  However, what actions are these people taking? [Read more...]

Filed Under: Step 1 - Priorities Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Choose To Be Happy

August 16, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Roses...I’m on a plane to Austin right now.  I’m going to be meeting some customers there tomorrow and then flying back home tomorrow night.  When I boarded the flight I saw a sign that said “free Wifi mid air” and it occurred to me just how wonderful these times are that we live in.

Sixty years ago it took my grandparents two weeks to escape from Romania to Israel.  They huddled in trains and on ships, not quite sure where they were going or what was going to happen to them.  They left behind all their belongings and faced a completely unknown future.  And here I was, making a journey of about the same distance in comfort.  I sip my complimentary drink and surf the web 30,000 feet above the American southwest. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Goals, Happiness, Making More Money, Step 1 - Priorities Tagged With: , ,
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