From His Temple He Heard My Voice; My Cry Came Before Him, Into His Ears. (Psalm 18:6)

Hey, what can I say?  I'm in a minimalist mood right now... I know, I know... usually that would mean stark white with a tiny bit of black on it... but coincidently, not only am I in a minimalist mood, but I'm also in a contrarian mood...

Went with Wifey to see Avatar today, the whole "3D IMAX" thing.

First, I don't know what I was expecting, or where I got this idea to begin with, but I always thought IMAX was one of those huge concave screens that kind of wrap around the audience, like the inside of a dome. I saw a cool volcano movie in such a theater once, at a museum in San Diego... I don't know why I thought that's what IMAX was... I thought we'd walked into the wrong theater... so my question is, what's the difference between a 3D movie, and an IMAX 3D movie? It seemed like the screen was the same, just a bit taller...

But the positional sound was awesome. And really, the 3D effects were awesome. I liked the movie itself a lot. I doubt anything will come close in the Special Effects-related categories for the Oscars this year. If there was ever a sure thing, it's Avatar sweeping all the audio-visual Oscars this year. The message was pretty heavy-handed. I almost injured my eyes rolling them at the line about how "we killed our mother" and had come to Pandora to kill its mother as well. Gimme a break. There were other eye-rolling moments as well, but not enough to lower my rating of the film below an 8.

Though here's how some think it Should Have Ended...

Hmm... still no signal...

Saw a trailer for a Tom Cruise movie that I actually would like to see! It's called Knight and Day. The funny thing is that it also stars Cameron Diaz, who is also on my list of Movie Stars I Try To Avoid If At All Possible. Other notable names on the list include Nick Cage, John Travolta and Julia Roberts. Anyway, check out the trailer... looks pretty good, actually...

Come on, admit it... that looks pretty good. 

Saw a bunch of other trailers, but nothing else worth noting.

Yeah, I know... I broke tradition by putting another large landscapey picture in the middle of this post instead of just at the beginning. What can I say? I'm also in an unorthodox mood, with a stress on horticulture. 

Seeing as how I'm in an unorthodox mood, I'm going to do something I've never done in a blog post... I'm going to post a snippet of one of the interviews I've edited for Piranha Marketing, since I'm curious what you will think about it.

The speaker is Stephen Pierce, the interviewer is Joe Polish. Stephen Pierce is an expert in Internet Marketing... HERE is his website.

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 Joe: If you could touch on how you would recommend someone get started with Internet marketing, if they really feel like they don’t know what they’re doing.  How would someone get started?  

Stephen: For somebody who wants to go online, make extra money, supplement income, replace lost income, or maybe just get rich, the absolute fastest way to make money on the Internet, and this is going to seem obvious but it’s the truth, the fastest way to make money on the Internet is to sell what people are already buying.

        Now, it’s an obvious truth.  But interesting enough, most people, the majority of the people who go on the Internet, sell one of 2 things:  1) what they want people to buy; or 2) what they hope people will buy.  

        It doesn’t work that way, because everybody has what I call the GAP, which is their Goals, Activities and Priorities.  The goals that they’re looking to achieve (whether daily, weekly, quarterly, monthly, whatever), the activities they engage in to reach their goals, and the prioritization of their resources (their time, energy and money) to engage in those activities to reach those goals.  

        So, if you were competing against their priorities, the game is over before it even starts.  

        What we want to do is we want to understand what are people already buying, because those are transactions that are going to take place regardless of you.  

        I tell people all the time, “The Internet does not require your permission; it only requires your participation in a very specific way.”  When you can understand what the flow of money is, all you have to do is just get into the stream of it.  

        There are billions of dollars in transactions taking place independent of you.  What you want to do is understand how you insert yourself into the process of those transactions and get a cut.  You do that by understanding what people are already buying.

        One of the fastest ways to do it, I think, is literally minutes worth of research.  Go to Amazon, go to the different categories.  First thing you look at is best-sellers.  That lets you know what’s selling the most.  

        Most categories, to the left from best-sellers, will have a movers-and-shakers category.  That lets you know what’s selling the fastest.  

        So, from just doing that in all kinds of categories from software to games to electronics, you can know, based on Amazon’s market share of those products, what the best-selling products are and what the fastest-selling products are.  Bestsellers, obviously, in the bestsellers category.  Fastest-selling products are in the movers-and-shakers.

        The interesting thing is products that sell fast will show first on Amazon’s movers-and-shakers list long before they’ll even appear in Google’s keyword list.  So, you want to pay attention to that.  

        Now, the second-fastest way to make money on the Internet is to sell what people are about to buy.  In other words, where’s the money flowing today, and the where’s the money going to be flowing in the future?

        Well, one thing that’s easy to monitor are franchise-type products.  Software products have franchise-type products.  Video games have franchise-type products.  

        But one way to know where money is about to flow is to know what’s on preorder, whether they’re clothing or electronics or games.  

        Again, Amazon, you can go and you can look at what products they have available on pre-order.  

        You can do keyword research.  Here’s the thing.  I was teaching this, this year, to people.  It blew people’s minds.  I’ll give you an example.

        Before Call of Duty:  Modern Warfare 2 came out, this was like 4½ months before the product came out, there were over 300,000 searches a month for “Call of Duty:  Modern Warfare 2,” that exact phrase.  

        There was only one person advertising the product, and that was I think Gamespot or someplace like that.  If you wanted to get the pay-per-click traffic, you would pay 5¢ or less to get it.  

        Here’s the thing:  I show people product after product.  Even Windows 7, before it came out, there were el-zilcho advertisers.  But if you looked for Windows Vista, you looked for Windows XP, there was like 100 different pay-per-click advertisers on paid search.  

        But if you looked for Windows 7, I think there was like 2 people advertising for Windows 7.  There was tons of search volume on it, but yet you could sell those products on preorder because the way Amazon works, at least with Amazon’s model, you can take a product that’s on preorder, you can build a landing page, pre-filled page, whatever, bring the buyer in, and take them off the market.  Because the moment they hit that pre-sale order link and they order it, pre-sell via Amazon, their card isn’t charged and you’re not credited the commission, but the buyer’s off the market.  

        Once Amazon ships the product, they charge the card and credit you with the commission.

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What do you guys think of that? You find out what is selling best/fastest on Amazon, set up an affiliate page, if people buy it from your page, you get a small piece. Is it really that easy to do? It makes sense, in theory... it strikes me as one of those "if it's that easy, everyone would be doing it" type of things... the guy seems to know what he's talking about. And he has a lot of great info in that interview, I thought...

Meh, who knows.

OK, I'm done feeling contrarian for the day. Sunday is church day. We'll see what happens. All I know is, it's a good time for me. The Wife and I are getting along, and I have a ton of Facebook Scrabble games going. Now if I could only find a good book to read, I'd be worry-free. That Erikson book is waning... not sure how much longer I'll be reading it. It's inconsistent... flashes of great reading, stretches of dullness, hampered by the effort to try and remember who is who... too many characters...

Adios for now.

Dave the Gump