Nerdy Dork

I’m very mediocre at online marketing. I know all the theory and things I should be doing to make money online, but I haven’t hit the big time by any means. I think a big part of the problem is that I’m not very motivated by making money. For for some weird reason, I’m very motivated to save money!

This is where the knowledge and skills I’ve developed in internet marketing begin to be entertaining and profitable. I have two example to share. One I’ll share now, the other I’ll share after May (you’ll understand why when I share it then)

Example the first:

I love Rocketman! It’s one of my all time favorite movies. It’s just plain clean stupid humor. I wanted a copy of it so bad on DVD. At first it was only available as a region 2. I couldn’t take a chance of it not working. LaterI found that it was released in region 1. I saw a few copies on Amazon, but they were selling for over $50 per copy. I did some searching and found that the only way to order them was by joining the Disney DVD club. I didn’t want to join the club for one movie. I did some calculation, and though I can’t remember the exact numbers (this was two years ago) I figured if I joined the club and bought filled my requirements by buying all Rocketman movies, I could get approx 9 copies for $118.00 ($13.10 each) and then quit. So, if I kept one and sold the rest to break even, I would just need to sell them for $14.75 each. Since they were selling on Amazon for $50 I figured it wouldn’t be a problem.

My wife was quite surprised when she saw 9 copies of Rocketman show up in the mail. Ok, by now she’s probably not surprised by the weird things I do, but rather curious. I kept one copy for my personal collection and sold the other 8 on Amazon for an average of $40 each after shipping. So, to do the math, I got my movie and made $202.00 in the process!

I told a friend about it and he was elated because his wife had joined the Disney DVD club and they still had 3 movies to buy before they could fulfill their commitment. He bought 3 copies of Rocketman and sold them promptly.

So why not wash, rinse, repeat? I told you, I’m lazy. I hated going to the post office and shipping movies. Besides, I’m sure they have some kind of rules about household quitting and rejoining. I did tell everyone what I did and said they could do the same to make a quit buck, but I think they were all too skeptical and no one took me up on it.

Don’t bother now, because you can buy them new on Amazon for under $10.

Look for the follow up to this post in a couple of months.

UPDATE:

I wrote the follow up post, but just before publishing it I changed my mind. As much as I would love to share what I did (I basically got a $1000+ value from $6 worth of advertising and 1-2 hours of time). I thought it would be a once in a lifetime opportunity, but from what I’ve learned, the opportunity may present itself next year! So, I guess I’d be better off keeping this one to myself for now.
Continue reading “Skills for Deals”

I was looking at some web statistics this morning and I noticed that I had quite a few hits on my DVD site coming from a forum at LDS Mingle. I was intrigued (mostly because I’m LDS) so I signed up temporarily to see what the talk was about. A member there suggested visiting DVD Anthology to track your DVD collection, keep track of movies you loan out and print lists of your movies - exactly what I created the site for

Another man piped up and suggested, why bother when you can keep track of all your movies on your PDA and not have to be tied down to the internet. They argued for a bit about the pros & cons of each. I thought it was funny, because little do they know that the creator of DVD Anthology is also the owner of Shilbon Software and LDS PDA!

I wanted to join the conversation, but it required that I pay for membership. Since I’m already married I couldn’t see the value in it.

Technorati Tags: LDS, DVDs, PDA, PDAS, Palm, Clie, DVD Collection, Mormons

Have you ever wanted an easy way to keep track of all your DVDs? Sure you can use a text editor or spreadsheet, but there are better ways.

I remember quite a few years back visiting a family and they asked what movie we wanted to watch and gave us a list of all the movies they owned, printed out in little binder. Wow, that was nice and easy! When I say easy, I mean it was easy for me to choose, but I wonder how easy it was for them to maintain.

Well, now it can be easy to do both. At DVD Anthology you can register free and begin creating a list of all the DVD movies you own. Once you have your collection completed, you can print the list out in a number of different formats – alphabetical, by genre, or by rating – all with or without image thumbnails! Hey, why not print off all three and keep them in a binder.

Do you ever loan your DVDs to family and friends? You can even print a check out list so you can know who has what! How cool is that? Now my paranoid grandpa has that list he has always wanted to know who has borrowed his old movies.

Now you can keep your own neatly organized binder to show off to your friends when they come over to watch a movie. You can also keep a list of your absent minded friends & family who have forgotten to return your moves.

Technorati Tags: DVD, DVDs, DVD Collection, Movie, Movies, DVD Collector

I was at the Library the other day to pick up a book I had on hold. I always like to walk by the DVD section to see if there is anything good available. Hey, its a free DVD rental!

Well I saw Raising Helen and figured my wife would like to watch it. She really liked How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

I have to admit I really liked it. I was completely surprised. I just figured it would be a silly comedy. Who knew it would involve such tragedy. Maybe I’m just turning into a chick flick kind of guy, but I would recommend this movie for a “feel good” evening.

Growing up, I often heard my mom talk about Boise Idaho. I know that she lived there for some period of here life, but I’m not exactly sure when. I’ve actually been there once, briefly. My friend got married there and I was his best man. I really didn’t see much of the city. I was in the Boise Temple most of the time there. We did see the inside of a mall and a Golden Coral or something afterwards.

It seems to be growing in popularity though. Can you believe their football team this year? That game against Oklahoma should have a movie made about it! Between that game and Napoleon Dynamite, people might start finding Idaho on a map

My brother is currently doing his residency to become a doctor. Yeah, he’s a scrub. He’s here in Utah at the moment, but he and his wife have often talked about moving to Idaho once he is done. From what I here it’s a great place to live and lots of people are moving there.

Well, if it’s growing anything like the Salt Lake Vally, better jump into a home there while the housing is still affordable! Check out some Boise real estate.

(This was a sponsored post.)

My mother-in-law called me last night to see if it was possible to extract clips off of DVDs and then make a compilation of these clips on a new DVD. I had to assume it was, but honestly I’ve never tried. So I spent my morning trying. I found it was possible and even free with the tools I had available.

I also found a nice free VOB to AVI converter. Just try try it out, I copied one of my favorite scenes from Rocketman!

I’ve really enjoyed the harry potter series. After watching the first movie I read the book. I then read each of the following books before the new movie came out. I was disappointed with how much they left out of the last one. I understand why they have to cut so much out, but it can be hard to sit and enjoy a movie when things are not as you remember them.

So this time I’m waiting until after I watch the movie to read the book. I found this sneak peak on Google video.

Recently I’ve been on this honesty kick… I’m going through all my software applications I use and either 1. registering them, 2. finding free or cheaper alternatives, or 3. removing them and doing without.

The hardest has been doing without photoshop. I can’t afford to buy such an expensive program. So I’ve recently installed GIMP as a replacement. I understand it can probably do most of the image editing that I would do with photoshop, but in a completely different way.

So far I haven’t gone through any tutorials, but after playing with it for a while I’ve had moderate success. My most recent success is the creation of my new Napoleon Dynamite blog header! What do you think?

I’m currently reading Book 4 of the Harry Potter series. I’m only about half-way through. I just happened upon these pictures of the film though. Exciting!!!

link: Studio Stills Photos

Napoleon Dynamite

Originally uploaded by niner74.

I love those portraits that were hangin on the wall!

Now, it seems back in the 80’s when they used to do that kind of stuff, wasn’t the background photo normally looking into space, and the main photo looking at the camera?