Yes…yes they can.  I was recently shopping for a new camcorder.  The retail value of the one I had in mind was $1,200.  My goal was to get it for $500 lightly used.  On one site I found my choice, the Canon HV20 for $369…what was my first thought?  “Wow, hook me up with that” or “What’s the catch…is it made out of used pinball machine parts?”  Sure enough, after a little research this website was famous for selling you something for super cheap and then refusing to ship it unless you were successfully upsold to a variety of different accessories…all with high markups.

Recently, a project of mine was faced with small margins that left it little room for growth.  Over the course of many months however, prices for this product soared, leaving me the opportunity to almost double my prices while maintaining the niche I had of being the affordable solution.  The result?  Order volume stayed level, leaving me with an huge jump in revenue and the ability to put a lot more into marketing and advertising to foster some growth.

The lesson?  If I would have kept my prices where they were before, what would have been the thoughts of people doing some comparison shopping?  It could have been, “wow, what a great deal”, but at the same time, they could have felt my product was either inferior…or just too good to be true.

I have lots of ideas about where I want to end up in 10-15 years with my career.  Yesterday, a family friend told us about his new jobs making eye-glasses for kids as part of a non-profit organization that leverages big name sponsors and an intellegent board to bring sight to underprivileged children.  Talk about shady characters; how do those people sleep at night?

But the more I think about it, that is the direction I want to head.  I would love to combine my love of sports with my love of marketing and my love of philanthropy to market charitable sporting events.   In fact, as this summer began, I told myself that if I couldn’t find a worthwhile internship I would split my summer time between starting a new business and organizing a charity road race in Logan.  I found an internship, but the desire to do something like that remains.

So the dream as it stands right now is to keep working my tail off to improve my skills and gain experience, all the while remembering where I want to be and make sure my choices in experience and work are taking me closer to that goal.

I am tired of websites that shout at me and I am tired of hype.  I am tired of headlines full of words like: instant, secret, laser, exposed, killer, and explosive.

I miss simplicity.  I miss clarity and honesty.  I miss being able to trust a website.

Stop shouting…talk to me.

While the name is still a secret while I work out a few kinks and get ready for the launch in about three weeks.  This is the design for my new site: a video podcast featuring free tutorials on internet marketing for small businesses.   The focus will be on quick, afforable IM solutions without the need for techy knowledge.

I have the content about wrapped up for the first 4 months of tutorials (they’ll be released every other Tuesday) and I am just waiting to put the final touches on everything until after I come back from the New Media Expo this weekend.   Something tells me with all the stuff I’ll be learning there, my plan/model with this project might need to be tweaked, so I will launch it officially on either Sep. 2nd or the 9th.