NevBlog

As I got his first rough-draft book for reviewing in the mail, I almost threw it in the trash like I do most of the promotional books I get. They’re usually something along the lines of “Make Millions Without Lifting A Finger” or some equally outrageous (yet unrealistic) title.

Tim’s book “An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million As A Stock Operator & Created A Hedge Fund” caught my eye because of the title and the fact that he is only two years older than I am (he is 26 now).

I started to simply skim through the book, but to my surprise it was actually quite an interesting read! His book described how he would work out of his dorm room in college (which sounded very familiar to me) and trade stocks. I did this too once, although not near to the level he got. Sometimes he would gain as much as $130,000 in ONE DAY!! Needless to say I was very enthralled by the story:

From $12,000 in Bar Mitzvah money, Tim turned that into about $1.65 MILLION in less than 3 years! I was a little skeptical about him claiming to be a big shot money guru, because he traded during volatile times in the stock market. Impressive none-the-less, but I feel a truly seasoned money professional can make money throughout every type of stock market (like TheKirkReport.com), but Tim wasn’t even old enough to have experienced more than 1 or 2 types of markets.

Surprisingly he didn’t tout himself as a big-shot money guy, but it shows the reader about his absolutely risky trading habits which luckily paid off for him. Of course turning such little money into so much money still takes lots of skill.

While I was in New York I got a chance to meet up with Tim, and he’s quite the cool character! We met up at the really slick W Hotel bar called WetBar (sorry, I forgot to get a picture) and started talking about all his ventures. Really cool guy. He now has his own web series with his own camera crew and everything on MSN Video and TheStreet.com, plus has been on CNBC many times, interviewed cool people like Richard Branson and has done some very interesting skits to teach people about stocks.

I told him he was going to be the Bill Nye the Science Guy of stocks one day because he makes his lessons informative yet interesting at the same time.

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One of the other things that fascinated me about this kid was instead of him publishing his book through a big publishing house, he decided to start his own publishing company to release his book. This caught my attention, because I love it when people embark upon an industry they know little to nothing about and succeed in it. So instead of going with a big publishing house and getting very small returns per-book, he can go through himself (and Amazon.com) and make a large sum per book. I love it!

If you haven’t heard about Tim Sykes by now, I have a feeling you’ll be hearing a lot more about him soon. I do know one thing though, his personality is a love-him or hate-him type. We were supposed to attend the Trader Monthly 30 Under 30 party while I was in New York, and Tim actually got DIS-INVITED!!! HA!!

Apparently the previous year he showed up in a bath robe to the party (which I think is completely hilarious and a nice break from the stuffy suits that always show up).

Check him out.

Although I rarely watch CNBC anymore, I like when they profile big companies like WalMart. Today I saw a profile about the start and growth of McDonalds.

It showed how the McDonald brothers had a small chain of restaurants until Ray Croc (a milkshake machine salesman of all things) bought them out. He started replicating the McDonalds business model all over the nation then globe, but the thing he was fanatical about was consistency.

He wanted all McDonald’s stores to have a proper look and feel to them to make customers familiar with them, therefore more inclined to buy from them. I’m not selling hamburgers, but having a “put together” business to make people feel comfortable is a good idea for any business.

This somehow ties into my recent plan to start making HouseOfRave more consistent and “put together” to appear more professional. I’ve started working with a more professional supplier, and therefore I need to make the site more professional and consistent. This doesn’t mean necessarily re-designing the site, but just making everything more congruent.

I went from somehow watching a special about McDonalds (which I then proceeded to eat at) to snooping around my own website trying to view it from a brand new visitors perspective. One of the first things I noticed was the 2nd top-level navigation menu button “Catalog” was horribly designed and outdated by several YEARS.

This is a highly clicked page, and some of the category links on this page had dead links, and many of them have been changed or removed over the years. This could easily turn a potential customer away. I immediately started working on this and cranked out 18 custom category images. I use Photoshop all the time, so this went relatively quick..but was very boring. Now instead of writing “Battery Operated Section” and including a small 75×75 pixel product image from that category, it now has a proper image associated with it. So the battery operated section of the catalog has this image:

It has a more congruent feel with the website and more thoroughly conveys what that section contains. A portion of the images used were actually taken by me in previous product photo shoots. For example, the only non-mine image above are those finger lights, that’s just a standard manufacturers picture.

Another thing I quickly noticed on the top menu bar was another high-traffic page which has been neglected for some time. The video section leads to a page that looks like this:

It’s meant as the video landing page where you can select between five different types of videos. This section has been around a long time and has proved to be pretty popular, so I figured I should at least jazz it up with a few small images. So I quickly added a few and it looks like this now:

I’m not 100% happy with that look, but it’s slightly more engaging now.

So these are just two small changes I’ve made to make the site look more congruent and put together. The ultimate goal is not to have the best designed site around, but to make potential customers feel comfortable enough to order from it.

Since I see the site everyday from the owners view, I focus on different things than customers. I need to start patrolling around the site more often with a different perspective to catch other obvious errors and areas that could use improvement. That will be my main objective for HouseOfRave this September.

Feel free to let me know via comment or personal email if you catch other obvious errors!