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I have been with DVDNow for several months now. Actually it was this time last year that I had my first contact with them. How have things gone since then? Any surprises about the company? What exactly is good about DVDNow, what is bad about DVDNow, and what surprises have I faced since signing up with this company?

This post will be the good. Before any of you start writing saying this is an advertisement for DVDNow please reconsider. The very next post will be only the bad, and there is some bad you should know about.

For those of you that don’t know, DVDNow is a Canadian company that manuafactures DVD Kiosks and sells them to the public. Most of their customers are in the United States of America. They sell their kiosks for 15,000 ~ 19,500 USD. Their Kiosk has a very attractive look to it, holds 112 DVDs, and has side panels that are expandable to hold DVD artwork or revenue generating advertising. [Read more →]

Several times annually I must order a batch of RFID tags from DVDNow. The RFID tags are what we DVD Kiosks owners stick on the DVDs to make sure we get them back, instead of an empty DVD jewel case. What happens when you are sent a bad batch of RFID tags? Well, unfortunately I can tell you.

The last batch of RFID tags I received looked like pretty normal. As I was sticking the RFID tags on the DVDs I did not notice anything out of the ordinary. My first clue that something was wrong happened as I was sticking the first DVD in my machine for the week. The DVD was spit back out at me with an RFID security tag error. After three or four tries to get the machine to accept my DVD I gave up and tried the second movie. I was surprised to get the same error. Of the six movies I was going to put in the machine only two went in without a problem. I replaced the tags on the other four movies and after going through several third, fourth, and fifth tries I finally got all six movies in the kiosk. [Read more →]

Whew, sorry to leave you guys and gals hanging with no idea of where I was. Thank you for the emails of concern. We are OK. My wife left for a mission trip in Peru leaving me and my wonderful little girl to fend for our self a whole week. In the mean time I had an investment deal I was trying to work (more on that later). My day job was wild the last two weeks and just when I thought it could get no more hectic DVDNow sent me a bad batch of RFID tags. My next post will alert you to the troubles of bad RFID tags.

Thanks for your understanding and patience. I have not been blogging long enough to have a the number of posts queed for such an extended rainy season. I hope to return to somewhat of a normal schedule next week.

My third post was Bullish Trading with BullTrade and I gave the company lots of accolades. I am not going to take away anything from there past for they have proven to be effective time and time again. Since joining BullTrade I have made some money and while I still like their stock picking abilities I do have to let you know everything is not roses.

With the volatile market of recent weeks if you are making money consistently you are doing good. BullTrade posted on its website that it completed the month of March with a 9.5% loss. They are posting gains of 11 & 15 percent for April and May. In June BullTrade posted a 6 % gain and so far in July they have done a little better than 20%.

However, to be fair to everyone I have to point out that BullTrade is sitting on 9 stocks that are performing miserably. Currently, they have a total of 9 stocks in their portfolio and all 9 have lost money. As of today they are down an average of 12% in their holdings.

I own a DVD Rental Kiosk and never have to deal with a customer, right? Although it is not often I do have to deal with issues that arise. Most of the time these issues are very menial and can be dealt with by offering the customer something for their trouble. 

It seems like when I started the DVD rental business I dealt with issues a lot more than I do now. I am not sure if people are more acclimated to the process now or if there is another reason for the decline. What ever the reason I like it. The less complaints that I get the better for business.

Here is a list of complaints that I have dealt with since November 2007. [Read more →]

It has been a slow week for RealWebToday as I have only written 2 posts this week. I have had some other business opportunities that have side tracked me temporarily. I certainly hope to have everything headed in the right direction this time next week.

Here are the numbers this week:

As you can plainly see all numbers are down again. This is not really a surprise as I have not pushed any real content out this week.

Here is a typical week in the life of a DVD Rental Kiosk owner.

• Friday: Receive and prepare new release DVDs. This includes placing RFID tags and ‘Insert this way’ stickers on the DVD.
• Sunday: Load movies in one kiosk. Clean and maintain kiosk. You will not believe the greasy hand prints that are all over the machine each week. I bring a pack of Windex wipes with me.
• Monday: Finalize any ads to be run this week and load movies into second DVD Kiosk. Clean and maintain kiosk.
• Tuesday: Look ahead 6-8 weeks and order any new movies from the distributor.
• Wednesday: Load trailers into DVD kiosk for the next release date. I use the back-end kiosk management software to do this.
• Thursday: Accounting and bill paying and ordering of supplies. Supplies would include any stickers and tags needed along with anything else used in my home office.

There you have it, what happens behind the scenes to make sure the DVD Rental Kiosk stays full of new release movies.

It has only been a week and a half since the advertising campaign really started. I know not to expect to much too early in the campaign. I know that an advertising or marketing plan can take weeks or even months to return positive results. I know that even if current results are looking promising that it is too early to tell how it is working.

The numbers are looking better though. The fact that we just had a holiday weekend with a little rain in the area did not hurt matters however the rentals were already up. In fact, the day after I ran my first advertisement rentals and income went up.

Income has gone up $15 a day with initial rentals up almost 5 movies a night. While on face value this does not sound like a whole lot but when you multiply $15 times 365 days it is just shy of $5,500 bucks. Now that is what I am talking about. [Read more →]

For all of you in the good ole USA … Happy July the 4th.

My blog is certainly headed in the wrong direction, statistics wise. I haven’t been cultivating traffic the way I had been over the past few weeks. Mostly relying on traffic driven to my site from Google and yahoo. As you can see from the stats below everything is down except the number of pages each person looks at.

I am not concerned about the revenue being down. Until I start counting traffic by the hour instead of by the day I don’t expect this site to be profitable. I am starting to be a little concerned because the traffic count is not growing. I have several people looking and reading but so far not many people putting this site on technorati, del.icio.us, digg, or stumbleupon. Until Google picks the site up consistently on several search phrases it looks like I will have to rely on the other sources.

Have a wonderful 4th of July holiday.

Anytime you deal with people you are going to be surprised. Even when you think you have heard it all, along comes another question. The same is true when you own a DVD Rental Kiosk. Very rarely do I have face to face contact with customers but when I do most of the time it is memorable.

Each and every time I go to the kiosk I am asked by customers, “What is coming out this week?” This is a question I like because it shows interest in my inventory and possible conversions to rentals. It humors me though because the first thing I do when putting in new movies is to place a sign on my machine alerting customers what the new releases of the week are.

Why don’t you have movie “fill in the blank” in your machine? Most of the time I have never even heard of the movie in question but the times that I have the movie may have grossed a million or two at the box office. I politely tell them I have never heard of the movie or it just did not do well enough at the theaters for me to purchase. [Read more →]