What is my storyline?

I am making some observations after a year of playing around earning money online. I decided to see what niches turn into hot web sites. First observation is I can not compete and win with Ebay.com or Amazon.com or even against Walmart.com.

There is a website service called alexa.com/topsites where it lists the top 500 websites world wide. Sigh, I am not even on that list. I doubt any of us are. But if I wanted to pay cash and buy my own Lear Jet and live with my toes in the sand on some tropical island surrounded by pretty senorita's well that is where I need to be.

So who does Alexa (Alexa itself owned by Amazon) consider to have hotter websites than me? Ah, some small companies. Google, Microsoft, Lowes, AT&T, Amazon, Wells Fargo, Citibank, and 493 similar others. As a matter of fact we get way down to about 250 on the list before we even start seeing things maybe someday we can compete with. A shocker that sights selling furniture get more visits than sites selling movie DVDs. Not a shocker that computer places like Best Buy or Geeks are high up too. There is a site selling mens shoes and sneakekrs somewhere in the top 225. So yes, success by filling a niche is possible.

But I am not seeing any small single person owner websites on the Alexa list. What is there is huge corporations with millions of dollars invested. That is disheartening.. Maybe I should find a list of the top 100,000 websites?

We need to find a niche specialty folks want to spend money on. YES, folks will spend money if you tell them you have a way to get rich making money off the Internet that you will sell to them. No need to tell them it is their money that will make you rich. If they are silly enough to go down that path. Those sites seem to do well too, for a few weeks. Then they get old and the owners have to change the ads (or the .com address) so it all seems new again.

What I wanted to find was hot widgets and gadgets, the kind you put in your car or on your coffee table, not the kind that sits in your WordPres, buy 10,000 of them then sell them on the Internet at profit and retire. What I learn browsing Alexa and other sites with cold numbers we can see is there are NO hot widgets that consistently earn profits. From pliers to AR 15 rifles to Addidas sneakers, nothing stays hot for more than a month or three.

Service industries do well on the Internet. So do sites with large numbers of every conceivable size and shape of gadget or widget. Plumbing supplies, electrical appliance part sites, etc. Of course they also have huge inventory costs. Logistics issues too. I have worked in warehouses run by Home Depot and Lowes, so I know all about that (and have no interest in un ending streams of tractor trailers and dangerous loading dock and warehouse operations).

Where (besides hucksterdom selling promises to make money selling promises to make money) are the good niches? Your guess is as good as mine. I had a website selling hot songs on MP3 (an affiliate thing). Gadzooks, what was hot this week was stone cold 3 days later and it was easy spending 19 hours a day trying to continuously tweak the top 100 list. What is #450 in the USA is #12 in Indonesia, #1 in Japan is like #800 in the USA, so it was constant research and website tweaking and at the end of the week, maybe $43 in affiliate commissions. Not worth the effort. Amazon copes by just selling everything. I had to get a different link for each new song and DVD. I lso learned that once my users realized I was selling Amazon and Ebay stuff, they had no need to visit my site anymore. They just went directly to Amazon or Ebay and browsed or bought there. Usually after my link's cookies had expired.

Cookies, that is another laugh. No one sane uses Internet Explorer or any browser that stores cookies. Your best customers probably use Mozilla and Self Destructing Cookie as their add on. Grease Monkey too to stop the pop ups and reminder channels. Maybe run Super Anti Spyware and delete all history automatically as soon as their browser turns off or switches tabs. So each run is totally fresh with no embedded affiliate links to earn you some money.

Hey throw some adblocking software in their browsers too. The result is when I go to my own websites I don't even see my own ads, so I know my customers don't either. How do you make money in that environment?

So what do we know? We are not an online bank, so Chase Morgan and Bank of America will always get more visitors a day than we do. We know depending on ads not seen and cookies not retained is pointless.

I see only one valid path. Web content not readily available elsewhere combined with a paid membership. You will have to be busting your butt to keep the normally unavailable content constantly added to. The week you stop adding new things is the day the money spigot begins shutting down. Wealthy Affliliate if you think about it is a good example. A constant stream of valuable information all in one place, and paid membership.

Yes I have log on privileges at some knock off clones of Wealthy Affiliates. Some actually do have good content, just not enough for me to spend money on them. A weekly newsletter with blogs suffices. Sorry for the ones wasting effort trying to get me to spend money on things I already know or can get here. Ain't gonna happen.

What do I and you need to do? I think find a topic no one else is talking about which folks wish the information was easy to find, but it isn't.. Put teasers out there at the for free level, but make them pay money for the real deal.

For the technically minded, here is a for instance I am not offering (yet). Scalable machinist drawings (blueprints you can scale up or down) for a Chevrolet 350 engine without emissions controls. Note you don't make the drawings. You find someone else that did, then put their drawings up on the web (with their permission of course) and charge folks money to see them.

Not technically minded? How about a serious study of how to tell which cities have the best public educational system? No, I don't mean the Consumer Reports fluff. I mean serious deep studies. Design the factors yourself, do the research, then put it on line, for a price. In your free teasers mention why the Consumer Reports article is junk and yours is better.

Don't sell information people already know. Everyone knows drinking a half cup of vinegar will make you smell like a corpse to mosquitos, ticks and fleas for the next six hours and they won't bite you. If someone pays you money and sees something they already know they will be annoyed, won't come back and may even demand a refund. Why not instead sell them a chemical, harmless to humans and pets and most wild life, that can be sprinkled into a pool or a pond and no mosquito larvae can survive there this year?

Something else too. YES, you need to put up some YouTube videos. HOWEVER, there are some lousy How To videos on You Tube. Some good ones too. Recognize making a good video is a pure PITA. Go visit my own website ( plimking.com ) and watch the free video there about 'plinking with a rolling block'. You can't see it, but even that was about 10 takes. Things kept going wrong. Batteries died. Tripods blew over, forgeting script lines, etc., etc. I even later created a blooper movie of stuff going wrong (just for friends, sorry). Do not think you will sit down and make a 12 minute video and have it come out perfect on the first go. It will not. Do not be one of those folks who puts up videos where things go wrong. If your video is junk, so too probably is what you are selling.

There are work arounds to not having a camera person, but it is really visible to the audience. Like when both your hands are full and you need that third hand to zoom in with the camera. I truly sometimes wish I had an assistant to hold the camera, but that would mean paying someone, so I don't.

Note also you and I are not the most photogenic of people. Do not let your ego rule your production. As most of my audience on plimking is male (according to Analytics) I truly wish I had pretty women in more of my videos. The sequence with a female speaker gets way more hits than the ones of my ugly face does. Again, $$$ modeling fees and a model agreement would be needed. I can't afford that yet.

I have one camera recording in avi while another records in mp3 and a third records in WMV. Aaargh. Conversion time so different takes can be spliced in or together. It can take hours. The 'cutting room floor.' If I have a 10 minute video out there, rest assured there is another half hour of discarded footage.

What is the best program to use for making your movies? You should try several. I did. Some have features that the competition lacks, but I went with a decision that works for me, a program that does everything reasonably well, but very slowly. Yes, I did try Adobe and I liked some things, but disliked some others. What won with me? The free one. Windows Movie Maker. Very slow (LoL, can we say a day) but it does a good job.

Photo editing.. Again I played with a bunch of programs. Again, I like the free one. Irfanview with the plug ins. Best of all is it can take a video and extract all the frames as pictures which is great for inserting the page the viewer sees when first spotting the video online (thumbnail).

When doing re-takes to be spliced in, please remember to wear the same clothing and do it in the same weather or room as in the rest of the video (LoL).

You Tube has classes on making good videos. Watch a few.

Listen to this guy for a good intro to the topic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlM6cQgTGjI

Video length is up to you. Yes a lot of folks bail out after 5 minutes. If you make a good half hour video you probably did at least 3 hours of filming and set up, and 5 - 10 hours of review and editing, then more time to make it into a movie (you can go out for dinner while your computer is doing that) and maybe even 4 or 5 hours to upload the movie to YouTube (while you sleep).

Just thoughts afteabout a year of doing this stuff...

I do advertise my site on Facebook. It does get some visits through that venue.