Strategies for profit

captainwatercolor dot com is about a year old. It is a web site offering free video watercolor lessons. There has been good content on the site since about January and traffic has been building since then. Now it’s over 100 visits a day. 40% are repeat visitors. Visitors load about 125 flash videos a day, (about half hour long each). I wish I could know how many visitors see the lessons to the end, but bandwidth indicates that most are fully loaded on visitor’s computers.

The plan was to get some good content and then to find a way make money from the site. I tried:

• Asking for donations, with very limited success.
• Adsense; and make about a dollar a day.
• Affiliate marketing for three weeks; and have done zip.
• Four days ago I put up a 1-1/4 hour lesson, and asked for $8 for it, and there are no takers at all.
• Watercolor supply companies have blown me off completely as regards advertising.

I am thinking about making a specialty product and selling it, or even stocking a full line of watercolor supplies and selling them, but I am 71 years old, and do not want to start a major business effort at this time of life.

Another Idea is to “charge” a “donation” for almost every lesson, but give a choice between “Donate Now” and “Maybe Later” buttons. Or offering everything free on Tuesdays, and not free the rest of the week.

I saw a guitar lesson site that offered beginner lessons free, then charged a membership fee for the rest, but don’t know if that sort of thing works any better.

I am running out of ideas. Can anyone make some suggestions?

 

I think the donations are not a good idea. The people will ignore it. Especially if the will have a choice.

I think you should try to change the layout of your website so the Google ads will be more visible. 100 visits a day is very low traffic to do any profit :-( You should do some promotion. Where do your visitors come from? Search engines, direct traffic?

The RSS and Twitter posting could help to attract more visitors.

 

Thanks. I do not understand how to use RSS. Can anyone point me to a tutorial that explains it from the beginning.

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