This is our February Cleaning Products for Face and Eyes list. The best-selling products for the month are as follows:
1. Simple Green Multi-Surface All Purpose Cleaner, 1 Gallon, Amazon.com $11.29
2. Crest 3D Whitestrips, 64 ct, Amazon.com $20.99** **
3. Oral-B Pro 1000 Electric Toothbrush with Bluetooth Connectivity, Walmart $46.88* *
4. Colgate Total Advanced Care Dental Floss, Amazon $6.99** **
5. Tweezerman Slant Tweezers with Stainless Steel Tips and Case, Amazon $8.99** **
6. Nivea Soft Cleansing Pads for Face and Eyes (4-Pack), Walgreens $6.59** **
7. Burt’s Bees Sensitive Skin Hand Cream, Target $15.* *
8. Cetaphil Gentle Skin Cleanser with Aloe and White Tea Extracts (1 oz.), Walgreens $9.* *
9. Dermalogica Daily Microfoliant Treatment (1 oz.), Amazon $41.* *
10. Clarins Instant Smooth Perfecting Lotion SPF
If you want to get rich, there are thousands of ways. The way I’ve made my money is one that thousands of other people have also used with great success. The key is to find the best selling products for your niche, and market them well.
As an example, cleaning products for face and eyes. Products for this kind of thing are often very expensive, because they are in a specialized niche: many people have eyes, but not everyone needs them cleaned. So if you make a quality product at a reasonable price, you can get a huge market share. You will be able to make more money than the big companies that make the same product at the much higher price.
This is one of the ideas behind our site: we publish the best selling products for face and eyes every month, so that readers can see what’s hot and what’s not. That way they can decide which vendors to buy from.
This is how we make our money: we buy only from vendors that provide good customer service and offer competitive prices. We don’t pay a lot; we’re not trying to be rich; but we do offer some extra features like customer reviews and discussion forums, so our customers generally feel happy with the service we provide.
In the world of technology, products that are best sellers often become famous very rapidly. But not always. The blogging site WordPress began in 2003, but it didn’t begin to be known outside the world of bloggers until 2006. Facebook didn’t begin to be known outside college students until 2007; and Twitter was unknown for all but a few early adopters until about 2010. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why: people who stumbled across these products by accident were dazzled by their initial success.
But what if a product is so good your friends don’t realize it’s new? That’s what happened to the polygon cryto blog, which was created in 2009. That blog was best selling in February 2012. It still is today–although on February 1st this year its sales fell below $100K.
It’s a cliché that the most important thing you can do for your business is to have a good product. But it’s true. It’s also true that the best way to make a great product is to have a great idea. And so far this month, we’ve seen four great ideas and three great products. The best of all was the final one.
The original idea for polygon cryto had some problems: it was too complicated, or not complicated enough, or both. It had to be easy to use but difficult to describe in words; it had to be simple but hard to explain; it had to be speed-of-light fast but also secure; it had to be portable but only take up as much room as a credit card; and it needed some kind of heuristic system for playing with the numerical results.
I think I got a handle on all these problems at once, in a single insight: if you want something simple, then make it hard to describe in words. That way, anyone who understands your product will know what an idiot they are if they try to describe it in words instead of using pictures.
At a certain point, the mass of people who are new users of your product can make it impossible for you to tell which features are essential.
It’s like the early days of the Web, when companies had to pay huge amounts of money to get on top of search rankings. It’s no good if the search engines think your site is about cats and you don’t know it.
Some people are fascinated by the idea of writing a book about how to write a book. This requires an unusual mixture of talent and luck, since it’s hard to move from being an amateur with no writing experience to being a professional. But there are lots of people who are interested in writing books about how to start a blog or how to make your best-selling product.
There is no obvious reason that one should be better at writing a blog than the other. The person who knows the best way to write a blog may not be very good at writing the book, and vice versa; but those skills are not obviously related. But there is one key skill that makes both possible: writing code.
There is no obvious difference between writing code and writing text, and if you don’t have much experience in either, you will have trouble in both. People who know more about either will have an advantage in both; and when it comes to starting up a new business, the best way to make money is probably by doing something better than your competition: inventing something new.
The most common job in America is domestic service. There are more than 20 million people who do housework and child care in their homes, and another 1.2 million people who do dishwashing and waitressing in restaurants, but only 6.5 million accountants work on paper, working with numbers instead of words, using a machine to turn the moving figures into money.
The number of accountants has shrunk by half over the last 30 years. In 1980 there were around 300,000 accountants in the U.S., today there are around 150,000. Over the same period, however, the number of women who do housework and childcare has more than doubled, from 3 million to more than 8 million; so even though there are now hundreds of thousands fewer accountants than there used to be, there are twice as many people doing housework and childcare as there were thirty years ago.