I don't know if it's literally true that Successful People wake up at 4AM ,deal with expensive niche objects and make quick decision but are also quick to put an idea on hold if it does not work out.

I would say that it's not just the money, rich buying rich to get richer, it's also the social network - you need to build trust relationships and have leverage.  But honestly, I'm not there myself, so I can't really speak to it, only I have read and listened to Michael Phipps's Secrets of Successful People post.

What would be a high priced niche object?  Michael Phipp says it could be a 55,000 BMW that you sell for 60,000, making 5,000 on the sale.   Another niche object is a recognized artist's work, like the Janet Fish opening I went to yesterday on 57th Street - see Janet Fish at DC MOORE Gallery for more.  There was more money rolling off sleeves of the people attending that opening if you knew who to talk to.  But if you looked deeper into Janet Fish's background, she came from an established family to begin with. It's really a woman who makes an attractive niche product, is from money and is selling to others - money buys money; and maybe they just like the art too - but it's probably as much about the money as it is about the art.

Which gets me to the real point of this post - there's established wealth and then there is "disruptive wealth"; like the wealth that comes to one Google's founders after developing the most successful search engine on the planet.  It's also the Disruptive wealth that comes out of the AlwaysOn 100 that I reviewed last month at AlwaysON NYC.

One of the problems, I feel, with the Architects work I've tried to promote (many who are well to do themselves), is that even a 500 dollar or 1000 dollar architectual house plan is not enough of a margin, it's not niche enough; nor is online advertising via Google AdSense or even organic search results going to be the most effective way to reach the real buyers.

In fact, perhaps the first thing I'd ask - do I have a successful product or service to sell, to begin with?  Sure, someone needs to sell the 2 dollar widget, or the 500 dollar one, but what about the 5,000 dollar widget, the 50,000 dollar widget?  Can I sell a couple of those?

And here we come back to the fundamental issue - beyond price, is your product or service a commodity?. You can't make a lot of money of a commodity unless your the the guy in the middle - the trader or the owner of a large number of other commodities and perishables.  

In this case, the guy in the middle is not the architect, it's Google!  Google has become Super Rich become the guy middle - who profits from the advertiser who has something to sell and the publisher who displays the contextual ads.

In a way, Touch Clarity, now owned by Omniture, deals with this issue by offering a custom offer to every potential customer - I wrote about Touch Clarity in Omniture's Discover 2 Launch at NASDAQ plus Touch Clarity .  

Until a successful offer can be made to the right audience (usually niche - if your going to make money); it's hard to see how the little guy will profit that much from anything. 

Getting back to Architects (and I'm not even sure how much longer I will have this client - they may have more interest in the search part - the part I'm moving away from because I don't see it working well), what would a custom offer look like for a Craftsman House Plan with a Front Porch which costs between 750.00 for a Vellum copy you can build the house with or 1,350.00 for a CAD file you can use instead?

With Touch Clarity, you'd have behavioral tracking of each visitor to MascordLivingSpaces.com which would follow over to the main site and, based on backend rules that are learnt and fine tuned, make an offer on Craftsman House Plan with a Front Porch that was pretty much in range of 7 possible offers (or more), with copy that went along with that offer based on behavioral history, not a unique customer, but patterns derived though visits.

Do you think you'd sell more house plans that way?  You bet.  Will the do it? No, of course not - it's too far off from what most in that industry think like - it's too far out, too radical for them. 

But the point is, if you want to sell Niche Products that cost a lot of money (and 1350.00 could be a lot of money to some people, even DIY builders) you need to have a "custom" "niche" offer - or you need to be Conde Nast or some other big publisher that has tons of sites interlinking and can send prospects from one link to another, and own them through the whole process.

And if your not doing either - your not going to make much of a profit or sell that much - especially if what your selling is perceived to be a commodity - and to a builder a house plan is a commodity unless they can find just the right one - and only a few exist.

Enough ranting for a Sunday afternoon.