Internet prices seem to be getting ever lower.

That’s good news if you’re a buyer – digital products that would have been upwards of $67 (and often upwards of $1,000) a few years ago are now available for a pittance. Often below $10.

But it’s bad news if you’re a vendor or an affiliate. You need to make more sales to get the same income, people don’t value the information as much and it seems like you’re trying to walk up a down escalator.

What – if anything – can you do about it?

Start by recognising that this trend is here to stay.

It’s been in the electronics industry for a decade or more – computers are cheaper, televisions are at almost throwaway prices, you’re getting ever-more features for ever-lower prices.

It’s in other industries as well. You don’t darn your socks when you get a hole in them, you just buy another pack. The old “make do and mend” mentality has been replaced by a throwaway society. Partly because it often doesn’t pay to get something repaired.

Information has been affected as well.

With the pervasive nature of the internet, we increasingly expect information to be free or – at worst – cheap.

This affects things like books (free books on Kindle), music (free or cheap downloads or just play the tune on YouTube) and, of course, digital information.

I recently got a book from Jeff Walker, creator of Product Launch Formula. At a guess, it’s a print-on-demand book and I was asked to pay the cost of shipping.

When he originally launched Product Launch Formula, from the price was something like $2,000.

Now it’s the cost of post and packing.

By any standards, that’s quite a big drop.

And it’s by no means unusual.

The logic behind the price drop is that I get lots of information and I get added to his list.

The trouble is that I’m so used to getting digital products that by the time the printed book arrived I’d forgotten I’d ordered it and it’s sitting in my “to do” pile waiting for me to maybe get round to looking at it.

And I’ve either unsubscribed from the list or Gmail is auto-spamming the messages. I’m not sure which.

I suspect I’m by no means alone in doing this.

Yikes!

Essentially this means that we’re discounting the value of information.

But we’re trained in other markets to associate value with price: food in a restaurant is a good example. The pricier items on the menu usually have better ingredients and are often more complicated to make.

Which means we’re in danger of equating the value we get from our internet marketing products with the price we paid. Throwaway prices equal throwaway value.

Chances are you do that with most, if not all, the products you buy.

When digital products were $67 and more, you’d treat them with a bit of respect.

And you wouldn’t have the overwhelm of buying a new product every week or even every day.

The weird thing is that a lot of the modern, cheap, $7 products are at least the same quality of information as the older $67+ products.

Maybe better as they don’t feel the need to pad out the quantity of information to justify the price point.

At the high price, we’d be upset to get maybe 10 or 20 pages of information or less than 30 minutes of video. Even if we had to trawl through hundreds of pages to get the core information.

At the lower price, it’s often either no-fluff or relatively little fluff. So we can access the information faster.

Of course, that comes at a price. Because if you can read or watch the product in your coffee break, chances are you won’t do anything with the information because it will take you many times that initial reading time to implement.

And we’ve been trained to want results instantly!

How can you address this?

Well, it isn’t easy to buck the trend.

You’re not likely to get many sales of a product at $67 when the same information is being sold elsewhere for $7 or given away free on a blog or on YouTube.

Sure, you’ll get some sales as not everyone knows the cheaper sources. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to arbitrage gigs on Fiverr or buy products on Amazon and re-sell them on eBay.

But the bulk of the sales will be at the lower price.

You need to find ways to add value.

It’s happened in the operating system world.

Linux is free but most of the versions (usually called distributions) have a paid-for option that includes support and updates.

If you can find a way to apply that to the products you sell, you should be on your way to getting your income up.

Let’s take another market where this is done very successfully: weight loss.

In theory, losing weight is simple: eat less.

In practice, most of us struggle. And programs such as Weight Watchers provide the support and updates (weekly weigh-ins) that we need.

Put your thinking cap on and work out whether you can do that in your market.

Maybe even by giving the product away or at a very low price and then offering support to the relatively low number of people who do more than just put the information on their “that’s useful” pile.

It works very, very nicely for WordPress. Free website hosting, free system to easily put your site online, would you like one of these cool upgrades?

It works for a lot of the apps on your phone – basic level free, pay to get rid of adverts or for extra features.

It explains why so many people in internet marketing are offering coaching and mentoring, albeit not always as personal as it’s made out to be because you can’t sell your time for a handful of dollars an hour and still expect to make money.

That brings us full circle.

Essentially to counteract the downward trend of internet prices you have to find a way to add value.

Big value.

Hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of value.

Sometimes that needs a mindset shift.

Sometimes we take our own knowledge too much for granted and don’t put a high enough value on it.

A bit like the “we’re not worthy” scene in Wayne’s World where they meet Alice Cooper.

If that kind of thought is going through your mind, you need to change otherwise you’ll be forever stuck promoting products that are getting forever cheaper or are just available for free.

Adding value takes a lot of thought.

It shouldn’t just be adding to the overwhelm by piling on extra bonus products that people probably won’t download let alone use.

It needs to be real value.

Something I’ve done several times is to add in my notes that I’ve taken when I initially went through the product.

They usually include my “take” on it and things I’d either do differently or even outright disagree with.

A simple, short, PDF can work wonders for this.

Or a mindmap.

Or a screen capture video.

Or, even better, some personal one-on-one time.

That last option often sounds scary but my experience is that most people don’t take you up on the offer.

After all, Dan Kennedy wouldn’t offer a free critique with his books if everyone took him up on the offer. He’d never have enough hours in the day to do them.

Much like a guarantee, the longer the redemption time for your offer of a consultation, the lower the take up will be.

It sounds cynical but it’s true and you’re not taking anything away from the offer.

Let’s take a quick example:

Let’s say you decide to offer a free Skype consultation with a purchase.

• If the consultation has to be used within a week, you’ll put off some purchasers who know their schedule won’t allow them to use it. But other purchasers will immediately book their time because they’ll be afraid they’d lose it otherwise.
• If it has to be used within a month, there’s less pressure and a fairly large number of people will book the consultation “later” (i.e. probably never)
• If there’s a one year period, there’s no pressure to book or use the slot now. After all, a year is a long time. But within a week or two, the majority of purchasers will have moved on and will never redeem the free consultation.

The keen purchasers will still redeem fast.

And they’ll be the ones who get the most out of the product and the consultation because they’re the action takers.

The drive-by purchasers (the ones who buy a new offer like they used to buy a daily newspaper) get the option but don’t use it but don’t feel swindled because it was their choice not to use it.

It’s win-win.

You’ve added value and got the opportunity to chat with a few, self-selected, people.

Some of whom will “click” with you and will become real consultation clients.

Effectively you’ll be using the free consultation as a weeding out process but one that doesn’t seem as intimidating as the questionnaire style that a lot of internet marketers use, myself included.

Experiment.

Find out what your market wants.

The chances are high that the thing they most want is personal service – it’s the thing that is being taken away in almost every area of our life and is one of the reasons Apple are so successful – you can walk into their stores and get your issue fixed or explained by a real human rather than having to go through an internet support process that makes the old “press 1 for…” phone systems seem easy and intuitive.

Add value – real value, not mutton dressed as lamb value – and you’ll be able to counteract the downward trend of internet prices.