In the real (physical goods) world, it’s fairly easy to use price as a reasonable indication of quality. The relationship between the two doesn’t always hold but it works most of the time and it’s one of the short cuts that Robert Cialdini mentions in his book Influence.

But on the online world – and maybe especially so in the internet marketing niche – can you use price to judge the quality of the product you’re about to buy?

At best, I’d say that’s not easy.

I recently promoted a product and talked about the various upsells. Nothing new there – I do that quite a bit, so do a lot of other internet marketers.

One of the upsells was training about creating digital products. The training was priced at $67 and I said in my email that I thought that was pricey.

The product creator then sent an email to his list and said that he thought I was wrong and that I was doing both of us out of sales.

The weird thing is that both views are probably correct.

The way that pricing is moving in the online world, there are some incredible bargains to be had.

Training that a few years ago would have been priced at hundreds or even thousands of dollars is on sale for a handful of dollars.

I’ve seen packages where there were 50 top class products that had each sold for good money being sold – with the right to repurpose and re-sell them – for not much more than the price of a couple of eat-in pizzas (that link may or may not work by the time you read this post).

Whether or not that’s good value is up to the person buying the package.

If it’s just left to rot on your hard drive or – as is likely with that quantity of product – effectively left in it’s shrink wrap and not even downloaded, it’s poor value.

If it’s used for your personal training and you follow through on the ideas in it, it’s great value.

And if you re-purpose and re-sell it (not necessarily easy as it’s mainly audio products) then it could potentially make you a small fortune.

All those outcomes – zero to 4 or 5 or more figures – are possible from the same purchase.

The only difference is what the person making the purchase does with the information.

So you can see why it’s not easy to figure out whether the price of a package is worth the quality contained in that package.

It’s a conundrum.

Even the same person buying the same package (the one above has been on offer more than once and it’s not unheard of for people to buy things twice) could have a different outcome on the second occasion.

Eek!

That throws all our normal price/quality judgements out of the window.

It’s probably also why so many people drift through their internet marketing career.

There’s lots of good information – probably too much.

The price of that information varies from free up to as much as people are willing to pay.

The quality of the information varies – anything from barely acceptable through to fantastic.

The implementation of the information varies from person to person and also varies over time. I’ve lost count of the number of good ideas I’ve started to implement and then stopped, regardless of whether or not they were making money.

Life’s too short to do everything we want to do, so we have to make choices.

But implementing what we learn is the crucial, key, difference that can turn the quality of even a free report into something worth lots of cash. Or (equally) it can turn the quality of a pricey report into near enough zero value because we don’t implement it.

Of course, there’s the theory that we value things more if we pay more for them. That’s going back to Cialdini’s book.

But there are countless people who’ve bought information or spent money on real world courses and seminars who’ve not implemented the ideas they learned.

The quality was there.

The price wasn’t cheap.

But the implementation didn’t happen so the value didn’t make itself known.

One of my email subscribers described this recently as not knowing where the “on” switch is.

I think that’s the case for a lot of people – maybe including you.

The theory is there and the information needed to implement the theory is also there.

After all, there are only a few basic methods that work at any given time. Writing content, recording content (audio or video), creating a physical product, not much else.

Sure, the places that content or those products are promoted will change over time. That happens fast on the web, a bit slower in the physical world. But it’s not difficult to figure out where those places are – they’re most likely the ones you use every day, much the same as everyone else also uses them. So currently that’s places like Facebook or YouTube for the relatively mass market and smaller groups (Facebook and YouTube again, plus forums and Skype groups and other places) for smaller niches.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work those out or figure out how people are monetising them.

Follow what you do and where you spend your money and you won’t go far wrong most of the time.

But that still doesn’t answer the quality vs price question.

Probably because there isn’t an easy answer.

You could take free stuff that you learn of a forum or Facebook or even an email. And you could make that the whole basis of your online business, so the return would be near enough infinite.

Or you could do the same but pay for the information. Which would still be a great rate of return.

Or you could go down either of those routes (free or paid) but do nothing with the information, making the return close to zero.

Your choice.

It may also pay you to bite the bullet and pay for a higher priced product.

If you know that you’re more likely to implement the product if you’ve spent some serious cash on it, that’s a good route to follow.

But if it just “scratches an itch” then maybe it’s not.

One other route you could go down is to hire some help.

Either for a short period of time or as a longer term mentorship.

Athletes do it all the time – they have fitness coaches, dieticians, mindset coaches, all sorts of people to help them get into the zone and win.

Top businessmen do it all the time as well. They might call the coaches “consultants” or “advisors”. But it’s much the same thing.

If you’re stuck in your internet marketing then getting outside help could be fantastic value for money.

Always assuming that you do something with the information and help you get!