There’s often too much choice available.

Which means we can fall into the trap of using decision making to put off making a decision at all.

Sometimes that’s a good move – there are often good reasons that we’re being pushed to make a decision now, this instant.

But they’re not necessarily reasons that benefit us. More often, they benefit the vendor.

That goes for a lot of “special” offers on the web.

It’s difficult to run out of stock of an electronic item.

Unless you crash your webserver – and even then that’s only temporarily unavailable – the product could be available for as long as you pay your hosting and domain renewal fees.

So there are lots of psychological ploys used to push us to making the decision now.

• Countdown timers.
• One time only offers when we try to click away from a page
• Time limited bonuses
• Time limited offers – I’ve seen quite a few where the offer or special price is only available for a handful of days once or twice a year and not just in the internet marketing arena

Offline, a walk round your local supermarket will give you the same kind of experience:

• Buy one get one free deals
• “Reduced” price (which will comply with the letter of the law on price reductions but not necessarily the spirit)
• Extra free deals
• X for a price deals (the old market stall tactic of £5 each, 3 for £10)
• Sale ends soon (a furniture store, DFS, here in the UK famously have a sale that is unlikely to actually end before hell freezes over)

Or there are the shopping channels on TV and the day-time and late night television offers.

They’re all there for a reason.

We need triggers to buy.

But that can mean we stall like a deer in headlights.

How many times have you gone to Amazon for a cheap product (maybe £10 or $20) and spent an hour reading the reviews rather than just clicking the buy button?

My guess is that’s happened to you – probably more than once.

There are two main places we need to get out of analysis paralysis:

• When we’re working in our business
• When we want potential customers to buy from us

Working in our business, I see it all the time.

There are countless threads on forums asking which WordPress plugin is better.

Truth be told, amongst the market leaders (the ones that usually come up first in a search), there’s probably not much in it.

For instance, I use WP Shorties to cloak links and make them look nicer. But I could equally have chosen Pretty Links and got the same result.

I use Yoast’s SEO plugin but there are several others out there that do a similar job and do it just as well.

Dan Kennedy has a phrase “good enough is good enough”.

And if you’re not making a life changing decision, I think that’s worth using more often.

Don’t spend hours researching the minor differences between 2 very similar products.

Equally, don’t just grab a shiny penny because the sales page is full of “buy now” triggers and you feel you just have to click the Paypal button.

Which brings us on to using those kind of triggers to get potential customers to do something – whether that’s join our list, buy the product we’re recommending, sign up for our latest webinar or whatever.

There’s a reason top copywriters are paid big money – they know which buttons to press in our minds to get us to move off the fence.

But most of the time you don’t need to pay a top copywriter.

It’s the “good enough is good enough” phrase again.

The closer you can get your sales page to being a conversation with a friend, the more likely your reader is to trust you and the more likely they are to buy whatever it is you’re recommending.

Or not buy it.

That can be a powerful tactic as well.

A friend on Facebook has just been looking for webinar software and asked for opinions on the one he was considering.

I took a quick look and was immediately in “don’t touch this with a 10 foot pole” mode – I recognised the marketer involved and my trust levels dropped through the floor.

So I put a quick reply along the lines of “depends whether you trust Mr X”.

Then I did a bit more research and found that the $297 a year webinar product was actually just a fancy wrapper around Google Hangouts.

There’s nothing wrong with adding value to free products and selling them.

It happens all the time – the Linux computer operating system has various “distributions” where you pay for support; you can pay someone to install WordPress or another free website content management system; there are books for sale that are in the public domain; there are movies based on public domain stories (that’s an expensive value-add!)

But part of your decision process needs to be whether or not what you’re buying is the internet equivalent of mutton dressed as lamb.

A quick bit of research away from the sales page will probably tell you.

That’s straying a bit from selling to your potential customers…

If I was selling that product as an affiliate, I’d be up front.

I’d say that the product was a wrapper for a free product from Google.

Then I’d spend a lot of time explaining why that actually made it good value.

Google Hangouts aren’t exactly intuitive.

Unusually for a Google product (and I’m sure this will change over time) they’re complicated.

So something that makes them easier and more accessible could be a good thing.

Whether this particular product is, I’m less certain. Which is why I’m not mentioning it by name,

But if you were selling a free product – maybe a better eyesight without glasses one, maybe using the 5 Tibetan Rites. maybe Think and Grow Rich, whatever – then I think you should address why it’s worth paying the extra money.

For instance, I’ve sold products based on the public domain book Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D Wattles. At one stage, Bob Proctor had a complete seminar based around the book.

In a nut shell, the selling point was that it made it accessible to modern audiences who struggled with the olde worlde language.

So it’s do-able.

You just need to come up with an angle!

And that angle needs some sense of urgency so that your visitors don’t just think “Oh, I’ll come back to this later” because nowadays for most people “later” is very much used in the way a teenager would use it – some time later in life, if ever.

Your emails, web pages and other communications with your readers and customers need to make sure that – as far as possible – they don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis.

It’s a tightrope walk.

But it can be fun!