A Facebook group I’m in suggested that in the early days of internet marketing – when a cheap product was $97 and upsells were often in the thousands – the success rate was higher.
Which got me thinking…
A typical entry level product nowadays is under $10. Sometimes as low as $5 or even $1. And sometimes entirely free.
The information isn’t much different from the $97 products that were around when I first started the web. They gradually dropped in price so the normal amount was the $67 or $47 or $27 that we still see in places like Clickbank.
In fact, nowadays the information is probably higher quality.
Way back then, you’d have got a PDF report. Probably about 50 pages or so, sometimes a lot more. But no videos or Facebook groups or webinars or Skype calls or other support methods that are now almost the default, even for products that are competing in price with your daily fix of coffee.
I think the price point is definitely part of the problem.
It’s difficult to make the switch in our mind from the price of a large coffee to some information that could make a significant difference to our bank balance.
And it’s easy to have a more-or-less daily “fix” of internet marketing products to go alongside that cup of caffeine (or whatever your equivalent indulgence is).
Maybe we even spend about the same time on the new piece of marketing info as we do sipping the coffee. Then it gets put in the trash – or more likely your hard drive – before the next replacement comes along.
It’s easy for those small purchases to mount up.
By the time there are upsells – even if you only take a handful of them – and “must have” pieces of software that will “definitely” make the system work for you, it mounts up big time.
Plus a few dollars on Bing or Facebook or Clixsense or solo or video ads.
Before you know it, your internet marketing hobby is costing you $500 or more a month.
And the income – if there is any – is nowhere near that level. But there are glimpses that it’s just around the corner and will be happening soon.
If only you buy the next spill-the-beans product.
Most of the answers in the Facebook group were along the same lines:
It’s not the products to blame, it’s the people buying them.
Or, more correctly, the human nature of the people buying them.
Almost all markets have the same instant results nature.
Just check the titles of the weight loss books on Amazon – if you really could drop that many pounds that fast while still eating all those nice things, there’d be no market for the books in a months time.
Back when I learned various bits of programming, there were series that promised I’d learn everything in 12 or 24 hours. The title forgot to mention those weren’t consecutive hours, they were that many lessons plus homework on top.
In self help, the best selling meditation product I promote works in 12 minutes a day, down from previous times of 30 and 60 minutes.
Going back to that coffee, it’s not quite instant speed but it’s pretty fast. Certainly quicker than brewing it at home and keeping all those syrups and other extras in stock in your kitchen.
But the quality of all those products is – at least a fair amount of the time – decent enough.
It’s our perception of them that skews things.
Can a $7 product increase your income by hundreds or thousands a month?
Yes. If it’s a decent enough quality and if you spend a decent amount of time putting it into practice and working out if there’s anything extra you need to add to your knowledge.
There will probably be gaps in the information you buy.
And they probably won’t be deliberate.
Most product creators don’t teach what they produce face to face. So they don’t know what their purchasers don’t know.
Face to face is a lot different – I taught my Kindle course to a small group before I released it on the web and the questions I got surprised me.
Basics that I thought everyone knew and therefore I hadn’t planned to include.
That happens all the time and never ceases to amaze me.
But usually those gaps are easy enough to fill. Maybe with a quick email to the product creator, maybe a question in their support group, maybe a search on YouTube.
The difficulty is in the implementation of the product.
Often it seems too simple to work:
- Put up a website, create some content with affiliate links, repeat.
- Create some slides, record a video with you reading the slides, upload to YouTube, repeat
- And so on
Sure, even a $7 product will go into more detail than that but there are also web pages that will talk you through the whole process for free.
But our minds play tricks.
Surely something that’s free or cheap can’t be valuable?
It can, but we have to shift how our mind perceives the information.
Think of it as closer to a physical book written by a world expert – plenty of those around and lots of information for not much money.
Then treat it as though you’d spent thousands on it.
That’s not always an easy shift but it’s one worth doing.
For the next 30 days, only work on one project.
Not 20 or 30.
No distractions.
Go cold turkey on buying new offers – unsubscribe from emails that are too distracting.
Just work on that project daily for the next month. No excuses like “I didn’t get chance to do anything today but I’ll catch up tomorrow” because you know that won’t happen and it will just languish like all those other good ideas.
Then evaluate what’s happening.
Publicly commit to doing this and then do it.
You’ll increase your chances of success big time.