The other day I was reading a question from a frustrated internet marketer on a web forum. It read something like this (paraphrasing here)...
How are people selling products for $50 or more? I can barely sell my eBooks for $5 each. In the last 6 months I have ONE affiliate sale for a product that is more than $50! What am I missing?
The answer is actually very simple. He is not building, or even offering, any real value. In marketing terms, this would be called Perceived Value. Either he's doing a bad job at relaying the value of his product, or the product he is promoting, or that product does not offer any real value. Real value has to be present, other wise you are just a liar.
It's simple, forget about the price! What I mean is, don't worry about the price for now. While you are presenting your product, for example on your sales page, you need to build up the value for the product first! Give enough value and the price really isn't that much of a factor.
Here is a quick example. Let's say you are selling a piece of software you wrote. Say it took you 6 hours to create this software. Now say you are able to bill $100 per hour had you wrote this software on a contract for some company. This piece of software now has a value of $600.
Now, to help build up the value of this piece of software, you should create a video (or screen cast) of how to setup, install and use this software. This adds another $100 of value (it took you an hour to create it).
As a bonus, why not write a special report on how to effectively use this software in whatever business niche you are targeting (or whatever). It doesn't have to be a huge report — 10 pages is plenty. Just make sure you give valuable information to help improve your customers business or quality of life. In other words, you are making their life easier some how. Add another $100 of value for this special report.
So you're looking at around $800 of perceived value. On your sales page, you need to properly convey this value. Present it cleanly, use bright colors, bold headlines & sub headlines. Maybe use fancy graphics or create a nice display table on the page to show the various extras that are included and why they are worth the extra $100 each. You need to make sure that your reader understands they are looking at possibly purchasing something worth at least $800 (in this example).
Make sure they are at ease when purchasing from you. Offering a 30 day no questions asked money back guarantee is absolutely required. More and more marketers are offering 60, 90 or even 365 day money back guarantees! Your visitors have to feel that their money is safe and if you are offering a money back guarantee they will feel like you really are offering something of value. If you weren't, you wouldn't be offering a guarantee right?
Now you can ask them to buy your product and give them the cost of it. Do yourself, and your customer, a favor. Make the price so low that they CAN'T SAY NO! It's simple, sell the item for $49. That's less than 10% of the perceived value and if you present it right, it will be a no brainer purchase for quite a few of your website visitors.
There are so many methods to build value it's way beyond the scope of a single article. Maybe I will work on a series of articles for this blog.
The point is, if you want your item to sell like hot cakes then you need to build up the perceived value to be so great that your visitor will have no choice but to purchase your product.
Now go make some money...