You can spend less than 5 minutes on the net and fill your inbox with tons of “click here to make millions on the internet” links. There are so many different make money things and free reports and how to grow your readership ebooks out there that you could literally spend the rest of your life (would be short, I predict a stroke on day 4) reading nothing but how to get traffic and give things away for free.
I know every one of you reading this is nodding your head because it is true and you have done the same thing. Many of these programs are from A-list bloggers too. I know that is how they make their money. It is proven to work. Can I do it? I don’t know if I want to get to that point. I have gigabytes of ebooks all dedicated to this.
A question here, if the point is for these guys to make money, how can they give away so much stuff for free? Granted, most of the money they make is from using the free stuff as a teaser and selling memberships or upgrades. But still, there is enough free stuff to choke several small camels and still fill up pages and pages on my site.
I have 2 case studies. I have not really done anything with these money makers yet but I want to chronicle these. The first one I purchased several years ago in a round about way. I saw this program either on the internet or on tv and ordered the “demo” cd-rom. Only pay for postage order the whole thing if you want right? Well I was wrong. They took the shipping charge and sent me the whole kit (valued at some ridiculous price like $495). There was a trial period and then send it back. I called to send it back so I wouldn’t be charged for it. At the time I didn’t know the Marketing ploy.
You call to return the product, you get a special deal for $197, then $97, then $47, then $27, then $17! Now this program was not bad so I ponied up the $17 and that was that. I am sure that the program cost at least that much to make the cd’s and print the book. I have often wondered why? this guy was willing to get a darn near $0 return on investment so his product can be out there. How many people take the special $97 or even $47 deal and he is ahead.
Fast forward to last week. I was looking into a program to use affiliate links and some Resale rights stuff to be supplemental to my books I want to sell on the site. The program was all online downloads, you guys have seen them. Price $497 value for $97! Not for me that time. Try to close the window, wait special deal, $47! Nah. Try to close the window, $37! This was turning into an auction, I decided to see how low it would go. I ended up at $7. I bought it for that and I may never use everything that is included. For the price of a Subway sandwich and a drink, I can make money.
The really annoying thing about this site, after I had bought my basic members access, there were literally 20 pages of sales copy trying to get me to upgrade. All of this before I even saw the program bits that I bought. Now, there was not printing or duplicating costs with this program but there was a ton of time invested in putting all of those pages together and he was willing to get $7 for it.
The lesson that I learned from these products is have a minimum price and then jack it up 1400%. Then don’t be afraid to drop it down to sell it. With this model my fiction ebooks will be $130 to start. The hard part I think is to get people to click the item initially.
How do you pick and choose what to read, keep, or get for free? Will the book help me? Will I actually read it? Why is this person giving me a free book? It is all to make cash somewhere. I am not going to be running things like that though. I will start with a cheap price that will go up to a static price after X amount of books are sold. And I am going with the paypal buttons to start. Way too much time wasted messing with the shopping cart program right now. Thanks for all of your input on that.
I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments! Also, my first Newsletter will be going out on St. Patricks Day, Sign up here!
Until Later!
Justin
