There are ways of getting people to part with large sums of cash for information which if published in the normal way would be a book with a cover price less than £20 or $30.
There are certainly a lot of marketing gurus out there marketing information products about marketing information products, and I suppose at least some of them are making a lot of money.
To make a lot of money marketing an information product, this is what you are supposed to do. You create an internet ‘squeeze page’ with a lot of very long copy that tells you what the product is going to do for you. So for example a squeeze page about dating should have long copy explaining how you can learn to overcome your fear of talking to attractive women, how you will learn to become attractive to women by developing confidence and so on. There may or may not be photographs of scantily-clad temptresses interspersed with testimonials from fellows who got lucky.
The further down the page you read, the more you are imagining overcoming all your fears and being able to get hot dates, in short, becoming a man with choices.
Then the marketer will tell you what they think the product is worth. The principle behind this is trying to get the potential customer into the frame of mind that thinks, “what would I be willing to pay to get this area of my life sorted out?” The marketer wants you to think, “Yes, if I was certain of becoming a babe magnet I’d happily pay $2,000.”
Then the marketer tells you that as it happens there is a special limited time offer so that this information product is marked down to only $300 (or $291, because a number without zeros looks less as though it’s been plucked out of thin air), but only if you buy now. What’s more you can stage your payments into three easy instalments. Not only that but if not truly delighted you can return the materials for a full refund, no questions asked. And you get bonus items just for replying which are yours to keep whether you return the materials or not.
At this point your head is in a whirl, you’re looking at the instalment payment of $100 (or more likely, $97.00 because there is some weird alchemy in the number 97) and you’re thinking, “hey, that’s not much money,” (unless of course you don’t live in the USA and $97.00 is more money than you’ve ever seen in one place at one time) and you click the pay link.
Now, while I should like to be rich, the truth is that doing all this would require a considerable investment of time and energy. I think the people who do this and succeed actually put a lot of effort into it. The time I would spend doing this would be better spent writing more books.
The marketing model I am adopting is pile ’em high, sell ’em cheap. Even so, I believe that the insights that I have packed into ‘Dating – the missing manual’ are as good as you’ll get anywhere, basically because they work.
In order to get a high sales ranking on Amazon I am deliberately pitching the price for the paperback book below its main book rivals. I shall keep the price low at least until sales volumes suggest I should increase it. (There’s my limited time offer right there – to quote Bugs Bunny, “Ain’t I a devil?”) The booksellers’ discount is sufficiently generous for regular bookstores to get it for you, too.
The price at publication will be a mere £5.50 (US$9.50) – that’s less than the price of a coffee and a decent sandwich to learn how to attract and keep the woman of your dreams.
Cornelius Agrippa 