Author: Jay Shaffstall

One of the things we see a lot of these days, when it seems like everyone wants to make money online, is people “becoming” Internet Marketers.

They start out by doing what every other Internet Marketer they can see does.

They sign up for an affiliate program, and then make a blog post that is basically just the product’s sales copy. Or they send to a list about a great new product their “friend” is offering. The email they send out to the list is the email suggested by the affiliate program, right down to the claims of friendship. They use traffic exchanges to send people to a program’s affiliate page.

There are a couple of problems with this.

First, the techniques that 90% of Internet Marketers use do not work. Oh, if you were the only person using those techniques, you’d do quite well. But taken as a whole, across all the marketing we’re exposed to on a daily basis, it all adds up to spam.

Second, online marketing is not about “becoming” an Internet Marketer, it’s about learning skills. You don’t learn those skills by observing what the majority of people are doing.

As an analogy, let’s say you go to a beginning juggling class to learn juggling. You get there late, and you see a bunch of people around the room throwing balls into the air and dropping them. You don’t want to make a fuss, so you just grab some balls and start to do what everyone else is doing.

You aren’t learning to juggle, you’re learning how not to juggle. The people who really have the skills to make the kind of money you want to make online are not the ones who catch your attention. They know their business and they get about it and make money.

The ones to emulate are not the gurus, who make their money by taking advantage of the gullibility of newcomers, but the ones who successfully market to the 80% of the Internet population who are not trying to be Internet Marketers.

I think it’s critically important for newcomers to the field to be authentic. Don’t do what everyone else does just because everyone else is doing it. Understand the principles behind what you’re trying to accomplish, and at all times adhere to your own ethical standards.

You will not make millions overnight being authentic. But then you won’t make millions overnight copying everyone else, either (at least, you won’t make those millions for yourself).

By being authentic, though, you’ll build an understanding of what it takes to market online and won’t be discouraged when the techniques you see everyone else using just don’t work.

If you’ve been around the Internet Marketing world for any length of time, you’ve probably had the chance to purchase products that came with Private Label Rights.

PLR products give you the right to edit the document to say that you are the author. They’re attractive because you have an instant product, just a bit of editing to give yourself the credit.

PLR articles are not all that useful as blog posts, for example, because of duplicate content issues. To use PLR products in blog posts, you have to edit them sufficiently to make them seem unique. That’s possible, but not really the sort of thing that excites me about Internet Marketing.

What you can do with PLR products that is exciting is to repackage them into a new product.

Pick half a dozen PLR articles on related topics, and package them into a complete ebook. Make enough edits so that the articles seem to flow together and support the main topic of the ebook. Put yourself down as the author.

Now you have a product to sell that is unique (at least, a unique combination of articles).

To make it a best seller, you have to come up with an angle. Some spin on the product that will make people want it. One way is to create a fictional author who is a bit of a character, and market the product as being by that person. Sal the Site Swiper is an example. The quirks of the fictional author can be played up in email marketing and JV partnerships, such as when various JV partners of Sal’s told their lists that Sal was going to “work them over” if they didn’t email about the product.

Creating that kind of interest in a product goes a long way to making sales. Any angle will work, as long as it catches people’s interests.

Okay, so you’ve got an ebook, or a piece of software, or a service to sell.

What do you charge for it?

The answer has nothing to do with how much time or money it took you to create the product. It doesn’t matter if you spent thousands developing it, or if you knocked it out in an hour. Pricing online has nothing to do with product cost, and everything to do with maximizing profit.

Here are some of the factors that play into a pricing decision.

Similar Products

How much do similar products cost?

Your natural tendency might be to figure out how much similar products cost, and then lower your price a bit so you can undersell them. That works well for hard goods, but not so well for intangible online products. Sure, if someone is looking to buy a specific product, such as Microsoft Word, they’ll shop around to find the best price.

But if someone is looking to find the best word processor, the cost of the products plays subconsciously into their impression of the quality of the product. Under price your product and you’ve created the impression of a cheap product.

Pricing your product at or a bit above other similar products is the best idea. Go above their price point especially if you can point out how your product overcomes the shortcomings of other products.

How Much Does A Sale Cost?

You need to get traffic to your product page, and some percentage of that traffic will purchase.

For every person who buys, how much did it cost you to get that sale? Figure in not only your actual advertising costs, such as the cost per click for PPC campaigns, or the cost of sending out solo ads, or however you plan on advertising to your target market, but also your cost in time for doing the marketing.

All of these are estimates, of course, since you’re pricing before you know the numbers. You can read the blogs of people who have launched similar products, they often disclose numbers that will help you predict your own.

So you come up with your cost per sale…figure in how much profit you want to make on top of that, and you’ve got a possible price.

Have You Just Launched?

When you’ve just launched a product, it makes a lot of sense to give early purchasers a discount. By getting those early sales, you get some buzz in your target market. People will write on blogs about the product, if you have an affiliate program some percentage of those people will sign up for it, etc. You’re basically giving early purchasers a discount in order to get them to advertise for you.

The proper way to do this is to designate some time period as your “introductory pricing” period, and make that public on the sales page. When that period ends, raise your price to the normal level.

Don’t play the game where you artificially create a deadline one day into the future, or in the next 30 minutes, or whatever. Those sorts of techniques give you a poor reputation, and can affect your later launches.

So What’s The Final Price?

You might come up with different answers for a price as you look at similar products and how much it’ll cost you to make a sale.

The bottom line is the cost per sale. If you sell for less than that, you must have some way of making money off your customers after the sale. Maybe a one time offer, or whatever. If you make the decision to sell a product for less than your cost per sale, make very sure you have a good back end system in place to make up your losses.

For those of you who have products, how did you come up with your pricing?