A Sudden Realization That Completely Removed My Guilt With Charging Money

Yea, I agree 100%. That was Facebook's strategy for a long time. Same with PlentyofFish. Also a bit of luck and timing.

But I'm just trying to get over the guilt of SELLING things. And this was the realization I had that would let me push forward and allow me to sleep at night.

This is true.

You not understanding WHY people would feel guilty would mean you
were lucky enough to be raised in a home where you're parents believed
it was best to serve people by asking to charge for your work.

Very, VERY few households BELIEVE one should make money from their
efforts, and often times it takes a lot of MENTAL work to overcome past
upbringing and mental blocks.

Yes, logic tells us it's "okay to charge for your work"...but in this case,
logic "loses" over feelings and upbringing unless that person is willing to
go through the uncomfortable phase of weeding out those old feelings
which are NOT easy to do and does NOT happen overnight.

I stopped giving away free stuff a while ago, and not only do people
respect you MORE when you charge them for something (even if they
never buy from you), you'll enrich their lives and your own.

It IS a win-win situation.

As for MY personal opinion:

It's good you SAY you've overcome your mental blocks of charging
money for your work (products or services), but the REAL test, my
friend, will come from actually making money from your new LOGICAL
reality.

I say logical because...

you're not "done yet".

It's one thing to ADMIT you and the end-user are better off if you
charge money for something, a totally different ball game when you
are actually doing it, because what is LIKELY to happen after you
recognize you're mindset is not where you WANT it to be that'll best
serve you...

you'll encounter bouts and challenges to accept the money.

Just because you SAY you've changed, doesn't mean you have. Be-
cause, psychologically and unconsciously you will still choose NOT
to buy something because you believe it should be "free anyway".

Breaking a habit is going to take more work and effort on your part,
and the HARDEST habits to break are psychological and ingrained.

It's like coke head who says he's gonna' quit someday, and without
even knowing it next day he's in a coma from an overdose.

But...

you took the first step and you're on your way...but the TRUE test
of your fortitude is yet to come, because the RESULTS will prove to
YOU rather or not you've truly broken an old, nasty habit.

The internet has made information available on an unprecedented level to anyone with an internet connection.

However, many people are forgetting that time is money. While you may be able to look up information in a report just by browsing through the internet, how much is your time worth to you? If it takes you 5 hours to do it, when you could have just bought and perused the information for $27, I think the choice is clear - even if you value your time at $10 per hour (which is ridiculous, we should be valuing our time much more than that) then looking for that information would have cost us $50 in terms of opportunity cost.

When you look at things this way, then buying the report at $27 is a complete no-brainer.

Hi BaoTV,

This thread is all very well if one desires to take a bunch of snippets of information, mangle them together and jump to broad conclusions without applying much logic or reason - in order to ease one's conscience about their business dealings.

If I may, can I attempt to inject some of that logic and reason and see where it gets us?

The whole premise of this thread is -

(And at this point you have moved the thing from applying purely to yourself into something which is meant to help other people.)

The reasoning for this decision seems flawed and I see no explanation for why anyone should feel guilt in the first place, except this -

Could you possibly explain why you feel this way?

Perhaps if you didn't have this seemingly flawed idea in the first place, you would have no need to take action to avoid 'feeling guilty?'

Therefore, in order to solve this problem, you simply ask yourself WHY you feel this way and unless you can come up with valid reasons to explain it, you simply discard it as a flawed idea, or preferably find the real reasons why you feel this way and eradicate them through logical/rational means.

Your explanation for how you reached this decision about pricing seems odd. You seem to be saying that due to three isolated experiences of your own relating to free items (even though the lamp was 'garbage'), coupled with your perception of the availability of information on the forum upon which you have reached a slightly spurious conclusion regarding why people pay for information in WSOs, has decided your whole approach to pricing in your business?

So overall, what you are concluding here is that due to your opinion about why people pay for information when it can also be found for free, plus your experience with three items you received for free, you should not feel guilty for charging for information - even though you fundamentally believe all information (and everything else!) on the internet should be free anyway.

There seems to be an overwhelming amount of twisted and flawed logic here, although the majority appear to be agreeing with you and thanking you for it.

Here's a suggestion - instead of basing business and pricing decisions on flawed logic and your own personal preferences and experiences, what about basing your business and pricing decisions purely on what the market as a whole tells you when you test, sell to and survey them?

If there is a gaping hole in the logic somewhere along the path that leads you to a conclusion, then that conclusion itself is probably not based on logic and therefore probably not a logical conclusion to make.

I don't mean to attack you, but if I spent time making this appraisal seem nicer, it would probably just confuse the issue and detract from the point - but apologies if you feel I am being harsh. This forum needs more clarity and rational thinking in my opinion, because I feel that too many people are just blindly going along, posting agreement and thanks, when in fact, we would all be better off if we had the guts to say what we really think and confront any illogical beliefs that we have before spreading them around as new threads.

The harsh truth is that if this thread is demonstrative of how you construct your information products, then I have a clue about why you might have felt guilty charging for them. Harsh? Yes. Helpful? I think so. Solution - if you understand my points, then use the same type of logic to construct your arguments, lessons and conclusions within your products.

There's nothing wrong with your goal there. In most instances, people shouldn't feel guilty for selling things.

But if you are to try and achieve this by fooling yourself because you have failed to understand the problem and therefore the solution, you're only delaying the issue until it rears it's head again and you realise that you never solved it in the first place.

It's simple - in the first instance, use your answer to this question to start solving it -

Why do you feel this way?

.........................

By the way, on your blog you have a post that starts -

If you put one sentence (or a part) of the post you have re-printed in that post into google inside speech marks ("), you will find it easier to discover who the person is who originally wrote it and give them the credit, in order to avoid accusations of plaguarism.

Hope this helps.

Hi Andy,

Do you disagree with my points?

@ExRat-
I couldn't let your post go unread.

"I see no explanation for why anyone should feel guilt in the first place, except this.." Ok, this opinion of yours is written ambiguously. Either you personally can't understand why anyone in general should feel guilt, OR you can't find reasons in my post for why anyone should feel guilt. I would hope it's the latter. And if that's the case, this post wasn't meant to expose my reasons for feeling guilty. That would involve a long history of how I was raised, environment, etc... Now, if you can't understand why anyone would ever feel guilty about selling something, then I would just end my counter-argument here.

Why do I feel all information should be free? That's like asking "why do you believe in lassez-faire or why do you believe in democracy? I could write a 100-page dissertation on this. I didn't feel it was necessary to get into, so I left it out of the post since it was not relevant to my overall point. It was just my own personal opinion.

"Perhaps if you didn't have this seemingly flawed idea in the first place, you would have no need to take action to avoid 'feeling guilty?" First of all, why is it flawed? Is it flawed because you personally see it as flawed? If that's the case, I have A LOT of opinions I should pass your way to get checked.

"ask yourself WHY you feel this way, and unless you can come up with valid reasons to explain it, discard it as a flawed idea or preferably find the real reasons why you feel this way and eradicate them through logical/rational means" Ok, assuming I'm a robot and I can switch my feelings on and off through buttons of rationality, I would accept this as an acceptable solution. However, seeing that I am human, I think you need to re-examine the logic behind your advice before people begin to start "blindly going along, posting agreements" to you what you have to say.

"So overall, what you are concluding here is that due to your opinion about why people pay for information when it can also be found for free, plus your experience with three items you received for free, you should not feel guilty for charging for information - even though you fundamentally believe all information (and everything else!) on the internet should be free anyway." First of all, it's more than just 3 examples. I just listed 3 in the post. And yes, my fundamental beliefs contradict my actions. It sucks, but it's what I have to do to survive in this business. Have you never done something that wasn't in line with your beliefs? I don't believe in taxes either, but I still pay them.

"instead of basing business and pricing decisions on flawed logic and your own personal preferences and experiences, what about basing your business and pricing decisions purely on what the market as a whole tells you when you test, sell to and survey them?" I really hope this is a joke. You're saying to not base any business decisions on your own personal preferences and experiences. I guess the market always knows best then, right? Why waste time with creative thought and personal beliefs when you can just ask 100 people for THEIR opinion. I'm starting to find a lot of "overwhelming amount of twisted and flawed logic here."

"In most instances, people shouldn't feel guilty for selling things." Maybe if you were raised on a car lot selling used cars as a child, then obviously you shouldn't. You keep hammering on this point. I can't tell if you actually have a hard time grasping the concept of feeling guilty about selling something or not. Maybe you've been in the business for so long that you can't step out of that mentality for one second to visualize what it's like. Hypothetically, if someone agreed to buy a simple one-page wordpress blog site from you for $5,000, would you do it? I wouldn't. I don't know what your answer would be.

I'm not trying to FOOL myself into anything. It's just an epiphany I had about money and how it affects perceived value of items and how it has helped chip away at my guilt. There is a general psychology that people put more value into things that cost more. I know because I'm guilty of it all the time.

All in all, if you were legitimately trying to be helpful, your post wouldn't have been worded that way. And just because you say "I don't mean to attack you and apologies" doesn't deter from the rest of your condescending syntax and tone. That's along the lines of "I'm sorry I slept with your wife." It doesn't negate the actions.

You weren't so much trying to help me as you were trying to make a statement about your own bitter feelings about people and their posts in the forum. I'm sure the forum was much better back in your day before it got infested with people have illogical and twisted opinions.

If that actually is how you help people though, with responses like that. Then, I am going to have to apologize. My apologies.

Although, your Google advice for my blog post was good. Sometimes I forget that Google knows everything.

Hi BaoTV,

Thanks for the reply.

Good! That's why I posted it. I have a habit of phrasing my responses in a way that often elicits a similarly direct response. This often raises some hackles, but I still find it effective, regardless, in creating an interesting and helpful discussion.

I believe that you are mistaken about this, but nonetheless, it got you to read my reply and apply some thought to it and reply yourself - that was my main aim.

I won't reply to each part of your reply, as it would get too long-winded so I'll try and briefly summarise.

What I am suggesting is to become closer to this goal of being able to 'switch feelings on and off' at the right times.

From your OP -

I too was raised like yourself. I wasn't raised on a used car lot. I don't think it's silly, unless we fail to overcome it. I too have suffered the same problem.

All I am trying to do is to get people to understand the real reasons why people suffer this guilt, so that they can truly eradicate it from their minds permanently, so that it doesn't come back again.

I believe that if they harbour beliefs like this -

...then they will find it more difficult.

I see no need for you to have to write a 100 page dissertation, but I still wonder why you hold on to these beliefs, when you also seem to believe the opposite.

Why should 'ALL INFORMATION BE FREE?' Why should 'everything on the internet be free?'

Do you not have a short answer? If the answer is 'because I was conditioned to believe this' then surely you also now understand that that conditioning was wrong and based on unsound, illogical reasoning?

Should all food be free? If not, then how are people who spend their lives working to present good, helpful information supposed to pay for their food?