$947 Value for $9

The sales copy related to the product you are linking to in your sig encompasses most of the things you've enquired about.

Blind copy relating to a "secret".
Content worth $38 ...Now only $9.

Would you agree that it's perhaps an odd thing to do if you are unsure of these marketing methods asking if certain approaches are just "stupid tricks"?

It is just marketing. That's all.

That's the old sales gimmicks......Normally $999.99 Right Now You Pay $7.99
They are also trying to put a relative market value to their product/content for sale.
In the real world it is the price they sold it for in the past (original retail price)..not just a blind made up figure to look like a great deal. You have probably also figured most WSO's are under $10 (or start below that dollar amount).

Honestly, the answer lies in the eyes of the beholder. Marketing is is an art in itself, so yeah maybe it can be seen as a marketing trick... or however you choose to perceive it.

However, a good marketer knows: "IF" someone were to "APPLY" the techniques shared in some truly amazing WSO's or other IM related products being sold online the skies the limit. I bought a WSO 2 years ago when I first got online for $37 (It too made a suggested income claim in 'x' amount of hours), and though most of the information was pretty basic, it contained a proven formula, and laid out a very achievable way to create a product and profit from it in less than 24 hours.

That thread has nearly 5,000 responses, an unheard of amount of 'happy' buyers, and IMHO was rather genius by the creator, as I said; it wasn't that the information was some 'insider secrets' per se, instead... it was 1,2,3... you now have a way to make money online if you take action and apply the process!

I did, and feel the product was worth more than $37 dollars.

Copywriting triggers and targets many aspects, greed is a big one... (almost) everyone wants to have more money, so using these techniques to project 'buyers' are saving money and getting great value simply works.

Now, not all the products are worth the cover price, naturally. However, from a marketing prospective, which would you prefer...

-Learn How to Make $100 Every 3 Days Working Part-Time Online!

OR

-Learn How to Make an Extra $10,000+ Per Year Working Part-Time Online!

Obviously, they are both conveying the same message, as to earn $33.33 per day = $12,166.67

However the second example is more likely to get a response.

Point being, everyone wants to imbed the proceived "value" whereby, psychologically people feel they are getting more than they've paid for... whether it's true or not, depends on the products themselves.

I personally have bought from some warriors who have blown my mind with the amount of content they share in their WSO's and it truly is a massive over-delivery!

Then there's the flip-side to that coin... others attempt to replicate that massive over-delivery value, and think by "inflating numbers' that it reflects value, and many times their product flat-out sucks, to put it simply.

I simply research before I buy anything. See what kind of track record the person has, read through their posts/threads and see if they know their stuff before you buy. Often the big promises of value are over-inflated, and is a desperate marketing attempt.

In my experience, nearly every WSO that I've ever purchased (as few as they were) almost always over-delivered, and was worth more than I paid, for the WSO for sure. After all, many of the WSO's launched here are sold elsewhere and for a larger asking price... just do your research, and if it really sucks... get a refund!

Art

A pretty stupid one, quite often, I think.

There are times that (for instance) a bonus previously sold as a separate product at $27 is included, and then it's clearly perfectly legitimate to say so. In some countries there are laws about this, and if you say that something is "a $97 value" or whatever, you have to have had it on sale at that price for a certain period of time, and sold some, and so on. These things vary. The reality is that, online, people get away with all sorts of deceptive claims in sales posts/pages.

Sometimes it backfires. Some of us don't buy those on principle, in the belief that the vendor's trying to deceive us (personally, I don't buy from people whose behavior I find "of deceptive intent").

In the case of WSO's, one can always ask pre-sales questions, along the lines of "On what is that valuation based?" I don't bother, myself, because I won't be buying them anyway, so it wouldn't really be legitimate for me to ask.

They do it because it works the first time I saw a guy say it's $75,000 real world value but today only $497 and people purchased it that is why it's done.

If a person tells me that their $9 product is worth $947, then I will hold them to that.

I don't know the answer to your question but I can tell you one thing that works very well. I've done it in other niches and it increases conversions like crazy.

Lets say you have a product selling for $97. Then you have a forum (like this one) where you can also sell a "special offer". Leave the product up for $97 and sell it on the forum for $27 or whatever. That, in my opinion is a true special offer representing real value.

To me, that's real value. Value is what people are CURRENTLY willing to pay. I don't understand the whole "people paid $1,000 for this information now it's yours for $7". They forget to leave out that people may have paid $1,000 in 2006 for the information. Stuff like that is usually just a product creator cleaning out their hard drive.

It doesn't mean it's bad content. It just means that in my opinion they are misrepresenting the true value because value is what the current market would pay.

I've sold a lot of PLR and MMR stuff over the past few years. Once a product is released into that market the perceived value goes down. I've often advertised "The Retail Value Of The Products In This Offer Is $1647.19..." Or something to that effect.

That's the combined once-retail price of the combined lot. Many of the products I've sold were still selling at the original price. Sometimes inflated price claims work well.

Others times not so well. Value is relative. Tickets to see Lady Gaga might go for a thousand bucks. I wouldn't pay ten. To each his own.

A lot of marketers will not like my response but I am going to say it anyway.

When you see inflated values like that... The marketer falls into one of the following situations.

1. Trying to take advantage of gullible people. Some call this "just marketing"

2. Has a very big ego and thinks anything they produce is worth that and a bag of chips. Apparently it's not worth that since they are selling it for $9.

3. A combination of 1 and 2.

4. See's many others doing it so they think that has to be the way to get sales. AKA stupid or lacks real world marketing experience.

5. Or a combination of 1, 2 and 4.

That's my 2 cents and I am sticking to it!

Re's
Rob Whisonant

It's also partly to do with the way our brains are wired - a concept called 'anchoring'. If we see that something is 'worth' $947, our brain holds onto that price as a reference point. When our brain sees that it's selling for only $9, it sees that as a bigger reduction.

However, one becomes very immune to these types of claims when we realise that the product was never worth $947 in the first place. This happens a lot in the IM market.

To me, there's a difference between a genuine discount (i.e. the product once sold for $943 but is now reduced) versus 'this product is worth $947 but I'm only selling it for $9'. I can't think of too many products in the offline world that are worth $947 but are sold for only $9 or even discounted to that level.

The worst are those people who write comments in WSO's such as...

"This course is awesome. I would have easily paid $497+ for this information."

No you wouldn't have. In most cases they are people writing reviews for the WSO and were so cheap they got a free review copy so they didn't even spend the $7 or $9 to buy the WSO... and then they are telling us they would pay hundreds for it.

Yeah... right.

$947 to $9 is a ridiculous jump. I would question whether it is even worth $9.

If your product has value and delivers what it claims to then people will pay whatever you ask. I say this as a vendor and customer.

When I offer my own WSOs, I don't use "made up" "value". The "value" that I quote is typically readily available on the forums already. For example, I usually include one of my plugins as a free bonus in each of my offers. I quote the ACTUAL value of the plugin if the customer was to buy it separately.

People don't know how to value their time and the over-value their "bonuses". My WSOs are typically more expensive than others because I put a value on my time and include REAL bonuses.

That's difficult to do because absent actual numbers, value is subjective.

No.

MY WSOs are not a secret. I don't believe in blind WSOs.