If you give the Milk for Free Nobody Buys The Cow?

I totally agree, bit like on WF - people complain about OTO's or up-sells. No one complains to supermarkets about the loss-leaders, that's been a strategy for years, as is the strategy of placing essentials at the far end of the store so you have to pass all the luxury and promotional items, it's just marketing.
I did freebies in my off-line business as did many of our competitors and we made great sales as a result that we would never have made otherwise.
Yes we got a few whingers who expected more, that just goes with the territory. The cliche still stands you can't please everybody.
Also I attended many seminars years ago and spoke at some too, it involved travelling, hotel stopovers in addition to the cost of the seminar. I remember speaking to a speaker from the USA who commented that when people pay higher fees to attend they pay more attention, take notes and take action. If it was a lower ticket affair and on their doorstep they tended to just not attach the same value to it.

Yeah - that's what I mean by a little bit of introductory. I write articles that give some pretty good tips, too - but I'm not giving away the farm by any stretch of imagination. What John just described is a real problem for someone if they need to make money. You have to present yourself as an expert - and to do so you have to render some information freely. You have to also know where to draw the line.

Information has been bought and sold for centuries.

However, we are living in the Information Age. The accessibility has gone up, exponentially. With that will follow a decline in how much that information costs.

I think MMO is a bit different than the other 'niches', but, in general, selling information, selling an ebook on how to get a set of abs or how to train your dog, etc., will become less and less profitable.

With a site I am setting up now, I could have pumped out a top-notch, 200-300 page ebook and sold it for $30-$50 and still not put everything in there that will be on the site for information. But, I don't see that as a viable business model in the future. At least not as viable as it is now and has been the last 10-15 years.

Again, the MMO thing is a bit different, but sooner or later people are going to realize that 99.9% of the solutions to people's problems being bought and sold are already available on da net. For free.

Information Age guys and gals. There is no stopping it. You all have time left to profit off of selling information, but those days will come to an end, or at least be a much more restricted and less profitable market than it is today.

The people with disposable incomes to send money to your paypal account that live on this planet are already online. The other 5 billion + that are yet to get online are not rich. They do not have $27 to buy information from you.

The glory days of selling information are coming to a close. For those currently online that are making purchases of information, well, as the weeks and months pass, they will become more savvy and understand that the information they seek, whatever the information is, can pretty much be found online for free today.

Google/Bing will always be in a running battle with IMers and SEOers, but they have too many PhD's working for them to bet against their algos, IMO. Google wants to serve up sites that give information for free versus a site that charges for the same info.

Sell your information while ya can boys and girls, but, eventually, it will be much less lucrative than it is today. Information Age.

Hi PerformanceMan,

That depends on your viewpoint.

Some might say that they concentrated them or re-arranged them, rather than killing them - unless you believe that no one makes a profit from porn anymore.

Hi icandi,

Thanks for your reply and detailed explanation.

A couple of points -

In my opinion, there's another factor regarding WSOs - it's the WSO of the day factor. If you analyse the stats, there are many benefits to being given WSO of the day, which apparently is chosen by Mike Lantz of WSO Pro.

The stats suggest that you are much more likely to get the extra exposure provided by this (too complicated to elaborate here on this point) if you offer 100% commission on the front-end product.

Therefore many people offer the 100% commission (therefore no direct income from the front end) and look to make money on the backend (OTO or upsell).

This strategy then provides the added complication of the altered dynamics between the two (or more products), particularly the one I mentioned earlier where the front-end is sold as 'all you need' but once the back-end is revealed, it becomes apparent to many buyers that without also purchasing the back-end the front-end product is unsatisfactory, hence buyer's remorse and a feeling of being duped via bait and switch - (and as you point out, sometimes these complaints occur even when no under-handedness has taken place, but purely because buyers have been conditioned to expect it purely due to the presence of an OTO.)

The pun might be unintended but it's a good one. If it's not a pun, then it's a cunning sales tactic. The non-blind misleading the blind.

Regarding 'blame culture', well it's a complex subject and I think we're in danger of talking about many different issues at once here. I'm sure some people complain to supermarkets, The original point was regarding -

...and how that relates to complaints about WSOs.

Again, it's complex, but I think that supermarkets (certainly in my country) have a virtually captive market. They are powerful and have the state in their hands and use these connections to become even more powerful, taking over like a virus by destroying all smaller competition on expensive (in terms of business rates and rents) High Streets by expanding their range of goods and using economies of scale to undercut.

They don't care about customers switching between supermarket chains because they have a cartel of sorts and there are elements of price-fixing going on. They also use a class system, where each 'class' only has one or two choices of supermarket (and who really knows who owns who? Perhaps an elite cartel carefully hides the fact that they own the whole shebang?)

In other words, they make people walk further past other products and continually disorientate them by moving products around the store, because they can.

In effect this isn't 'just marketing' or good salesmanship, it's more like psychological manipulation based on a time-poor, 'can't park in town', 'can't get through the traffic jam', 'I just want to eat!' captive market.

Hence the 'no one complains about supermarkets doing XYZ' point being invalid in my opinion. With that type of captive market, it's a bit like saying 'no one complained about XYZ brutal military invasion' - they may have complained, but no one was listening and nothing changed anyway, so the complaints are muttered under the breath as opposed to directly to the perpetrators, because everyone knows that the perpetrators aren't listening or about to change their approach due to complaints.

But WSO/OTO complaints are an entirely different kettle of fish, in my opinion. The opinions of WSO buyers can often have some immediate effect, especially considering certain factors IE their warrior rep, or if their complaint within the thread appears to halt sales until a resolution/compromise is found. It's quite common to see comments such as, "I was going to buy this until I saw XYZ's comment in the thread" - and then an obvious slowdown in sales.

Regarding -

Well we could probably both write an extensive book on the WSO forum, the nature of complaints, buyer's remorse, shoddy products, failure to take action etc.

This is the typical nature of a marketplace where dreams are for sale.

Thanks again.