Marketing Product Prices Are Targeted More and More for the Elite?

It probably hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that just about everything sold online today which involves supposedly “super insider” information has gone through the roof in price.

There’s a small camp that thinks this is cool.  Any guesses as to who is in this camp?  The people selling things for more and more money.  And that’s where the excitement over ever increasing prices for training ends.

I’m not really interested in picking out and picking on the crew pushing high-priced, big ticket internet marketing training.  Everyone who has an email address knows them well.  And I’m not mad at anyone who finds ways to make a million bucks in 24 hours.

Except, what about everyone else? 

The problem is that there are tens of thousands of people who have websites who are serious enough to want and use this information.  They just don’t have a couple grand burning in their pockets.  And naturally, like any normal person does, they shrink away when they see the hype with which such products are sold.

Our industry is at an impasse…again.  It is being redefined…again.  And it is coming back to the consumer of information products in a good way.

But first let’s look at the reasons for the zillion dollar launches.   Specifically, why product owners feel so confident in their ability to sustain million dollar launch after million dollar launch with fewer customers and higher prices.

1.  Because they can…

Simple enough.  If you know you can create a product (and most importantly a launch) that can whip people into a frenzy and have enough of them willing to fork over anywhere from $1000-$10000+ for it, how long would you hesitate before clicking the “Send” button?

2.  It’s Cool…

There’s nothing in the world like standing on a stage and telling everyone how much you made in 5-10-24 hours with a product launch.  I know this not from experience but from the faces of those who have cheerily given the news from stage.  Ironically to the very people who made it possible and, thus, got a free ticket to the event as part of buying in.  (That’s always weirded me out when the guy is bragging about his launch and how much he made right to the faces of the people who bought the “thing.”)

3.  It’s Fun…

Money rolling in in very large numbers is fun to watch.  I can’t say I’ve ever watched it ROLL in.  But I’ve watched it come  pretty fast and furious a few times in my career and that stuff is mighty addictive.

From a numbers point of view there is nothing wrong with any of this.  I am not looking to make enemies.  Many of the people I am talking about are friends of mine.  And to my knowledge, not a single person in the “guru mafia” has EVER taken anyone else in the loose federation to task on anything serious because of the fear of being blacklisted.

So I don’t want to say anything they wouldn’t at least begrudgingly admit to if put in the spotlight.

Here are the problems with million dollar launches:

1.  I’ve yet to see one squeeze out more than a relative handful of success stories in all my 10 years online. 

It’s quite possible that no one has ever wanted to go beyond the social proof they’ve provided thinking that would be all the proof anyone could want.  But I know that’s not true.

People are lazy.  Most of them.  When it comes to entrepreneurial spirit, there are precious few of the 6 billion of us on Earth who really have it.  Notice I am not saying the products in question probably sucked.  I am saying that whether they did or not doesn’t matter.  It’s the people, human beings that we all are, who screw themselves in the end most of the time.

I’ve seen people blame the products thousands of times by now in forums and emails.  Yeah there are some truly shit products out there.  But I bought my share of bad products in my day and I didn’t let that dictate my success or failure online.  That’s lamo excuse #1 people use to this day:  “the product sucked and now I have to go back to working my day job!”   No Dilbert – you sucked and you quit trying!  Back to your cubicle!

2.  If most people are going to fail after they buy your product, how much is ok to charge someone who has a 90+% of NOT doing what’s on the sales letter? 

I don’t care if the product is about getting traffic or about getting off your ass.  If most people succeeded who bought Tony Robbins’ DVDs (millions were sold) don’t ya think just about all the world’s problems would be solved by now?

With millions of the most powerful, success-driven, inspired people running all over the planet making truly big, Earth-shattering things happen, whole economies would be changed for the better (instead of recession bound) and everyone in Africa would have full bellies.

If most of the people who bought Power Linking (any version) had used it to get all the traffic it made available to them since 2002, don’t you think I’d have a 12 mile long testimonial page somewhere to show for it?  Better than that…don’t you think someone would have used it to promote and then sell something like Skype, Napster, or YouTube and slip me a little credit by now?

But that hasn’t happened.  And Tony Robbins’ training alone hasn’t lifted up the world to a more peaceful, successful, prosperous human existence.  He surely has made some very powerful, successful people from his training.  But nothing close to how many products he’s sold.

Not a single person who read Power Linking has gone on to own a site that gets more than 100,000 visitors a day and contacted me to thank me.  Certainly many people got a lot “out of it.”  They will cop to that.  And a good percentage of people got more traffic.  In fact everyone who applied it got more traffic.  But where are they now?

By now, if everyone succeeded with my courses the way I know they would if applied perfectly, there would be tens of thousands more happy people yelling my name on rooftops all over the world.

So I know for a fact that most people will not do anything meaningful with anything they buy to make them better at… anything.  

And it doesn’t matter how much more they pay for it!  They will still squander the opportunity they purchased and what it represents to them no matter how much they pay for it.

Forget what you’ve heard.  This is one of the biggest secrets on the web or off.  Even though it’s plain to see that if a significant number of people who bought anything that would make them better at their craft actually used it to get better, there’d be a hell of a lot more successful people on the web than there are.  It’s kind of freakin’ obvious!

Product sellers don’t want to admit it for obvious reasons.  But the creepy thing is that the buyers don’t want to admit it either.  They want desperately to believe in any product’s ability, on it’s own, to lift them up to wherever they think they deserve to be without working too hard for it.

Sellers and buyers are in a dance macabre with each other.  “Lie to me.  Tell me I’m beautiful.  Tell me I can be anything I want to be.  Tell me I am going to be rich, powerful, successful.”  

And then  marketers found out how deep this really can go.  First Product:  “Can you believe they bought it for $1000?” Next Product: “Can you believe they bought it for $2000?” Third Product: “Holy shit! They are buying this stuff like hotcakes for $10k a piece!”

We haven’t plumbed the depths yet folks.  They will keep pushing if you keep buying.

Back to the Price of Internet Marketing Training…

What am I saying with all this?  Am I going to tell anyone it’s wrong to charge $2000 for some coaching?  No.  I’d have to stop charging for coaching myself if I did that.

I guess what I am getting at is that I know me.  And people who have paid big money for my services know from that experience that I give everything I’ve got.  They can tell there’s a country boy deep down inside me that blushes when he gets paid so much just to tell folks what he knows about marketing.  And they ALL walk away appreciative and very much fulfilled from the experience.  I make doubly sure of that.   (Almost to THEIR embarrassment at times.)

I dote on people too much, I know.  They’ve told me to stop.  They’ve said they feel like I am giving them too much.  The good ones who have an ounce of decency anyway.   The others never stop taking until I realize they are never going to stop taking free consulting, lol.

I personally think, to a point, that’s what you owe people who’ve paid a lot of money to get close to you and learn from you.

I don’t think that’s what’s always going on behind closed doors after the big launches are over though.   It’s very hard to tell because a lot of people who go and rant on public forums are losers who couldn’t succeed with anything you gave them no matter how good.

Or they are just normal, regular people who could never be expected to be entrepreneurial because of the way they’re just built.  And yes, plenty of them have been given a good ‘ol fashioned screw job by a marketer or two who had no intention of giving them their money’s worth.

So how much do you charge for products you know most people are going to fail with? 

Whatever the hell they will pay!

I’m no ethics cop to anyone but myself.    What did you think I was going to say?

But in telling the story you now know a lot more about me and how I feel about treating customers and clients.  When it comes to me, you know more about whether or not you can expect a good deal with anything you might buy from me in the future.

The other guys?  Well, they have to do their own convincing.  Some don’t seem to have to go much beyond the $100,000 copy they throw up.  Seems good enough for most people.  But it’s not my place to judge.

The Bottom Line

Internet marketing products, while going up in price (along with the hype – which is only shrouded in more free content than the hype everyone was “sick of” a couple years ago) will also go back down.

We are near the top now.  I will be one of the first to help take it back in the other direction and make it affordable for tens of thousands to prosper, or not, from my product; Social Power Linking.  It’s not cheap – it’s affordable.  And it’s designed for the masses.

Not the elites who already have so much money to spend on their marketing how-to collections that they probably don’t really need more money in the first place.