One of the toughest things internet marketers face is to pick the right price for a product. If your price is too low, you’ll be losing money. If you set the price too high, no one will buy. Setting the right price is very important for any business.

Daniel Levis says in his newsletter that price is when you and your customer both make the maximum profit. When a customer sees the price, he automatically determines the price of the product. It’s called the perceived value. That bar between the offered price and the perceived value of the product in customer’s mind is his profit.

The higher the perceived value of the product, the more chances there are that they’ll buy your product. If you manage to set high price, yet offer double, triple that or maybe even 10 times more in quality bonuses to your customer, you can expect some great sales and great profits.

The better the product you have, the more money you can ask for it. If your product or service offers tons more features than the rest of the competitors, you can set much higher price. But again, not too high, cause if you overprice it, you won’t get any sales.

How to Set the Right Price?

• Asking
  One of the ways is to ask. I’ve seen when marketers simply send a message to their list and say something like: “Hey dude, how much you’d be willing to pay if I offered you that kind of product?” And then they give several prices, $29, $49, $69, $99, or over $100. One thing here is that some might simply click on the lowest price. Others might actually think about it and honestly say that they’d be willing to pay no more than $99. Others might push the price as high as possible so less people could get their fingers on that “super duper product”. Not sure how this works, but it’s worth trying.

• Testing
  Another, very widely used method is to test. Simply do a split testing. If the mailing list software allows that, you can send each other email with a different offer. Like prospect A gets – 1, B – 2, C -1, D -2, and so on… When you try different prices, you simply know what works. Lower price will bring more customers. Higher price will bring less, but the profit can be much higher. Sometimes even when you increase the price from $69 to $149, you’ll see no reduction in sales. If you don’t test, you never know what works. You might be leaving money on the table for years. Don’t let that happen. Always test.

• Guess
  That’s the most stupid method ever, yet so many entrepreneurs do that. I mean offline world too. Some are so dumb as not to even look what are the prices on the market for similar products. Guessing is a surefire way to failure. Never allow yourself to guess. Research, ask, test, but never guess.

I thought, I’ll share a website that inspired me to website and graphics designing. It’s 2advanced company. Until now, I think they’re one of the most quality and professional website design companies around.

The version of their site that impressed me the most was the third one. You can check the archive at:
http://v3.2a-archive.com

Or you can go to the main site and see the new version here: 2Advanced

I mean this kind of design is just awesome. Of course, it’s not a money generating design. If you want to make money, then you should use simple design and go straight to the point (whatever you want to accomplish: get a lead, sell a product, make them call you, etc.). But there are companies that simply want to represent their identity online and not to make any sales from the site.

In that case, such design is awesome.

And not only that. Just look at how nicely the colors are balanced. Look at the images and the whole subtle flash design there. It’s really impressing. I see many websites that try to look a bit professional, but they just make it worse. Now this kind of design should be an inspiration for you if you create sites yourself.

In the future, I’ll post more of great design examples, so you could strive to look as professional and good looking as possible.

Have you ever received a marketer’s email saying that the response from their previous promotion was 70%? Or when they email and say: “Hey, have you ever seen a 95.453% converting web copy, well here it is…”

You know, that really pisses me off. I mean, c’mon…

This kind of promotion can only be generated from a super targeted, small mailing list. There’s simply no way one can get a response even close to that from a PPC campaign, or SEO rankings. So when they emphasize their unbelievably successful “web copy”, which in their opinion is responsible for such success, it makes me mad…

Gee, I could meet a dozen close friends and tell them about the opportunity, then send them an email or call them to go and buy my stuff. Walla, 100% CR! But try to get such a response from an Adwords campaign these days…

What I mean is that newbie marketers might fall for that and start thinking that great web copy is all they need. Don’t get me wrong, copywriting is very important, even one of the most important skills in online marketing. But copywriting alone, won’t help you succeed. It’s not the web copy, it’s the right market.

You may have the best directory building software in the world, but if you advertise to bad credit mortgage market, you’ll get no sales. But if you have a product that’s really not the best in the market, actually one of the worst. Yet, you manage to send a promotion to the specific target market, you’ll get sales. Maybe many refunds too, but you’ll get some sales. That’s the whole point here. Sending a promo to the most specific target market is mostly responsible for the success of your ad, and not the copywriting. Yep, you may argue with me, but that’s what I think it is…

The broader that market, the lower the response. So don’t blindly fall for any copywriters’ claims about extremely high conversions… If their ad was sent to a broader audience, probably they’d lose 10 times the response. On the other hand, if your current web copy produces 0.5% CR, sent to the right market, it may get you 7% or 10%.

The point is that email marketing produces the best response rates. Nothing can beat that. People who get the message already trust and love the owner, so they’ll buy. They might even buy, because it’s their buddy sending them a product and not a stranger. PPC or SEO can’t even compare to that.

So when measuring your web copy statistics, don’t be disappointed when your CR is only 1% or 2% when others are screaming about 50% to 90% conversion. It’s the right market and the volumes you’re trying to reach and not the copywriting.

I recently saw email marketing videos – “Email Promos Exposed” by Michael Rasmussen. They’re really good for newbies and well done. I loved that they were cut into small chunks so I didn’t have to wait decades for it to load…

Anyway, one thing that I’d like to point out here is - personalization. I believe many rookies, have done this mistake. I did it when starting out.

What some people do when they realize the “coolness” of personalization is, they use prospect’s name over and over again in the email. I have submitted prospect’s name like 4 or 6 times in the email…

Problem is that this brings the negative effect. Newbie marketers think that the more they’ll use the name, the more personal an email will be. However, it’s not true. Especially, when people type in their full name.

Think about it… Seeing your first and last name 5 times in the 400 word email looks odd and distracting…

“Hey John Doe,

How are You. Today I’d like to tell you some unbelievably awesome web marketing secret that will blow your sock off. Ready John Doe? Ok, here it is…

And by the way John Doe, these tactics are so powerful that Your competitors will shut their businesses down…”

You get the idea right…

And don’t take this writing as an example. I’ve exaggerated the talk of some so called “gurus” that’s all. So my point is to use personalization carefully. Yes, it’s cool to be able to include someone else’s name into an email, but what’s too much is unhealthy…

So whenever you use personalized emails, always remember that there are people who’ll put their full name in the “name” box. Use a subscriber’s name 2 to 3 times maximum for longer emails.

Hi,

Today I’d like to give you a tip when designing your website. I’ll use my site as an example here.

If you’re not a PHP geek or you don’t use some CMS (content management system), then you may have a pretty flexible website even with CSS (cascading style sheets). That’s what I basically use for my website design.

If you look at the picture below, you’ll see that the layout of the site is broken into 3 chunks – left, center and right sides.

Each of these is just a table with CSS assigned to it. Now, if you use HTML formatting on every single page, there’s no way you can change the layout of all the pages at once. However, if you use external CSS on every page, you can change almost any layout detail and have it updated on all the pages.

For instance, the sidebar (image on the left) has a CSS class assigned to the table and also CSS class assigned to links. Those borders around links are just CSS. Now I can open the main CSS file any time and remove those, change the color, size, font, width or height of the whole table. At the moment the sidebar is 200px in width. But with CSS, I can change it to 150px or 300px if I want to.

I can actually change the main table (centered table) width or background color, as well as sub navigation menu layout.

So, talking about CSS layout, it’s really easy to use and update. If you’re using just a simple HTML for your pages (not ASP or PHP scripting), I suggest using CSS for all your website elements (tables, cells, H1 or H2 tags, links, etc.). This will really save you time if you decide to change the layout of your site.

I think these days almost every (at least decent) web development software has the option to use external CSS for your website layout. I like to use Adobe Golive for editing websites. You may use FrontPage or Dreamweaver. They’re also quite powerful tools.

One more thing I decided to tell you. I think that if you have a blog, you definitely should install a solution to block comment spam, which is a big problem now. Some bloggers receive over few hundred spam posts per day without this option. So, I strongly suggest you to use Captchas.

Don’t know what it is?

These are just simple images that automatically generate random numbers or letters whenever submitting information (email forms, forum posts, etc. They’re used widely…). So if you have a blog, make sure you use some similar solution to this.

I don’t remember where I got this Captcha script for WP, but you may check the internet if you use WP. Major blog services now offer this solution as well.

Let’s fight comment spam!

Hi there,

Thanx for stopping by.

I’ve finally decided to install a blog. Boy, this was a 3-day pain in the ass… I’m no big techie guy. I can’t script or anything, just a little HTML. So going through all these WP files (especially CSS) was quite tough for me.

As you’ve noticed, I’ve changed the design of the whole site. Yes, you’re right. It looks like Adwords page now. Well, shame on me But if I like some design idea or example and I’m passionate about it, then nothing can stop me. Well, maybe except lawsuits for copycatting

You know, I also wanted this blog to look just like the website and not another Kubrick theme, so I spend quite some time tweaking various tiny classes and DIV’s until I’ve managed to make it look like I wanted to. One problem though, on Opera or Firefox it looks quite crappy. I’ve tried changing one CSS class, but then in IE it looked even worse. I’ll just leave it like that… Sorry FF & Opera fans

Anyway… A little about this blog.

I’ll post here some information whenever I have time. So this isn’t regular blog… However, I’ll try to put here some valuable info about web marketing and other related areas, such as website design or RSS. I think these are also important. I’ll give you some tips and even links to some great looking websites, so you could distinguish bad design from good one (some people can’t even do that…). I’m also planning to start offering some web design (not programming) services in the near future. If you’re interested, let me know

And of course, I’ll share some tips here about things that work (and don’t work) for me in web marketing. You can come here from time to time and check the updated info here. You can also bookmark this page or subscribe via RSS reader.

And one more thing…

If you have some internet marketing related questions, don’t hesitate to ask. If I’ll be able to answer them, I’ll post them on this blog so others could benefit.

Ok, that’s all for today.

Take care,
Monty Lee