The $7 Secrets Method

How the $7 Secrets method solves information’s problems

What can you buy for seven dollars? A fast food dinner for one person, two magazines off the rack, a few gallons of gas. You buy all kinds of things, probably every day, that cost about seven dollars. You probably don’t give it a second thought. You just buy it, use it, and throw it away.

Why? Because seven dollars isn’t a lot of money, not to most people. At least, not to most people who can afford a computer and an Internet connection. That’s the beauty of the $7 Secrets method of producing and selling information products: if the person has the means to be looking at your sales letter, chances are they can afford to pay seven dollars for the product! This method also takes away the first three of the fourmajor problems with information products:

1. It’s easy to convince people to pay seven dollars for a product.
2. The price is just right for most people’s pocketbooks.
3. Refunds are virtually non-existent. And there’s an added fourth reason for only charging seven dollars:
4. There’s virtually no support required for the product.
   

Let’s go through each of these points one at a time.

Convincing People Your Product is Worth $7 Is Ea

I love bookstores. Yes, I’m a programmer, and yes, I create (and buy) digital informational products all the time–but I love bookstores. I go to my local Barnes ‘n Noble all the time. I almost always buy something while I’m there–but I don’t always buy something expensive.

I put thought into buying a book that is more than fifteen or twenty dollars. I think about whether or not I really need it, or if it’s good enough to spend that much. I examine the table of contents, flip through the pages, and really consider it.

This is especially true if the book is priced in the fifty dollar or more range. It’s a rare book that holds that kind of value for me. When I find them, I love them, but that doesn’t happen very often.

That’s how most people are, isn’t it? We’ll drop ten (or seven) dollars on just about anything without giving it a second thought, so convincing us that something’s worth that much isn’t hard to do. That’s because it’s not a big risk. Ask for much more than that,though, and we start thinking about whether or not it’s worth it.

Salesmanship is all about taking away the risk from the buyer. That’s why so many products have money-back guarantees. People want to feel safe when making a major purchase. Not so with a seven dollar product. Most people don’t consider losing seven dollars to be a risky investment.

Because of this, your sales page copywriting abilities don’t have to be stellar whenyou’re charging only seven dollars for your informational product. You don’t have towow the visitor with a huge list of “bonus” gifts to get them to buy. You don’t have to get the wording just right or have a hundred testimonials splashed across the sales page.

In fact, your sales copy can be pretty short. My first seven dollar report sales page was less than a thousand words long–I’ve written articles longer than that! Compare that to 22,000+ words on Joel Comm’s recent sales page for his Monthly Templates product.

Why so long? Because he’s selling an expensive product, so it takes a lot of convincingto get people to buy.

Now, I don’t know Joel’s conversion rate, but I got a 15% conversion rate on my reportwhen I promoted it to my own list. My first wave of affiliates had a 10% conversion rate.

Now, the overall conversion rate for my affiliates is near 7%. What are your conversion rates like? Want them to improve? Then charge seven dollars for your product.

A $7 Price-Tag Prevents Refunds

Selling an informational product for seven dollars also prevents refunds. As I said earlier, when your price is high, the demand on your product is very high. People want a three hundred page ebook for $97, and it better deliver the goods! If it doesn’t, you can expect a lot of refunds–not to mention that the customer will never buy again.

As of the time of this writing, I’ve sold close to 800 copies of one of my reports in thelast 7 days, and I only got one refund request. That puts my refund rate at just over one tenth of one percent. It was a ridiculous refund request, of course–the person had a bogus reason why my report “wasn’t worth seven dollars”.

I wasn’t obligated to issue the refund. I don’t have a money-back guarantee on the sales page, but I went ahead and issued the refund anyway. I mean, it was only seven dollars, right?

Compare that to my other products, which have refund rates in the 3-7% range. It stinks issuing refunds for digital informational products because the person gets to keep it, and there’s not much you can do about it without making it hard on all of your honest customers by using password-protected ebooks that you have to install and stuff like that. To me, that would lose more customers than it would protect in refunds.

You see, people just aren’t expecting a novel when they buy an informational product for seven dollars. They’re expecting something of value, sure, and I believe in over-delivering on that expectation, but you don’t have to provide 300 pages of rock-solid content for your customers to feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth. After all, do youexpect a gourmet dinner from McDonalds? Or do you just expect something that tastespretty good and is fast and easy? It’s the same thing when selling digital informationalproducts for seven dollars. The expectation is lower, so refunds are lower.

There’s Virtually No Support

With higher priced ebooks, people often write in with a myriad of questions. This happens because it’s hard to put your head around 300 pages no matter how many times you’ve read it, so people will often write in looking for straight-forward answers to their questions.

This almost never happens with reports created using my $7 Secrets methods. For onething, they are generally much shorter, and therefore it’s easier to grasp the concepts because there are less of them. I have yet to receive a single support question regarding the reports

Faster Production = More Profits

All of the above adds up to you being able to create more products faster, and in niche markets that simply won’t support a 300 page ebook. Your research time is lessened, your time to market is lessened, and you can regularly send out multiple seven dollar promotions to your lists without losing their interest.

That’s an important point. If you send too many high dollar promotions to your list, people will start to ignore your promotions all together. Seven dollar promotions are a different story. People don’t mind spending it because it’s so little of their money, and if you really deliver a good report with solid information, they’ll keep coming back for more.

I try to keep my seven dollar reports to around 30 pages. Any less than that and people might feel a little gypped (even if it is only seven dollars), but too much more than that isn’t really necessary. Since the whole point of my $7 Secrets is to create a lot of products fast, you don’t want to pack it with too much more. If you find that your 30 page report has reached 65 or 70 pages, perhaps you should consider breaking it up into two reports instead? The two reports can link to each other for cross-selling.

Does Anything Really Need 300 Page

I’ll be honest with you: I almost never read the 300 page ebooks I buy. I skim them. Who’s got time to read 300 pages? Maybe some people–but not me! Do you? I’m guessing that you don’t.

I find the 30 page report to be a much better teaching tool, since people are far more inclined to read 30 pages than they are to read 300. So if you do have a 300 page ebook, why not break each chapter (or two or three) out into a separate report? People can purchase the reports they want, and not the ones they aren’t interested in–and they’ll be much more inclined to read them all if you send out the offers once a week or so.

And isn’t it true that really large, 300 page ebooks are often full of fluff just to make the ebook bigger and to have a nice bullet on the salespage? Shorter reports let you get right to the point.

This All Sounds Good, But It’s Only $7!

Now, you might be thinking, “So what if it’s easy to sell a seven dollar product? I’m only making seven dollars! That’s not a lot of money per sale.”

If that’s what you’re thinking, you’re both right and wrong. Seven dollars isn’t much per sale–but the reality is that you’ll be making more than seven dollars per sale. How that’s possible is the focus of the next section. without all of that fluff. Your customers will appreciate that, too.

Sources : Jonathan Leger, www.jonathanleger.com