Right after the questions about finding niche markets, picking ebook topics and getting your ebook written comes the question – how do I price my ebook or digital information product?
The advice you typically get looks like this…
- Look at your competition
- Get what the market will spend
- Price it according to the value you deliver
- Somewhere between .99-$27
Decent advice on the surface don’t you think?
Small problem though…for those of you who want to build BIG digital product businesses, this is completely the wrong way to go about thinking on how to price your digital information products.
Digital Products Strategy
You see, those of you who have one or two ebooks and stress over pricing that ebook alone are looking at your business tactically…one product at a time, one product TYPE at a time.
The reality is that anyone who operates a 5-figure, 6-figure, or 7-figure + digital product business ONLY looks at pricing a particular product in the context of an overall business strategy.
We work with digital information entrepreneurs inside of Information Marketer’sZone each day on building beyond their products into a solid 6-figure digital business strategy.
I often share with people building digital product businesses that you should not think of your ebook in isolation.
Whether you realize it or not, you are in the business of selling knowledge – a means for your market to achieve a desired result.
That desired result could be
a) To be entertained
b) To reduce pain (overcome shyness, build confidence, get out of debt, fix a broken relationship, etc…)
c) To increase pleasure (master golf, improve your chances of getting a promotion, build muscle, have more sex, become more prestigious so your friends look up to you…)
Within that digital product business, you will have multiple offerings (if you want to build a significant business) – ebooks, manuals, videos, training programs, consulting, seminars/webinars, etc…
Even if you do not yet know what some of the back-end, higher-priced/higher-touch products may be yet – you need to realize that if you have chosen your market correctly – there will be demand for multiple levels of teaching/help.
In that context, with that strategy in mind, doesn’t the ebook take on a different purpose?
For us, if we produce an ebook, it is but a small (yet important) step on capturing the digital information spend in a given niche market.
Our pricing is mainly set based on what we believe will maximize our overall ROI given the FULL business strategy.
If you are just starting out – you need to establish a significant enough customer base that you build a movement around YOU and your business in the marketplace. That doesn’t necessarily mean you give it away (that can often backfire and present you as less credible) – but it also doesn’t mean you price it at $47 or $97 even though you may get a few sales at that price point.
Based on a competitive review in your market and some initial testing, you may discover that your objective of maximizing response in order to build your profile in the market and set the stage for additional product sales is $17 – then that’s what you go with IN ORDER to front-end load your business and win within the overall strategy.
