Saturday, October 25, 2008

Are You Getting Sucked Into The Price War Game?

By Theo McLanahan

If you're selling anything online, chances are you've got competition selling similar products. If you don't have any competition, you're either really lucky to have found an untapped niche, or you're probably not selling much which is why nobody else is in that market.

If you have competition, how do you differentiate yourself from them? I hope it's not based on price...

Competing on price alone is one of the worst things you can do. You're leaving a lot of money on the table and you're only going to have the best price until someone else comes along who's willing to take less profit than you are.

Just ask all the small "Mom & Pop" stores that have been put out of business when Wal Mart came to town how that works.

There is always a way to offer something more or something different than your competition.

If you're selling an infoproduct, what else could you add to it to make the product more attractive? Maybe an audio version of an ebook, or a physical package with a printed book and the audio version on CD. Or even some extra bonuses that your competition doesn't have.

Or if you're selling a physical product, maybe you can include a "how to use it" guide that you write yourself. Or some instructional videos if that makes sense for the product.

Incidentally, this is one of the biggest problems I see with most of the private label rights product offers for internet marketers.

You know the ones - you get an ebook, graphics, sales page and ready-to-post website each month, just waiting for you to post it on the net and start raking in the cash.

Well, the trouble is everyone else who has a membership to that PLR site gets the same thing. Even if there are only 10 other people who actually use a given product, you're going to have 10 competitors selling the same product with the same website, graphics and sales copy.

And how do they usually compete?

Price.

Now there's nothing wrong with these PLR packages, but if you just post them up unchanged, you're fooling yourself if you think you're going to make a lot of money.

Get some new graphics made. Rewrite the sales letter a bit. Add a couple of bonuses to the PLR package.

Make yours stand out from the crowd. In fact, make it so it's unrecognizable as the same product.

Quit taking the lazy route and using price as your competitive advantage. You'll make more money and you'll make it much harder for someone to come into the market and beat you at your own game.

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