In any marketplace finding the price to ask for your product or service that appeals to customers but doesn’t cut you out of profits is a tough balancing act to pull off. Pricing at what you think you deserve for your work may suit your self image but it might mean your product or service will not sell. A big factor is the competition because if someone else comes into the market with a similar product for a little less, they can steal your market share. But on the other hand selling too low means losing margin which means at some point you lose money so why be in the marketplace at all? This dilemma is just as much of a challenge when selling your product online in a digital marketplace like Clickbank as it is outside of cyberspace. Clickbank doesn’t set your prices and you will live or die in their market based on the quality of your product, how well known what you have to offer is and the relationship between price and value. All of these things are age old market principles that are unchanged just because our marketplace and our product has all gone digital.
One school of thought calls for you to come in with as low a price as you can so you can capture larger sales numbers. Within the context of Clickbank, this does have some solid business thinking behind it. The Clickbank tracking system reflects the movement of your product quantitatively and that is reported to existing or new affiliates. So simply put, the more product your sell, the better it looks to new affiliates. This means more affiliates pick up your product out of the Clickbank marketplace and your sales continue to go up which is a delightful momentum to see happen. That kind of market behavior can offset setting your price low fairly easily.
The other school of thought calls for you to set your price higher to reflect a higher quality product and realize a greater profit per unit on each sale. This may result in fewer affiliates picking up your product on Clickbank but the sales they do generate give you a higher return per unit. It's possible the outcome could be a wash so deciding which approach to you can be intuitive and may be an area worth some experimentation to see which business model works best for you.
Much of the beauty of becoming an internet marketer in the first place is that you have so much more price leverage than a traditional merchant outside of cyberspace. Because your product is entirely digital, you operate at basically zero overhead. Once you produce the software or the e-book, production is nothing more than generating another digital copy which costs nothing. You may have some software costs for specific formatting software but once your infrastructure is in place, your only cost is the time it takes you to make more product. There is no manufacturing, no cost of goods sold, no distribution costs and with the Clickbank system, virtually no advertising cost either.
This means you can afford to price your product competitively because you will always make a profit of some sort. Now the shelf life on digital products is not very long so you want to milk as much profitability out of each product during the months when it is "hot" and then pump more product into the Clickbank marketplace. But you still have the leverage to experiment with price to see where the proper price level for your product might lie.
You do have to beware of adjusting your price too much on a single product. If customers see your price moving around, they lose faith in you as a merchant. The best way to "experiment" with pricing is to set a price on a product, track its sales and then sell a very similar product at a different product and continue to track and compare the results. While other factors influence sales, you can eventually develop a model which will serve as a solid pricing strategy. And once you have that, you are ready to compete in the Clickbank marketplace successfully for the long term.
- Mohammed Zahran -
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