How Much Should I Pay For IM Products?

I’m often asked by people who are new to internet marketing or marketing online about how they can get information to  learn about the field. It’s a big space and there sure is a lot to learn. Unfortunately most people think of IM as the business rather than IM being a vehicle for building the business. It’s a bit like saying, how much should I spend on a car to drive around and sell my widgets to potential buyers?  They focus on the car rather than the widgets.

I digress.

I’m surprised by how many people want to ‘get into internet marketing’ and simultaneously don’t want to spend any money. Now it’s perfectly possible to spend absolutely no money and make money online. Difficult but not impossible. For instance you don’t need an internet connection – you could use the pc at your local library. You don’t need a hosting account, a domain name or a website – you can use free solutions like wordpress, blogger or squidoo.. You don’t need to buy products, you can sell other people’s or make your own. You don’t need a merchant account – you can use PayPal. So it IS possible to run an internet business for free.

However, you chances of making money online are significantly increased when you spend money on these things.

More importantly, your chances of making money online are increased exponentially when you LEARN how to make money online.

You CAN do that for free as well – just search online (assuming you know specifically what to search for) and you can hunt around and find what need to learn.

Again, you reduce your speed to market (and speed to income) when you spend money on your education. Finding the right person at the right price at the right time for your level of learning is the key here. An interesting comment worth repeating here from Ivan Walsh:

I worked with Accenture a while back on price strategy.

One research finding was the link between education (or lack thereof) and the willingness to pay for information.

The more education the target segment had (e.g. min university degree), the more likely they were to ‘invest’ in books, courses, training etc.

Others saw these as an ‘expense’.

Maybe it’s less to do with ROI (and perception of value) and more to do with the target audience core values.

Some folks won’t ever spend a nickel online… but that’s their problem.

‘Nuff said, really.

Learn. Spend money to learn. It works.