Marcu Taylor's Blog, page 31

The Gift of Not Being Rich

I'm quite open about the fact that I don't have an abundance of money and never have. The reason why is because this didn't and won't stop me from creating businesses and projects that help people, and I want to destroy the myth of 'starting a business is expensive' to encourage more dreamers to take the lead and create projects that make the world better.

If you can dream it, you can do it – Walt Disney



Most people assume that setting up a business is expensive – you have to hire accountants, solicitors, invest in warehouses, inventory, and employees. That is complete bullshit. The most fundamental purpose of a business is to help and provide something of value to people who want or need that value, and since when did helping people have to cost money? I suggest we start considering that our time and creativity are equally, if not more, important and valuable.

I like that people are often shocked by my frugality when it comes to setting up projects, especially entrepreneurs who throw thousands at mediocre ideas. My latest project (a comfort zone calculator called 'WhatisMyComfortZone.com) cost just under £50 in programming costs to create, and it reached over 10,000 people in the first month with no marketing. My 'bread and butter' project TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk cost £0 to launch, and is now ranked as the UK's #1 blog for musicians, and is subscribed to by tens of thousands, including employees from major record labels.

I'm not telling you this to brag about these projects, I'm telling you to share an important lesson that I've learnt.

Not having money is a gift when it comes to setting up a business

When you don't have money, you're forced to get really creative, learn out of necessity, adopt a laser-focus on delivering real value, and testing every move. If you don't have penny's to waste, you can't afford to make mistakes, which means you're forced to make smart decisions.

When you have large sums of money or funding the opposite becomes true – you can pay others to do things for you, removing the need to frequent the library to learn how to make smart decisions, and removing the focus on delivering real value (your focus shifts onto 'how can we make back what we've spent?)

I recently finished reading Chris Gillebeau's book The Art of Non-Conformity. Those of you have read it will perhaps remember an article he referenced from the New Yorker about How David Beats Goliath, which really got me thinking in this context.

The article suggested that approximately 71.5% of the time, the Goliaths in history (larger armies, big corporations, powerful people) defeat the David's with their power. But when the David's get creative (e.g. outnumbered armies, creative protestors, and other passionate individuals lacking 'power') they beat the Goliaths 63.8% of the time.

In other words, if you have less power than the big guys, you have a better chance of beating them IF you get creative and adopt an underdog approach. Wow.

This applies to anything – if you want to change the environment, the economy, or any accepted albeit broken system, you are more capable than 'the Goliaths' if you adopt creativity an unconventional thinking. In the context of business, creativity certainly outweighs other power sources such as money, funding, or amount of mahogany furniture in your boardroom.

I'd be really interested in hearing how this principle applies to other aspects of life and if anyone has experienced their own 'David beating Goliath' experience – the best way to get in touch with me is either through email here or by sending me a tweet.

Marcus

Image Credit: Nksung

What is Your Comfort Zone?

If you follow my tweets, you'll probably have seen that over the past few months I've been working on a project called WhatisMyComfortZone.com, which is essentially a 'comfort zone calculator'.

I started the project for two reasons: 1) to heighten people's awareness of their comfort zone and hopefully inspire them to take a step outside of it, and 2) to help people like myself who are fascinated by the philosophy of 'growing your comfort zone' learn more about the vastly unexplored concept.

Unfortunately, these two goals are rather open-ended, which means it's going to be hard for me to throw in the towel and say 'I'm done!' any time soon, but until I'm no longer getting excited by the insights and thought of encouraging people to do the challenges that scare them, that's not a problem ☺

After several weeks of collecting user's scores and analyzing them in the thousands, I've finally reached a point where I can make some statistically significant assumptions about what our comfort zones are and how they vary across demographics. Here is an infographic summarizing some of the most interesting findings (if you'd rather see raw data and charts, I've posted them here).

The Value of Knowledge

Have you ever wondered what the source of any service or product is? If not, shut your eyes and think about it for just a moment.

At the core of every useful service or product is knowledge, or more specifically 'specialised knowledge'. When a plumber, marketer, or scientist sells their time to a customer or an employer, they're transferring their knowledge into a useful action – installing a bathroom, increasing a business' turnover, developing a new drug.

"There are two kinds of knowledge – general and specialised. General knowledge, no matter how great in quantity it may be, is of little use in the accumulation of riches" – Napoleon Hill

Specialised knowledge can be converted into valuable actions more easily than general knowledge can, but here's what I've come to realise about the value of specialised knowledge.

Specialised knowledge is valuable, but you don't necessarily need to own that knowledge to share (and benefit from) its value.

Sharing The Knowledge of Others

When I created TheMusiciansGuide.co.uk (a hobby 'web-business' of mine) I had some specialised knowledge on music marketing from running an indie record label, which I was able to share with other musicians. The specialised knowledge I was offering had a value that musicians were willing to pay for.

But then I started offering professional music contracts on the website to help musicians get hold of contracts without having to hire an expensive lawyer, yet I had no knowledge of music law.

Now I could have pretended to know how to write the sunset clause and allocation of royalties in a 360-type record deal, but I'm not one to trick customers or create a half-arsed product, so instead I shared the specialised knowledge of a professional entertainment lawyer who did know his stuff.

Rather than extracting value out of the specialised knowledge I already possessed, I shared the value of someone else's specialised knowledge with an audience eager to receive and pay for it, which benefited everyone.

Knowledge, used at its best creates time, health, and opportunity

If you want to create a product that's useful, here's an idea that I go back to time and time again. Write on a piece of paper "What could save X many people Y many pounds/hours?" and list some ideas that do exactly that, and that you'd enjoy creating. When you start getting excited by one of those ideas, decide how you're going to reach X people, and then harvest the knowledge needed to create the idea and offer it for a fraction of £Y.

It sounds simple, and it is. Money and time are the two most commonly exchanged commodities we have to dispose of, so anything that gives us more of either is valuable.

People spend thousands of pounds as well as days of research when buying cars, sofas, mortgages, and clothes. If you can share with them the knowledge to save money or time while doing any of these things, you've created something useful.

With the tools we now have, such as email and search engines, it's easier than ever to find and compile specialised knowledge from people and web pages into a package that is useful and valuable to people.

You no longer need specialised knowledge to benefit from its value. If you can find and share it with people who need it, you're arguably more useful than the people who obtain the knowledge but never use it to make a difference.

Remember, knowledge is not power – it's potential power. You have to do something with it for it to have any use, and there's a world of opportunity for you to harvest the power in other people's knowledge.

If you agree or disagree i'd love to know why, you can leave a comment below, drop me a tweet, or send me an email

Marcus

60,000 Words in Your Head

It's said that on any given day approximately 60,000 words go through our head, but even more interestingly, 95% of those words are the same as the ones that went through your head on the previous day.

My new journal that I bought in Melbourne, for inspirational and creative idea writing

Depending on how you look at it, you can learn a lot from this fact. It suggests that we should think less about our past, it suggests that we should spend more time thinking of new ideas, but what I find particularly interesting is how it links to the idea of why writing things down on a piece of paper increases the likelihood of us achieving what we want.

When you write something on a piece of paper, it sends a message to your brain telling it that whatever you're writing down is more important than the other 59,999 words that go through your mind that day. It subconsciously says 'this is important, so remember it'.

With that in mind, and given that every thing we own, do, and create begins in the form of a thought, it makes a lot of sense to write down everything you want to do, change, remember or achieve. As your mind will prioritise its importance and subconsciously find ways to make it happen, at least more so than if it remained as just 1 in 60,000 insignificant words.

Of course, writing things down isn't the only way to signal a thought's importance – you can also repeat it, or dedicate more time thinking about it, but writing it down has the added benefit of making it tangible. It's not an electrical signal in your brain or a sound wave floating in the air, a piece of paper with your thoughts written on it is an object that exists in the real world.

If you've ever dipped your feet into the realms of personal development, you'll probably be familiar with 'life coaches' and gurus asking you to make 'idea boards', create 'dream books' and record your thoughts in a journal, which are essentially ways of converting your thoughts into real-life objects in an inspiring way. While I personally find these approaches somewhat fluffy on the surface, I respect the psychological explanations behind why they work.

Note: If you are interested in understanding why these things work from a scientific perspective, read up on autosuggestion.

Here's something to think about. When you're learning a new language or a scientific formula, you're often advised to write the equation or translation down in a textbook or on a post-it. This is an age-old trick that has been proved to heighten your memory or understanding of whatever you're learning. This follows the exact same rules as above.

Yesterday was my first day in Melbourne, where I'm living for the next six months, so I decided to take the opportunity of creating new habits to start writing more of my ideas and thoughts down.

Every time I open my journal I'm hit with a list of goals, an array of inspirational quotes, as well as a constant reminder of what I already have achieved, and what needs changing.

As the quality of our days are determined by the quality of our thoughts, I can't imagine how this won't help me in some form to get closer to the things I want to make happen. It reminds me to make every action I make a step towards the things I consider important.

"Repetition of affirmations to your subconscious is the only known way of voluntary development of faith"

On a final note, I picked up one of my all time favourite books last night, Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, and read a quote under the chapter on Faith, which read "Repetition of affirmations to your subconscious is the only known way of voluntary development of faith".

To put this into context, Napoleon dedicated 25 years of his life studying tens of thousands of successful and unsuccessful entrepreneurs to create one of the best-selling books of all time detailing how to achieve riches (not just the financial kind). He identified that a combination of desire and faith (having a clear desire of what you want and believing you can get it) are two of the thirteen fundamental principles.

This quote suggests that the only known way of believing something voluntarily is to repeat it over and over to ourselves, as regardless of what it is, we will eventually begin to believe it. I'd like to think that by writing something on a piece of paper and seeing it over and over acts as a strong affirmation and helps us firmly believe the things that we'd like to solidify our faith in, even if it's 'I will run the marathon'.

Write something down that you want right now. Even if you don't think it'll help, your mind may appreciate the extra signal, and who knows what knock on effect that little signal may have…

Writing a Book

In Brazil, they say that before a man's life is complete, he should do three things; start a family, plant a tree, and write a book. It wasn't until recently that I realized why Brazilian men live up to this mantra – those three things give a man legacy that lasts beyond his lifespan.

Just like planting a tree, writing a book provides legacy

When we think about writing a book, we often only visualize the tip of the iceberg – that is, the ultimate feeling of accomplishment gained from holding a paperback with your name written across the front. But what lies below the surface is far more profound.



In my experience, the greatest things about writing a book are (in no particular order) the opportunities it provides you with to learn new things and connect with new people, the good feeling you get from sharing your ideas and helping people who need the information that's in your head, and finally, the legacy it provides you with.

Think about it. People could be picking up your book in 200 years time. Your book may be passed down through ten generations of your family. That's an incredible feeling – as is receiving messages from readers telling you about their experiences and how you've helped them, it's all part of an amazing journey.

Writing a book is about how it affects your journey and other people's lives, while you're alive AND when you're not.

You can write a book

Writing a book can seem intimidating, so here's how I like to think about it. First of all, you've probably already written several hundred 'book-length' documents in your lifetime already, just imagine them as 'unpublished books', now it's time for you to write a published one. Here's another way of thinking…

If you were to write 500 words a day (one side of A4) you'd have a 40,000-word book in less than three months time.

As some of you may know, I wasn't an aspiring author. One day when I was writing a blog post, my ideas got out of control and the word count crept from 3,000 words, to 5,000 words, to 7,000 words and so on… it was then that I realized that it was naturally turning itself into more than a blog post. After meeting my good friend Rob, we decided to put our heads together and create a book.

The reason I'm sharing this story with you is because I think it represents that anyone can write a book if they want to. I was an average student in English class, and I didn't even start reading books until I was 16. Four years on, and I have written a book.

I occasionally receive messages from aspiring authors asking for advice on the various stages of writing a book. Here are some of my best tips below, but if you have a more specific question, don't hesitate to drop me an email.

My Recommendations on Writing a Book

Have Someone Challenge Your Ideas

One of the best things about writing with a co-author and having a team of editors who understand your book's subject is that it means your ideas get challenged, and subsequently improved.

If you're not co-writing, I recommend asking a friend who understands your book to challenge any ideas you have and offer their opinions. In my experience, this process forces you to get to the point of what you're trying to say.

Set a Completion Deadline that seems Crazy

When Rob and I began writing Get Noticed in July 2011, we set ourselves a target to launch the book by October 2011. Having just four months to write the book was a lot of pressure, but it forced us to waste no time, go through vigorous editing, and prioritise the very best of our findings. Particularly with non-fiction, there's a tendency to get into a never-ending loop of writing, so a firm deadline helps you to include only what's necessary.

On a side note, there's a great chapter in Predictably Irrational about why these kinds of deadlines work, which really helped me. I'd definitely recommend reading this if you're into understanding human behavior.

Use a full-screen writing environment

Unfortunately, I didn't learn about full-screen writing environments until after I wrote Get Noticed, but since hearing about them (thanks to Ali Luke!), I use them for pretty much every bit of writing work I do.

If you're a PC user, you can download Writeroom, or if you use a Mac, you can download DarkRoom. Both give you a full screen-writing environment, so that you have no distractions when writing.

Find your creative writing spot

I work best when sat in a café or restaurant. I don't know why, but it just seems to fuel my creativity and productivity. While this might not work for everybody, getting out and about when writing can be a great inspirational boost, as well as making your journey more interesting to look back on.

My Recommendations on Editing & Publishing

Great editors are a great investment

Editing can be a bitter pill to swallow, as it may seem as if you're paying for someone to point out the flaws in something that at this stage will have become so precious to you. But the way I see it is that no matter how good a writer you are, you will not only become blind to many of your own mistakes, but the way in which you explain things will become obvious to you, but maybe not to others who don't have the surrounding information that lies in your head.

The fresh perspective of a team of editors highlights these issues and helps add clarity and conciseness, which can make a huge difference for the reader.

If you're looking for recommendations on editors, I 've used Ali Luke, Amy Mueller, and Rachel McCombie, all of whom are incredibly talented editors and lovely people to work with, that I'd thoroughly recommend.

Self-publishing vs. traditional publishing

This is a tricky one and I'm not in a great position to answer, as I have only experienced the self-publishing option.

My advice (from an objective perspective) is that if you enjoy the hard work of creating a product and marketing it, self-publishing is great as it puts you in control of everything. I really enjoy marketing and solving challenges, so the concept of having a publisher do all this for me wasn't very attractive. However, if that seems overwhelming it may be worth considering a publisher.

If you decide to self-publish, I recommend Createspace and Lightening Source as Print-on-Demand distributors in the UK and US, and BookBaby for digital eBook distribution. The only other distributor I have experience with is Lulu, who (at time of writing) I would not recommend.

My Recommendations on Book Marketing

When it comes to marketing your book, the most powerful thing you can do is create a book that people are going to find useful, enjoyable, and worthy of recommending. If your readers aren't going to share your book, you're going to have a tough job raising awareness of it. If you're confident that what you've written passes that test, here are a few things that I found useful.

Stand on the shoulders of giants

Watch what other authors are doing and see what works and what doesn't. When I began thinking about marketing Get Noticed, I spent hours looking at what many authors in similar niches did to raise awareness of their books. If you're not sure where to begin, I'd recommend checking out The Domino Project, as well as Gary Vaynerchuk's book websites, and Tim Ferris' blog post on what he learnt about book marketing from The Four Hour Work Week.

Create a strong web presence

These days, the majority of book sales are made online, which means that as an author it can be very beneficial to have a strong online web presence that encourages readers to share their thoughts on your book, as well as having a great website that informs potential readers about your book.

For more book marketing tips, I did do an interview recently on SelfPublishingExperts.com about what I learnt about marketing from launching Get Noticed, which you may be interested in reading.

As always, if you have any questions about writing a book that I haven't answered in this post, or if you just want to say hi – drop me an email ☺

All the best,

Marcus

Image Credit: Asphericlens

Create Your Own Culture

If at any point in the past few years you asked me what my idea of a dream lifestyle would look like, I would have told you that for me it would be something like this…

It would involve living in several different countries each year, working in cafes from a laptop, meeting inspiring people on a regular basis, and building useful things that people appreciate. I love eating at restaurants and trying new food, so I'd like to make that something I do at least 3 or 4 times a week in my ideal lifestyle. No billion pound saving accounts, no mansions, just a simple but interesting lifestyle that keeps me learning and surrounded by great people.

Sitting at lunch today, I realised I'm living my dream lifestyle

To create your perfect lifestyle you must create your own culture

My 'dream lifestyle' is not exactly the norm in Western culture – and if abided by the cultural norms, I probably couldn't have my dream lifestyle. Let me explain.

We're brought up to think that we should work for an employer and earn a big salary. We're taught that living in a mansion and owning a Ferrari is a great luxury. We're taught to be 'realistic' by people who don't understand the psychology behind how 'realistic' works.

We accept these things as truth and forget to question them. The thing is, we all have an idea of what our perfect lifestyle looks like, but we're living in the norms of a culture that doesn't support our perfect lifestyle. To live a dream lifestyle, you must abide by the little things our culture teaches us like being healthy and safe, but forget the big things and make your own set of norms that work for you.

In short, our culture teaches people to want the wrong things, which means that many of us end up walking around doing things we don't understand why we're doing. Let me clear up a few of those things for you.

A high salary will not make you happy

Research has proven that any salary above £40,000 doesn't make you any happier, so why do so many people aspire to have a high paying job?

Money is an enabler and will allow you to live more freely to do the things you want, but you don't need much of it. My advice is to work out how much you need each day for your dream to be reality (it's probably much less than you think) and then find a way to attain that amount each day doing something you enjoy doing.

Owning things is over-rated.

Our culture tells us that we should own things, but when you take out a mortgage on a house or buy a car, it ties you down to that location and limits your freedom to move around and live a flexible lifestyle.

All of my possessions fit into a carry-on luggage suitcase and small backpack (see picture), which means I can pack things up in ten minutes and get on a plane to another country with ease. Most of my possessions are also inexpensive and non-designer, which means I don't have to worry too much if it gets lost, broken, or stolen. Fewer possessions = less stress = more happiness.

Working for the man is over-rated.

This is perhaps the hardest thing our culture teaches us to 'unlearn'. I'm not saying you shouldn't work for an employer – I'm just saying that there are plenty of opportunities to earn an income doing what you enjoying doing that it makes absolutely no sense to do anything 'just for the money'. There are literally thousands of ways to earn an income – if you're stuck or want advice, drop me an email.

The culture I've created for myself is far from what you may consider normal – I have no bills, and few possessions. I don't know about the lives of celebrities or politicians, I don't have a full-time job, I don't even own a degree or a car. The amazing thing is that despite all of this, I have everything I need to make each and every day an amazing one.

You can't change your culture overnight

This post will be useful in different ways to different people. I realise that creating your own culture and believing that you can have your dream lifestyle is not something you can get to grips with overnight – it takes months, if not years to slowly adapt to – and that's a good thing, because it means you get to change one little thing at a time to see whether you like the change or not. One big change would be too uncomfortable.

Regardless of what stage you're at, think about what your utopian dream world looks like. Ask the questions for why it's not already like that and what you need to make it happen, and then start making some little changes. In a few years or less you may be just as surprised as I was this afternoon to realise that it's become your reality.

Destroying My Comfort Zone, Again.

Tomorrow I'm leaving the UK to spend ten months living in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji and Hawaii. Out of the many reasons that are making me ecstatic even thinking about the year ahead, the thing i'm most excited about is destroying my comfort zone, again.

In 2011 my new year's resolution was to take a huge step out of my comfort zone – I succeeded – I jumped out of an aeroplane from 13,000ft, wrote and published a book, spoke at a several major conferences, drove my favourite car around a racetrack, faced my fears and got a tattoo, and moved out to live in a new place. All of those things scared the hell out me.



Every time you step out of your comfort zone you learn more about yourself and about life than you could any other way – it helps you to become familiar with what is currently unfamiliar to you, which is how we make dreams become a reality. One of my favourite Chinese proverbs is 'A man grows most tired when standing still' – doing the things that excite and scare the hell out of you is the best way to stop standing still, for me at least.

Smashing My Comfort Zone Taught me Two Things

The first is that your comfort zone never shrinks, it only expands. By consistently expanding your comfort zone you increase the amount of opportunities available to you. When someone says to me "Marcus can you present to 5,000 people or write a book?" my brain says "that's easy compared to jumping out of a plane!" Whereas a year ago those kinds of ideas would have terrified me.

The second thing i've learnt is that when you're presented with a choice, there tends to be two options – the scary option, and the safe option. Go for the scary option, every time. If you're not sure whether to take a year out to go travelling or whether to study at university, ask yourself which one scares you the most? If going to university feels 'safe' and doesn't scare you, go travelling – you'll learn more.

This year i'm planning to climb Mount Kosciuszko, hike up the Franz-Josef Glacier, swim with sharks, run a half marathon, learn to scuba dive on the Great Barrier Reef, climb the Sydney Harbour Bridge and many other exciting and scary things.

If anyone has any recommendations for things to do in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, or Hawaii, i'd love to have a chat. My email address is marcus(at)themusiciansguide(dot)co(dot)uk, or alternatively you can send me a tweet or leave me a comment below.

What are you doing this year to step out of your comfort zone?

Image Credit: aftab

Improve Your Strengths, Not Your Weaknesses

In the Western world, we're brought up with the mentality of building on our weaknesses rather than our strengths. Am I the only one who feels that that's a bit backwards?

If a kid at school sucks at French, the teacher will make them do more French until they've got the hang of it, regardless of whether that kid wants to learn French or not. When you're forced to work on the things you dislike doing or you're not passionate about, your outcome is at best average and people don't get to see you in your best light.

A few weeks ago I was having a chat with my friend Rob about this and he told me a story about a girl who was troublesome at school – she had terrible grades and was disruptive in class. The school invited her parents in, and eventually the parents met with a psychiatrist to find out what the problem with their kid was.

The psychiatrist spoke with the girl and left her in his office alone for a while. He asked the parents to wait outside with him and watch what she did.

After about fifteen minutes the girl got up and started dancing around the room. The psychiatrist told the parents and the school that there was nothing wrong with this girl at all, she was neither disruptive nor unintelligent, she just wanted to dance. All of those times she was being disruptive, she was upset because she wasn't dancing, and sure enough when her parents sent her to dance school, she excelled and eventually went on to become a successful dancer.

If you try to be great at everything, you'll be great at nothing.

If you waste your time trying to improve your weaknesses, you end up being mediocre at multiple things, but great at nothing. If your focus is narrow and deep, you can invest your time and energy in being exceptional at what you're most passionate about. Which not only means you're able to spend your time doing what you enjoy, but it means you become more valuable and more successful at whatever it is you choose to do.

Sure, it's harder to go from good to great than it is to go from bad to average, but the outcome is far more valuable, exciting, and rewarding.

I believe education should be about helping people to identify their core strengths and passions and then building on those strengths. If that were the case, I would bet my bottom dollar that we would see significantly less people unemployed, dropping out of education or dissatisfied in their careers, because they'd have a passion to pursue.

If by any chance anyone with the authority to make this a reality is reading this, please get in touch, as I'd love to know the boundaries that need to be overcome to start sticking people to their strengths in education.

What I’ve Learnt About Pricing and Value from Selling eProducts

If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from selling information products, it’s that customers can be a pretty irrational bunch when it comes to interpreting value and price.

Image Credit: Santos

Three of the most profound things that i’ve learnt about value over the years are:

1. People are crap at differentiating value from price.

2. The more time or money a customer invests in a product, the more value they’ll get out of it.

3. Value is 100% psychological – it’s a feeling, not a thing.

How Selling £50 Contracts at £0.99 Taught Me That People Can’t Differentiate Value from Price.

Generally speaking, we assume that the more expensive a product is relative to other similar products, the more quality or value we are buying. In most instances this is a safe assumption (as the old adage goes ‘you get what you pay for’), but it also means that sometimes we’re tricked into buying overpriced products because we believe that they are better than the cheaper alternatives, when they’re not.



My first exposure to this was several years ago when I met a company who wanted a new content management system for their website, I recommended a free option explaining how it met their requirements, but they barely took me seriously after hearing the word ‘free’. They ended up wasting thousands on a significantly inferior system.

But it wasn’t until I started offering contracts on my website for one fiftieth of the standard market price that I truly realised how irrational consumers can be.

Here’s a little bit of background: professional music lawyers are not cheap and everyone in the market of selling contracts sells them for £50-£100, putting them out of budget for most curious young musicians who just want to know what a record contract looks like.

My goal was to help as many musicians as possible by providing them with the best information, so I decided to price my contracts at the ludicrously low price of £0.99, in the hope that it would make the information more accessible to musicians who don’t want to fork out a lot of money.

I received very few sales in the first four months, despite a considerable amount of targeted traffic from search engines. I honestly couldn’t figure out what on Earth was going on.

One day I received a phone call from a musician asking “are you sure your contracts are legitimate? Everyone else sells them for way more”. I then realised that by charging so little and thinking I was doing musicians a favour, I was actually causing them concerns and driving them away.

Sometimes being the cheapest is not the best for your customers if it means they’re associating low value with your low price tag.

Higher Price Tags Earn More Emotional Investment

If someone sent you a free eBook about how to grow your business, chances are you wouldn’t be in any rush to read it – you might not even read it at all. Whereas if you had paid £100 for a book on the same topic, you’d likely start reading straight away, or at least make it a priority to try and apply some of the techniques recommended in the book.

This is because we like to return our investments, and so if you spend £100 on a product you will have an urge to get at least £100 of value out of that product, which requires more effort. Whereas, if you received a product for free, you can do nothing and it hasn’t had any negative impact.

I noticed this when I was looking for reviews of my book. I noticed that people who had paid for the book were more inclined to write a review of it, and were also more inclined to finish the book sooner compared to those who received free copies.

From an author’s perspective, I can’t help but feel that the people who paid for the book will probably benefit more so than those who received free copies, and because I believe the information to be so potentially life changing for the right people, I really want readers to emotionally involve themselves with the content and really apply the techniques outlined in the book. Encouraging people to make a higher financial investment in receiving a product is an effective way to earn a higher emotional investment from them as a customer.

Value is 100% Psychological, and 100% Unique.

If you believe that the designer handbag you paid £500 for is good value, then it’s good value. Simple. The concept of value is 100% psychological and we all have varying yardsticks as to what we consider good and bad value.

You’ve probably known someone who’s spent £1000′s on a top-of-the-range mountain bike, DIY tool, or musical instrument and wondered “what on Earth are they thinking?!” Whereas to them, they probably think they’ve got a great deal. This is because how we determine value is based around our personal values and beliefs – people who spend ridiculous amounts on designer handbags value the appearance of being affluent and glamorous, whereas the people who think they’re silly don’t.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to value and pricing, there are a number of things to consider besides the usual accessibility and competitive considerations – what value are you implying to your potential customers? And does your product exceed that implication?

I’d be really interested in hearing anyone else’s experiences on this topic, so if you have anything you’d like to share please leave a comment below!

What I've Learnt About Pricing and Value from Selling eProducts

If there's one thing I've learnt from selling information products, it's that customers can be a pretty irrational bunch when it comes to interpreting value and price.

Image Credit: Santos

Three of the most profound things that i've learnt about value over the years are:

1. People are crap at differentiating value from price.

2. The more time or money a customer invests in a product, the more value they'll get out of it.

3. Value is 100% psychological – it's a feeling, not a thing.

How Selling £50 Contracts at £0.99 Taught Me That People Can't Differentiate Value from Price.

Generally speaking, we assume that the more expensive a product is relative to other similar products, the more quality or value we are buying. In most instances this is a safe assumption (as the old adage goes 'you get what you pay for'), but it also means that sometimes we're tricked into buying overpriced products because we believe that they are better than the cheaper alternatives, when they're not.



My first exposure to this was several years ago when I met a company who wanted a new content management system for their website, I recommended a free option explaining how it met their requirements, but they barely took me seriously after hearing the word 'free'. They ended up wasting thousands on a significantly inferior system.

But it wasn't until I started offering contracts on my website for one fiftieth of the standard market price that I truly realised how irrational consumers can be.

Here's a little bit of background: professional music lawyers are not cheap and everyone in the market of selling contracts sells them for £50-£100, putting them out of budget for most curious young musicians who just want to know what a record contract looks like.

My goal was to help as many musicians as possible by providing them with the best information, so I decided to price my contracts at the ludicrously low price of £0.99, in the hope that it would make the information more accessible to musicians who don't want to fork out a lot of money.

I received very few sales in the first four months, despite a considerable amount of targeted traffic from search engines. I honestly couldn't figure out what on Earth was going on.

One day I received a phone call from a musician asking "are you sure your contracts are legitimate? Everyone else sells them for way more". I then realised that by charging so little and thinking I was doing musicians a favour, I was actually causing them concerns and driving them away.

Sometimes being the cheapest is not the best for your customers if it means they're associating low value with your low price tag.

Higher Price Tags Earn More Emotional Investment

If someone sent you a free eBook about how to grow your business, chances are you wouldn't be in any rush to read it – you might not even read it at all. Whereas if you had paid £100 for a book on the same topic, you'd likely start reading straight away, or at least make it a priority to try and apply some of the techniques recommended in the book.

This is because we like to return our investments, and so if you spend £100 on a product you will have an urge to get at least £100 of value out of that product, which requires more effort. Whereas, if you received a product for free, you can do nothing and it hasn't had any negative impact.

I noticed this when I was looking for reviews of my book. I noticed that people who had paid for the book were more inclined to write a review of it, and were also more inclined to finish the book sooner compared to those who received free copies.

From an author's perspective, I can't help but feel that the people who paid for the book will probably benefit more so than those who received free copies, and because I believe the information to be so potentially life changing for the right people, I really want readers to emotionally involve themselves with the content and really apply the techniques outlined in the book. Encouraging people to make a higher financial investment in receiving a product is an effective way to earn a higher emotional investment from them as a customer.

Value is 100% Psychological, and 100% Unique.

If you believe that the designer handbag you paid £500 for is good value, then it's good value. Simple. The concept of value is 100% psychological and we all have varying yardsticks as to what we consider good and bad value.

You've probably known someone who's spent £1000′s on a top-of-the-range mountain bike, DIY tool, or musical instrument and wondered "what on Earth are they thinking?!" Whereas to them, they probably think they've got a great deal. This is because how we determine value is based around our personal values and beliefs – people who spend ridiculous amounts on designer handbags value the appearance of being affluent and glamorous, whereas the people who think they're silly don't.

Final Thoughts

When it comes to value and pricing, there are a number of things to consider besides the usual accessibility and competitive considerations – what value are you implying to your potential customers? And does your product exceed that implication?

I'd be really interested in hearing anyone else's experiences on this topic, so if you have anything you'd like to share please leave a comment below!