HOW TO TURN A $15 BOOK INTO A $1500
PURCHASE

One of the most interesting stories I’ve heard recently is how you can turn a book into a $1,500 single purchase. I scratch my head and I honestly have not figured out the way I’m going to do this yet, but I’ll tell you what I’m going to figure it out. Let me just tell you the principle of it and you can adjust the numbers accordingly.

I think I’ll just tell the story. Joe probably would not mind, and you may think he’s a genius because of it. You ______. There’s a good friend of mine named Joe Vitale who is most famous for writing a biography of P.T. Barnum and basically the marketing secrets of P.T. Barnum. He’s published in Nightingale ____ Catalogue and he’s just a really amazing guy. I think his website is mrfire.com. Great marketing guy, and what he did once is he said, “You know, I really want one of those little BMW Z3’s,” (little bitty convertible BMW’s) and he goes, “I’m not going to go finance it, I’m going to earn it. I’m going to earn it in the next 60 days. He looked into it and it was $30,000 or $60,000
(I actually have never purchased one) but it was, you know, $30,000 or $60,000 and he said, “How can I do that? I don’t have a product that costs $2,000.” You know, 2,000 times 10 customers is $20,000, so he’s thinking 30 customers times 2,000 that’s $60,000, it’s all done. So, at $2,000 per piece and 30 customers, that’s $60,000. Well that pretty much buys his car if he pays cash. So the question is, what can you sell for #2,000 that you can find 30 customers to buy, because it’s a lot easier to find 30 customers than it is to find 300 customers, or 3,000 customers which is what you’d have to get if you were
selling a $20 book. 3,000 customers vs. 30 customers. Well, really he sold the same thing that he was selling before and in this case Joe had been selling a how to market yourself on the internet course and specifically how to write great copy(?), how to write great sales letters and so he thought, “Well, if I sold “x” amount and my mailing list is...” and I’m making these numbers up, I don’t know his mailing list, let’s say it’s 5,000 people,
there has got to be 30 of them that (a) could afford it, and (b) would see a perceived value of $2,000 if I could come up with something that would be worth $1,500 or $2,000. Well here’s what he did. He said, “Okay. I’ve got this great book,” and I think he was retailing this book at $60, and it was essentially a book on how to write sales copy, and he took that book, which was six chapters long, and he divided it into six different sections or learning modules and what he did is he said, “I’m going to do an e-mail course, and I’m going to charge $1,500 for it, and with that e-mail course there are lessons at the end of each chapter and I’m going to personally respond to your e-mails and inquiries and personally help you come up with a sales letter. So at the end of this course you will have a complete, professionally written sales letter that you will have written, but I will have
coached you.” The other model would be actually doing some kind of telecourse, where you take the same sort of book and divide it into six chapters and then you do an hour telecourse and perhaps doing some consulting on top of that. Again, Joe was smarter than most people. He didn’t actually do a telecourse, he didn’t actually talk to them by phone,
he actually did it by e-mail, and some of those people actually e-mailed him every week and, surprisingly, some of them didn’t do their homework and didn’t e-mail him at all, but none of the ones who took the course asked for a refund so he ended up marketing that to his list, there were people that found enough value in getting some extra personal attention that actually wanted the course and they weren’t willing to read the course by itself or even, you know, read it and implement it. They wanted some help, they wanted someone to do it for them, and the fact is I have friends that charge $3,000 for a good sales letter, so $1,500 for someone who holds your hand is a great value. So, whatever you have you can find some way to pump up the value into the $600 or $700 range with some personal attention, then you can do that. I mean I’m to the point now that I charge $300 per hour for business consulting or even light handwriting analyses. So it’s legitimately worth five hours of my time. That’s $1,500. So if I put a course together that is five hours, you know, that’s $1,500. Now I can charge $100, $200 for it, but if for some reason I actually do offer someone five hours of my time, whether it’s consulting or a teleclass, well it’s easy to justify that cost.

So that’s what you do. That’s how you turn a $15 book into a $1,500 product is you take the same information but you repackage it in a more personalized, customized, accessible
and you will find that there are people that will pay the higher price for more personalized, custom service.