NOTE: If you’re a brand new customer of mine – I send out a new tutorial every week about running a solopreneur business and copywriting. There will be nothing for sale this week. I just have some good-will content to share.
This week I want to give you five rapid fire hacks for making more money in your business. One hack each day of the week.
If you follow even just one of the tips I give you this week, you’ll make a LOT more money in your business – I guarantee it. These are all tactics I use in my own businesses and teach to entrepreneurs I work with one-on-one.
I’ll be focusing mostly on solopreneurs selling digital products but what I’m sharing applies just the same to freelancers.
So let’s get started with…
Pricing Hack #1: Only Solve Problems Worth Higher Prices
This might seem extremely obvious on the surface…
But put simply, the market values some problems way more than they value others.
I remember first noticing this 10+ years ago when blogs like Smart Passive Income were all the rage. These were blogs where the authors would document their monthly income from an array of digital products they’d created in a wide variety of niches…
And they’d showcase products about pool cleaning or passing niche standardized tests, which would be making $2k/mo.
Next to that they’d showcase their marketing courses, which would be making $50k/mo.
Now I’m not taking a dump on people who sell marketing courses because, obviously, I do too. And if you have a fresh voice and interesting ways of doing things, you should be making marketing courses too – if you can show me how to make more money with less effort, I’ll happily buy your courses because they’ll improve my life.
But the point is that it doesn’t matter how in love you are with your product.
It matters how in love THE MARKET is with your product.
My first ever digital product was an ebook back in 2009 about how to live your regular every day life like James Bond. I was an early-20s guy, I thought the idea was cool (because I wanted to live like James Bond), and I was fresh off reading The Four Hour Work Week so I wrote it up and started selling it…
But ebook sales capped out at about $2000/mo.
People weren’t really interested in paying more than $27 for it, and the demand for it was pretty low. I could market it as hard as I wanted, and it wasn’t going to budge much.
After that I started getting involved with a bunch of different businesses as an online marketing consultant, where I really cut my teeth.
And that’s when I saw that:
- Even a "flop" in the dating market vastly outperformed my James Bond ebook at full marketing capacity.
- Even just a decent offer in the health market would do gangbusters – like "change your life" money.
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And if you can get into the golf niche (which is dominated by wealthy people with tons of free time and a love for buying high-end gadgets), holy moly, DO IT.
The same goes for freelancing. If you write copy, you’re going to make a LOT more by a) writing sales letters (which are what actually determine how much money a product makes), b) for highly profitable/competitive niches (health, beauty, financial, marketing, etc).
There’s simply more demand, more competition, and more money flowing around.
Personally I don’t get involved in any business anymore unless it’s in a competitive niche, where people are charging higher prices already, and there’s clearly tons of demand – because I will make more money for the same amount of time I’d be investing in a less-competitive niche.
Which means I invest my time in "sharpening my axe" only in those niches – and with skills that pay a lot of money.
For example, copywriting.
The more time I invest into improving my copywriting skills, the more money I’m worth – both in my own business, and in others’ businesses.
Hopefully this is clicking for you.
I can’t begin to describe how many entrepreneurs I talk to who can’t let go of a dying/dead/low-value product or service or market – when their time would be worth 10x more by investing their energies into a market that simply paid more (with higher demand) for the same efforts.
This is how wealthy people get wealthy – they invest their time in people, places, and ideas that are proven to have the highest return & demand, and ruthlessly cut out everything else.
I recommend you do the same.
With that out of the way, tomorrow I want to talk about my favorite prices for digital products – the prices I’ve personally found over the last 10 years to maximize profits and lifestyle.
I think you’ll dig that lesson a lot.
— Derek