Although a drop-dead fabulous sales letter is the key to securing the most sales from your website, we all know that it's harder for prospects to make a buying decision if your product is expensive.

As you know, if you can offer your product at a price that doesn't get your impulse buyers to question their judgment .... that's a good thing.

TIP: Doing so isn't always about offering a LOWER price -- it's about how you PRESENT your price to begin with.

Jumping right in, here are 6 simple pricing secrets for making your high-cost product seem cheaper:

1. Copy the infomercials: offer payments, and ONLY payments.

Split your high price into several payments. For instance, instead of offering your product for a one-time $140, say: "For only two easy monthly payments of $69.95, you can..."

Infomercials do it successfully all the time.

Note: To pull this off with the greatest success, it's best you *don't even MENTION the total cost* of your product on your site.

Infomercials do THAT successfully all the time, too. ;-)

With this option, you can even charge a little more than you would've originally, because your payment plan automatically makes your product's cost a lot easier to digest.

If I were going to do this, I'd *definitely* make sure I had a security feature in place that would allow me to DISABLE a copy of my product that's been refunded (or passed around for free). One such e-book compiler that does this is the one I use, at: http://HarmonyMajor.com/uses/p.cgi/compile

2. Offer a "try before you buy" option.

Let me go ahead and clear this one up quick: I *DO NOT* recommend offering completely free trials!

Especially to people you know are "freebie seekers" anyway.

Okay -- now, you're probably like, "Duh, Harmony!" So let me explain why I mentioned something so obvious.

When I started my first member's site, I stopped publishing one of my ezines to offer something very similar inside the new paid site. I then offered ALL current subscribers a "going out of business" sale of sorts ... giving them a free 30- or 60-day trial to the site.

That bombed. BIG time.

I had about 1,500 free subscribers. About 30 signed up for the trial, but only about FIVE stayed subscribed! :-/ Other marketers have reported similar results from free trials.

For that reason, I suggest CHARGING people for their trial. Even if it's only a dollar. There's something about making people break out their credit cards and actually *be CHARGED something* that eliminates the freebie seekers.

I DID have people register credit cards for the free trial, but not actually pay. So make sure YOU charge!

After my free trial disaster, I tried offering something like 3-day memberships for $5, and that worked great. Just about every member who signed up for that one stayed on for months at least, and no one ever approached me about refunding the difference (subtracting their trial price from their first month).

If you're offering software, you can do something similar by charging a few dollars to try a full-featured version of it for a month.

If you have a tangible product, you can offer a "free" review copy of the product for 30 days, if *they* pay shipping. (You see most T.V. mail order companies do this.)

TIP: If they have to pay shipping AND pay to ship it back if they don't like it, it reduces refunds, and completely eliminates any losses you might otherwise experience by offering a completely free review period.

3. Offer real, live *personal* consulting with your price.

NOTE: This is NOT as smart OR effective if you're a "new kid on the block". If this is your first product in your niche, you'll have people like, "The product looks good, but who the heck is THIS joker?!"

They will SCOFF at your offer to consult with them for free! Especially if you have *no credentials*. (That is, unless they're newer on the block than you.)

Whew! Okay, now that I've gotten THAT little pet peeve out of the way...

This is a great way to *instantly* boost your product's value, allowing you to charge more for it.

I used to sometimes offer a half hour of consulting as a bonus. Since I charge $250/hr for consulting, this adds a nice little chunk of value to any product in just a few seconds.

But if you hate the idea of talking on the phone (like I do) or just don't have the time (like I don't), you could offer consulting by live, online chat.

So long as the both of you have the same chat client (i.e. MSN Messenger), this can be really convenient for your customer. Some clients might even prefer it, because this way, they'll have a complete "transcript" of your session, not having to rely on memory, or scribble notes during a call.

4. Offer *super-unique* benefits, and a return on investment guarantee your prospects can't POSSIBLY ignore.

To create more sales (both impulse and otherwise), depending on what you're selling, you'll want to try to guarantee that your prospects will either recoup their investment or make a profit after using your product or service.

The best example I have for this one is the solo ads I offer now in my ezine.

I offer nice benefits to the advertiser, like guaranteeing that NO competing ads will run for the same company/product they advertise, for a full month following their run date, and not putting the usual massive disclaimer block before their ad copy.

Those benefits are great and all, but the prices are STILL pretty "up there" if you're only considering the number of readers I have (7,000), or if you're comparing prices only, with other ezines on the market.

Anyway, because I KNOW my subscribers are some of the most responsive in this field, I offer a super-bold "break even" AND "clickthru" guarantee.

Basically, if an ad doesn't generate at least 125 clickthrus OR recoup the entire cost of the ad (which one depends on the advertiser's per-sale profit), I *keep* running ads for that client until ONE of those two things happens. Period.

That's almost unheard of in the ezine advertising industry.

The result?

Advertisers not only RESPOND to this, but usually order THE most expensive ad package I offer, because they feel like they're not risking anything buying from me.

And they're really not.

So if you can, if you're going to offer a guarantee, have it be something NO OTHER BUSINESS in your industry offers for a product in your niche, and totally "wow" the customer. The key is to remove ALL risk from their order, and overdeliver.

Note: Obviously this'll only work for you if you're 110% confident that your product WORKS, and will do what it's supposed to do, so long as the customer uses it right. (Another "duh" moment? Okay, okay ... sorry!)

5. Offer a completely "feature stripped" version of your product, designed *specifically* to make your high-cost version seem cheaper.

If you want to offer your new product for $127, go on and offer it, with all the bells and whistles, for that price. BUT also *offer a dumbed-down version of it* with JUST the basics, for less -- for maybe HALF the price of the other.

This is a strategy that's worked throughout the ages.

When prospects see all the good stuff they're missing by not ordering the higher cost version, they'll either:

(a) go ahead and order the more expensive one, or

(b) order the cheaper one, but upgrade to the more expensive version after they're comfortable that you've delivered on the promised quality of the cheaper one.

It's human nature for people to want the best. No one likes to feel that they're missing out on something, or getting the short end of the stick.

If you make the high end version of your product enticing enough that it looks like filet mignon compared to the "ground chuck" of the cheaper version, you'll pull in more sales of the higher cost product effortlessly ... WITHOUT you having to do any additional "selling".

»-«

That's it.

It's all about finding ways to make your product SEEM more affordable that'll boost your sales. In doing so, you'll be left with lots more impulse sales, and a much fatter wallet.