How do you ensure that the information products you sell give fair value to your customers?

One way is to follow Internet marketing guru Fred Gleeck’s “ten times” rule.

Fred says that the information products you sell should be worth at least 10 times the price you charge for them.

Alex Mandossian and I discussed this in an ETR tele-seminar, looking for a way to determine whether your product and pricing meet Gleeck’s criterion.

The solution we came up with is something I call the “loose-leaf test”.

Here’s how it works…

Traditional non-fiction paperback books (around 200 pages) typically sell for around $10 to $20 or so.

To determine whether your book is worth ten times that amount—Gleeck’s “ten times” rule—imagine printing out the book manuscript on 8½ by 11-inch sheets of paper.

Now, three-hole-punch those pages and put them in a three-ring binder and maybe even add tabbed dividers to separate the sections or chapters.

Information products in three-ring binders are typically dense in content and consequently command much higher prices than bookstore books.

It’s not unusual for these “loose-leaf services” to cost $100 to $200 or more per copy.

(One loose-leaf service for executives on how to write and give speeches, American Speaker, sold for $297.)

Does your $20 paperback book contain enough valuable, in-depth content that you could reprint the thing in a three-ring loose-leaf binder—and sell it for $200—to customers who would feel they got fair value for their investment and not ask for a refund?

If it does, then you can rest assured that the content you deliver in your book is indeed worth at least ten times more than the $20 you charged on it.

However, if you think customers who paid $200 for a loose-leaf version of your book (remember: same content, just different packaging) would feel gypped and ask for their money back, then your book doesn’t pass Gleeck’s “ten times” test.

I increasingly see today non-fiction business books that are thin and light. They present just one or two new ideas, often in a short book of 150 pages or less.

If a reader buys such a book in a bookstore, they probably won’t complain: expectations for trade books are modest. If it’s a good read, they’ll be satisfied enough.

But your customers perceive information products published and sold online as containing more specific and highly specialized content than a “bookstore book”.

So if you are an Internet information marketer, you have to deliver far more value to your customers for their money than a bookstore book.

Gleeck’s “ten times” rule—and the Bly/Mandossian “loose leaf test”—help you ensure that you do just that.

I have discovered that, if the customer thinks your information product was worth the $20 you charged but no more than that, they may be dissatisfied and want a refund.

One customer, JB, recently asked for a refund on one of my e-books. He wrote: “Your e-book was certainly worth the $19 you charged me, but no more than that. So please send my money back.”

At first, I thought: how odd! JB says the product is worth what he paid for it. So his desire for a refund made no sense to me.

But in Internet information marketing, we make big promises in our copy to grab the reader’s attention—and make a sale.

(In a bookstore, by comparison, the only “selling” is usually done by the book’s cover and its jacket copy.)

JB apparently felt that the book did not live up to the copy on my landing page, and was disappointed on that basis.

The solution, of course, is either to charge less (not very desirable), write weak copy (also not a good idea), or,
preferably, to make the product stronger.

Add content until the product meets the Gleeck/Bly/Mandossian test and delivers content not just worth what you charged for it but worth ten times what you charged for it.

When you sell an item worth $200 for $20, customer satisfaction will soar, and refunds will be minimal to non-existent.

I can’t remember who said it or where, but a famous marketer once stated: “It is our goal not to give the customer her money’s worth, but to give her more than her money’s worth!”

Or more specifically, at least ten times her money’s worth—or even more.

Bob Bly is the author of “World’s Best Copywriting Secrets” and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him “America’s top copywriter”.