Let’s face it, personal development is a niche in the lucrative information marketing sector. There’s great value in this niche, but there are also a lot of unjustified prices charged with false claims.
Let’s break down the products in this niche and analyze them from the customer’s perspective.
You’ll find a lot of value for free in blogs, free e-books, podcasts, and videos. Then, there are audiobooks from audible and e-books from Kindle. These are pretty affordable. On the top layer of the market, there are premium priced information products.
When it comes to personal development, I can hardly imagine a premium product that provides more value than the content freely available on the Internet or for a small price in an audible audiobook or a Kindle e-book.
Having said that, once in a while, I buy one of these premium products. My main incentive to do so is to reward the producer for the free content they already provided us. Paying a premium price for a product also creates a higher engagement from my side.
When you pay a premium price, you get more involved with the content. You tend to consume the content thoroughly and do the exercises. When you come across a free or cheap program, you might tend to toss it aside after working on it for a few hours.
There are great programs for very low prices on audible. If you have the discipline to study them and do the exercises, you’ll get great value out of them.
At the end of the day, it comes down to how hard you study those programs and how often you apply them in your life.
Good Bye to Shy by Leil Lowndes is a standard paperback book. But if you truly want to overcome your shyness and commit to complete all the exercises in that book, it will take you a couple of years to do so. Yet, your life will change if you do that.
The Magic of Self-Direction by Brian Tracy is a standard priced audio program available from audible. You can complete it in an hour or so, and it will give you a direction in your life. You have to ignore the references to outdated technology though, but honestly, those references don’t have any relevance to the core of this program anyway.
Another one of my favorites is The Psychology of Higher Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden, which is also available from audible for a standard price. Yet, this program requires a lot of work on your side.
The chances are slim that you’ll find a piece of information in a premium price personal development product that you can’t already find freely or for a standard price. And the information you find or the price you pay for it doesn’t matter either.
What matters is what you do with that information. Do you learn that information? Do you add it to your functional knowledge? Do you apply it in your life? Do you do the exercises? Do you use the information to change who you are? Those are the questions that matter.
If you want to create higher engagement or reward the producer for their contribution by paying premium prices, go ahead and do that, but don’t forget that paying a premium price to an information product by itself won’t change your life.
Burak BilginSoftware developer with a Ph.D. and 15 years of experience. I write daily on personal development and life lessons. Sign up to my email newsletter to receive a weekly overview of my latest content on personal development and life lessons.