This weekend I learned several good lessons. While meeting with a potential client, who became a client, they clued me in on a bit of advice about how to present myself. If you have been to this site before, my tagline used to be “Ramblings of the Village Idiot”, but I have since changed it to “Entrepreneur Extraordinaire” thanks to Jan’s advice.
See, the way we present ourselves to the world, gives people certain first impressions. By my having the tagline, even in jest, suggesting that I am the Village Idiot, it can put people off immediately, and diminish in their eyes, the quality of what I say. Even though my posts here are often meant to be taken tounge-in-cheek, that same feeling can be carried over to other areas of my life online. So from this, I’ve decided to label myself, at least here on this site, in a more positive light. This should not only give me a more positive view of myself, but also let others know that I do know what I’m talking about on certain topics.
I learned another important lesson this weekend about the value of your services, and offering fair value. In the last few months, I’ve been attempting to launch a new brand of hosting called Nerfix Hosting. This brand is catered more to the global community, those looking for higher resources for lower prices. Targeting those who are perhaps, a little more web savvy, and don’t require the hand-holding that local clients often need. Well, it has been a rough few months, with only 2 paid hosting customers signing up. This was a bit of a discouragement, but I still kept heart. I decided that I wanted to have a special of sorts, to entice users to sign up, even if at a small loss, to start building a client base for the brand.
I thought about lowering the price of the plan to a couple dollars a month, but then I though that it would be a bad idea. Part of what Jan told me on Friday, I was already figuring out for myself on Thursday. People place a certain value on a certain price level. For example, my normal hosting rate for Nerfix is $7.77/mo. So potential customers have a preconceived notion of what they value as $7.77/mo worth of hosting. If I were to lower the price to $1-2/mo, they would have an even lower notion of the quality of hosting, just due to the price level of the plan.
So I decided to keep the standard price at $7.77/mo, and offer a coupon code for 75% off the regular price. I advertised this in several forums, and did not post it on the site. Now these same potential customers saw that I was offering a hosting plan with the value of $7.77/mo, at the price of $1.94/mo. That was enough of a bargain that 5 people signed up within the last 2-3 days. That is twice as many had signed up in the last 2-3 months!.
So, I guess the point of this post is, people have a preconcieved notion of the value of things. Whether it is the value of a person, or the value of a service/product. You need to meet that preconcieved value, by offering a fair value, whether it is how you present yourself professionally, or how you price your services.
