How much is a marketing product worth anyway? How much can you/should you expect to recoup? Logically it would have to be the cost of the product, then a multiple of your current earnings. Here's an example; let's say I own a marketing course valued at $200.00 it is from a reputable company with a good track record, I have looked through the material and it looks solid, I would recommend on that alone.
If I work through this course how much additional revenue can I expect to make? It has to be a multiple of my current earnings. If I have no subscriber list and make a dollar a day on AdSense it's going to be a multiple of this. If I have 1,500 responsive subscribers on my mailing list and make $120.00 dollars a day selling 2 downloadable products, it's going to be a multiple of this.
Starting your online business from scratch is different from rolling out improvements on an existing business. The scale and effectiveness of your existing business will determine how quickly you recoup, then multiply your investment.
What's the time frame? Working your way through an 800 page manual will take longer than implementing a JavaScript pop-up to collect new subscriber details.
It is worth setting goals around your implementation of a product then checking your results. Let's say you expect to work through and implement your marketing course in six weeks and are looking for a 50% net increase, check back, did you make it, did you over or under-estimate, did the product over or under-perform.
Play it again Sam
Some products or their methodologies can be rolled out more than once, some can't, and it really depends on the nature of the product and your business. Using the marketing course as an example: if the online business is a start-up we might only be able to implement 50% of the material. If there is detailed instruction on how to increase and then utilise your subscriber list and you don't currently have one, then clearly you can't implement it. However, second and third time round, you may be implementing these strategies to greater effect.
In the case of the java pop-up example, it will still be a pop-up, nothing is going to change there, but we can split test it and see what is most effective. Change the headline – what happens? Change the body – what happens, change the font, image, each and every element, to see how it affects the results.
Overlooked resources
I subscribe to several free marketing ezines, some are daily, weekly, fortnightly, and some seem completely random. Much of the material is solid advice, but not all of it is acted upon, either due to time constraints or because I'm in "email mode" not creative thinking or business implementation mode.
I know for a fact there is some excellent free material buried deep down in my yahoo account. If this is you then don't over look these resources. Make a commitment to search all the emails you subscribe to and print them out or collate them in a word document, put them in a ring binder, read through them highlight ideas that stand out.
Something that doesn't relate right now, may relate down the road, it may be a crucial piece of information later on.
The Same or Different?
When it comes to business development products, there are basically two types:
1) The ones that make you the same as everybody else.
2) The ones that differentiate your business and help it mature, grow and reach its full potential.
Let's look at the ones that make you the same. these for the most part are software programs that automatically generate web pages, articles, web sites, blogs – with a view to increasing visitors directly, or indirectly by increasing page rank through back-links to your site.
You will generally buy these products and enter your keyword and hey presto (or maybe after a considerable amount of work) your pages are there, just like the other 399 people who own the product and put in the same keyword, (because they get their keywords from the same place as you).
The vendors will often claim that once they reach x number of members or purchasers they will stop selling the product ("The Doors Will be Closed!") thus the effectiveness of the product "is not diluted".
Even if this is true, which may be the case, 399 other people creating the exact same pages or articles as you are, more competition than you need. On top of this, many of these products suffer from latent redundancy due to the ever-increasing sophistication of search engines.
A recent example of this is changes at Blogger, which have made several blog spawning programs completely redundant.
Search engines are now using human beings to review pages – you may get your page past a Google bot, but it will take a human being approximately 2 seconds to spot autogenerated content – your site will be dropped from the index like a piece of hot lead on fire. These products may work for a time, and may make you some decent money, but if you want to keep looking over your shoulder or stress ever so slightly each time you log into your AdSense account you might want to rethink.
Interesting that the developers of these products even sell them, maybe THEIR AdSense account is too precious, or they have burnt out the true value of software from their own over use, who can say?
The other type of product is usually a "how to" or info material product or customer facing software. These are usually marketing related and may focus on areas such as product development, customer retention, copy writing or generating and increasing sales. Software might include collecting and managing opt-ins for email marketing or programs for creating secure eBooks.
What they have in common is they help you do more of what you do, they are usually strategic in nature, the software products usually automate some routine but necessary task.
Please don't get me wrong, I am not moralizing either way, I'm just looking at it from the point of view of someone that wants a sustainable business that is profitable for the long-term and can be built upon.
It is at the end of the day your call.

About The Author

Noel Warnham writes for several of his own websites and blogs.
This article has been adapted (with permission) from the FREE eBook "Ideas for Websites" at www.sitesforbusiness.com.