Returns had been steady since I created www.howtoproducts-xl.com back in December 2004. Steady, but not spectacular, so I decided to conduct a survey.

What I did was to mail those visitors who had taken up my freebie offer but hadn't made a purchase. They were presented with three optional price bands for each of ten products and asked to tick the one that best reflected value for money for each individual creation.

The market spoke up and it was clear that I was in danger of over-pricing.

However, it is wise to exercise caution when playing around with your pricing structure so soon after a launch. Do it overtly and some will accuse you of being a rip-off artist; others will say you don't know your 'a' from your 'e' (which I patently did not).

So I decided to adopt a softly-softly approach and engaged the services of a marketing specialist: the Mad Hatter.

I set him loose in my store and he returned with his alarming verdict;

"Lop 50 percent off the price of all ten products".

Hold up, I thought, but I allowed him to proceed anyway?

The result: Returns graduated from steady to spectacular: sales on the ten products in question tripled and overall returns were up by 300 percent over a 7 day period; just peachy when you are operating on a 100 percent mark up.

That's the beauty of selling your own personally generated intellectual properties. You can react to market forces and adjust pricing without the potentially nasty side-effects you incur when marketing other peoples' produce.

The Mad Hatter's strategy is available for viewing at the website featured in the resource box.

Jim Green is a retiree, entrepreneur, and published author with a string of bestselling hard copy titles to his bow including his latest 'Your Retirement Masterplan' ISBN 1857039874. http://howtoproducts-xl/madhatter.com