There are certain “rules” in Internet Marketing - rules that help you estimate results. For example, I’m sure you’re familar with the 80/20 rule: 80% of your work will be for 20% of your customers.

I’d like to introduce you to what my partners and I refer to the “10 to 20 rule”. For any given product, membership site, PLR content, or anything else in the internet marketing business, approximately 80% of the users of that product or service will do absolutely nothing with what they have purchased.

When you see a PLR membership site that only allows 300 members, you may think to yourself that you’re going to have 299 other people using the same content on their websites. According to the 10-to-20 rule, only 20% (60) of those 300 members will actually do anything with that content. Of those 60, about half (10%) will make a half-hearted attempt at using what they purchased, and the other half (10%) will actually fully utilize their purchase.

So, in our 300 member PLR example, 240 of the members will probably never do anything with that PLR content they have purchased. 30 or so will “play around with it”, and then move on to something else. The remaining 30 (10% of the total membership) will go gangbusters with their purchase, and will likely make good money with it.

I’ve been selling products online since 1999, and have run many membership sites since 2001, and without fail the 10-to-20 rule has applied. For example, in the past month, I’ve received 12 emails from people who bought a $300 piece of software from me almost two years ago, and they are just now getting around to installing it. Those are the 12 that emailed me because they lost their unlock codes… how many more are just now, two years later, getting around to using the tool they purchased?

I recently purchased a package of 20 PLR ebooks for around $400. This package came with not only the product, but also graphics, sales letters, and even Adwords ads. All you had to do was upload the stuff to your website.

It took me 5 days of part-time work to rewrite one of the sales letters (which weren’t very good), customize the eBook, get a new Clickbank account set up, and get the product approved there. At the time, I was amazed to see that no one else had submitted the eBook to Clickbank to sell. Today, one month later, I’m making about a hundred bucks a week on that product, and not a single one of the other 299 people who purchased that package is selling the book through Clickbank.

When you stumble across a membership site, information product, or software tool that is selling limited quantities, your true competition (the people who actually use the product) will end up being somewhere between 10% and 20% of the total sold. That’s the 10-to-20 rule. Be sure to factor the 10-to-20 rule into your buying decision, because if you’re part of the 10% that goes gangbusters with a product, you’ll leave all the slowpokes in the dust.

How can you help ensure that you’re part of the 10%? Here’s what I do: before I type my credit card number into an online form, I open up my electronic calendar, and schedule time to learn AND utilize the product I am purchasing. Simply by scheduling the time before you click the Buy button, you’ll help ensure you’re one of the people who actually uses a product.

Remember, no product can help you acheive success if you don’t use it.