This is a review of the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook 2008 Edition with details why I returned the handbook to the publisher taking advantage of their 30 Day Money Back Guarantee. Back in November I wrote about my intention in buying the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook. A new version was published and I was waiting just for that too arrive. But when the book hit the (virtual) shelves of the MarketingSherpa Store I was quite shocked about the increase in pricing. The price went up from $297 to $497 for the new edition. I had higher priorities and it took me until early December 2007 before I was able to pull my business credit card out of my wallet to pay a total of $501.60 (Landing Page Handbook + Shipping). I received instant access to the PDF version of the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook and pretty much started reading right away. It took about a week before the “hardcopy” of the handbook arrived. I was glad it was not damaged because a) it was delivered in one of those larger, soft material (not cardboard) priority mail envelopes that you get for free from the post office and b) because the mail carrier was able to squeeze it into a normal post box – not really properly sized to hold an item like this. Better judgment would have asked to place it into the box department and put the key in my normal mail box, but what it gives – I got lucky and received bended a little bit, but not damaged.

At this time I had read the Landing Page Handbook about twice and was ready to read it again. I prefer books and magazines when reading some stuff. It is easier on the eyes and allows to take notes or mark text that I consider important (either on paper or with sticky notes). The landing page handbook of Marketing Sherpa had some good information in it – no doubt. It also had some great information in it as well. BUT – many areas of the book were just a collection of numbers that are nice if you just want to provide statistics – but often enough the conclusions made from those statistics were short or incomplete or missing at all. What good is a collection of statistics without the proper conclusions from it? If I spend $500 on a product I expect a little more. This is not a $29.95 book from Amazon.com. For $500 I do except a little more. The examples of landing pages the book had were partially good, while others more seemed like placeholders to boost the number of pages of the report. A one or two sentence comment is not considered a great analysis in my opinion. If you expect the landing page handbook to be your guide to learn more about landing pages, you will be disappointed. The book has a great approach of introducing you to landing pages overall, some psychological visitor behavior, and touches some of the pieces to make better landing pages, it definitely fails to tie the knots. If you expected to build better landing pages after studying the 2008 Landing Page Handbook you would feel like being sent on a journey just to find out that the map is missing the details on how to find safely back home.

My conclusion: If this book would have been priced at $297.00 like the former version I would have had no problem on keeping it. It would have still been expensive, but considering the value it delivered much less tempting to use the money back guarantee. It would have felt like an expensive item that did not fully live up to the hype, but still came out pretty good. But pricing the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook at a steep $497.00 is just way out of the ballpark in my opinion. A price increase that high is better be backed up by some serious value. Value I personally did not see coming from the 2008 edition of the landing page handbook. The landing page handbook is now back on its way to Rhode Island. I don’t know if this review of the MarketingSherpa Landing Page Handbook is what you expected. I am disappointed myself a little bit. I don’t mind spending money when I receive proper value in return. I do not return items very often. I might not always get what I expected when purchasing an item, but I always carefully weigh what I received and what value I got from a product. I only return items when the price and the delivered value are out of sync.

PS: This review was published after the item was delivered to the Post Office. I just had not had time to write about it earlier. And I used better packaging to return the handbook so that it arrives in a state that it can be resold as new.