My Take on Scarcity and Value

Frankly, the whole subject of scarcity annoys me.  It annoys me because most people think of scarcity only in the most black and white terms. Marketers have pigeonholed it into a way to scare people into purchasing their product or in the very least to make a decision right now, rendering it less effective than it was a couple years ago.

Your idea, market, product, or niche can still be scarce and not be valuable…..

Alternatively, you can be valuable in a market that isn’t scarce but most bloggers and marketers don’t have the willpower to sustain the chasm that separates failure to success…

But the ones that really profit from scarcity is when they combine it with value…..

…and this is what this post is about….

Digital Scarcity is almost laughable and although some marketers will do what they say (this is especially true in the black hat world, where you have to or risk making it uneffective), others don’t.

But this post isn’t really about the out and out marketing of scarcity.  If you want to check out marketing strategies for implementing scarcity, Michael Fortin has a couple good posts about it here and here.

Blogging and Scarcity

Bloggers  have no idea what scarcity means because those that are considered blogging pros preach and teach the exact opposite….abundance.

I understand that most who read this rag aren’t really “bloggers” and those that are aren’t doing it for some pie in the sky notion that they are going to get rich doing it.  This section is more for people who want to brand themselves…..

Usually this is in the form of content. And because there is an abundance of content, quality suffers and suddenly you are saying the same things that 300 other blogs are saying.  In a nutshell, you aren’t scarce.

Why should a blogger care about scarcity?

Great information is scarce…..

Good and mediocre information isn’t…

And of course, we have an abundance of bad information…

If you are a blogger, your goal shouldn’t be volumes of content.  Every blogger out there produces volumes of content.  In most cases, it is volumes of echoed crap content to boot.

If you are a blogger, looking to make waves in your market, the content you deliver should be the best content you can deliver.  If that means posting once a month and taking a week to build a storyboard on what you plan on saying, then so be it.  The point is that, provided that your market will hold what you say as valuable (remarkable content), you will do far more damage than yet another post that mimics the same old-same-old.

In fact weekly blogging will likely get you more citations across the net and more time to do the things that actually matter in life (remember your family?…you know the people you haven’t seen since you started this internet thing?)

Of course, scarcity has many faces…

Sometimes it isn’t about content at all that will make you scarce.  Allyne from BloggerIllustrated has made himself “scarce” because while most bloggers still write tons of content, most of his stuff is video….

And while most who do video blogging (I think that’s “vlogger” in geek speak) are absolutely terrible at it(see below as I stutter through a very uncomfortable 2 minutes….I can say for a fact that vlogging takes some skill), Allyn mixes it up with comedy.

^^Perfect Example as to why some of us need telepromptors…^^

In the case of Allyn, his modus operandi is mixing in comedy with tutorials thus making even the stuff that has been repeated have value, both in entertainment and in information.

The Less Scarce it is, the Less Valuable it Becomes

Just to use an example, Blogging about blogging or even blogging about making money online is not scarce.  There are thousands (probably hundreds of thousands) of blogs out there that blog about blogging.

Because of this, those that are ambitious enough to even try to make money blogging have a much tougher road ahead of them.  They will have to jump through more hoops, perform more tricks, figure out ways to make themselves scarcer than the majority and do it for longer with less attention than a smaller market.

The More Scarce it is, The More Valuable it Becomes

I am not intending to offend anyone when I say this (because it is common sense), but wouldn’t you find it safe to assume that building a blog about how much you love duct tape and the various ways you could make things out of duct tape would be much easier to build a brand and traffic to?

My first niche (which I accidentally fell into) was a social niche that was fairly small.  I didn’t rank for any keywords within the niche.  However, I unwittingly provided something that the community was missing.  I had made myself and my website “scarce” because I wasn’t like everyone else.

Just Because Something is Scarce Doesn’t Automatically Imply Value

The duct tape example above doesn’t get much traffic and may not be valuable.  Then again it may be.  However, your chances of speaking to the community surrounding this market and actually becoming something in this market is much greater than if you were to say, blog about blogging.

By the way, this particular niche is lucrative if you know what to sell them (a black hat friend of mine spends his days stuffing tape forums with his affiliate ID and pulls in a fairly sizable paycheck from this tiny market).

The Scarcer the Community is, the Less the Value is Needed to Dominate a Market

Now, I am not saying that you shouldn’t deliver good content.  What I mean by this is that breaking through to those within the community doesn’t  necessarily need a brute force marketing strategy because the information within the market is so scarce.

Niche marketers do this but they usually don’t focus on community;  their focus is on long tail keywords (which in a sense, defines scarcity) and their motif is to drive traffic via organic search to their offer.

Most bloggers don’t have this luxury, (after all, could you really build a blog about how to remove skin tags and build a community out if?).  Their markets typically have to be larger than a couple keywords to get going.

In a market that is scarce of information, generally it doesn’t take waves and waves of content to become an authority.

Which also means the Larger the Community of the Market, the more “Value” is needed.

Ambiguous, right?  What is value anyway?  Bloggers tend to think of it in terms of “unique content”.  But unique content isn’t really valuable in larger markets most of the time.  The echo chamber in large markets are very large.

In the case of online marketing markets (I am including all things that involve making money here, from WAHM niches to blog about blogging…basically any niche that teaches you how to earn income online), the intentions of your “fans” aren’t clear and usually aren’t as altruistic as you may think.

To prove this point, take a look at some of the comments on these types of sites and you will see all sorts of one-liner comments that don’t add to the conversation and aren’t meant to do anything but either drive traffic to the commentator’s site or pass link juice to their site.

What about Popular Brands/Websites that Offer Little to No Value Then?

There is a but to all of this.  Popular brands or blogs that offer no value have the luxury of either money for their marketing (ie. John Chow) OR they started at a time when the community was small (as in Problogger’s case).

And consequently, once again, their comments and “fans” aren’t necessarily there because they like them or even agree with them (who really wants to see pictures of what you ate last night?…really?)…most are there for reasons other than simply to absorb their content (ie. comment spamming or comment funneling).

The sad irony to this is that most of the “A-listers” who have the most reach also have the least amount of valuable things to say.  They live in the “list” arena where there is a lot of feel good and not enough substance for anyone to really grab hold of and actually apply to their life.  I say most, because there are some exceptions to the rule.

Earl Nightingale once said, When you have no role model to follow, you should always do the exact opposite of what everyone is doing…because the majority is almost always wrong…

A Couple Examples and Then I am Out of Here…..

List Marketing and Scarcity

It is no wonder that so many people view internet marketers as the pariahs of the net.  What is being taught to new and fledgling online marketers is to basically inundate their list with offer after offer.  When everyone is doing it, it loses the small amount of value it had in the first place.

In other words, if you are doing this, you aren’t making yourself scarce. Or to put it another way, there is an abundance of people just like you doing the exact same thing that you are doing….There is no value. You are simply doing what everyone is doing….you are doing what you think you should be doing as a permission marketer.

Scarcity and Blogging

I mentioned earlier that bloggers are taught that in order to “be” a blogger and “build” a fan base (if that is your intention), you need to “blog” often.  Which I have to ask.  Why?

The problem with blogging often is that you are actually diluting your value.  And while a lot of bloggers may argue this point (my “fans” won’t stick around), the fact of the matter is that if what you are saying is the same thing that everyone else is saying (especially true in large markets), what’s the point?

In a large market, this is especially true.  And assuming that what you are saying is actually reaching your audience’s inner core and assuming that you what you are saying makes sense in a new way, value wise, then it doesn’t matter whether you post one post a month or whether you post  one post every other month.  In fact, the community will actually find you more valuable.

Of course, I can only go on my own numbers.  In the course of a year, my RSS reach has stuck at about 60% meaning that 60% of those who subscribe to my feed, read it (correct me if I am wrong in this assumption).  My traffic to my site verifies this.  And I don’t post daily….I sometimes don’t post weekly.

Photo Credits-Mary Aben