Comments on: My Take on Scarcity and Value

By: Tyler Davis@How to Increase your Height

Tyler Davis@How to Increase your Height — Thu, 06 May 2010 23:59:11 +0000

Yahoo Answers, Ezine Articles, Forums, etc. do well with quantity. In fact in another one of your posts you said that quantity is more important than quality! But there’s a reason why more people watch night time soaps than daytime soaps as the quality is so much better.

And because Ben, Grizz, and Allyn post so infrequently I needed my fix and came to your site

By: Leo

Leo — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 05:31:24 +0000

Hey Ric,

Noted. And personality and “appeal” does have value, ya know? In fact, most of the time when it comes to blogging or selling stuff via you (which would mean you are selling y-o-u), the appeal typically is what is valued the most. Take Frank Kern for example. What he says I have heard before from the likes of Dan Kennedy and other direct marketers. Not much new. But that doesn’t matter. I like the dude.

By: Ric

Ric — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:22:13 +0000

I have to say I find value, even if the information is not scarce, as long as that information is valid. The nightly new for example, 4 stations all report the same things, but one is more popular than the other, Why? At this point their all valid reports, basically the same information, so when you hear the comment “I like channel 2 the best” the value to that person watching is appeal.

Regards

By: Leo

Leo — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:32:10 +0000

@ Mike,

Yeah, so true. When it comes to digital products, scarcity is laughable. After all, what is the limiting resource? And most marketers are in it to make the most money they can.

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 05:58:17 +0000

That was a funny post about Shoemoney. $200 a month is a lot of money for any IM course IMO. I like emailing these people after their courses have “sold out” and see if I can still get a place. More often than not, places magically open up.

By: Tom | Build That List

Tom | Build That List — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:11:46 +0000

That is so true! I think that scarcity can come from quality, and also content. Even the worst content if it there is no other content on a topic is going to be valuable. However the value should always be in our content.

By: Leo

Leo — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:24:42 +0000

Obviously different strategies. But we are talking about blogs here that focus more on the “social” side of things. and not full volume “general” content websites. The value in the case of hubpages is the scarcity of information in relation to the long tails you are chasing and your ability to rank for those keywords.

You would probably understand where I am coming from if you knew why I wrote it….

Blogs about making money online and blogging all pretty much set themselves up for failure because their voice isn’t unique and because what they give sounds like something you have heard before. There is obviously nothing wrong with this. People can strong arm their way to success with enough money or ambition even peddling the same old-same old. But the majority of “bloggers” can raise themselves above the noise out there because they really aren’t saying anything remarkable enough to give someone pause. Does that make it clearer?

In the case of Wisegeek, the focus isn’t social at all. You are just delivering content and basing your website’s model on long tail keywords that will be easy to rank for.

From a social side, building a base of people who follow you and buy things from you is much harder than doing what wisegeek does, what niche marketers do, or what those of us who manipulate hubpages for traffic do. However, if you are going to go that route, you have to understand that “scarcity” is a bigger catch phrase that means more than not having enough of something.

I think that, from a blogging standpoint, you have to make your views and opinions valuable. You can’t do that if everyone around you is saying the same thing and you are basically repeating it. There is no value in that and it doesn’t make you scarce. If what you say or do isn’t “scarce”, you ultimately are limited in value.

By: Matt Savage

Matt Savage — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 20:29:39 +0000

It makes sense, in fact, I’d much rather visit this site where basically every post you make is so much more unique and valuable than any other IM blog on the interwebs. However, it seems to be a little contradictory to the tactic you discussed a couple of posts ago about the wisegeek site or hubpages, where their main strategy seems to simply be volume and quantity as means to authority rather than a focus on quality. I understand that there is obviously many different strategies one can approach IM but out of the volume vs. value approach which would be better for a some blogger/IMer like me?