The "Value" Thread

You know, I hear all the time from folks (not only internet marketers but bloggers as well) who say that in order to be truly successful, you need to provide "value". The problem with that is that "value" is so ambiguous that it means nothing. I equate the expression to the United States "war on drugs"....

By the way, this is complete common sense and could potentially make me the king of the obvious. However, so many people flippantly throw around this word as a catch-all when trying to teach new marketers about things like list marketing..

So what is value?

The trick with creating value is to meet your readers where they are at at the time. If you go too advanced, then you will lose them. If your information is too "easy", then you may lose them as well.

In other words, your readers are new to your market, value could mean tutorials on the things that would help the person along the way. That could be valuable to them. However, if you have readers that are more experienced and already know about it, it will not only be NOT valuable, for many, it would simply be a waste of time.

If your readers are more advanced, value could mean new twists on old strategies, theories and more advanced things from within the market. That could likely be valuable to them. However, if your readers are beginners, then this information will probably be beyond them and NOT be valuable. Once again, it could be simply a waste of time for them.

In other words, if you are selling to new folks in the MMO market, showing them how to open a clickbank account may be valuable to them....showing them how to create "bots" to automate their bookmarks may be above them and therefore not valuable.

Showing experienced marketing folks the AIDA principle will not be valuable to them...but showing them how to you used a soft sale approach that increased conversions by 10% would be.

So far, I have talked about value in terms of knowledge but value can also be other things. For instance, entertainment has value. If you can manage to express your thoughts and ideas and entertain them at the same time, then sometimes even if the person knows something already, the value can come from the entertainment factor.

Ideas have value has well. Ideas that get the mind churning are really valuable (at least for me).

That's my take on what "value" is....what's yours?