Looking to start a business or a blog? Then you’ll read a lot of advice or tips about how to first provide “value” for others, especially on the web.
What you may not read much about is how you can be quickly drained of your motivation to keep providing value, and eventually, start to hate people like Clay Collins once did.
I have personally struggled with this problem over the five years of providing free valuable information in my field.
Over time, my energy and goodwill for fellow man were sucked dry. To my alarm, my creativity dried up too. At one point, I decided for the betterment of my mental health, I needed to start ignoring the continual streams of requests for free advice.
You can take a more productive approach than I did. I hope you don’t let your creativity and generosity degenerate and dry up!
Here are 5 ways to keep yourself productive and creative and prevent your good work from risking your ability to keep providing value:
- Have clear rules of engagement with your readers and visitors from the beginning
- Use template responses (gmail now has canned responses) that you can personalize to save time
- Have a list of outside resources you can point out for someone whom you can’t help
- Make information products from questions you get over and over again, put a price tag on them, and don’t apologize for wanting a return on the value you provide!
- It’s OK to just ignore some emails that are, frankly, inane. I know people who create folders labeled “stupid emails” to save themselves from sending back what they REALLY think.
If you have been on the web a good amount of time, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. I’d love to hear how you’ve handled entitlement issues on the web!
Thank you Jane for another great post, and a (much needed) slap upside my head to remember how I give everything away. (My wife reminds me quite often.) I have been burned out by the takers too!
I’ve been an entrepreneur and microbusiness person for the majority of my working career. Over the past 30-years I have helped innumerable people with business and technology issues, and yes, even photography, and have nothing to show for it. So for me a lot of the give-away stuff started before the web. Today, I still have clients who want me to write copy for them for nothing. (“All we need are just a few words–nothing big.”) Or, they’ll have a project they want me to do, but they want to tell me how much I will get paid, as opposed to me providing a quote. I’ve fired clients for this. That’s a little off topic, but similar.
I really like #1 above, “clear rules of engagement”. That is so important. Trouble is, I always advocate this, but often neglect it myself. Thus, my appreciation for the slap upside my head. Thanks again.
Lloyd Lemons
30 Oct 08 at 3:10 pm
The Harvard Business Review has an article in their November issue on the value of a free customer. There’s a new valuation model that the authors are pushing, but one of the things I took away from the article is that this Web 2.0 model — that of Facebook and Twitter — is that many of the blogs and technologies out there do not have any clear valuation for the service that you might be providing. That’s one reason why #4 is important, but I would also add that you should probably have a clear idea of how what you do is translating into “what’s in it for you” — whether it’s money in your pocket or lavish praise from the community or whatever.
If you are looking to simply build your personal brand for some unknown quantity in the future, that’s fine — but keep your eyes open for that quantity that will eventually make itself known.
Paul Ardoin (sus4th)
30 Oct 08 at 4:29 pm
Thank you Jane for this informative video. I agree with you to a certain extent on 5 ways to keep yourself productive and creative. While I do think that giving people something for free has its own benefits that of establishing credibility, and developing future relations. In Internet Marketing this tends to happen a lot, where people start their blogs – and give users information for free – and when they’re hungry for more – launch information products.
However, there are certainly lot of helpful folks out there, who genuinely believe in helping people. But, in the end – it all boils down to the amount of time you’ve spent. And, the questions we’re left to ask ourselves – could we have spent this time better somewhere else?
Therefore, I personally believe that busy entrepreneurs who have the knowledge and skills should share their wisdom with the world for free when they have the time to do it, and if they feel that the beneficiary truly appreciates the time and effort put in helping them out.
Ayush Pant
30 Oct 08 at 6:00 pm
Lloyd, Paul, and Ayush:
Did you three get together and coordinate your comments? Each adds to this article so that these comments combined with my article and vLog makes what I’ve done even better.
I’ll start with Ayush – you’re absolutely right – as an entrepreneur, I enjoyed the success and established my credibility almost entirely through the upfront provision of value. You can say that my “marketing” was done primarily through education.
Because of the level of passion that I have felt, and I believe Lloyd has felt for decades relating to his expertise, we give a lot of ourselves. Don’t get me wrong – I rarely felt coerced to author papers or write articles or provide web resources – I do almost everything I do because I have a desire for it and a passion to match.
But, as Lloyd shared and I personally have experienced, a few bad apples spoil what is predominantly a rewarding experience. I don’t always learn from these lessons, which becomes my own fault. Over time, I did not create safeguards that keep me from feeling like I was taken advantage of, which reduced my enjoyment of doing what I love to do, and ultimately hurt my productivity and creativity.
This brings me to Paul’s point about having an idea of what my value proposition is, and who CAN and WILL buy what I have to offer. Whether you are an entrepreneur or an employee – your time isn’t free. Time is bought and paid for by someone, somewhere, in some way so that we can continue “a living”. Unless you’re guaranteed a trust fund and have no financial considerations, at some point, you will want to know who may be willing to pay for the unique value you offer.
Even those of us who leverage the power of the web to build our personal brand do so because we have an implicit expectation that this method of investment will eventually generate a tangible return on investment for us that we can ultimately use to pay our bills, create a lifestyle we want, invest in our children/future, etc.
Thank you for your comments!
Jane
Jane Chin, Ph.D.
30 Oct 08 at 6:27 pm
Jane,
truly enlightening and to the point
thanks,
Rajiv Lulla
6 Apr 09 at 9:52 am