Value of Free

It is funny how things play out. Recently Griz got upset about how people don’t appreciate make money advice that he gives for free. This is an on going trend. Vic, at BloggerUnleashed, got upset and moved to a pay model with limited access. Next, I saw Court come out with more and more “paid lessons”. He still hands out a ton of free information, but now keeps the juicy content behind closed doors.

This reminds me of a post I read by Aaron Wall where he said:

I learned the hard way that if people do not pay for help they intrinsically value your time and advice at $0 (or really close to it). Help the wrong people who are unwilling to do work and you not only waste your own time, but you get their internal frustrations cast on to you…further lowering your sense of self value.

http://www.seobook.com/self-esteem-self-promotion

I think Aaron really nails down the issue: if you do not assign value to your time, others will not value your time. (Aaron is a great blogger and SEO by the way; I read his blog regularly, and if you’re a serious SEO, you should too)

I bring this up this morning because I got a trackback from a site that decided to use my Grizzly Sniper theme on their blog. It wasn’t a hard theme to make, but I did spend time on it. I did this for 3 reasons: 1) I wanted a theme like it, 2) I wanted to help people, and 3) I can sometimes earn a link from it. Removing the footer link is a common practice and it isn’t something I get upset about. If someone removed the link, no biggy, I’m an SEO, I get it. I’d like the link to stay, since I get value out of it, but that is each webmaster’s choice.

Just jumping on the rant train myself, but I’m not going to stop giving free advice. The advice may go under appreciated by some, but it does help people, which is the value in it. And mainly, I wanted to single out that guy, cause I thought he was a jerk for doing that and I hope he reads this.