Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Racing to the Bottom....
Racing to the bottom.....
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Those of you who get my Fearless Freelancing newsletter read in the latest issue the comments I made about the dangers for freelance writers if their service can be commodified or commoditized. I have posted those comments on my BlogWrite blog site. The short story is that if your writing can be digitized - it can be outsourced. For the past decade this has worked to the freelancer's advantage. But now that the wired world has become more wired in a broadband sense - can anybody do what we do? (For a fascinating read on this topic I recommend to read Thomas Friedman's "The World Is Flat: A Short History of the Twenty-First Century.")
I do nothing but write speeches. And there is no doubt that even in a specialty niche like this - speeches can be commoditized. In fact they already have been. You can buy a pre-packaged 5 minute wedding speech on the Internet for $14.95
You can even find pretty good speech writers who will race to the bottom by offering cut rate services on their web sites.
They are quite mad.
If there is one thing speech clients don't appreciate is off-the-rack cheap.
Serious clients want personalized one-of-a-kind speeches that are unique to them. Price isn't their issue. It's time and substance. They want exclusivity and for that they are willing to pay a lot more money.
So make sure your services are so exclusive that no matter what the technology can do, no one can replicate what you offer. Then the digitizers and bottom feeders represent no threat to you at all.
