Today I had to take my wife’s SUV to Goodyear for an evaluation of her car battery. Turned out she needed a new one, and when the guy told me $190, I was in shock. He said that Hyundai’s used a particular kind of battery that was powerful, but cost more. Nothing I could do but go ahead and pay it.

At the same time, I happened to look up on the wall and saw that service per hour is now $94 per hour, and that shocked me also. I think the last time I had service anywhere other than my dealership, it was around $60 an hour, and at the time I thought that was kind of high.

Today, however, I started thinking about this concept of value just a little bit more. I wondered why I thought $94 an hour to pay for people to fix my car, which I know nothing about, is too high. After all, for my main business service in health care, I charge at a minimum $150 an hour to do what I do. Some hospitals pay it willingly; others balk a bit at the price until they realize just how much money I’m going to make for them. When you balance $15,000 against the opportunity to make an extra $1 million a year in revenue, it has to eventually seem like a pretty good deal.

Yet, it doesn’t always pay well. I’ve had some big years, but this year, with worries about a potential health care plan, as well as reductions to Medicare and Medicaid, I haven’t worked in that industry all that much. The people who would hire me haven’t quite figured out how to value what I do against what their needs are. When you don’t have a lot of money, and you’re not sure of what someone else tells you are guaranteed results, it’s hard for you to determine just what value really is.

I’ve suffered at times with trying to figure out how to price items I’ve created, along with some of the services I provide. Last week, for instance, I sold my very first Mitchell Manager Training Program online for $39.99. That bad boy is around 150 pages long, and I’m selling it for less than $40. Last year when I was talking with Lynn Terry about my ebook above, Using Your Website As A Marketing Tool, which I sell for $20 based on her recommendation of how many pages are in it.

In a way, this question of value is what I was talking about in my last post about writers lying when talking about secrets. They’re not offering anything new, just saying the same exact thing someone else has said before most of the time. There’s no real value in that; it’s just a waste of our time.

There’s also this thing about how we value ourselves, and how we value others. Value isn’t always about money after all. On my business blog in June, I wrote about a lesson my dad gave me on a personal value issue, and how I was glad to have learned such a lesson even though I was over 40 years old. I’ve also written there on how some people have either positive or negative values, and get to decide which direction they want to go.

So, how do you value yourself? How do you value your time? How do you value the worth of others and what they have to offer to you? How do you value your own products, or services, or anything else you have to offer or sell or even write on your blogs? It’s something to think about as you’re deciding how you want to write your blog, how you want to market your products, and whether the products other people market just might be something you may feel you’ll get some kind of value from.

And it’s something I continually think about as I work on this thing called affiliate or internet marketing. I don’t have that particular answer myself.