Knowing When to Raise Your Rates
One of the biggest problems I see in my fellow freelancers is that they are unwilling to bump up their rates when they know they are worth the money. Well, not all of them. Some people will gladly bump their rates up too early and then inundate your inbox when you post a project on craigslist (ahem…). But, for the well-meaning majority, the issue of rates and getting paid what you are actually worth is a HUGE deal.
If you sift through the archives here on the site, you’ll see that I once worked for micropay sites like AssociatedContent and Helium, making between $3-$5 for 1,000 word articles. It was horribly low paying, but at the time I was exhilarated to get paid for anything and to see my name next to a block of text. I even used to sit and track page views to see how many people had read my articles.
That jubilation passes when you realize you do in fact need to make enough to pay your bills if you want to quit your job.
So, I migrated to Elance, quit my job and promptly struggled by for the next 15 months. No matter how fast you type – and I’m a fairly speedy typist – $5 an article makes it very hard to get ahead. So, I slowly started creeping my rates up.
I was terrified it wouldn’t work, that my regular clients would abandon me and I would go broke. A funny thing happened though.
- I didn’t go broke
- Many of my regulars did abandon me, but a lot stayed on and paid the higher rates.
This told me that I had not been charging enough all along. People were gladly willing to pay more than they already were rather than go out and find another cheap writer. Stop and think about that – it’s a really incredible feeling. It means you’re not replaceable and that you’re a valuable commodity.
Pricing the Commodity
Once I realized that I was not working with men and women I needed to be buddies with, things go much easier. We’re talking about marketers, business owners and entrepreneurs who all think in terms of $$$. I make them money so they see me as a valuable asset. They might be nice to me, and me to them, but at the end of the day, it’s all business and if it makes good business sense to pay me twice what my old rate was, they’re going to do it – not because they have no choice, but because my work is worth the extra fee.
So, stop thinking of yourself as a starving artist who needs to take whatever people are willing to pay you. If you are a good writer with years of experience and a solid portfolio of happy clients, you have earned the right to be paid more for your time.
But, here’s fair warning. You WILL lose clients. It’s going to happen. Some people don’t care about quality. They don’t need to. They’re uploading articles to dead end blogs or posting on article directories. They just need quantity and if they can pay someone from Romania $3 an article and get the same results, they’ll do it.
Your task is to STOP competing for that low paying work and start putting yourself  in line for the high paying, rewarding work that real business owners and marketers offer on a daily basis.
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