Pricing Yourself Out Of Work
I had a question a while back from a freelance writer who was concerned that he was pricing himself out of work.
If you are a freelance writer, then in most cases you will start with bottom of the barrel work where you are paid pennies per word. If you have English as a native language and a working brain, then you will quickly find your skills exceed the pay you are commanding.
So pricing yourself out of that cheap work is something that will happen to every freelance writer.
What you do when that happens?
Let’s find out.
Firstly… Your Own Projects
This isn’t strictly related to the topic with discussing in the article, but it is the most important. If you want your pay to increase and more importantly your skills to increase, then you need to do your own projects. Depending on what you want to concentrate on, these projects may vary. You might pick a particular niche market to concentrate on a particular skill.
But you should start your own projects and you should start them yesterday.
This is important both as a skills increase tool, but also an income generating tool to cover you if you tell clients all to go away at any point.
Let’s move on.
Don’t Do The Same Work
Here is a big misconception that people have when they talk about increasing their price.
You aren’t going to have the same clients for ever, do the same thing forever, and still increase your prices gradually.
If you are writing SEO articles about the 10 cutest bunnies on Instagram, you might command a penny a word. Maybe with a good track record and regular clients that like you, you might command two pennies a word.
However, you are never going to turn one dollar word if you carry on doing those same SEO articles with the same clients. Essentially, there’s a ceiling to how much the average SEO article is worth, and you will hit it very quickly.
Now when most freelance writers sit and complain about not getting big money for small work, you have to make changes.
I recommend moving into direct response work of some kind, but you can also specialise in a particular niche or with a particular skill, (such as email marketing, high converting sales pages, technical white papers, etc.)
But what about the clients you are leaving behind?
Scaling Out Of Cheap Work
You have a few options. A few people I have known have just quit once they achieve other goals. Other people have gradually reduced their new client intake on the old pricing scheme whilst keeping a legacy option, and a few people have outsourced their menial tasks or lower paid work to other freelancers or employees.
Whatever you choose among those options, I would recommend gradually changing your approach as opposed to going scorched earth on your client list.
In the Internet business sphere there seems to be a meme where if you want to change something in your life you have to burn all your bridges so there’s no going back.
I personally think this is stupid. You might want to charge $10,000 an hour as opposed to the $15 an hour you currently charge, but that doesn’t mean that the dream is going to pay your bills.
How I did this was to put more time into my own projects firstly, secondly to put more time into sourcing newer, higher paid clients, and thirdly to gradually replace the low-paying clients with new clients.
For a while I kept legacy payments for loyal customers, but eventually I have emailed those and said I’m doing different things. If I had have been smarter I would’ve set up a freelance referral system for myself or otherwise done arbitrage, but my experience with hiring freelancers has been not so great to this point and so I haven’t done that yet.
Wrapping Up
Let’s say you work 40 hours a week with low-paying clients. I would recommend putting aside five hours to find newer, high-paying clients. Then when you have some, increase that to 10 hours; five of which are still sourcing new clients, five of which are doing the work for the new clients.
Then, in straightforward fashion, simply replace your 30 hours a week gradually with new high-paying clients.
This is straightforward, and over time you will swap low-paying clients for high-paying ones, and hopefully you will replace client work with other ventures further to that.
In other words, start your own projects as well and gradually scale up with everything that you do.