Because You’re Worth It
For those of you who are reading this on the day of publishing, a Happy Easter to you all.
Easter is a festival about the importance of sacrifice.
Sadly, most people sacrifice their earning potential by not knowing what they’re worth.
If you’re working online, in marketing, sales or in product creation, then there’s a good chance you’re undercharging or otherwise not knowing how valuable your skills and knowledge could be.
If you read this blog, you know a ton of useful stuff about making money online – and not the stupid “follow your passion” clichés either.
Should you implement some of this knowledge, you’ll have some pretty useful skills too.
Even if you’re not lucky enough to read this blog on a regular basis, you’ll want to know your worth should you need to make money online.
If you don’t, then you’re falling into a death trap. I should know, this is what I’ve realised over the past few months.
- “Hey you’re a copywriter, you must earn loads of money!”
- “Hey thanks for your work Jamie… you know we made [ludicrous figure] from that campaign!”
- “I can’t believe you only charge this month. We pay more than that for mentally-challenged monkeys to type for us!”
If you want to avoid hearing similar statements and feeling like a moron (and trust me, that’s what it feels like) then you need to test your worth, know your worth and demonstrate it. You owe it to yourself.
It’s Never Been Easier
With online money making and the like, testing has never been easier. You can get a reasonable understanding of what’s popular with free tools, find potential customers and market to them with a tiny budget and even test what it is they want and how they want it.
Demonstrating your skills is easy in the field too.
That’s important for two reasons;
- There’s no reason for you to be underpaid or not paid at all
- You don’t have to believe people without a track record
Testing
Let’s say you want to be a medical copywriter. You like writing, you like money and you like describing bodily functions and the drugs that make them work better.
But you don’t know what to write, how to find clients and how to pitch to those clients.
Within a few hours, you could have your first client though. You don’t need to spend a lot to achieve this.
Get a free trial of Market Samurai and look up the biggest problems that people face in terms of medicine and health issues.
Go to Clickbank and find products that address some of the problems you find. Find out who the company is, sign up for their free mailing list and see what’s going on in general.
Browse Google until you find some competitors that are doing a worse job than the people you’ve found above.
Send out a dozen emails and see which email gets the most opens/replies.
Congratulations, that’s your first split-test.
Know Your Worth
When you approach people, you need to know your worth. This is tough at the beginning, but it gets easier. (As long as you’re not dumb like me and undercharge for years.)
Firstly, look up what other people are charging. If you want to be really sneaky, find other people offering your service in your niche and ask them for a quote.
Pitch your figure around that level – don’t think you’re being smart by undercharging. You’re just underselling yourself.
If people in your niche are charging $10,000 for a sales letter, then you should charge in that ballpark too.
If you don’t know what you’re worth, it’s time to get some statistics.
See if you can find someone who wants a free sales letter in exchange for you being able to see the statistics. Better yet, create your own product (ebook, Alibaba cheap thing or whatever) and then you can split test to infinity.
If you’re into affiliate marketing, then create your own site and write your own sales letters.
Then drive traffic to those sales letters.
You don’t need too much traffic here – if you can get 100 visitors to each sales letter, then that’s a great start (because you can talk in percentages.)
You can do this with SEO and natural traffic, but it’ll take a lot longer to get results.
Anyway, it’s outside the scope of this article to talk about PPC and driving traffic.
The point here is that you can prove that you can sell stuff. (If you’re not a copywriter here, extrapolate for your skill. You need to prove what you’re worth.)
If you can get conversion rates of 5% then you can command immense value to the right people.
Prove Your Track Record, Don’t Trust Armchair Philosophers
It’s a lot easier to sell your service if you can prove it works.
If you’re the guy in the example above and you can get a sales letter to convert at 5% on a regular basis, then you have a particular value that’s inarguable.
If you approach a company with a mailing list of 10,000 people and say, “My sales letters convert at 5%” then they’ll be able to calculate how much you’re worth and so should you.
If they sell a $100 product and can send out your sales letter to those 10,000 people, then your sales letter can conceivably generate $50,000 for them.
You might think, “I want lots of that money” or “I could charge royalties or something” but those are finer details. The point here is that you shouldn’t be charging $50 when you’re making someone $50,000.
Second point: This is all easy to demonstrate and it’s easy to calculate the figures. Moreover, you can mostly tell if someone is talking absolute rubbish because there are logical processes behind all of this.
What blows my mind is how there are so many people who talk absolute rubbish.
We’ve ranted about this on the blog many times, so I won’t repeat myself, but there are a lot of people who talk nonsense online.
You can easily run the figures and if they’re talking rubbish, ignore them and listen to people who know what they’re talking about.
There are people on marketing forums who think “copywriting is a scam” and “you can’t make money online.” Don’t waste your time arguing with these people, even in your head. Run the numbers.
This will be especially true when someone tells you they can get a copywriter to do your job for $0.0001 a word or whatever.
Final Thoughts
It’s easier than ever to work out what you’re worth. Don’t fall in to the trap of undercharging people, worrying about whether you’re overcharging and certainly don’t pay attention to cheapskates who want to undercut you financially and spiritually.
Instead, test things out for yourself and see what happens. You might think you’re worth a lot more than you thought.
P.S. I’ve spent quite a few of these P.S. messages talking about how one day I’m going to introduce password protection for some of the articles I write on this site.
Naturally, the good ones are going to be password protected and more so I’m password protecting ones which reveal more than I’m happy with about how I conduct my day-to-day business.
In other words, I’m not giving away every secret.
Anyway, like I said… I’ve been threatening this for some time.
Well now it’s happening.
I put my system for getting more clients with less work as a password protected post.
I’ll write more about this in a future post, but the condensed version is this: regular comments, me knowing who you are and being a blog buddy are the keys to the password protected posts.
If you’re one of the above, then shoot me an email and I’ll give you a password. At some point, I’ll get around to fixing The Island too.