Should You Offer Your Services For Free? What If People Aren’t “Buying” That?
Quite often, I’ll see variations on the question:
“Should I offer my services for free?”
The answer is almost always “no.” It doesn’t matter what your service is… free “customers aren’t the right ones to attract, their testimony isn’t valuable and you’re devaluing yourself for the future. This is in addition to simply wasting your time for no money.
In short, don’t do it.
Now, the other day I saw someone ask the following question (Which I’m paraphrasing):
“I’m trying to build up a portfolio and offering free websites to people but they aren’t interested. When that’s the case, how will I ever get people to pay?”
I’m going to answer that in this article because it’s important and I wish I’d done exactly what I’m going to recommend you do now years ago.
First Step: What Do GOOD Companies Charge In Your Niche?
Stupid old me was once stupid young me. I used to charge based on the fact it’d take me a certain amount of time to do a job and I wanted to earn the same as I’d get working a job.
Ha ha. Big Mistake.
So big in fact that it’s impossible to really emphasise how dumb this is.
Let’s say you build an ecommerce website. It takes you a couple of days to put it up and you figure a web designer gets paid £20 an hour. But because you’re new you charge £10 an hour.
So your ecommerce site costs £150 for the fifteen hours you work.
This is so backward in its logic that it beggars belief. But that’s how I used to think.
Realistically, if you build an ecommerce website and a company draws in a modest £100,000 a year in sales… you deserve a lot more of that than any day rate.
If you charged £1000 an hour, then that company is getting a 7x return on investment within a year.
Here’s what I’d do now instead.
Someone hires you to build an ecommerce site. Find the best people in your niche or area and find out what they charge.
Forget cut-rate deals. Forget the budget options.
If you are going to do this, aim to be the best.
Second Step: Build Your Own Projects
Let’s say you want to be a copywriter. Here’s the best way to become a copywriter: Start your own projects now.
It doesn’t matter if you’re doing more content work. Start a blog. Apply direct principles. Build a niche site. Make sales. Get data and learn from it.
This is not only the best learning experience you can get, but it’s also the best way to build a portfolio. If you do this, then you will get real world experience and data, and you’ll be able to use that to woo prospective clients.
You’ll also rely less on those clients, which is a good thing for the next step.
If you want to concentrate on something specific like physical mail or the real estate industry, the same thing applies. You might not be able to sell billion-dollar real estate as a newbie, but there’s nothing stopping you putting together a “private report” and mailing it out.
Get your own projects and use them for your portfolio.
Third Step: Work Out How To Charge More Money Than You Thought
Every so often, I realise that I’m stupid and that’s why I don’t make more money.
I’m not an expert on everything in the world, but in the niches and markets I know about, sitting down for a couple of hours with me could make business owners a huge amount of money.
Sometimes I’ll see other entrepreneurs products and services and realise I’ve been undercharging by a ridiculous amount and still am.
You don’t want to be in this situation. Trust me.
It’s better to go to a bigger client, get more money and then work out how to make your product or service better than it is to provide a $100,000 service for $10,000. Even if you have to hire in help.
In step one, I told you to find out what the best in your niche charge. In step two I told you to start your own projects. This will help you understand the value you can provide. In this step, I’m telling you to commit to charging as much as you can for the value you provide.
If you are helping people make lots of money, then by extension you should make lots of money too.
A lot of your psychological programming will try and convince you out of this. Don’t let it. It doesn’t matter if you’re twenty-three years old and straight out of University. It doesn’t matter if you’re a single mum of three who is still working at Tesco to support yourself.
If you are providing immense value, your compensation should be as such.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t drive a Mercedes or you grew up poor or “rich people are different” or whatever stupid reasons your brain gives you. Experience. A cute logo. Some endorsement from some stupid industry magazine.
All that matters is the value you provide and your compensation reflects the value you can provide.
Write A Letter, Email Or Call Using Direct Marketing Principles
Let’s say you provide SEO services to local businesses. You can find keywords, analyse and rejig a company website and have them showing up in a ton of searches that they’d never have appeared for otherwise. As a result, they get more clicks and more sales.
You’ve never had a client, but you’ve done this in multiple different niches.
Now, for those of you who are starting out in online business: This is an easily achievable goal. SEO takes time but you can start a handful of websites now and have full case studies within six months.
So let’s say in six months’ time you’ve produced five websites that went from 0 to 1000 views a month based on search traffic alone. Maybe one of your websites was pulling in 40 visits a month in month four and when you kicked up your SEO efforts, you suddenly went to 400 in a month and a half.
That’s a 10x increase.
Look at some of the companies that you think you could help. There are plenty of companies with poor websites. There are also great websites that get no search traffic. To expand from SEO:
- Some companies still don’t have functional websites
- Newsletters and other marketing stuff don’t exist in a lot of markets
- Some companies struggle with understanding the internet in general
- You don’t have to do anything related to the internet
When people say “There are no unfilled niches” they are talking rubbish. Ignore anything those people have to say.
Back to the SEO example, you don’t have to create a sophisticated pitch.
Just write to the person and say,
“Hey… Do You Think That You’d Benefit From TEN TIMES More Visitors To Your Website?”
The answer is obviously, “Yes… I want to learn more about this” and that’s all a headline really needs to do.
You can write a message about (not revealing) your method and how you decided to concentrate on these few little-known systems to generate ten times more traffic in month one.
Here’s the bit that people will find hard.
You write that you cost a lot of money because you know how valuable that service is, and you’re not going to pretend that you’re giving someone a sweet deal because that cheapens you and the companies you’re working with.
You’re willing to be flexible but this isn’t just some cheap service run by a guy who doesn’t know what he’s doing.
(Hopefully that’s the case. Please don’t do this and be terrible.)
Explain why you cost a lot and the value it provides. If you’ve done the previous steps and internalised why you’re valuable to people, this won’t be a problem.
Forget sneaky sales tricks and extreme copywriting stuff. While it’s useful, you don’t to be an expert. Just come out and say “I’m providing a high value service and if you want it, then great.”
In a lot of cases, this will work. It will be easier than you think. The hard thing is having courage and conviction.
Final Thoughts
So there’s your four-step guide to starting a high quality service business and launching it without doing anything stupid that’ll tie you into being seen as cheap. Let’s reiterate:
- Find out what the top expensive companies charge
- Build projects, collect data and get results that are as good as the above companies for yourself
- Realise the value of what you’re providing and commit to charge top-dollar in line with that value
- Approach business owners with a matter of fact “This is what I do, are you in?” type message
Most freelancers and naïve business owners, myself included, are or have been in a gilded cage of their own making. If you avoid this and seek high value opportunities with high value clients, then you can be more successful than you can even conceive of.
Just to restate one more time:
You must charge what you are worth. What you are worth is determined by the value you provide. You must charge a reasonable percentage of your value to the people you work with. You are entitled to that.
Everything else is irrelevant.