Ed Gandia explains why freelance writers undercharge and how pricing is mostly arbitrary. He walks through raising rates with new clients and shows that what you charge often has little to do with your actual value.
Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia.
Hey there.
Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who.
Want to earn more and less time.
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Just like you across 101 countries, this episode is much shorter than usual. Rather than my typical 45 minute format. Today I'm sharing a quick tip with you. This is part of the audio insights I publish for my private coaching clients every weekday and I thought you'd find it helpful.
So here we go. Hope you enjoy it. Kim asked an excellent follow up question about the advice I gave in a recent Daily Insight.
And in that insight I was talking.
About how most writers undercharge for their services and they do so partly out of guilt and issues with devaluing what they do. And that's a whole separate issue that we should all talk about soon, by the way. And they also do it because many writers are looking at the wrong indicators to determine whether or not they are pricing correctly. So, for example, they give way too much weight to every no they get from a prospective client, and especially they give way too much weight to the last no they got. So they pull back thinking that this last no represents the entire market. And Kim's follow up question was really good. She said, well, how do you know if you're pricing yourself or when you're pricing yourself beyond what the overall market can bear? And my response was basically this. Well, first, let's talk practical terms. Start with a project you're very comfortable with and with your next project quote, give the prospect a price that's about 10 to 20% higher than you have been charging. Okay. And again, we're talking about a new prospect. It's so much easier to raise your fees with new prospects than it is with existing clients. And bottom line is when you do this, if you start getting more yeses and no's, and it's not scientific, but that just tells you that you have room, that you have wiggle room in your pricing room to go up. I also explained that there's really no such thing as what the overall market can bear. The range is very wide and frankly, much of it is arbitrary, at least to. It really is, to a great degree arbitrary. And you can generally keep going up with the right clients, the right positioning and the right set of offerings. So I'll give you an example, there are firms that charge $30,000 or even more to put together a white paper for you. And sure, that's not just for the writing. That always includes much more than that. It might include extensive research, custom research that they do for you. It can include other complimentary services. So bottom line, you know, when they're charging that much, it's sold as a total comprehensive solution. Now, I'm not saying that that's what you need to do. You may not want to offer all those other things or position yourself that way. Maybe that's, you know, that's not the type of business you want to grow or create. But the point is still valid. There's really not a hard ceiling on this stuff. If you're willing to change several factors of your offering. This is more challenging to do when your services are very much run of the mill. So in other words, when you're talking about a very commonplace project, which is why blog posts are so challenging from a pricing perspective because they've been commoditized to a large degree. For many clients, it's just difficult to distinguish how your hire fee will make a difference when they have access to other writers who can do it for much, much less. But when we're talking about higher value custom work projects that are either higher profile, more strategic, and or the client understands that there's a lot riding on getting it right, it just becomes much more difficult for them to price shop. They're going to have a very limited understanding of what this is worth. They may not have any experiences from the past as to what they've paid for this stuff. Many times it's the first time they do, you know, this particular project or maybe it's been a long, long time. In fact, I'd say that your ability to keep pushing up your fees little by little is based on three core factors. It might be some more, but these are the everything I thought of kind of falls into one of three buckets. The first one is what kind of solution you're willing to create again. So how complex and comprehensive an offering are you willing to put together? You can always go up if you're willing to add more items and create more of a comprehensive solution. Again, might not be for you, but that always gives you more room. Number two, how profitable you want the project to be for you, because you might feel as if you're entering a very high fee range and you're worried about that in, you know, you don't know, man, should I keep going up? But then if you're honest with yourself and you look at the sheer effort involved in doing this work and the toll it takes to do it right, you realize that you have to push up your fee, otherwise it's just not worth it. And that could be a great motivator to keep driving that fee up. And finally, your confidence that they're going to get value, meaning the prospect or client based on previous similar projects you've done. So if you've done a few of these for two or three clients and they were all thrilled with the outcome, that can definitely help you feel more confident to continue raising your fee gradually. So that's the third driver being able to push up your fee. And this last point is key because at the end of the day, your ability to get the fees you asked for has a lot more to do with confidence than with what the market can bear. Confidence will always be a bottleneck, limiting your growth. It's not a bad thing, it's just a thing thing. So bottom line, don't worry too much about what the market can bear. Again, the range is very wide. Frankly, much of it is arbitrary, and you can generally keep going up with.
The right clients, the right positioning, and the right set of offerings. Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book, Earn More in Less Time the Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to Prosper as a Freelance Writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com or you will also find the details shown us to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.
