#332: Yes, You Should Still Raise Your Fees (Even in This Economy)

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 doing work they love for better clients. With over 1 million downloads from listeners 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. When we're in the middle of a challenging economy, most of us operate from a place of fear. And fear causes us to either keep our fees the same or to lower them. But I have a different recommendation for you today. I'm going to challenge you to raise your fees starting right now. Now, before you start thinking I'm crazy and out of touch, hear me out, because there are many, many ways to do this wrong and only a few ways to do it right. The way most writers attempt to raise their fees is they go to existing clients and they tell them that their fees are about to go up across the board starting next month or the month after or whenever. And yes, if you do it that way in a challenging economy, you probably won't get very far. Now, I'm not suggesting you avoid this approach, but I am suggesting that this method has the most risk in the most limited upside. You may get a few clients to agree to it, but it's a very stressful process to go through. I don't even need to tell you that. And frankly, there are much better ways. So let's talk about some better ways. I'm going to share three of them with you today. There are many more, but we'll focus on three. First, I challenge you to raise your fees by 10% to your next prospect. Not client prospect. Prospective client prospects don't know what you charge. You're new to them. So once you scope out the project, ask yourself what you think you need to charge. So what would you normally charge for this thing? And then I challenge you to bump that fee up by 10%. And if you really want to challenge yourself, bump it by 20%. I've been doing this myself for years. I've also had dozens of coaching clients go through this challenge. And here's what I found in more than 60% of cases, the prospect accepts the fee, no questions asked. Now, when they feel in situations, when they feel the fee is too high, I found that even your original non discounted fee would have been too much. So your increase didn't really matter. It didn't work against you. In other words, the second thing I recommend you do to raise your fees is to start thinking in terms of bundles. So think through the top two or three projects that you typically work on and then what I want you to do is take some time to brainstorm ancillary or related deliverables you could offer your client. So for instance, if your client needs a case study, you could also offer to create a shortened version of that story for the sales team as a sales enablement tool. Or perhaps you could create a slide deck that tells a story in a presentation format. You can even offer things like audiograms for social media or to include and embed with the written piece. From there, you could offer the client options A, B and C, each with a greater degree of involvement on your part. So lots of possibilities here. That's just one example for one type of project. So what does this have to do with increasing your fees? Well, when you bundle and quote a bundle price, rather than itemizing your list of deliverables, you could make some of these extras very profitable. Generally, these are easy add ons for you to create. Because you've already created the main piece, you're intimately familiar with the content, so creating new splintered pieces is not that difficult. Now for the client, the perceived and actual value of these new splintered and repurposed content pieces are very high. So you can bump up your fee for these things significantly and just quote a bundled price. And because you're not itemizing, you can make that bundle very, very profitable. You've just raised your fee in an indirect way. So here's my final idea. Offer an advisory or strategy engagement to clients if and when it makes sense. There are lots of possibilities here, but here's one quick example. Let's say that the client or the prospect's challenge is that they're not sure exactly what they need. They know they have a problem, but they're not sure how to solve it with content or copy. Or maybe they have a lot of ideas, but they're not really sure which one to pick or maybe which one to start with. Rather than spend a couple of hours with them giving them advice for free, you could instead offer a brainstorming or project roadmapping session that enables you to take a deep dive into the situation, come up with a list of smart recommendations, narrow it down to the first few to get started with, provide the justification as to why those are the best ones to start with, and then include an action plan for implementing these recommendations in order of priority. So this is a separate engagement that you could charge for. It could be part of a bundle like the ones I described earlier, or it could be a standalone engagement. But the reason this falls into the raising your fees category is that you can charge a project fee that seems very reasonable to the client because of the outcome that it creates or that it promises them the clarity that it gives them. Don't underestimate the value of clarity to a client. When somebody is overwhelmed and you offer to net things out for them, to really give them the clarity they need to move forward with confidence, that is very, very valuable. And your internal hourly rate for a project like this, for an advisory project, can and should be very high, especially once you've done a couple of these and have the infrastructure in place to do the work very efficiently. So there you go. Many other ways you could raise your fees, but these are just three ways you can use to raise them in any environment by taking an oblique or indirect approach to the problem.

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 where you will also find the detail show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day.