How To Make More Money As A Freelance Writer

Most freelance writers are broke. ZipRecruiter says the average part time freelance writer makes between 18 and $31 per hour. And Salary.com says most full time freelance writers only earn salaries of 56 to 64k per year. Which is shocking because in our Premium Ghostwriting academy, we show writers how to find, pitch and land clients capped by time. You can't manufacture more hours in a day and you're capped by perceived value. At a certain point, a client won't be able to Rational is paying you $1,000 per hour the same way? You don't want to measure your value by the number of words you write. You also don't want to measure your value by the number of hours you work. If you want to get above $10,000 per month as a writer, you have to stop trading hours for dollars. Level 3 charging per month How a lot of writers get out of charging per hour is they move to a retainer model where they charge per month. You might even be doing this already. And in the beginning, the retainer model seems great because you're getting paid this lump sum of money each month. So it a lot. But here's what ends up happening. In the words of Michael Scott, I've.

Got two tickets to paradise. Taking her to Sandals, Jamaica. All inclusive. All inclusive. You know what that means?

You know what that means? When you agree to a retainer model and don't define the scope, think of yourself as an all inclusive resort. If the client wants a blog post, you write them a blog post. If the client wants a newsletter, you write them a newsletter. If a client wants a couple Instagram captions, you give them captions. And before you know it, you're right back to essentially being an overworked, underpaid, salaried employee. Except you don't have a salary and you don't have any benefits. No bueno. Level 4 charging per asset here's where you want to get to Instead of charging per word or per hour or even per month, you want to sell a productized service and charge per asset. So what is a productized service? It's an asset you can create over and over again that you can build efficiencies around, templatize and scale. So for example, this is what we train ghostwriters to do in our Premium Ghostwriting Academy, and we also show them how to charge a premium for it. And the asset they learn how to write, build and sell is a five day educational email course just like the one we have at startwritingonline.com, which has driven over $3 million in revenue for our beginner writing program. Ship 30 for 30 when you're selling a productized service, the client isn't buying how many words it is. The client also isn't buying how many hours it took you to create. What the client is buying is the creation of an asset that you have educated them would be valuable to their business in some measurable way. This is how you start having some pricing power and leverage. Level 5 charging per outcome. This is the last level and this is what separates profitable writers and millionaire writers. Just so you know where this is coming from, and I'm only sharing this to show you what's possible, but this framework that I'm giving you here is how I've made millions of dollars as a writer. I used these same principles to scale my ghostwriting agency to several million dollars in revenue. And today I'm the co founder of a portfolio of related companies. Ship 30 for 30 premium ghostwriting academy, typeshare and write with AI that collectively do millions of dollars in yearly revenue. I've also spoken at Mastermind events with other world class millionaire writers and marketers. And do you know what millionaire writers do that most other writers do not? They price anchor to an outcome. So here's a really easy example, recapping the five levels of pricing power so you can really see how this plays out. Let's say you're being hired to ghostwrite a pitch deck for a startup. A GhostWriter at level one will charge per word written inside that pitch deck. So assuming 5 cents a word and maybe 500 words in the whole pitch deck, that's $25 not great. A ghostwriter at level 2 will charge per hour. So assuming say $50 an hour and maybe 20 hours of work, that's 1000 bucks better, but not great. A ghostwriter at Level 3 will charge per month.

Month.

So assuming it takes 20 hours spread over the course of a month, maybe this writer can get away with charging something like $3,000. But chances are they're going to have to lump it in with some other tasks and make it all inclusive to get away with charging this amount. A ghostwriter at level four though, who charges per asset and positions themselves as someone who specializes in the creation of pitch decks, for example, can charge upwards of $5,000, maybe even more $10,000 because they're selling an asset. But a GhostWriter at level 5 who charges per outcome can charge the most. And they do it by price anchoring to the outcome a great pitch deck can lead to for a startup. So for example, a pitch deck for a startup might help them raise something like $2 million. So if you can help create an asset that unlocks an outcome of successfully raising $2 million, all of a sudden, charging $25,000 for a pitch deck seems pretty reasonable. Same work, same effort, same number of hours. But the value of your value is perceived completely differently. I used to be that writer scraping by, charging a penny per word or $15 per hour. So trust me, I get it. But I've also been fortunate to have had some really great mentors over the years who have helped me break out of some of these faulty frameworks and beliefs. And that's what I want to be for you. So consider me your digital writing ghostwriting mentor. So any questions you have, drop them in the comments. Hit subscribe if you want to know when my next video goes live, probably sometime next week. And if you want to go down the rabbit hole of becoming a premium ghostwriter, I really encourage you to grab a copy of the Art and Business of Ghostwriting. This has everything you need to get started. Let me know what you think after you give it a read. See you next week.