How Much Are Your Ninja Skills Worth?

A lot of freelancers have the problem with figuring out how much they are worth. You don't want to charge to much and scare away potential clients, yet you also don't want to be underpaid. So how do you really access how much you are worth?

How to Start Charging Your Dream Rate and Get Away With It
by Skellie

Are you charging your dream rates yet? If not, why?

In this post, I want to explain how you can start charging your dream price for work. I’ll also be outlining three key factors which will determine whether a client will accept the fees you’ve proposed.

Even better, there are some concrete steps you can take to increase the likelihood of clients saying “Yes” to the price you’ve always dreamed of charging.

Test the waters with no win, no loss clients

A note: If you’re struggling to make ends meet, I’d suggest building a stable financial base before attempting to charge your dream rates.

When you receive an expression of interest from a new potential client, try proposing your dream rates. For a client to accept, three factors need to align:

1. They need to believe you’re worth it
2. They must be able to afford it
3. They need to believe that you wouldn’t do it any cheaper

Here’s how you can secure each of these factors:

Convincing clients that you’re worth it

Think of your credentials and portfolio like a film trailer. The aim of a film trailer is to show only the portions of the film which make it look as attractive as possible to potential cinema-goers. Too many freelancers fall into the trap of covering everything, rather than just the best bits.

Explain what you can do for clients — they’re not interested in your design, your coding skills, or your writing ability for its own sake. They’re interested based on what they believe your skills will do for them. A new design is only a means to a more impressive web presence, something that will lead to more traffic and links.

You might have an English degree, but clients interested in your web writing or blog posts are mainly concerned with the kind of traffic your writing will bring them. You can sell your work more effectively than most freelancers by focusing on the results your clients really want to hear about.

Less can be more — if you have three pieces of work that you and your clients were incredibly proud of — work that you believe is a level above anything else you’ve done — showcase only those outstanding jobs to potential clients.

List other jobs under ‘experience’, but there’s no need to showcase them in detail. If all your clients know of you is outstanding work that they like, they will see that as the kind of work you’re going to bring them.

Once you start admitting anything but your absolute best work into your portfolio, you’re doing nothing but increasing the chance that clients will see something they don’t like.

Carry yourself like you’re worth it — if you’re worked for high profile or well-respected clients, make sure your potential client knows about it. Freelancers are often judged by the quality of the people they work for. If you’ve done three jobs for high profile, impressive clients and a hundred jobs for Average Joes and Janes, mention in detail only those three high profile jobs.

Everyone else does it — saying things like “For the same price, previous clients have received…” reminds the potential clients that other people have paid the price you’re asking. This can help make the price seem more reasonable to them.

One important, overarching tip is to think of the things you show clients, and the way you communicate, as a flashlight you can use to highlight certain aspects of your freelancing business and leave others in shadow.

If you focus on what makes you outstanding and don’t introduce your clients to anything else, to them, you will seem outstanding in everything you do (because outstanding is all they know about you).

Setting Freelance Writing Rates the Right Way

We’re getting close to the end of the year, and there’s no better time to rethink our freelance writing rates. While I’ve already covered the issue here and on the writing forums, I want to revisit the topic again by taking a close look at the numbers and possible freelance writing rate strategies.

Common Freelance Writing Rate Strategies

• Per word
• Per project
• Per hour

What They Have in Common

Whether you prefer to charge your freelance writing clients per word, per project, or per hour, you’ll still need to account for an hourly rate. Finding the most appropriate hourly rate is really the key to setting freelance writing rates. Once you have that number, you’ll simply charge accordingly. If you charge by the hour, that’s easy enough to do. If you charge by the word or by the project, you’ll need to estimate the amount of time a project would take or how many words on average you’re able to write (not just how quickly you can type).

Working Hours vs. Billable Hours

In order to find the best hourly rate for yourself, you’ll need to understand the difference between working hours and billable hours. Working hours include every hour you work (assuming a “typical” full-time work week, we’ll say that’s 40 hours). Billable hours, on the other hand, are the number of working hours that you can actually bill out to clients, minus the hours spent marketing and on administrative duties.

Billable hours are often approximately, or a little more than, half of your total working hours if you’re not neglecting anything on the admin and marketing side. To simplify the numbers, let’s round it to exactly half, and say that out of a 40 hour work week, you would have 20 billable hours. Now we have something to start from.

Salaries vs Yearly Freelance Earnings

It’s easy for a freelance writer to say “I earned $50,000 at my old day job and I got by fine, so I want to set a goal to earn the same amount from my freelance writing full-time.” What’s harder is understanding that the two numbers truly aren’t comparable, and they can’t be interchanged as easily as that.

To get a more realistic number, you would need to figure out your real “cost” in your former full-time job. Think of it from the company’s perspective instead of yours (because as a freelancer, you’ll be playing that role). For example (assuming a US-based writer)…

Your full-time gross salary would have included your portion of taxes, benefit payments, retirement savings, etc. on top of the net take-home pay. Use that as a starting point. Now add on any Medicare and social security taxes the employer had to pay for you as their employee, any contributions they made towards benefits or retirement, the cost of any supplies or other expenses they covered that made your work possible, etc. Now you have a more realistic number regarding what you would need to earn as a freelancer to be in a comparable situation. That number can be significantly more than your gross salary - in this example, let’s say it works out to around $70,000.

Freelance Switch has made it easy for you to calculate your Hourly Rate with their Hourly Rate Calculator.

Follow the link to Calculate Your Hourly Rate

Source and Contributors:

• How to Start Charging Your Dream Rate and Get Away With It by Skellie http://freelanceswitch.com/money/how-to-start-charging-your-dream-rates-and-get-away-with-it/
• Setting Freelance Writing Rates the Right Way by Jennifer Matternhttp://allfreelancewriting.com/2007/11/16/freelance-writing-careers/setting-freelance-writing-rates-the-right-way/