One of my biggest mistakes in my early freelance writing days was that I undervalued my worth. In other words, I worked for low pay because I didn’t think that I deserved more. While there is nothing wrong with starting out at the bottom, too many freelance writers work for peanuts for entirely too long.
The main reason that many freelancers are afraid to raise their rates is because they think they will get laughed at. But guess what? This very rarely happens unless you increase your rates above and beyond anything imaginable. Remember, clients are willing to pay good money for good work. Believe it or not, a lot of companies and webmasters have been burnt by low quality content in the past because they tried to skimp and save money. For this reason, they are more than willing to pay you what you think you are worth.
The question is: how do you determine what you are worth as a freelance writer? There is no easy way of doing this, and much like me, you will have to learn as you go along. With that being said, there are two points to consider.
1. How much experience do you have? As mentioned above, when you do not have a lot of experience you cannot command high rates. But luckily, as you build a client list and samples you can quickly increase the amount of money that you charge. There is no easy way of taking your experience and directly relating it to your rates. This is something that you have to decide on based on what you are comfortable with, as well as what you think your clients will pay. My freelance writing rates are always on the move, and yours will be too.
2. Although I have beat on this a lot in the past, I want to say it again. Find out what other freelance writers in your shoes are charging. I am always on the look out for other writer’s rates so that I know what I am up against. If my prices are lower, I know that I have a leg up on them from the start. If they are higher, I don’t lower my rate, but instead sell my experience and work samples against the competition.
It is important that you believe that freelance writers are worth a lot of money. Remember, content rules. If a company or website does not have the words to explain themselves or sell their product, they will be out of business in no time at all. For this reason, they are willing to spend a reasonable amount of money on a solid, reliable freelance writer like yourself. Â
I get asked a lot about the size and pay of each of my freelance writing jobs. Even though my workload changes from month to month, there are some generalizations that I can make when it comes to the size of my freelance writing jobs.
During my first six months as a freelance writer, I would consider all of my jobs small. They were not paying a lot of money, and were more or less keyword or SEO articles of 500 words or so. While there is nothing wrong with these jobs, you have to put in a lot of work to make a decent income. Obviously, this is not something that freelance writers strive for. But of course, any job with any pay is better than none at all.
Soon enough, I began to move onto jobs that did not take as much work but paid more money. For instance, one of my biggest clients pays me about $1,500 month. The only thing that I have to do for them is write one or two articles per day on the topic of my choice. To make this even better, the article only has to be 300 words or so. This may sound like a small job due to the size of the articles, but it works out to big pay in the end.
In my opinion, there is no job too big or too small to take on. In other words, if you are presented an opportunity to do work, and you have the time, you should consider accepting. Of course, if the job does not meet your requirements in areas such as pay, you will want to pass. Again, this all depends on what career stage you are at.
Keep this in mind while you are shaping your freelance writing career: search for jobs that do not take a lot of time to complete, but pay the most money. Are these jobs easy to find? No way! But there are tens of thousands of them out there. It is jobs like this that have allowed me to make a good freelance writing income without having to work much more than four to five hours per day.
Earlier today I made a post about freelance writing deadline do’s and don’ts. Shortly thereafter, I spoke with a past client about a rush job that they need help with. In this case, the word rush really meant rush. They wanted me to complete a batch of SEO articles for them by tomorrow night. As you can imagine, this means that I would have to work a lot of the day today, as well as some of tomorrow.
Should you take on weekend deadlines? In the case outlined above, I said yes. There are a couple of reasons that I did this. First off, I was able to negotiate a higher price since they wanted the work done on a rush, weekend basis. Additionally, they have been good to me in the past, so it will definitely work out to my advantage in the future.
When accepting a new project and discussing a deadline with a client, make sure that you are aware of the weekends. There is nothing worse than agreeing on a delivery date, and then finding out that it lies on a Saturday or Sunday. You may not have any problems with working the weekend, but this is not something that a lot of people like to do.
Although I had no plans on working long hours this weekend, you never know what will change when you are a freelance writer. In the end, it will be nice to receive the extra money!
