Are you a cheap writer?

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Are you a cheap writer? Shame on you.
Pricing your writing services too low is a great way to fail as a freelance writer, and the failure won’t be pretty either, because you’ll be working yourself to death.

As All Freelance Writing: Your Freelance Writing Resource: says:

“Do you ever wonder how the ‘big dogs’ got to where they are, where they can charge just about anything they want for their copywriting or other freelance writing services? They didn’t do it by competing on price. And neither should you! Ever! I mean that - NEVER!”

It’s a good article - read it, and take it to heart.

You must know who your buyers are, and WHY they buy your services

To be able to charge good rates, you must know why buyers buy.

So, why do people buy? Jennifer gives a good rundown in her article, so I won’t cover the same ground here. What I will say is this: if someone pays you $500 to write something for them, and it doesn’t matter what it is, they expect to get a profit from it.

So, a magazine might pay you $500, and the ads your editorial is supporting may bring in $10,000 (conservatively).

A web site might pay you $500 and your writing may bring in $5,000 over the course of two years.

Steve Pavlina wrote: How Much Is a Blog Post Worth? Would You Believe $2400 Each? in 2006, that’s conservative too, depending on the blog.

The challenge for you is EXPERIENCE; this is the primary reason I wrote the Sell Your Writing Online NOW (SYWON) training, to give writers experience in writing many different kinds of material, and monetizing it themselves, so they get a sense of how everything works together, and how people make money from words.

Why you shouldn’t sell yourself cheaply

Here’s the main reason you shouldn’t sell yourself cheaply: you won’t learn anything.

It’s very easy to make a reasonable income writing for the Web, without doing anything more than considering yourself a word factory and churning out articles.

If you want to earn big dollars, you need to make yourself valuable. This means knowing what your buyers want from your writing, and creating good proposals, even when you bid on the out-sourcing sites.

When you know as much (and more) than the people who are buying your words, you can set your high prices with confidence… because you know what you’re worth.

Get confidence from your experience

Your biggest hurdle in increasing your rates is your lack of experience, because experience gives you confidence.

If you don’t know that writers like marketing copywriters earn $250 an hour, you’ll have trouble believing it, because you have no frame of reference for it.

So to get experience, start applying for writing jobs which pay good rates. You’ll fail at first, but people will tell you why they won’t hire you - they will tell you what experience you need, all you have to do is ask them.

Start learning, and earning. One of the biggest benefits of the Web is its transparency. If you know where to look - try SpyFu for example - you can work out exactly how much profit Web sites in various niches are making.

That knowledge is powerful; use it, and get paid what you’re worth. You can do it.

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