Freelance Writing Newbie? Here’s How to Charge Great Rates When Starting Out

Just starting to gain some ground as a new freelance writer? One of the secrets I like to share (learned from my own mistakes) is how you can start charging good or even top rates as a new freelance writer. How? We're talking about experience, clips, full-time job knowledge, and niche expertise as well as techniques to charge the true worth of the work with value clients.

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First things first, we're going to do a pub date cause it's Friday and I want to do a puppet and they're looking really cute today. If you were on one of my masterclasses, you saw that we finally got to do pup dates on the masterclass. So that was exciting. Here you go. Good job. You go. Good job. All right. We didn't do one more, but we're starting with a pup date because they just looked super cute today. They look extra adorable. Oh no, the lights in the wrong place. Hold on. There we go. Do that. Helped to it. Made it worse. I don't know. I feel like it helped light Charlotte a little bit better. Here you go, bud. Good job buddy. Charlie. Good girl. Everybody enjoys getting treated. I was on camera for sure. All right. So what we're talking about today? Oh, and second, the second thing.

Hey Vicky. Welcome in. She says, hello. You got stuck in your jaw. She'd get a little piece stuck in your jails. Okay. And the second thing is my course is open. So freelance writer, wealth lab is open for enrollment right now until October 7th. So until October 7th. Yeah. Vicky Bo is enthusiastic today. He's been a little bit of a wild child recently, so he's been inside a bit. Hey Gabby. Welcome in. So my freelance writer, wealth lab course is open for enrollment right now until October 7th. So you can head over to where is it? There it is two mandela.com/enroll to check it out. It's basically your step-by-step blueprint for growing a high earning freelance writing business. So I take you step-by-step through how to build a business that actually supports all of the financial stuff in your life, plus actually your lifestyle. It helps you earn more money in less time and it takes you through basically the blueprint of how you can grow your business quicker and really provide an excellent client experience.

I think that's really important to getting that recurring work, getting top top rates and actually having those, those high paying clients come to you is that you create these experiences and you create all of this good inbound and outbound marketing to have them basically like show up in your inbox. And so I give you all the strategies to get that well-paid work and get those high quality clients come to you. So if you go to mindy.com/enroll, you can check it out. So that is open from right now until October 7th and then I'm closing the doors until Q2 of next year. So I'm not opening it back up until April or may of 2022. So if now is the time that you want to set up everything and get all your strategies and all your steps in methods in place for 2022 to make sure it's like your highest earning best year ever as a freelance writer, check out the course, check out freelance writer, wealth lab, head to minneapolis.com/enroll.

If you have questions while we're on the live stream about the course, feel free to pop them in. Or if you have questions and you're watching this later, I know that a lot of people send in comments or email the questions afterwards. So if you have anything, pop it in the comments below. If you have questions about freelance writer, wealth lab, if you have questions about my dogs bobbing in the comments below, I'm interested to hear what you think and I'm interested to hear, you know, if like help you out, if you have any questions. Yeah. Cool. All right. So here's how we're getting started. Hey, we are talking about how to kind of charge good rates when you're a newbie. This was something that I really struggled with. So when I was starting out, I was working for $25 for 1500 words and worse and very much like rarely better than that.

And I didn't really understand how to do that. So basically this week's live. We're going to go through a bunch of different things and I have my notes here so we can go over it. So if you're a newer freelance writer this is going to help you kind of put everything in place. So when we're starting out, we want to talk about experience niches and your full-time job. So let's start with full-time job. If you're a freelance writer who are like, you want to become a freelance writer, you want to like move into freelance writing and you haven't started yet. If you have a full-time job, there are a lot of different things that you can use from skills and experience in that job to make the jump, whether that's the same niche, like let's say your full-time job is in healthcare.

And you want to skip over to using healthcare as a niche to grow your business. You can do that. So when you take your full-time job, you can take your niche expertise there and translate it into being a freelance writer. And that also helps with rates. So if you've been at your full-time job for like five or 10 years, and you have a lot of experience in that niche and you feel like you can write really well for that. Like you, you understand the pain points of healthcare companies, you understand what they really struggle with when it comes to content, you understand why they need help with writing. And you can communicate that you can charge great rates. This is something I get a lot of people that are like, oh, but I haven't been a freelance writer. I was like, yeah, but you've written for your full time employer a lot.

And you have a lot of experience in your time job. So sorry I had to cough. But you can take that niche expertise and you can take your full-time job and motion together and you can charge great rates. You're not coming into freelance writing blind. This is like a lot of things where people who are making that transition think that like they have to be a freelance writer or they have to be a very specific type of writer in order to translate that experience. And it's just not true. It's not true. When I was at my full-time job, I used a lot of, I used to work at an engineering company. So I was a technical writer at an engineering company. And the first few niches that I moved out into were I'm a freelancer or a freelancer we're food and travel.

And then and health. And one other one, I had like an initial niche that I was doing, but I dropped it. But I started out with dishes that were very different than my full-time job, but I still use the skills and experience from that full-time job to market myself as a freelance writer. Because just because I did it for engineers doesn't mean I can't do it for food and travel companies. Right. Just because I, I still have those skills and I can translate them to different things. And then if I wanted to do a manual or I wanted to help out different technical type stuff, I did use my full-time job experience say, yep. I used to do that. Full-Time but now I'm a freelance writer. There's nothing wrong with that. It's not like you, it's kind of like a hoop or jump rope just because you used to jump rope when you were seven and you haven't done it in 20 years, doesn't mean you can't jump rope.

It doesn't, it doesn't just magically disappear. Right. Or like riding a bike, right. Just because you learn how to ride a bike when you were five or six or seven or smaller it doesn't mean that you like get back on the bike when you're like 45 and you just magically you you're like, oh yeah. Now never ridden a bike. Like that's not how it works. So there's that piece. The other piece we want to talk about is like, experience. I get several freelance. Like I get a lot of messages in my inbox from people who are worried that don't have enough experience. And they're like, oh yeah, I was working at a marketing company for 10 years. And oh yeah. I was a copywriter at this ad agency for the last three years. Like that's experience it all counts and that means it can charge good rates.

Now, the thing that we don't want to do, what we don't want to do is roll into freelance writing and charge top rates when we don't have, like, when we don't have anything. Well, we've never really, we've done no writing. We don't have any like idea of what our client's pain points are or like how to actually do a blog post or how to create a case study. We don't want to roll in there and just like overcharge people when we don't have the, basically like the experience or the niche expertise or the knowledge to really back that up. What we want to do is take what we already have and leverage it. That's all we're doing. And just like a thing here, like I know you don't want to lie about this. Leveraging does not equal lying. What you're doing is highlighting, it's your highlight reel.

It's the best things that you can bring to the table to help some other company create content. So that means that for me, like, let me back up to when I started, I have traveled a bunch, I've been lucky enough to travel a bunch. And I been lucky enough to just be really excited about food. I was just very excited about recipes, about food ways, like where food comes from food history. I find it just really fascinating that all these different cultures have all these food, but like food really brings people together. Everybody needs food. Right. And I find it so interesting that one ingredient can be used in like all these different ways. It's not just like, you know, it's man, it's, it's, it's really fascinating to me. So I leveraged a lot of my personal experience from traveling and from food knowledge and things I really cared about and things I was interested in to write about that for different magazines and different companies.

I didn't have any full-time job experience. I didn't have anything beyond my own like knowledge of the industry. And I could show that right. I could show that by explaining that to them through an initial call, or I could show that to them by hopefully getting a few clients. Right. Like when I started I started on Upwork, which are, well, it was oDesk and Elance and now it's Upwork. And I would write letters in there and I like just FYI, that's not my preferred. Like I don't, I deleted my Upwork profile long time ago, but when I did start out there, the way that I marketed myself was leveraging all those things. I knew I would tailor, you know, at that time, like my specific messages, I would send people with like exactly what they were talking about. And then, you know, once I moved to sending LOI, once I started getting all of the pieces together, I started highlighting clients.

I didn't have to tell them all this history or these things about food and travel. Like I had clients to back it up. But as you kind of move along, like that's where we're kind of going, what we want to do to charge those good rates as a newbie is that we are leveraging what we already have and seeing how we can help somebody with it. The deal here is that we are digging into all the things we have, the niche expertise, the experience like have, do you have clients, or do you have clips that you can show, do you have experience writing about, do you have experience traveling to places? Do you have experience working with different people in that industry? Do you have full-time experience? And then also you want to go with like your knowledge bank. Can you help someone?

And a lot of times, like I tell this to core students and coaching students this was something that Simon Sineck said is like, if you can show someone like explain what their problems are, if you can explain to a potential customer or a potential client, like what their pain points are, you show that you understand where they're struggling. They already think you have the solution. So you don't have to go through this like weird proving step where you're like, oh, I gotta cut my teeth. And I got to work at a hundred dollars, a blog post for like six months. Like, no especially if you're someone who's coming to freelance writing with like decades of experience as in marketing or in content or doing other stuff, like you worked at a magazine, like you're already coming from a lot of experience. So that means you can charge really great rates the times where we're coming in here without clips.

So the next piece I want to make sure we go over is clips. So we want to continue leveraging what we have here. So for example, when I started out, I didn't have any clips. I didn't have anything. And I would just, you know, eventually someone took a chance on me because of how I wrote my, my thing. Like they took a chance and they needed some help. I also started like I had like a, like a little blog at the time just to say I had samples right now, if you're like really nervous about samples and you're really nervous that you need to have something to show someone. I usually recommend that people post on LinkedIn pulse and that you post on LinkedIn polls to attract, you know, your ideal clients to read your stuff. So you, you don't post like a destination story.

Like, let's say if you're doing travel, you're not just like, here's a story about a hotel in my city. You post about like why these specific types of travel articles do really well with consumers, right? You're showing that you understand the audience that you're writing for. You're understanding how to solve the pain points of your ideal clients. And that really helps in LinkedIn pulse. You can have comments, you can have hashtags, you can share it all over the place. It can get shared, it can get picked up. It can get found outside of like LinkedIn. So that's cool. And I think for writers that are starting out without clips, but you have a bunch of stuff to leverage. You have that experience, niche knowledge like some expertise, some full-time stuff when you're pulling it in. Sometimes you can use your full-time job stuff like your collateral as clips.

It just depends, right? If you signed an NDA or like your employer's like, no, then you can't do that. But sometimes you can take things with you. You can like, you didn't sign an NDA and you can block out, you know, the company name it's not really recommended, but if you have an article, like, let's say you were one of the let's say you were the content marketing manager and you helped write a lot of blog posts. Then you can share those as clips and say, yup, this was, you know, my old full-time job, but here's some clips I have. If you have zero clips like, and you have, but you have a ton of experience. You've been kind of, you understand all the stuff that needs to go into content, marketing and strategy, or how to write a great blog post, or how to write a great case study that you can leverage to.

If you're coming in this into freelance writing as a newbie and you just, you're just like starting and you have no zero experience I usually recommend at least writing some stuff, you know, put some things on LinkedIn pulse, then you at least have something, some kinds of clips. And it's also something that you can do to like, get some traffic. The other pieces that I am not a big fan of like creating a ton of free content. We really want to just leverage a couple of things to get our first client. And people will take a chance on you. This was something that I never believed. Like I was just like, no, I have to prove to them all of these things before they hire me. But it's just not true. There's a lot of times when you get on a call with someone and they like you and that's it, they all, they only have to like you.

And then they're like, yeah, we'd love to work with you. There's some times where you get on a call and they put you through like a full-time job interview, like the ringer. And that's just not a fit. Like they're trying to treat you like an employee. That's just not gonna work. And a lot of times when we show up as writers, if we can give some good ideas and give some insight on their website or where they could fix their content or things that they could really like, that would really help their audience, that oftentimes leads to a job. So if you don't have any clips, right. A couple of things you know, maybe try that. I also, I also have found that people still get writing jobs, zero clips. Like they just do their marketing. They market themselves as a freelance writer and someone takes a chance on them.

And it all, it happens. People take a chance on me and I have, you know, I have plenty of things to show them. I've been a freelance writer for 10 years. I would hope that by now I have tons of things to show them. Right. But there's plenty of times where I end up having a new client and they know they don't ask for clips, or we don't talk about my portfolio or ideas. They're just like, yeah, we like you let's go. There's always someone who's willing to take a chance. So even if you don't have any clips and you don't have a ton of stuff, if you can explain how to help them, and then also explain how to help their audience, that really helps. And then, you know, as you move along, you can charge better rates. This is if you're starting from ground zero and you have nothing.

If you have experienced niche knowledge, some stuff that you can leverage, then you really can charge good rates because you're coming from a place of knowledge that can help them create content. That makes a difference. The last thing here that we want to talk about, and if you have questions, just pop them in the chat. If you have anything that comes up, pop it in the chat. If you feel like this has been helpful so far, give it a thumbs up. If you find out, learn more about being that high-income freelance writer, make sure to hit subscribe, or you can head to my courses enrolling right now. Just like another button here. So Mandy ellis.com/enroll to check that out. And we're going to go to number three. Oh, we should do a pub date. We should do pub date is Friday. Let's do cupping. Oh, look, you look so cute. You guys look so cute. Snooze in there. Oh, the ears moved, you know? Oh, good job buddy. You go me. Good girl. All right, we'll do one more. You guys get one more because you guys looked super cute over there. Also snugly up in your little blankets. There you go.

Good job. We always have to move the blankets around because they can't just lay on the puppets. They have to have blankets. There's just like, there's no other way. Like they need a sheet, they need a blanket. They need something to, to rake around. Like you can see with Minnie right now that she has raked it in. So it's like creased all the way around her. Oh, goodnight mini. Oh, she's like, where's your get something. Yeah. They're kind of sleepy today. We've been on the masterclasses. So they've put in like, you know, they're kind of just, when I talk for long periods of time, it puts them to sleep. So obviously I'm very interesting. I I'm so glad that they listened to me. Good night. All right. So let's get back to our last thing. Yeah, they are snoozy peppers. Okay. Getty, let's talk about this for a second.

So Getty says, other than my academic articles in referee journals, which are clips and lots of them from decades ago, they still qualify. I do not have much show and tell material, getting you have a lot of material. So I didn't have anything. When I started, if you had like articles that are in journals, you can at least show that you've published something. That's a big deal. And oftentimes clients, especially businesses see journalistic articles, like as really great. They love them. So if you have those as clips, even if it's different than what they're going for, you can at least say like I have clips here. They are. And it's okay. That they're decades old. Like I still use clips that are from a long time ago, like 10 years ago. I still sometimes send clips that are like one of my early, early clips, because they're the most relevant.

And if that's what you have, that's what you have. I've kind of, you I've done this throughout my career is just kind of like, if I don't have the thing that they're asking for, I send to them, whatever's closest because what they're looking for or writing skills, and most of the time, what I've found is if you have a potential client, that's looking for you to basically copy paste what they want. It's really hard to write for them because you can't like, you're not a robot. You can't copy paste every single time. Right. So when you write for them, they're like, why doesn't this look like your other article and why isn't this, this? And you're like, cause I'm not robot. Like I can't, you know, it's, it's like 90% similar, right? It's 90% similar in your, basically your writing style. But we're not robots, but want to talk about this.

So I've also had coaching students and also like people I've known who have been freelance writers for like 30 years who just their best, one of their best clips is from 20 years ago. That's all it is. It's just that, you know, you have you have one of your best clips is from that time period. There's nothing wrong with that. I think that those are still really useful. And there's lots of people who roll, rolling with no clips. So having some clips and journalistic clips are great, or even like academic type stuff. If you can at least show you've been published or at least that you have writing samples, I think that's, that's a bonus. I think that works really well. Thank you says I guess even though the academic voice is different from marketing voice, at least. Yeah, exactly. Some clients are really impressed by fancy academic stuff.

Like they they're like, oh, it's not even that, like, we're actually down here with marketing, you're doing like super technical academic, like, whoa, that's amazing. Like there, they see it so different than do. We're like, oh my God, this doesn't match exactly. It's too academic. It's too. Like it's too technical. It's too confusing. No, just the fact that you have clips, like it doesn't always matter that it's not an exact match. And the fact that you can say you've been published or that you've done this complicated stuff is valuable. Now the other thing is that when you roll in there with clients, you can say like Kay, can you send me an example of the type of content you're looking for? And they send you an example and you're like, oh, I can definitely do that. You can be like, yeah, I, you know, I know my clips are very academic, but I'm also really good at writing to consumers.

I'm really good at writing in a consumer friendly voice. I'm really good at, you know, making technical stuff, easy to read. There's a lot of ways that we can leverage this, right? These are skills. These are just, we're just telling them our skills. It doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be identical. And lots of times in my career, I send someone something in a different niche, a different type of article, a different angle, a different, like I send them all different types of stuff and they're like, sounds good. Let's go. Like, they're looking for skills. They're looking for you to show that you have some clips, right. Or something, you don't always have to have clips just FYI. But when you have clips, you're just like, yep. I've been published. And if you feel like you need to tell them, like, I know that your blog is a little more conversational.

These are my clips that I have right now, but I would love like I'm, you know, my my new business direction is that I am working on more consumer focused content. I'm moving away from heavily academic stuff. And one of my skills is that I'm really good at explaining all of these concepts to consumers. I'm really good at speaking more in a friendly voice. And that's where I want to go. And that's the truth. The truth is you are moving away from academic writing. The truth is you do want to write for consumers and you do want write for their audience. Right. That's the whole point. And it's okay that the voice is different, right? So let's give this another example how I would write for Conde Nast. Traveler is not how I would write for pizza today. How I would write for NAR, like the national association of realtors is not how I would write for a startup client of mine.

All of these things are just different voices, just because it's academic doesn't mean you can't write a fun travel story just because it's more technical. And you're talking about platform like a SAS platform doesn't mean you can't write about like the five best ice creams in Austin. Like th these are all of the magazines and clients that you work for have different voices, have different styles. That's how it is. So I think that a good client and one that really is investing in like working with good writers, we'll see good writing ability. They will see a good clip. They will understand that, you know, you're making a shift in your business. They will you know, if you get on a call and you tell them like how to solve their problems, they will, you know, work with you. I think that that's more, I think it's just more valuable.

Like we, we often think as writers that we have to constantly prove ourselves. Like we see, you know, we constantly have to do all this stuff, but really new writers don't have to do as much as they think. I also want to encourage you to be careful about the pro bono work. I have another video down below, like, I'll my channel that talks about pro bono work. Be careful about how much free work you do too. So yeah. The other thing here too, that we can talk about is NDA stuff. So Getty says that he's written much throughout his career in marketing and customer analytics. So that's cool. That's great. Much of this is proprietary. That's okay. Also quite a few, all of these. Okay. So it sounds like you have a lot of clips, Getty, stop being a crazy Daisy. You have lots of stuff to show people.

That's great. That's great. And because you have clips and you have all this experience, I know you have a lot of niche knowledge. I know that you have a lot of things from talking to you that you've got a lot of knowledge and background. You can use that to charge pro rates. You don't have to start at the bottom of the barrel. The other thing that we want to talk about here is NDAs and proprietary stuff. So if your clips are under an NDA, if your clips are proprietary information if you've signed a document that says you can't share them, you can't share them period. Unless you go to the client and say, can I share these clips with other potential clients? Like it would really help me grow my business. And they can either say yes or no. The other piece is that, hello.

The other piece is you look super cute today. Why do you look so cute? Why you look so cute and stretchy? It looked like a tiny bat. It must be because it's October is October. And you're like feeling all the bad vibes. Cause it's about to be Halloween because you're feeling extra batty. You just look super cute. Here you go. There you go. You guys look super cute today. I just, I just have to give you a treat out. You just look like a super cute bat. All right. So let's get back to that. So if it's under an NDA and you signed something, the way that you get around that, like besides asking the client, if you can use those clips to get more things like you wouldn't publish them on your website, you would only send them as attachments through an email to a potential client saying like, Hey, just so you know, please don't share these.

The other thing is that we didn't always talk about these things without violating NDA. We can talk about skills that we use to complete the work. We can explain how, like certain things, we can't always explain how everything that we did to complete the work, because some of that's proprietary, right? It's like they have certain processes for completing content. They have certain spreadsheets or things like that. But we can talk about like, oh, I worked for a fortune 500 company and our goal was to increase traffic by 50% by publishing content weekly that doesn't tell you what the content is. It doesn't tell you the company, but it tells you the goal. And we met that goal with, through our content. I'm sorry, I can't give you more information because it's under NDA, but this fortune 500 client of mine was, you know, we, we increased traffic by 60% with our weekly content.

We can kind of explain what we did and, and kind of give some metrics and some information without violating NDA. We're not saying specific things that we did. We are giving a big picture view. If you can give a big picture view, that's good enough. Don't give specifics. Don't violate the NDA, but you just, because you can't use the clip doesn't mean you don't have the skills. It doesn't mean you actually didn't do the work. It doesn't like get rid of all the stuff you did for them. It just means that you have to be very careful about how you talk about it. And that you don't identify who that company is or any potential strategies or processes they have. But you can definitely explain that as a, as a point. Yeah. Get a, you definitely underestimate your portfolio. You have a lot of stuff to work with.

Yeah. And if you can't, most of the time you can't take writing samples with you when you leave an organization, it just depends. Like sometimes it's public information. A lot of times people create content and it's on the company blog, or it's on the company website, anything that's published. You just, you don't have to take it with you, but you say like, here's a link it's published on this website. You know, that's all the last thing is that we want to talk about real quick is the charging, the true worth of your project. So you want to work with value clients. That means that they understand the value of content. They understand why they're creating that content. And they have a plan that's really important. Why are they creating content? They have a plan when someone doesn't understand why they're creating the content, what ends up happening is they're just like, we just need blog posts.

And then there's no way to measure if that's effective or not. Like, how do you keep a contract going? Or how do you keep working with a client when they're just like pump out this content? And they don't have any metrics to track? Like, why are we doing this? Or like, what's the point that's really important to not only getting good testimonials or getting good results are really helping people with content, but having direction for that content and to make stuff that really works. So there's that piece where we want to work with value clients, with clients who understand the value of content, but also value clients who are looking for a specific writer. They're looking for. Even with new writers, they're looking for someone to really help them. So when you're starting out, there's a couple of different things you want to price the work, according to the worth, both like, you know, the worth of what does this work worth like?

Is this very complicated work? Does that up? You know, that's going to increase the work. Am I doing interviews? Am I finding images? Am I doing a ton of links? Am I doing a lot of research? What is it really worth? Then also what's the worth to the client, right? A lot of our, a lot of our content lives forever. Like not even forever, like in internet years, forever, which is like five years or 10 years, right? You write a blog post. Like my blog posts still live around the internet from 10 years ago. Right? My case studies still live from a long time ago. My reported articles still live from 10 years ago, like, or however long, you know, whatever it is, it doesn't matter. They live a long time. That's value that content keeps getting them. Traffic keeps getting them leads, keeps getting them money sales, that content lives, case studies, right?

White papers, things that really highlight the company and its value that lives for a long, long time. And that's really important. So like if they give you $3,000 or $2,000 or a thousand dollars for a case study, that case study will, could bring in tens of thousands of dollars for them. That's a very small portion of what they're getting out of it. Same thing with blog posts, the amount of traffic they get, the amount of subscribers leads the way their funnel is going to work with that, that content, all that stuff is super valuable. So remember when you're pricing your work, it's not just like, oh my gosh, I hope that they accept it. Oh my God, when you're new, you need to understand that it's not just the content itself. It's not just pricing. Like what you think the work is worth in terms of like how many things are in it, right.

It's not just like, it's like a blog post, like two interviews. Plus you have to find three images. It's not just that. It's also like, what is this really going to do for them? Like, and also they're paying for quality. That means that when you charge a top rate, you better deliver quality. That's the really important part here. They're paying for a quality writer to do that work. So when you charge that top rate, it's also your responsibility as a writer to be very to focus in on that quality. Don't just be like, sweet. I got paid a ton of money. I'm going to write this blog post at an hour and move on with my day. No, the point of top rates is that they're paying for top quality. They're paying for someone to do good job and they're paying for you to write it and they're paying for that value.

And this is something to oh, that I wanted to mention. What was his, I saved it. So hold on. I saved it. One second there is a guy that I found the other day that talks about hourly versus I have to find the video, hold on. It's it like totally made my day. It was the best part of my day. So basically there's a dude who talks about hourly versus oh, it might be in my chat, hold on versus value pricing. So he has this video on Instagram. So if you go on Instagram and Chris DOE yeah, I think his name is Chris DOE. Let me go find it on here. So I think it's Chris D O I think it's dough. Yeah, I don't think it's do. I think it's Cristo. So Christo, D O and he goes by the Cristo on Instagram.

So he has this video. And I can't put it on YouTube because that's a big no-no, but he, hold on, let me find it. He talks about hourly, here we go. He talks about pricing based on value versus hourly. And if you go on Instagram and you look at his reels, I think it's, yeah, it's on his reels. It's the first it's the second video at the bottom, it says, how much do you charge for a logo? This talks about the difference between hourly pricing and value pricing. This is what really messes, like a lot of new freelance writers up. When it comes to charging high high rates, they think they need to go hourly. And this video, if you go look at it, it's the Chris DOE go look at it. It's in his reels. It's called how much do you charge for a logo?

And it talks about why you need to charge as a freelance business owner as a per project and not hourly. It is a very good explanation of he's talking to people who are trying to hire logo designers or graphic designers. He is talking to basically a giant room of potential clients, right. And there's a client he's talking to and it's going over like it's going over, like why this client wants to know his hourly rate. And so what he said was, okay, so if it takes me less hours through this work, you want to pay less, but let's say it ends up taking me more hours. Now you're going to pay more. Is that something that works for you? And he's like, oh yeah. And he's like, okay, so you care about time, more than money. And then he's like, well, you know, as a business owner, I do do that.

Oh, Vicki knows about it. I just came across this video is the best. And then, so he ends up saying like, you know, talking to this like person, you know, one of the people who's trying to hire a lower designer through the process of like, why they charge her value versus hourly. And he's like, basically the same thing. I've been telling coaching students at core students and other freelance writers for so long, it's being punished for being good and efficient as I get faster and better at the work, why would I work hourly to get punished for being fast and efficient? So instead of like, let's say, when I first started out, here's a good example. When I first started out, it took me a month to write my first reported article a month. Okay. That's all I did that month. I didn't do anything else with this one reported article doing three or four interviews and writing it and editing it and turning it.

That's all I did now. I do many reported articles per month. Sometimes 10. Like I do like up to 10, I think the most I've ever done is 12, which was like way too many. But usually I end up doing a bunch of reported articles every single month. And I should not be punished because I can now do 12 instead of one, like that's crazy. Or because I can now write, you know, 12 blog posts a month instead of one. That's crazy. So this goes through basically like why hourly is like, when you're charging for someone who's doing a better job, that's value. You're charging for someone who's really good at their work. That's value. You're charging for someone who has clips, experience, all these good things. That's value. It's not that you're paying for their time. You're not paying for someone's time. You are paying for that result.

When you look through someone's clips and this is a newbie lesson, you've got to know when you look, oh, I can share the link to the video. I don't know if you can watch it off Instagram because it might be on YouTube. So maybe I can share the link in YouTube. Cause he might've just clipped it for reels, but I'll I'll see if I can, I'll find it on YouTube. Cause he has a YouTube channel too. But it's so like as a newbie, you have to understand the like, even if you want to start out charging hourly, you get punished for doing a good job. Like this is a crazy concept to me as I get better. As you look at those clips, those clips, I have gotten to the good enough point that I can create that quality work in less time.

That's good for me as a business owner, I'm not going to have you pay me less money because I worked for 10 years to do that. That's not a thing. So to me, when I look at that, it's like someone says like, I love your clips. I want to work with you. Great. I worked really hard to create those clips. I worked for many years to learn how to write like that. I worked, I took courses in classes and learned all this stuff to be able to do that. I've read that dozens, if not hundreds of thousands of articles over my lifetime to write like that, I followed experts. I've done all this stuff. I've looked at trends. I'm constantly learning information that costs money. It doesn't, you're not buying my time. You're not buying the time. It takes me to do this. I'm not your full-time employee.

You are paying for this result. You want that clip, that clip costs this much money. That's value pricing. And it's also the value it is to their business. But this, this concept I think is just so it's just always like, it's crazy to me. Like I'm someone sees some, like someone sees something they like and want that costs money. It doesn't cost my time. If you see something that I've created, that's taken me a very long time. Okay. That's taken me a very long time to get there. So you're buying the many years that I spent doing this and it's actually, you know, it's more cost effective to do per project than hourly. Because if it does take me longer and you send them a surprise invoice, that's an unhappy client. If I do per project, they know how much it costs. There's no, there's no tracking.

There's no, I'm making sure I'm on budget. There's no checking in like, you know how much it costs. We don't have to haggle over like how many hours you're going to like, no. I think it's just, I think that's again, another thing where newbie writers kind of act like it's like a full-time job. They try to like, oh, well they should just pay me hourly because no, no, no, no project. I will like, I know that there are people who like to work hourly. I get it. That that works for you. I, I still don't think it's a good idea to get punished for being good inefficient. I don't think it's good to be punished or like lose money, which fuels your business, which fuels your ability to learn more, which fuels your ability to get better clients, which fuels your ability to make more money.

All those things. You shouldn't be losing money because you're better now than you were five years ago. That's crazy. Right? Professional athletes don't get paid more money or paid less money because they work the same hours. They always have, like, you don't write their value increases over time. Right? Kobe didn't get paid less money over time. Like nobody. Right. That's that's crazy. They start up and they're like, cool. We'll give you this pile of money and we'll see how it goes. You know? And then as they become more valuable as they basically sell more tickets for being with the organization, as they sell, you know, have more jerseys or people come to the games or they become a person who is of greater value to that organization, they get paid more money. They're still spending the same. They're going to the same amount of basketball games.

They're going. They're going to practices. They're training. They're doing all this stuff, right. There's you know, there's no, why would I pay hourly? That's crazy. Okay. That's my diatribe for today. Diane, welcome in. She said, Diane says, I always liked the idea that a client is not paying for today's hours. They're also paying for all the hours that got me here. Exactly what Diane said. They are paying for all this stuff and you know what? I'm not charging them $10,000 for one blog post. Even though it might've taken me $10,000 worth of effort to learn how to do good blog posts to write good blog posts, they're paying for like there being a, such a small amount of, for the amount of effort and time and expense and all the stuff I've done to just get there. Yeah. And that experience is way like why you're hired instead of someone else who said was exactly it.

You see the clip, you see the experience you see that they, you unders the client sees you understand their pain points, understand how to create the content. That's what gets you hired like as a newbie, the more you can understand how to help your clients and what they really struggle with when it comes to content strategy, content marketing, any of the services you offer, blog posts are reported articles, branded content, white papers, case studies, landing pages, copywriting, a drip emails, all of that stuff. The more you can understand what they really struggle with, the more you can charge value, value rates. And also like the more you're really getting in deep of how to help them. So like, I think that to me, the idea that someone would pay for my time is just like antiquated. Like I feel like I'm building an aqueduct in like Rome and someone's like, why don't you go over there and pick up some stones and like this for four hours?

And I'm like, okay. Like I just, I, it's just weird. It's a weird concept to me. It's like, I'm not picking up stones. I'm like designing the aqueduct, telling you how it runs, explaining why the water goes this way. And I'm explaining how why it makes more sense for the thousand people that live in the community. I have looked at all the stats and research, and this is what works like that's, you're playing for experience and knowledge and like all this stuff. Yeah. And Vicky says that she did two small articles for a local paper that took, I took radically different amounts of time in part because of my own life. But charging hourly in the law for the long one would have been padding. Yes, exactly. Like we also don't want to make it a weird thing where like you have to get in a conversation with someone about like, are you padding hours?

Like, are you trying to make more money? Why did you send me this invoice? No, it costs this much. This is why it costs this much. I've been around the block or like this video is for newbies, but this is a very important thing that you should know as a newbie, as you get a clip and experience, raise your rates. Even if you don't have anything right now, and you feel nervous about charging top rates. That's okay. Charge what you charge right now, even if it's the bottom of the barrel stuff like that checkout. Here's another link if you don't have it yet, check out my pricing guide. So you go to Mandy ellis.com/pricing guide. And that will give you a free pricing information. So check that out, but oh, she's had long time, not long art. Oh, okay. Yeah. So, oh, and Tommy put the link to the video.

You found the video on YouTube. You put the link in there, but we're also going to put it in the comments at the bottom so that we'll put it in the description. We'll put the link in the description so you can see it. It is like the best, like it, it is a very good explanation, not just of why you should charge value prices and why you should charge for experience and knowledge and all that good stuff. But it is the, it is exactly the like gap and CA basically the chasm, right? The chasm between clients who want you to charge hourly. And you saying like that doesn't make sense. And then not understanding why hourly doesn't make sense. This video brings that together. And like, I just want to send it to everybody. And I might, I might put a link in like my next weekly email, after the course closes on October 7th, I might put it in there because it is the perfect thing where you're like, you need to figure out where you're going here.

Like your logo is right. He's talking about logo design, which represents their business. And they're quibbling about how many hours it takes. This thing is going to represent their business. They're any, use it in everything, marketing, internal documentation getting people to for brand awareness like that logo is, you know, like it's why we know what oh, Vicky says get the free pricing guide. Thank you, Vicky. Yeah, I've gotten a lot of positives of other free pricing guide and I update it. So whenever I update the free pricing guide, I'm constantly asking people for rate info. So whenever I update it, I send it out and say, Hey, this is updated. I forgot where I was going. Oh yeah. So like, we know the logos for Nike, or we know the logo for Starbucks, or we know we know the logo of our favorite sports team, or we know like we know all these logos and if you're sitting there and being like, well, instead of the logo, the logo should be $150 an hour.

Like you're using it forever. Like the value of that logo to your business, like is way more than $18,000. Like that's what he's talking about in the video, Christo is way more than $18,000. Right? That's that to me is just that's why, why are we nickel and diming and doing this weird stuff. We are, we are business owners. We are doing good quality work and we're giving them stuff that lives for a long time content lives on it does good content quality content lives for a long time. So that costs money. So as a as a freelance writer, when you're starting out, use all these tips to charge pro rates, but also remember like, I think per projects, the way to go, I think hourlies sinking the ship. I just don't think that's a good, okay. Hourly is good for like little things like editing.

I think editing in it being hourly is a standard, like people charge hourly for editing, which is why I don't normally recommend people do editing. Cause it's not, you can't pay your bills with it. Like, yeah. I'm sure it could be a fun side thing. It could be your icing, but it's not your cake. Oh, Diane says that she got here from the price myth. Diane, Diane, don't you be? Underquoting Diane. Don't make me come find you. Diane. Listen to me. You need to charge at least the minimums on that pricing guide. Okay. Promise me that you will charge the minimums at least on that pricing guide. All right. People, I think we're good for today. What a little long, but thank you for staying in there. If you thought this video was helpful, give it a thumbs up. If you feel like you want to subscribe for more info about how to build that high income freelance writing business subscribe below.

Last thing I'm going to say is my course is open my courses open for enrollment right now, freelance writer, wealth lab. You can go to [inaudible] dot com slash enroll to check it out. It's open until October 7th. It will close until Q2 of next year. And it will. So like it'll, you can't enroll until April or may of 2022. So this is a time in my mind, I guess that this is the time to set everything up. So next year can be your best, most highest earning year as a freelance writer. Cool. well Diane says she doubled more than her original guests. Okay. Well at least go to the minnows, Diane. And then Vicky says editing can be per word, but then you have to read over. Yeah. So even if it's per word, I mean, you're rereading it so many times that I feel like the per word you're like not getting paid well. Cool. All right. Thank you so much for showing up. We go live all I, well, we know wheat because we are here. We're all here. Good job guys. You did great today. We go live every Friday at noon central time and you can go to .

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