Is there an alternative to raising your prices?ĭespite everything I’ve said above, for some people there is a way to avoid raising your prices – greater efficiency. That means your clients are getting more value from you, so if you don’t increase your prices at some point, you’re probably selling yourself short. What’s more if you invest in your skills through training, reading industry blogs or going to conferences, you’ll probably be getting better at what you do all the time. Unless you can be sure that none of your bills and expenses will be going up in the next year, you need some sort of rate increase just to stand still. If you need to prove yourself, cheap busy market places offer a great opportunity for you to over-deliver and build a great reputation, which you can then take with you into better-paid opportunities. If you price it too low at the start, it isn’t fair to them if you need to hike your prices by 20% a year later. Long story short, if a route to market is one you want to develop over time, price on the high side, unless you’re happy to work on those rates for a very long time. You’re now much better at what you do and should be charging more but you don’t want to rock the boat so you don’t ask for an increase. This is a match made in heaven, right? You really want to work with them so you set your rates very keenly, but fast-forward a few months and they’ve fed you lots more work and you’ve taken it on at the same rate. Let’s say you do SEO on their clients’ websites because they don’t have any in-house SEO expertise. Now let’s imagine you’re a freelancer and you start working with a local marketing agency. Then you’ll have a portfolio and you’ll be ready for better work at better rates. That criticism is warranted, but do you know what’s great about these sites? You can build a portfolio and a reputation and then just drop them. You’ve probably heard people dismiss the likes of UpWork and Fiverr because they involve offering cheap work to people with tiny budgets. Each route to market has its own pricing implications. Some work well in the short-term to get you established, whereas others provide good quality work and relationships that you’ll want to build for the future. There are many ways to find work when you start out. Does that feel a little presumptuous? If you feel that way it’s perfectly natural, but many freelancers – myself included – later reach a point where they wish they’d given more thought to their pricing strategy at the very start. However, it’s good to take a little time out and think about your pricing strategy for the first 12 months and beyond. That could mean you rarely think further ahead than next week because you just want to get clients on board first. If you’re at the start of your new lifestyle you’re probably experiencing the buzz, excitement and slight panic of working for yourself. Just starting out? Now is the time to future-proof your pricing
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