Winning a job in the freelance world often comes down to who is the more credible and more professional candidate.

It’s a sad fact, but many freelancers are inconsistent with their customer service and underwhelming with the quality of their work. In the several years that I’ve worked with freelancers, I’ve seen both unbelievably good work and unbelievably bad (as I’m sure most of you have as well).

When it comes down to the wire, your potential clients are trying to figure out which category you fall into: the good or the bad.

So how can you show that you’re an honest and hard-working freelancer? A lot of the time it’s the little things that count the most.
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Do you break into a sweat at the thought of raising your rates and having to tell loyal clients that you’re going to have to start charging them more?

Is your biggest fear that all your clients will walk away if you add even a tiny increase to your current fees?

As the new year is approaching, it’s a key time to get your business in order, focus on your strategy and ensure your business will not only be here this time next year, it will be thriving. Of course, earning the money you deserve for the value you add to your clients is a big part of that and many freelancers often don’t charge nearly enough.

One of the most common questions I get asked when coaching clients is “How can I raise my rates without losing any clients?”

So far, none of my clients have lost any of theirs once they’ve broached the subject of their increased fees and many, much to their pleasant surprise, have been met with the same response – “I’m surprised you haven’t done this sooner”. Continue Reading

NB. Want a job with SEOMoz? Check out their job ad on FSw jobs!

Image from iStockPhoto

I love discussing how much freelancers should and do charge, so when I came across a post at my favourite SEO blog – SEOMoz – on how much various SEO consultants charge I thought it was worth a link. Especially because believe it or not, SEO consultants go right up to a staggering $1000 p/hr – no that wasn’t a typo, I said one thousand with three zeros!

Specifically according to the site SEO experts charging on an hourly basis fall like this:

The simplest way to price a project is to charge by the hour. Rates in SEO vary with the lowest, entry level folks around $40-50, mid-tier consultants around $100-$200 and high-demand firms & people from $300-500. SEOmoz is obviously actively trying to limit our clients by going way outside the norm and charging $1000 / hour.

Aside from charging by the hour, the post also goes on to explain other methods of charging like:

• Pay for Traffic
• Pay for Rankings
• Monthly Retainer
• Modified Profit Sharing
• Standard Profit Sharing
• Contract Services
• Project-Based Consulting

The author – Rand Fishkin – also describes what projects tend to go for. If you’re a freelance SEO I highly recommend giving it a read.

Part guesswork, part experience, part number crunching – how ever you look at it, determining your price is a difficult task. Here are nine factors to take into consideration when pricing your services: Continue Reading

One of the most important things to take into account when calculating your hourly rate are the plain old numbers of hours, costs and profits. And to help you do this, we’ve built a simple calculator tool to play with. It takes about 5-20 minutes to complete depending on how much attention you give each calculation and is a useful tool for working out a starting point to base your rate on.

Remember your hourly rate should always take into account factors like market demand, industry standards, skill level and experience – things that unfortunately we can’t put into a calculator!

Code by Errumm
All the code in the calculator was very kindly donated by Lewis Barclay of Errumm Web Consulting and Development – a UK based freelancer who provides ASP.Net (C#), SQL Server 2005, Javascript, XML, AJAX development. On behalf of all our readers thanks Lewis!

Finding that pricing sweet spot where you make a great income without scaring clients away is one of the most asked about issues here on FreelanceSwitch. Today for your amusement, here are ten signs you might have gone the other way are charging waaay too little…

This article has been translated into Spanish by Diana at Artegami. Thanks Diana!

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By Mathias Meyer

Image from iStockPhoto

Work isn’t free. Well, for the most part. It should be common sense that if you do work for a client, eventually you’ll get paid for it. No matter how much it is in the end, it is often a question of how you charge your client, or on what basis you do it.

There’s a lot of dispute about what’s the right way to charge, and doing it wrong can lead to unwanted situations between you and your clients. In this article I’m going into the most common ways to charge and how to make them work successfully for you.

Getting Paid By The Hour

This should be a no-brainer. You work a certain amount of time and get paid for the time spent working. This usually means keeping a time-sheet and billing your client the result of (hours x hourly rate).

It clearly has advantages. You get paid for what you’re actually doing in terms of time spent on a specific project. This kind of charging surely is in favor of you, the freelancer, since you also get paid for those extra hours you put in.

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by contributor Scott Wills

(Note that any figures quoted in this article are purely for demonstrative purposes, you must consider your industry, country, expertise and other circumstances to determine a rate for your work)

Image from iStockPhoto

Price your services too high, and you lose the gig. Price yourself too low, and you wind up feeling resentful about the project, which in turn may ultimately culminate in an inferior result. So what then is the best way to price a freelance project, win the contract, and make both you and your client happy?

Your Break-even Baseline

To begin, you have to establish your hourly baseline. What is the minimum amount of money you need to charge as your hourly fee? What is the minimum amount of money you need to cover your overheads without making a profit? This, fellow freelancer, is your break-even baseline. Once you establish a baseline and start to understand that earning anything less than this equals a bad, unprofitable business, it will make it a lot easier to determine how much profit you then want to make. In turn, this will ensure financial viability for your ventures, and can help price your projects more competitively in the current market.

Above all else, establishing a baseline is about being honest with yourself. If you are unrealistic about how much to charge a client, you are only fooling yourself and in the long run you’ll probably get hurt doing it.

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Figuring out how much to charge is one of the hardest parts of freelancing.

Over the years I have given much thought to how to price jobs and I’m sure its a topic we’ll be discussing aplenty here on FreelanceSwitch. Today I thought I’d write out how I go about costing a job.

The first point of call when deciding on charges should always be how long it will take you to actually complete the job. If there are extra costs like printing, web hosting, outsourcing an illustration and so on, then you should also factor in how much it will cost you to have these done.

When a new job comes in I break it up into components and then estimate the time it will take to complete each one. I then multiply my hourly rate by that number of hours to get a costing for the job. When I first started out I would break down the job to the nth degree so that the components were really atomic tasks which I could estimate easily. With experience though you get better at estimating without needing to do that. Continue Reading