How much should you charge for your freelancing?
How a horse named Sunshine led me to up my rates, find great clients, and fall in love with my freelancing business.
Like many other freelancers I know, I started out not knowing how much my work was worth.
Also, like many other freelancers, I initially went after what I thought was low-hanging fruit — small businesses, especially those who didn’t have a lot of content marketing already. I figured that they were the ones who needed it the most, and that it would be easier to sell myself to smaller clients.
It quickly became obvious that my thinking was faulty. And by faulty, I mean totally wrong.
There’s a reason most small businesses don’t have a robust content marketing program — they don’t have the budget for it. Moreover, because they’ve gotten along without investing in content, they don’t necessarily appreciate its value.
About six months after I started freelancing, I hit a wall. I was exhausted from all the marketing I was doing without seeing results.
I decided to get back to horseback riding as a way to recharge and recenter. I’ve always found that being outside, especially around horses, calmed my mind and allowed me to think clearly.
I found a great stable near me where I could take lessons to get the rust off my riding skills. There, I totally bonded with one of the horses, a chestnut with three white socks by the name of Sunshine.
A private 30-minute riding lesson at that stable was $65. GULP!
I thought about my finances for a long, hard second, and signed up because hanging out with Sunshine was a no-brainer. It was such a thrill to get back into the sport with a good horse who listens and responds. Walking, trotting, cantering, changing diagonals — Sunshine did it all with ease.
Driving home after the first lesson, adrenaline still pumping from the morning’s great ride, a thought hit me:
I want my hourly rate to be at least enough to cover my weekly lesson. That is, I want to earn $65 net per hour. Allowing for taxes and expenses, I need to charge $100/hour for client work to get there.
DOUBLE GULP!
As scary as the idea of charging $100/hour was, the more I thought about it, the more determined I became. Yes, my riding instructor is an accomplished horsewoman with many years of experience — but I’m an accomplished writer with many years of experience in different industries, too! Why shouldn’t I value my work as highly as she does?
That’s when the next truth bomb hit me. She can charge her rate because I’m willing to pay it. She found a market that’s willing to meet her price.
So, if I wanted to charge $100/hour, I had to find a market that was willing to pay that kind of rate. And that market wasn’t the small mom-and-pop businesses I’ve been stalking for all these months.
It took a while for all the other pieces of the puzzle to drop into place for me, but that drive home from the stable was the moment I pivoted and the moment when my business took flight.
Hours and hours of hard thinking and research convinced me that my ideal clients will have to be B-to-B companies with serious content marketing programs that require sophisticated writing (that cannot be done by just about anyone).
After some trial and error, I homed in on midsized and large businesses that sell high-priced, complicated parts used in consumer-facing products. These businesses need writers who can dive into the technology and write about it conversationally. They need to produce case studies, white papers, video scripts, and a whole bunch of other stuff. They want to win industry awards. The work is literally never-ending.
These businesses aren’t extremely online and it took some effort to find the right person to contact and pitch. But it was totally worth it. Their budgets supported the rate I wanted and they had an appreciation for the value of the content I was writing.
I didn’t know it at first, but making more money was just one of the benefits of my pivot. The more intangible benefits are incredibly valuable to me as well. I get to work on interesting projects with highly knowledgeable people who have become not only clients but also friends.
And perhaps the best part? There’s so much less competition up here. While so many freelancers are fighting over $15/hour assignments, there are very few who look up and see the looming mountain of great clients right in front of them.
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I hope this article provides some food for thought to those who’d like to make a better living freelancing.
