It’s one of the most commonly asked questions I get from writers: What should I charge?

It’s hard to know, isn’t it? There isn’t one universal rate card freelance writers work from. Fair pay is determined by a million factors — how bad you need the gig, how easy it sounds and how pleasant the people are, how much you like the topic, how tight the deadlines are…and so on.

But lately, I’ve been hearing about one issue in particular that is stopping a lot of writers from earning what they truly deserve.

I’ve dubbed this problem Writer Client Crush Syndrome.

In other words, you fall in love with your client — before you find out what they might be willing to pay you.

The matchup between a writer and a client is a whole lot like dating. Ever get a mad crush on a guy (or girl) on the first email or phone call you had, before you really knew much about them?

Apply that to freelance writing, and you get Writer Client Crush Syndrome.

As in relationships, client love can strike when you least expect it.

It begins when you hear from a prospect

You love that they responded to your query or the resume you sent to their ad. You’re excited that you got an interview with them.

When you learn about the company, you fall hard for their story.

The owner is battling cancer. Their cause is amazing and wonderful and changes lives for the better. Their products are innovative and unique. The company is in an industry where you have great expertise. You’ve been wanting to break into social-media marketing and they’re going to let you run a campaign.

You know nothing about what your working relationship would be like yet. Maybe you’ll be gang-edited by a team of four, or have to pull night shifts to meet their deadline.

But you’ve got stars in your eyes, and you’re already fantasizing about how great it would be to add this client to your list. You’re imagining their clips in your portfolio already.

You haven’t taken the time to reality-check what you’re hearing with other writers you know. You don’t have a sense of what fair pay would even be for this gig.

You’ve jumped straight to the end of the love story and you’re imagining yourself already married to this client and their work.

The problem?

You’re a pushover when it comes to pay

You’ve let the initial-meet phase drag on too long, fallen in love, and now you’re a sucker for whatever offer they make.

They’ve got you right where they want you.

When they start telling you they’d like you to work for $9 an hour, the rationalizing begins. This is the equivalent of “Maybe he’ll call” after the first date.

Maybe they’ll offer me more work later, and I can raise my rates. It’s a foot in the door. It’s an opportunity.

The next thing you know, a big block of your time is being taken up by someone paying you peanuts. You’ve lost critical time you need for marketing to good-paying prospects, and you have a client that doesn’t respect you (in the morning or any other time) and doesn’t pay you professional rates.

Often, these dysfunctional, underpaid writer-client relationships can persist for years. It’s hard to break it off. You’re still not over that first crush you had on them.

How to prevent Writer Client Crush Syndrome

How can you avoid falling victim to WCCS?

Keep your heart in your chest when you first get a nibble from a prospect.

You want initial chats or meetings to be short, gather needed details about the project, and lead quickly to a question such as, “What’s your budget for this project?”

Before you have a chance to fall head-over-heels for a bum client.

I’m on vacation this week. I wrote this back in 2009, when I was answering a lot of online job ads and struggling to keep my income up as the economy tanked.

It created controversy in some quarters, and became a rallying cry for others. I’m sad to see how relevant this topic remains…think it’s time for an encore.

A while back, I had a disturbing phone call with a prospective writing client.

I had responded to several online ads for writing gigs in the legal field, as I am a former legal secretary. Two of them got back to me.

One paid $20-$40 per 400-600-word article. The other, an agency which claims it has more than 200 law-firm clients, paid $15-$30 a blog. This second guy had called on the phone and was clearly serious about hiring, unlike the many flaky email nibbles I get off resumes I send.

After I informed him that I did not work for remotely those rates and hung up…I thought about it a lot. I wish I had kept him on the phone so I could have asked this recruiter some questions.

Questions like, “Are you serious?” and “Is that even legal?”

And “Do you actually find qualified people willing to write legal content at those rates?” and “Don’t you feel ashamed to be offering what will work out to less than the minimum hourly wage (more than $8 here in Washington State) for a very specific writing skill that requires years of experience?”

He let me know his current team was “pretty maxed out” – yeah, I’ll bet. More likely that was code for “It’s really hard to find anyone who can do this work competently at these rates.”

To which I say, good.

I thought a lot about this call because for a tiny moment, just an instant really, I considered taking this gig.

Legal is easy for me…OK, I’d have to work a LOT of hours to make it into anything like a living…if each post took an hour, it would take me all day and night to earn something like my normal hourly rate…but this firm has a lot of clients I could connect with. Maybe I should take this and hope to build the account into some better-paying work.

Then I snapped out of it, and wrote this:

7 Reasons Why I Won’t Write A $15 Blog Post

1. I’d rather quit writing. If that’s all I’m going to make, I’d rather go out on the lawn and play Frisbee with my kids. They’ll only be young once. If I can’t really pay the bills writing, I should pack it in and enjoy life.

2. I won’t be part of the problem. I won’t contribute to the current downward spiral in pay rates by accepting insulting pay. If I accept this kind of work, it reinforces the idea that high-quality content on specialized topics can be obtained from professional writers at one-tenth or less of what was, until recently, market rates. I refuse to encourage this trend.

3. Low paying work begets more low-paying work. Say I worked for this legal content sweatshop, and managed to convince one of their clients to work for me directly. Even if the connection helped me land other clients and I cut out the middleman, I’m doubtful the wages would be appropriate. Any client I got through my association with this low-payer would likely also want to pay me joke wages. Once customers have the impression you’re cheap, it’s hard to convince them you’re not.

4. I’d rather get a day job. At those rates, I could make more money as an assistant manager at a fast-food place, and work on that novel in my off hours. So if it comes to it, I’ll do something else to pay the bills. My creativity will be fairly compensated, or I’ll earn money another way. I type fast – I have made a living as a secretary in the past, and could again.

5. I want to take a stand. I believe we’re at a turning point in the world of online content that requires accomplished professional writers to take a moral stand. Thousands of scam operators have flooded into the marketplace, hoping to get writers to write for peanuts and then monetize that content, or sell their whole Web site to someone else and make a killing – all off our backs. What they’re doing is morally wrong. I want to resist this trend. Accepting low-pay assignments may pay a few bills in the short term – emphasis on a few – but in the long term it will foster more exploitation. That’s why, for the sake of our vocation’s future, it’s important to me to refuse this work.

6. I have good-paying clients. Contrary to what you may have heard, there are still magazines and corporate accounts out there that understand that writers who freelance need to make an appropriate wage, or they’ll soon leave the vocation. Maybe there are fewer good-paying markets, but I know they still exist. That knowledge makes it easier to turn down slave-wage gigs.

7. Market forces will raise rates in time. As the economy improves, I believe the pool of good freelancers willing to deliver sophisticated, quality content for pennies is going to shrink dramatically as many find new jobs. The number of quickie-post assignments for writers who speak English as a second language is shrinking rapidly, thanks to the Google update. I’m expecting rates will naturally be driven back up as it becomes harder to find qualified writing help. The fact that Demand Studios now offers some of its writers health care is a sign that we’ve hit the saturation point. These sweatshops are struggling to attract the talent they need, so their compensation will have to rise.

I believe this is a momentary market glitch in our industry that’s flourished due to the downturn. Meanwhile, people are not going to stop reading quality publications, and companies will still need to communicate clearly with their customers in the future. The economy will recover, many content-mill writers will probably get day jobs again, and rates will rise.

If you’re with me that sweatshop wages are wrong, make a commitment to yourself not take any assignment that pays less than $50.

Why $50? That’s what I got paid per article when I first got into freelance writing in the early 1990s. Rates shouldn’t be lower now, accounting for inflation. So I think that’s a good cutoff.

I’d love to see writers organize around this issue. Who knows? Maybe Lance Armstrong and his Livestrong site or Amazon.com (have you seen their mill, Amazon Mechanical Turk?) would improve their pay rather than face public embarrassment over their rates.

But in any case,  not taking super-low paying gigs leaves you more time for marketing your writing and finding fair wages.

I’ve written frequently about the need for freelance writers to set a goal of having a high hourly rate. I’ve written about how to raise your rates. I’ve talked about how you can earn more bidding per-project than per-hour.

Today, I’m going to take the rate discussion to another plane and talk about daily rates. That’s the rate you want to earn per work day in order to bring in the amount you want to make in a year.

Why is it important for you to know your daily rate? Several reasons:

1) Quick tracking mechanism. If you know your daily rate, at the end of each day you can evaluate how you did. First, look at what you billed. If you didn’t actually bill any clients that day, review how much work you put in on ongoing projects. For instance, if you estimate you’ll work parts of 10 days on a $1,000 project, attribute $100 of earning on that project for today.

Now add up the total estimated earnings for the day. Does it add up to the daily rate you want? If not, the time to take action to find better-paying clients is now — not at the end of the year, when you do your taxes and are confronted in black-and-white with the reality that you aren’t meeting your earning goals.

2) Good weekly yardstick. Once you have a daily rate, it’s easier to track how you’re doing each week and each month. I find these calculations help me schedule deadlines throughout the month so I have revenue in each week, instead of having a lump of work all stacked up at the end of the month, which leads to late nights and stress as I frantically try to keep projects from hanging over into the following month (thereby screwing up my revenue projections for that month!).

3) Another way to view earnings besides hourly rates. While I’ve often said freelance writers need to aim to make $100 an hour, not all your work may be at your goal rate. Or you won’t be fully booked every day.  A daily rate can give you a better sense of whether you’re charging enough based on other factors including how busy you are, how many hours per day you’re willing to work, and how long it takes you to complete projects.

4) Quick quote ability for exclusive projects. Every now and then, a client may want to lock down all your time for a project. They want you to go cover a trade show for several days. Or they want you to drop everything and work on a rush project for them for a week or two solid. Maybe they need someone to write in-house for a month at their office. Or they’d like you to spend two months ghostwriting their e-book.

How do you know what to charge?

If you know your daily rate, you know how much revenue you would lose by being locked down on an exclusive project, unable to work your usual clients. Without a daily rate, you’re just guessing whether it’s worth it to you financially to take the assignment, so it’s easy to end up shortchanged.

How to figure your daily rate

Now that you know why you should care about your daily rate, let’s figure it up. Say your goal is to earn $100,000 from freelance writing this year. (Think big!)

There are 365 days in the year, but 104 of those days are weekends. There are also roughly 10 holidays a year where it’s virtually impossible to get much work done — Christmas, New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, etc. Family members will likely expect you to shut off the devices and pay attention to them on these occasions.

Let’s hope you’re not working weekends or major holidays, and that you also plan to take at least two weeks off a year (which you certainly should). That leaves around 240 real, viable work days in the year.

Divide $100,000 by 240 and you get roughly $417 a day. That’s your daily rate. Want to earn $50,000 a year? That’s around $209 per working day.

Have you calculated your daily rate? Ever needed to use it for client quotes?  Leave a comment and let us know whether you think it’s useful to know your daily rate, or whether hourly rates are more important.

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Photo via Flickr user bigburpsx3

I recently did my half-year analysis of my writing business. Earnings are looking good for ’10, and one reason is that over the past year or so, I have acquired some new technical skills. Those skills, combined with my writing portfolio, have led to some great-paying online writing opportunities. I think this knowledge really made the difference in getting me fully booked with lucrative writing jobs.

Now, those of you who are longtime readers of my blog know that I am not a naturally tech-inclined person. Tech malfunctions make me cry. I pay a Webmaster to create my Web sites.

So believe me when I say that all of these tech tools are easy to use. I didn’t spend more than 10 minutes or so learning to use any one of them.

In this Internet age, having some technical ability is a great way to set yourself apart as a writer. It’s a value-add — something you can offer clients that saves them money on the back end, so it supports your earning a higher rate.

Here’s a look at the tech tools I think writers should be getting to know if they want to position themselves for higher earnings. Right now, I’m finding companies are fairly open to training people up a little on these, if you have at least a rudimentary knowledge of the tools already. A year or two from now, I think knowledge of these tools may well be required to get many better-paying online writing gigs.

1. Basic HTML coding. If you don’t know how to code a link (that’s <a href=http://www.yourwebsite.com> words you want to enliven </a> except without the spaces), well, that’s how you do it right there. Know how to code to bold, underline and italicize words. That’s about all I’ve needed to know, but you can learn more about html at the handy free site W3Schools. In many platforms you don’t need to know HTML anymore, but it’s useful for adding links in blog comments, so great for those who are pitching writing packaged with social media marketing.

2. A blog program. I was thrown into this arena on Movable Type, which is pretty clunky, but have since learned Blogger, WordPress and most recently Joomla. Blogging programs are very easy and intuitive to use, and all the popular programs are quite similar to each other, so learn one, and you pretty much get the drift. I acquired this skill just in time to use it on my major gig blogging for BNET (part of CBS!). I’m not sure I could have gotten the tryout there if I hadn’t been able to say, “Yeah, I’ve used WordPress before.” I’d used it for about two weeks, and still didn’t know a lot of the features…but they didn’t need to know that. Blogging basics you need include how to enliven links, schedule posts, and add photos.

3. How to add free photos to blogs. In June, I signed a big ghost-blogging and Web content client who hired me an hour after I sent my resume, and deposited a $300 up-front payment directly into my bank account before the end of the day. Why? I was able to solve a big problem he had — this marketing-agency owner was way behind in blogs for his clients. When I told him I could write posts directly on his clients’ Joomla blogs and have them ready to post, complete with photos, he was sold. He’s paying me $100 a blog, a rate he let me know he had not paid previously. The technical skill made the difference and supported my rate. I know I should know how to add videos too, but so far that has kind of eluded me…still working on it.

There are several sites where you can get free photos to use — I like Flickr Creative Commons, which I’ve used for this post you’re reading right now. It’s easy to add them to a post two ways: either right-click on “Save image to the desktop” or “Copy image address.” Then click whatever the ‘add media’ icon is in the blog program and fill out the little menu to select and download the .jpg file off your desktop, or put the image URL directly into the address line. Ta-da! An illustration to enliven your post.

4. Virtual team software. Right now, I get my BNET blog ideas approved in a virtual newsroom on Campfire, where we all crack wise, support each others’ efforts, and stay off email for all our BNET doings. I also work in a virtual team for that ghost-blogging client above on Basecamp, posting and updating files and getting information about my projects. These virtual-team platforms are so easy it doesn’t take five minutes to learn how to use them. They’re only a half-step above the Yahoo! Groups or BigTent forums you may be using in your personal life. If a prospect asks if you know about them, just nod your head.

What tech tools are you using to earn more with your writing? Have I left any good ones out? Leave a comment and let me know.

Photo via Flickr user Andrew Abogado

There’s a lot of discussion online about writers’ rates. What’s the best way to bid a project — by the word? By the hour? By the project?

They all have their uses, especially since some publications and businesses are kind of in the habit of using one or the other of these methods for deciding what they’ll pay.

But which is the best way to price jobs? To my mind, it’s by the hour.

Time is your most precious resource. You only have so many work hours in the year, so you need to make as much per hour as you can. Which leads me to my one important rule of pricing jobs:

No matter how you price the job, track your hours and figure out your hourly rate. Because if you don’t know your hourly rate, how can you work on raising it? How can you compare clients and know which to keep and which to drop?

Now, if you’re working for an ongoing copywriting client, I personally believe bidding by the project is best. Your client is happy because they know exactly what they’re going to pay, and you can budget for the amount you will earn.

The trick is creating a flat fee for that project that will give you the hourly rate you want.

You can only do that by getting some experience with how long it takes you to do things. Obviously, this setup rewards efficiency. If you’re unusually fast, you can bid on a par with other writers, but end up with a better hourly rate, and earn more over the course of the year.

Before the downturn, I thought high per-article fees were the answer to maximizing earnings. But I’ve learned that’s not always true. When I was scrambling around for a few new clients in late ’08/early ’09, I got an offer from an old editor friend to write some quick articles for $100 apiece, just based on my knowledge of business topics, supplemented with a little online research. (Hey, it’s above my $50 an assignment limit, people!)

At first I was appalled. Prior to this time period, about the very lowest article rate I took was $300. Then I thought what the heck, and gave them a try.

I found I could write them in an hour to 90 minutes. A little quick math and hmmm…that’s $70-$100 an hour. Not too shabby. I’ve kept this work as good occasional filler projects — a quick scan of my bills for this year shows I picked up $1,700 this way so far in ’10, in maybe 20-22 hours. So the lesson is: Any work that earns a high hourly rate is good writing work.

Of course, getting a client where they’ll let you simply bill for however many hours you’re spending on their projects each month is the ideal. Then you know you’re getting paid for every hour you work. I had a client like that at $95 an hour for more than a year, sending me work every month. I think right now, those gigs are harder to come by.

But billing hourly protects you against the evil that is scope creep — the situation where you bid a flat project fee, but then the parameters of the project keep growing, as does your time spent. Been lots of discussion of how to handle this sticky problem on LinkedIn recently.

Most publications tend to assign a price per word or give a flat article price. In which case, you may need to work on your efficiency to make sure your rate stays as good as possible.

But you can always ask for more money — I’ve gotten companies to add $50-$200 to an article assignment or more if they ended up wanting sidebars, or a longer length, or I knew they were a slow payer. More about screwing up your courage to ask for more pay over at my latest post on WM Freelance Writers Community.

What do you prefer — billing by the project, the hour or the word? Leave a comment and let me know. Also, have you asked for more pay lately? If so share your strategy!

Photo via Flickr user zoutedrop

It’s been a long time coming…nearly two years. But last week, it happened.

A prospect called to see if I could do some writing work for them. I took a deep breath, and then I uttered three magical words that unlock the key to making more money as a freelance writer.

Do you know what those words are?

“I’m fully booked.”

That’s right. At the moment, I am not spending time sifting through online job ads, obsessively trying to make new LinkedIn connections, or beating the street at networking events. I only had time to blog once for MALW last week, because I’m so busy. I have all the work I can handle, nearly all of it at very nice rates. I’m really overbooked, but I’m  hoping I can somehow figure out how to make the workload manageable again in July, once a couple of big new clients ramp up and get going.

It took a heck of a lot of marketing to get to this point, and later this week, I’ll tell you about what worked for me in marketing my freelance writing business. But for now, let’s return to the three magical words, and why they’re so important and magical.

What happens to your business when you’re fully booked?

You relax. The anxiety of starting each month with open time still on the planner is gone. I’m now starting each month with enough work booked to be confident I can pay my bills, and even take my family out for an occasional meal. Being more relaxed makes you more effective and creative, so your work gets done faster, allowing you to make more.

You gain confidence. It’s an ego-booster to realize you are in demand.

You get picky. In the depths of the recession, I took a lot of crazy assignments. One-off projects. Small-business clients with not much money. Quickie articles that paid $100. Stuff I never would have considered in 2007. Now, that’s over. If someone doesn’t fit my image of an ideal client, I can pass.

You start dropping clients. Now you can look at your client list and identify your biggest problem child — you know, the client that pays in over 90 days, is a whiner, never satisfied, wants a committee to edit your work, won’t return your emails for two days, or simply doesn’t pay enough. The next good client that comes down the pike, it’s time to swap that loser out. Repeat this process until you have only top-drawer publications or companies on your roster.

You become more valuable. When you’re fully booked, it’s like smoke signals go up. You start to attract great new clients. When you tell some prospects you can’t take them on because you’re too busy, they are impressed. You must be a good writer! They want to hire you even more. Sometimes, they offer you more money in hopes of getting you to kick someone else off your schedule to make room for their assignment. Sometimes, you say yes.

Your rate starts to rise. Besides all the reasons already stated above, your rate starts to go up when you’re fully booked because you don’t have to spend as many hours marketing (but don’t stop!). You have more productive, billable hours, so that translates to more income.

Are you fully booked? If not, maybe you want to take a look at my mentoring page and think about whether you could use a boost to get your freelance writing career moving forward. There’s a lot of work out there now — the economy is thawing, new magazines are starting, companies are ramping up marketing budgets, and now’s a great time to make new connections and find  new clients.

Photo via Flickr user Bohman

As promised, I have one more question to answer this week from MALW reader Gina, who asked earlier about niche blogging vs general blogging. Today, we discuss SEO and high-paid writing. Her question:

Carol, I’m curious what you think of SEO writing. There are many SEO companies that charge big dollars to provide readable SEO articles and content to clients. How many upscale online writers do or don’t write with keywords in mind? I know search engines are becoming less keyword driven, but they are still a reality. Just wondering what your thoughts are on copywriters and SEO.

Let’s start by saying there’s SEO writing, and then there’s “SEO writing,” as in all the ads you see that are looking for an “SEO writer.” In my experience, this latter title in an ad usually means “I’m looking for someone who will quickly cobble together something from a few other similar topic pages they find online and use a lot of key words to help our rankings. We don’t care if the writing’s very good.” A threat that all content will be run through Copyscape to make sure you’re not plagiarizing is the hallmark of this genre.

And the pay is crap. And established, professional copywriters have names for what this is — names like “retyping” and “article spinning.” When you say it’s “readable,” in my experience that doesn’t mean it’s usually something anyone would ever actually want to read. These are articles created primarily for search engines to read. Whether people ever read them seems to be a sort of secondary consideration.

I know what you want to tell me, Gina — you’re different and special. Your SEO writing is great copy. If so…you’re being ripped off and underpaid for what you’re delivering. Stop writing for SEO houses if you want to earn more.

Well-paid copywriters sell themselves as capable of delivering knockout information in compelling ways, so that customers of their client Web sites will be excited by what they offer, come back often, and buy products and services. These articles are written for people first, and search engines second. That’s the difference. Not everybody can write something people want to read…the pool of possible writers is smaller…and pay is better.

Do top-flight copywriters care about SEO and use keywords in online content they create? Absolutely. We try to work them into our headlines and first paragraphs, for sure. But we’re not looking to use them at some crazy ratio where they’re every third word of an article. I’m often given keywords to use by clients. The key word there is “use,” not overuse. As you note, search engines are getting smarter about keyword-dense text. Keyword density isn’t most important to most good-paying clients — their top priority is to have mind-blowingly helpful information on their site and compelling sales materials that establish them as the authority in their sector and helps them sell.

As far as the “many SEO companies that charge big dollars,” I’m not sure that’s a reality. It’s a very cutthroat industry and I think their markup isn’t that different from that of any other type of copywriting agency or middleman. Stop worrying about how much profit SEO companies are making off you, and find your own clients to earn well.

Photo via Flickr user smemon87

Make a Living Writing blog reader Susan Glenn emailed me a while back to ask for more information on how to convince corporate clients to pay higher rates for your services.

Source: borman818

“Tips about how writers can articulate their worth would be very interesting,” she wrote. “Not what does the writer NEED, but what is professional writing WORTH to the client — especially relative to other professional services they retain.”

Great question…so today I’ll share a bit of the speech I give prospective clients who ask me about rates. One of the things I’ll frequently say early on goes something like this:

“If you’re having a bidding contest to find the lowest price, I’d like to tell you right now I’m going to lose. I will not be your lowest bidder, and I don’t generally work with companies that are only concerned with how little they can pay for writing.

“I work with business owners seeking exceptionally talented writers who can help establish them as the pre-eminent thought leaders in their sector. They need to communicate in a sophisticated, compelling way with their target audience.

“That’s what I will deliver for you — authoritative content that communicates that you are the most knowledgeable source for information in your industry. This will attract quality clients, build Web traffic, and will pave the way for you to charge more for what you do.”

Of course, when presented with it that way, most of my prospects rush to say, “Oh, that’s me! I understand that I need to be the authority. That’s just what we need to do.” And discussions of how little they can get me to work for tend to evaporate.

They get it immediately — I’ve helped them put their finger on what it is they’re really in the market for. They need content so compelling and strong that it will enhance their brand and company reputation, and bring them more business. Not every writer can give them that — but I can.

Once you’ve framed it that way, if they balk at a rate, I tend to point out that paying, say, $1,500 for a custom-written article they can get republished in newspapers, use on their site, hand out as fliers, email to their prospect list, expand into a white paper, and otherwise use FOREVER to promote their business and drive Web traffic at no additional charge is the marketing bargain of the century.

Compare it to the cost of placing a single decent-sized print ad! To doing one radio spot, or putting up one billboard! The reality is that having strongly written information about your company is a real deal, even at prime rates.

I find most writers don’t think about their services through the client’s eyes. Writing is usually part of companies’ marketing budget — and in that context, it’s very affordable compared with many other forms of marketing spend.

So ask for a great rate, and explain why you’ll be worth it. You’ll be surprised how often you find yourself with a wonderful new client who’s happy to have you, and willing to pay you what you deserve.

For more about negotiating rates, see my post for the week on WM Freelance Writing Community - How I Got Paid $300 A Blog.