Everyone only has so much time.
For the freelancers: hourly pricing has a roof.
You need to build some kind of a passive income model because you can't create more time.
How much do you want to earn? Be real.
How can you get there in a timeframe of 3 years?
I'm a freelancer and earn hourly. I can earn quite a lot, much more than the average job can pay me. To earn more I can increase my hourly rate, but this only gets you so far. The highest paid freelancers are super experts and do really specific work. But there's never a guarantee they can work a lot of hours for example.
There are different approaches I'm looking at:
- Sell a digital product: ebook, video tutorials, templates, etc
- Sell value: help businesses increase their value and charge a percentage
I haven't made up my mind about what I want to do, but I know I need to learn new skills such as sales, persuasion, copywriting, (social media) marketing. I've already started last year and notice my interests in this is growing.
Another is talking with clients in a different way. Partly persuasion, partly analysing.
Your goal is to discover the desired future state of his/her business. This is the driver of price. You talk about their business and find out what problem(s) they have. Define the problems clearly, so you can create goals clearly. You need to have a context in order to find out what it is, what they want. Most businesses don't just need a new website, but they actually need help selling products on the internet. This could be a new website of course, but it could be they don't know how to brand themselves, how to write about themselves or anything else.
Learn what their goals are and define together what they want to achieve. Do they want to grow their business with 200% by the end of the year? Sure. Now calculate: they sell 2 products of $3,500 per month. Which is $7,000 per month and $84,000 a year. They want to double this, that's another $84k. What do you think they would pay you to help you get them there? Surely a lot more than an hourly wage could pull in.
My first thought: I can't promise someone they will make $84k a year extra, that's ridiculous?? right? It is. But it's not this promise you will fulfil, it's them realising the potential you can supply. I believe this is more of an emotional trigger and way to help others. You create value, not a website.
You can charge them for example 20% of the value you believe you can create. That's a $16.800 from the example.
@flowen check out their interviews with Jonathan Stark and subscribe to his newsletter — it's a goldmine of value-based pricing information!
@zyumbik awesome I'll check it out! thanks for the tips
@flowen TheFutur rocks! 🔥
@flowen As kinda of freelancer myself, this really resonated. Going up the value chain is a great way to increase earnings, though I'm realising even that has a cap, because I'm was ultimately selling my time, and I became the bottleneck to more earnings. I'd also been thinking a lot about scaling, while maintaining a solo setup. One of the tactics that I'd been trying is to build up adjacent horizontal offerings around my core service, because after serving my clients for a while I saw they had other design needs as well. Another tactic is using by-products of the consultancy and re-purposing it as a product, e.g. tools/templates created for the project. This worked for me, though I recognise that YMMV. Would love to see you continuing to write about this! :)
@jasonleow thanks Jason! Exactly, I want to transfer to a model where I don't sell my time. Why are you kind of a freelancer? I'm curious to what you do, let's talk a bit on telegram if ur on there. @flowen is mine
@flowen messaged you!