How to price my copywriting services

Talking about money is not easy.

Who hasn’t had a lump in their throat or sweaty palms when asking for a raise, agreeing on their salary or sending a quote?

I suspect that if you’re here you already know what I’m talking about. You probably aspire to be a copywriter or are starting to work as a free throw and you have questions about how much to charge for your services.Mastering Facebook Marketing: Strategies, Agencies, and Services

With my first clients I learned through trial and error that in the budget you put more into play than you think. And I mean your income, your reputation and the way the client behaves towards you.

And today I am here to help you answer the million dollar question:

How much do I charge for my copywriting services?

Defining your budget may seem overwhelming right now, but it is necessary if you do not want to undersell your time, your knowledge, or your effort.

In fact, putting the right price on your work will allow you to transform it into a profitable business that you can dedicate yourself to 100%.

Because you can make a living from copywriting, but to do so you have to have a strategy and you have to always present yourself as a professional even if you are just starting out.

So I want you to join me and I’ll tell you the first tip to define your budget today and become a top-level copywriter.

The reasons to get paid as a copywriter

Recognizing the commercial value that copywriting brings to business is essential when it comes to charging for your services, and you have to be the first to be convinced of this when you sit face to face with your clients in a sale.

You have to make sure they understand that copywriting is a key piece to:

✔️awaken the audience’s interest in your product or service,

✔️convey with words how good your brand is, creating trust and differentiating it from the competition,

✔️and generate a strong desire to purchase in your potential customers through the texts they write.

I want you to be clear that your clients will earn money thanks to you and your skills as a copywriter, and this is the cornerstone on which you must stand so that they understand the value of persuasive writing for their business and also perceive it as an investment. essential and not as another expense.

Think about it this way, your potential clients will come to you with different levels of awareness about what copywriting is, even without knowing what your work is about.

This is where you should put on your copywriting suit and polish your sales pitches before meeting with them or committing to a budget.

In this way, you will help these people open their eyes to a problem they have, to the benefits and solutions that you provide them, rather than the price of the service.

Let’s now talk about the second tip to take into account when setting your rates.

You will agree with me that a copy that has not yet written a sales page does not charge the same as one that has already led a couple of launches.

The difference is in the experience

Here it is clearly seen with some information that can help you:

✔️It is considered that an initial copywriter is someone who has between 0 and 5 years of experience,

✔️intermediate to those who are between 5 and 10 years old,

✔️and advanced copywriter to a person with more than 10 years in the sector.

Okay, so you can see the different groups. Likewise, I advise you not to focus on the time factor alone because it is not the most important thing.

I want you to ask yourself the following questions to get an idea about your level of experience and adjust your prices accordingly:

• How many projects have I carried out?
• What level of complexity have they presented?
• For which brands have I worked as a copywriter?
• What type of copy do I have experience in?
• For what sectors or areas have I worked? Do I specialize in one in particular?

The actual time it takes you to write your texts

Now let’s see how to calculate the actual time it takes you to write your textsThat this is a fundamental factor, we both know it.

Copywriting goes beyond the writing stage. It involves researching, creating questionnaires for clients, putting together a calendar of estimated deadlines, coordinating meetings, writing and editing texts, among many other tasks.

The challenge from now on will be to analyze how much time you dedicate to each of these tasks.

Having a rough idea of the deadlines will allow you to calculate the time you will invest in each project, because many times we think “I am going to invest three hours”, but in the end it is not three hours and it is ten or twenty.

You will also have a clearer idea of what budget to spend and how to organize yourself if you are working with several clients at the same time, because there is a chasm between writing a sales page and writing copy for a single social media post.

How to create your own tariff

With this in mind, I want to reveal to you how to create your own tariffbecause this is essential, especially if you don’t have it, you need it now.

You have to find a way to calculate a price per hour that will serve as a reference for creating your budgets from now on, without getting involved every time a new client contacts you.

And that number, for now, has to satisfy you before anyone else.

I want you to be very honest about this figure. Otherwise, you may make some of these mistakes, such as passing very low prices that later do not allow you to make a living from the copy and that generate doubts about the quality of your work, or setting pretentious rates that do not correspond to your experience and that They can leave you in a bad light in front of your clients.

And, furthermore, later, through word of mouth, people only talk about you because of this bad experience.

Therefore, take the time you need and evaluate:

1- How much do I need to bill per month in total to live?

That is, to cover all my fixed expenses and have a remainder for my variable expenses.

2- How much do I want to earn net per month?

Here we are talking about the total amount that you would like to have in your account in that period.

3- How many hours do I want to work per month?

You can take the average work hours in a day and multiply them by the days you will work during that month.

4- How many hours do I dedicate to tasks that are not exclusively copy?

For example, answering queries, creating budgets, publishing on social networks or even having to take the computer in for repair.

Now, calculate your price per hour by doing this calculation:

✔️Your price per hour is equal to the salary you want to earn per month plus your monthly expenses, and all of this divided into the actual hours you work in copy, minus the unproductive hours, that is, in which you perform other tasks.

You can adjust this formula over time depending on the experience you acquire and the result you seek to make a living from this profession.

And let’s go with the last tip. I am sure that you will be interested because it is the question that is most frequently repeated among the students of the Copywriting School and among professional colleagues.

5- Should I charge per hour, per word or per project?

You, what would you say?

My advice Here is the option that will avoid unnecessary friction with your client and focus 100% on your work, and it is charge per project. By this I mean charging for a sales page, for copywriting for an ad, or for SEO copy for blog articles.

To calculate it you will have to multiply the approximate time it will take you to complete this task by your price per hour.

Price x Project= Total Hours x Price/Hour

Believe me, it’s not about the exact time you spend or the length of your texts. These are factors that difficult clients could question, putting your reputation and quality as a professional at stake.

Send a final budget for the project contemplating the texts that you will write for your client, the information that you will need to send you to get started, because without that information you cannot start.

The number of modifications that your budget includes, the agreed delivery times and also the payment methods. Detail all the aspects of the service that you consider, the more complete and clearer it is, the easier it will be to avoid back and forth, I say this from experience. Your client will thank you and you will also save yourself haggling and misunderstandings.

Now, I want to give you a extra tip which I would have liked to hear when I started back in 2013. I know it’s tempting, but please, don’t send a quote right away without collecting all the data to know the project in detail.

I recommend that before sending a quote, you apply a toxic client-proof filter and analyze in detail what that project is like.

✅You can send a form or arrange a meeting to find out what your client is looking for, what problem they need to solve right now and what their expectations are regarding the deadlines, the results and also the prices you manage.

✅Listen to him, let him express himself so that you can collect all the information that allows you to close a figure according to the level of complexity of the project, the time investment that you will have to make and the value that it gives to your business.

✅It will also allow you to detect if this is a good client for you and if you are interested in the proposal or if you prefer to be more selective when choosing your jobs. Please trust in your talent, truly value yourself, if necessary, work on your mentality, whatever you need to earn what you deserve.

Defending your prices will be your commitment to yourself from now on. That will be the way to value yourself as a professional and also to help copywriting maintain fair and reasonable budgets for the commercial value it offers.

If you would like to learn more in detail about how to run a copywriting business and learn the skill, I am going to tell you something that you may already know.

Registration is open for the new edition of the Copywriting Certification. For 15 weeks, together with my team, I will accompany you so that you learn to master my writing method and manage any copywriting project with confidence.

And one last question, do you have any questions or do you want to share your opinion on this topic? Your experience will be very valuable to everyone, so leave me a comment and I will be happy to read from you.