Top 3 Reasons to Raise Your Rates Right Now (Especially if You’re an Anxious New Freelancer)
Advice I wish I’d had when I started out. The sooner you start charging more, the better. Higher rates attract better clients.
When you start out as a freelancer, your tendency is to charge less than you should because you’re new to the game.
Some people manage to escape this trap quickly.
Others stay stuck making $25/hr because they’re either comfortable at that rate or they’re too nice to charge what they’re worth.
But here’s the thing:
If you undervalue your time, other people will do the same.
They won’t take you seriously if you aren’t charging enough.
Making $100/hr might feel like too much. But you need to account for administration, overhead, and taxes.
Not every hour you work as a freelancer is billable. Keep that in mind.
Here are three other reasons you should raise your rates immediately, and keep raising them every time you get a new client.
Clients Value You More when They Pay More
The psychology of value is strange. People have a tendency to appreciate things more if they are more invested. You see this everywhere if you pay attention.
At one job many years ago, we were trying to figure out how to reduce the number of people who RSVP’d to our events and then didn’t show up.
The solution? Instead of making our events free, we started charging $5 to register.
Our audience was tech professionals, think CTOs of medium and large companies. Five bucks wasn’t a lot of money to these folks. It’s basically still free, but you know what happened?
No-shows dropped. By a lot.
People are more invested in things when they pay for them. You take more care of an expensive item of clothing than something you know you can cheaply and easily replace, right? Same thing goes for hiring contractors.
