4 “Must Know” Tips for Pricing Your Services

Pricing your services may seem like an intimidating task, but it doesn't have to be. Use the four tips below to help you determine a price point that feels right for you and will make your clients happy.

1) Determine What Your Time is Worth 

2) Consider Your Skill Level 

3) Set Maintainable Payout Goals 

4) Include a Cap in Your Rates

OK, now it's time for you to take action! Remember - the best way to beat writer's block is just to start writing.

Write something now.

OK, that's it. You can stop reading now. Seriously. The book is over and you have what you need to get started as a freelance writer.

So go do it! I'll see you on the other side!

Go write a book right now. Go write a blog post right now. Go pitch a magazine article right now. Go edit someone else's book proposal right now. Go podcast your thoughts and experience right now . Go write something brilliant and original that will be read by millions in 100 years time… Write Now .

Jordan

P.S: Before I go… I just wanted to say congratulations! I know I've been pretty tough on you most of the time, but it's only because I want you to succeed. And there is no better feeling in the world than achieving your dreams. Besides, if you were easy to get along with then how could I have written such an entertaining book?

Sincerely,(your friend and guide), Jordan Gilligan.

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FREE Bonus Offer: Get a FREE 5-Day mini-course on writing your book by visiting http://www.bookwritingmadeeasy.com/free .

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APPENDIX I

How To Kick-Starter A Low Budget Book Launch

Kick-starting a book launch requires some upfront cash to get things moving. The good news is that you don’t have to spend a fortune on marketing and advertising. In fact, I use one simple method to market every book that I publish and the total costs are so small that the only thing they interfere with is my dinner date budget.

The single biggest factor in your success with self-publishing your book is how much effort you put into marketing it once it’s available. I put in a ton of effort into marketing all of my books.

For example, I wrote a case study book on business development called “The Successful Freelancer”. The goal of the case study is to teach people how to become a freelancer and make it as successful as possible. To do that, it's necessary to do market research and create lists of people who are currently struggling with their freelance career.

For the book launch, which I did through Kickstarter (a popular crowdfunding website), I created two separate iterations: one for the ebook version and one for the paperback version.

For the ebook version, I had to create a video trailer where I talked about freelancing and how successful freelance professionals create their business. I also set up a crowdfunding page on the kickstarter website where the people who pledged money for the paperback version could be contacted and told when to purchase it.

To do that, I used a Kickstarter page creator in order to get all of the information about my book and how to go about marketing it. The main focus of the page were 25 stretch goals that were all related to my book launch campaign. This is perfectly normal practice with any Kickstarter campaign because you can simply add new stretch goals or increase your rewards based on what happens during your run time (Kickstarter terms).

Stretch goals should be a part of any freemium business model. They are ideal because they allow you to offer more value, and thus convert more prospects into happy customers.

My stretch goals included things like:

The creation of a PDF that collected all of the case studies in one place. I titled this PDF “Who Does What” so that people could use it as a directory for finding freelancers they need. I focused on this project because I found out that most freelancers fail because they don’t know who does what. In other words, if you don’t know who you can network with and can outsource work to then your chances of succeeding are low.

50 Commission Invitation Emails to use for my own business

A Sample Speaking Outline for a Business Development Workshop

Opt-in Email List for a ‘Freelancer’s Forum’ once the forum is up and running. Projected launch date was two months out.

I also set up a bunch of stretch goals that never got chosen. They included things like:

Naming rights to a section in the book (Chapter 2)

Inviting everyone who pledged over $100 to join us at an upcoming travel conference in London (this was related to the niche of my book). This would have been around five people including myself.

Now, back to the book launch itself. I used my own personal email list to promote the project. If you don’t have a personal email list, then you should really gain access to one as soon as possible.

Using your own personal email list is a great way to build trust and credibility with your customers and prospects alike. In fact, it’s a must if you want any chance of being successful in business or freelance life. The best way for me to build trust was asking people for their email addresses simply because I wanted them on my “buyer beware” list in case they ever tried to market something that was unethical or fraudulent (i.e. a pyramid scheme).

I got quite a lot of people to give me their email addresses by launching the Kickstarter campaign. This was the only way I could reach those people because they didn’t visit my website and sign up for my email list. In fact, I had never even spoken to them before that point in time! They simply gave me their email addresses because they wanted to know about book launch promotions.

Originally, I thought that I would build an opt-in email list that allowed me to send them marketing messages, but it didn’t quite work out that way because most of the subscribers didn’t trust me enough (yet) to give away their email address.

Conclusion: It all comes down to trust. People don’t trust you unless they have interacted with you before, or unless you’ve got some sort of testimonial from someone they trust. So if you want to build your own email list, then a great way to start is by asking people for their email addresses at the end of your project.

Another thing I did during the fundraising period was update everyone who supported my project on the Kickstarter page about how it was going and share some lessons learned from running it. This helped me set up several interviews so that I could get my message out there to more people.