Hey what's up everybody, welcome back to my channel. Today I'm going to be discussing
one of the most asked about topics, and that is how can I charge my freelance clients?
How do I go about charging them? What should I charge them? How do I figure
this out? And most importantly, how can I actually structure this as a business
so I can predict what I'm going to make, I can create a side hustle, I can create a real business
as opposed to just freelancing here and there and making a couple dollars on the side.
So let's get right into it, and there are two main ways to charge for your freelancing services. The
first is to charge clients an hourly rate. Now charging them an hourly rate is pretty simple
you set your hourly rate and based on how long you work on that project for that week or that
month whatever you agreed on that's how much you charge the client now the other way you
can charge clients is by a fixed price and this is usually in the form of a package deal
whether that's working with a client for a certain period of time like a month or multiple months
or it's doing a specific service or providing them a product. So let me explain a little bit,
a fixed price project could be building a client a website or let's say you're doing something like i
do which is manage advertising campaigns that can be charging the client for one month of management
now it's important to really distinguish between these two different ways to charge clients
because the hourly method in the hourly way is where you really are still tied to the clock you
can still increase your hourly rate and get that higher and higher but at the end of the day you're
still going to have to be tied to the clock and you can only work so many hours in the day. Now on
the other end, the fixed price deals that's where you can really start to formulate a repeatable
process that you can package up into different bundles and sell that to different clients
so you have to ask yourself kind of where you're at in your journey and if you're just starting out
you're probably going to go down the hourly route first charge clients for your time get
some reviews under your belt and eventually you can use everything you learned and then transition
to charging fixed price, so you're never stuck to just charging one way but when you first start out
you probably want to get started hourly and then move eventually to a fixed price model,
and next thing you want to do is ask yourself what the competition is charging and a lot of times you
might ask yourself this and you don't actually know what they're charging because you may just
hear things. But I have a way for you to actually figure out what other freelancers are charging for
their products their services in that way you can get a better understanding for where you're at in
your journey and you can compare that and use that as sort of a benchmark for where you want to come
in the market and offer your products or services for, so if we jump on over here to Upwork,
I love working on the freelancing side of Upwork, but I also work on the other side,
the client side of things, where I hire freelancers to help me with certain projects
and even if you don't have a client account you can still go to Upwork and you can start to
search for other freelancers that are providing the same services as you or the services that
you want to provide. So let's just say for example that you are a graphic designer, you
can go to Upwork and you can search for a graphic designer and once you do that, let's do that here:
We can see that a bunch of different freelancers will start to pop up, now this is the best way
to get started because now you can see who is on Upwork, what kind of hourly rates they're charging
and not only that but then you can start to go into specific freelancers profiles and understand
why they're charging what they are so you can see that this graphic designer is up to $70
an hour which is awesome but also remember that he has 127 hours under his belt 55 jobs and has
earned over 10 grand on the platform. So you're probably not going to just sign up to Upwork
and then tomorrow land a client for $70 an hour, however, it's important to use this as a benchmark
so now you know what one graphic designer charges now you can see another graphic designer who's
charging $17 an hour for their services and they only have one job on the platform and $50 earned
so now you can start to see just right off the bat who are the first couple people that show up
and you can see there's a wide spectrum of people and that's the beauty of Upwork and the beauty of
freelancing is that there's always clients out there with different budgets and when you're
just starting out you can start to serve clients for a lower hourly rate and then eventually work
your way up. Now one important note here is that every single freelancer on Upwork is going to have
what's called a default hourly rate and that is what will show up here so let's go back to Matthew
here because we already saw he had a lot of jobs and what we can do is start to scroll down and we
can see all of the jobs that he has in the past and the ones that he actually has going right now
so we can see he has a lot of fixed price projects it looks like the last couple are fixed price
he also has an hourly client right here where it's still in progress and it's 13 hours for
$45 an hour and then he also has different fixed price at $30 an hour $100 an hour but you can go
into this in even more depth you can start to see exactly what kind of services he's offering
and what he's charging for them and then on top of that you can see the happy clients that were happy
with the services that he provided. So what does that mean to you and you pricing your services?
Well it's a benchmark like we said, if you ask yourself what the competition is charging without
doing any research you're going to have no idea but if you start to get on Upwork you start to do
your research you see what other freelancers that are making money online what they're charging for
their services you can start to price your own services based on where you're at in your journey
how much experience you have and how eager you are to make money online. Now I want to
go over when you are charging fixed price for your product or your service you always want
to provide three different service offerings and this does a couple of different things number one
when you're actually trying to get the client this really helps show them that you're not just
charging by the hour but you're charging for how much value that you are going to provide
and you're letting the client find what the best fit is for them and this is a great way to close
more clients and it's also an amazing way to upscale and to upsell all of your clients that
you have already. Because once you have them in the door and let's say they're on a lower package
there's nothing holding you back from offering great value and then starting to push them up
that value ladder and then getting them into your more expensive packages, so always remember that's
the beauty of freelancing everything is fluid nothing is just set in stone you don't just
have to stick to one skill set you don't have to work with one client doing the same thing forever
you can grow you can expand and that is actually what you should do. So when you're just starting
out, you're probably not going to do the same thing forever, something's going to get you in
the door you're going to learn you're going to expand and you're going to grow. So I hope this
video was helpful breaking down how you can get started charging your clients for your services,
how you can go out there get a benchmark for what other people are doing, and then ultimately how
to bundle your services and push clients up your value ladder. If you have any questions
please comment them down below, any ideas for future videos. I make content on freelancing,
entrepreneurship, and lifestyle freedom, and until the next time I look forward to your success!