For writers who have been writing for consumer and trade publications, the question “What are your rates?” is a new one. When a publication hires you, they typically tell you the pay rate for the writing the article and you can take it or leave it. While you can sometimes negotiate that rate a bit, I have never once been asked to tell my rates to a publication or newspaper editor before they hire assign me a story. But since I began doing content marketing writing a few years ago, I field that question all.the.time.  And recently I have found this topic to come up more and more because many companies are using freelancers for the first time and are unfamiliar with the typical content marketing rates.

While it is tempting to just throw out a number, I try whenever possible to resist that urge. There are so many variables when it comes to pricing a content marketing deliverable and that method more often than not results in you pricing yourself too high (resulting in you not getting the project) or pricing yourself too low (resulting in you earning a dismal hourly rate).

Here is my five step process to answer the rate question:

1. Respond to the company and say something along the lines of “Thank you so much for your interest. I prefer to price by project because my clients prefer knowing the price up front and I can focus on creating effective content instead of tracking hours.  What is a typical project that you hire freelancers for (type of deliverable, length, number of sources)? I am happy to give you a ballpark estimate based on those specifications.”
2. If the client responds back and says that they haven’t used freelancers before and don’t really know what they need, then I will give my typical blog post rate ($400 for 600 words with no interviews) and say approximately $1 per word for other writing, such as researched articles, case studies and whitepapers. However, I really hate giving these numbers without specifics because there are so many variables with content marketing writing. And I will only do this as a last resort and caveat my response strongly that it could increase based on the complexity and research requirements.
3. If the client responds back with some parameters, use the eight questions I wrote about a few weeks ago to determine how long it will take you. Be sure to look at any other content on their website to get a feel of the complexity, tone and research required.
4. Then multiply the number of hours (plus a little padding) by your target hourly rate (mine is $100 to $200 depending on the subject) to get a solid estimate of what you should charge for the project.
5. Email the client back with your estimate for the project and be sure to caveat that changes in length, sources and number of revisions could increase or decrease the rate. I also include a few more specifics about why I am uniquely qualified to write the project that they described.

I find this method to be very effective because it allows me to better understand the client’s needs as well as determine if their budget is a match for my business goals. And I have been able to successfully weed out low payers while also finding some high paying ones as well.

How do you respond to the rate question? Any tips for setting your rate?