How To Price Your Next Project – The Right Way
Have you ever built a website that made your client more money than you charged to create it? If not, how did you justify the price? Was it just based on how much time you spent working on it?
Websites Should Not Be Luxury Items
Are you selling websites that are nothing more than luxury items, like a sports car or a membership to a country club, where the only benefit to your client is that now they are part of the club? The website is not doing anything to grow their business. But they can show it off to their friends, and now they are part of the club of people who have a website.
If you are not confident that the websites you build for your clients will generate more money than they cost, then you're going to have a tough time selling websites for anything more than a few hundred dollars. The reason your clients are telling you they can't afford your rates is because they are looking at what you're offering and they see something with a negative return on investment. They see something that costs more than it will make. They see themselves losing money because of you.
Are Your Clients Always Broke?
I talk to WordPress developers and consultants who are very frustrated because they feel like all of their clients are broke. None of their clients can afford the rates they need to charge for their work – so they are stuck. They spend a lot of time and effort creating the website. They implement a responsive design. The finished website looks better than a lot of other sites out there. But, even with all of that, they can't find clients who are willing to pay the prices they want to charge. So, the question on their minds is, “What gives? What am I supposed to do now?”
Why Most WordPress Developers Earn So Little
Here is the answer. You have to have both technical skills AND business development skills. Your clients need someone with both of those capabilities. That is the DoubleStack. The reason freelancers competing for jobs on Upwork are getting paid so little is that they are only bringing technical development skills to the table. They are not delivering the business development skills. They don’t have the DoubleStack.
Most Freelancers Market To The Wrong Audience
The only people who pay a premium price for technical skills are recruiters, high-end consulting firms, and large corporations. Large corporations have the luxury of having two different teams for each of this roles. They have a tech team and a business development/sales team. If you want to charge high-end prices for your work as a freelancer, you are going to have to bring both areas of expertise to your projects. You can't just show up as the outsourced tech team. If you are relying on your clients to create the business development strategy while you sit listening as “just the web guy,” then you're not solving the real problems your client has. You are not leading the project. And, you are going to struggle to charge anything near what you need to grow your business. You have to understand that your clients don’t care about the technical details. They care about building their business, and that means you need to bring the vision for business development AND the technical skills to implement that vision. That’s the DoubleStack.
Are Your Ready To Start Seeing Results?
How much longer are you going to keep wearing yourself out competing for projects that don't pay anywhere near what you want to be making? Where are you going to be six months from now if you just keep doing what you're doing? If you're ready to start seeing some returns on all those hours you're working, let's talk about how you can connect with your clients much more effectively.
We'll get on the phone for about 45 minutes. During the call, we'll cover three things:
- How to lead your clients confidently and with authority?
- What rates should you be charging for your work (and why)?
- How can you start tapping into recurring revenue right away?
You don't have to blend into the crowd fighting to win cheap projects from nit-picky clients. Schedule a free call.
