A girl I met this summer wrote me yesterday to ask for advice on pricing a copywriting project:
“Wassup busy bee? 🙂 i need professional advice. How much should i ask to write anarchist articles for commercial purposes (meaning to sell t-shirts) :))? Is 100 dollars per 500+ words too much or fair? How much would u ask for?”
Anarchist articles?
To sell t-shirts?
At $100 for 500 words?
That’s not the pond that I play in.
Because I made a deal with the marketing devil a long time ago.
Yes, I sold my soul to him. In exchange, I get a series of ever-higher-paying contracts, working on ever-more interesting projects.
So the particular rates I would charge at this moment are really no use to this girl, or to you in case you’re wondering what you should be charging for your work.
But I told her something that the marketing devil taught me. And you might find it useful as well.
It’s a super simple price negotiation tactic. It works 100% of the time to get you an outcome you can be happy with. And it goes like this:
1. Ask yourself, “How much would it take to honestly make this worthwhile for me?”
2. Make your potential client this offer.
3. If it works for them, great. If not, or if they try to haggle with you, tell them, “Thanks, but it’s not right for me.”
But maybe I hear you complaining, “This isn’t negotiation at all!”
And it’s certainly not the kind of nickel-and-diming, car-lot tactics you can read about in hundreds of Medium listicles. But like legendary copywriter and entrepreneur Mark Ford wrote recently:
“The difference depends on understanding that in business there are two fundamentally different kinds of negotiation: transactional and relational.”
In other words, if you use my simple devil-inspired price negotiation tactic, and you end up doing business with this client, you’re on good footing to form a long-term relationship that both sides are happy with.
And if you don’t end up doing business with them, for whatever reason (they can’t afford you, or they don’t value you enough, or they are simply lowballing jackasses), then you don’t really have a negotiation problem.
You have a lead generation problem. Which is another topic, for another day. For today, let me just say I solved my lead generation problem in the beginning by going where everybody says you shouldn’t go.
And that’s Upwork.
In case you want to see how I made very good money by dealing with quality clients that I actually landed on Upwork, then check out the following: