It should be a goal of every freelancer to maximize his/her profits without sacrificing the number of clients they service, and yes, the balance between price and amount of work is a very hard one to make, but it is paramount to understand as a freelancer that what you do is an art: so price is ultimately dependent on your skill in your field of expertise.
Your Skill is an Art
The main reason why freelancers need to remind themselves that what they do is an art, is because it comes with one major advantage. It’s as simple as this, the better you are, the more you can charge. This means, that you can in theory become an excellent designer/coder/writer in a short space of time with a bit of dedication, and then end up charging your clients much more as a result.
Too many times I’ve seen designing (especially) being treated as a sort of mechanical process. Take for example in the template industry. There are a lot of people out there offering unique, custom designs for sale, but treat it as though the more designs they make in the shortest amount of time, the more money they’ll make. This is a total lopsided way of thinking when it comes to an art. Time should be taken when making a design (in this example), and you should be concentration on the quality of your work over the amount of work you produce; that way you can charge more for the template at hand and not have to work as much. The key idea here is don’t undersell yourself, the market has had enough of it already.
Take pride in your work
The work you do for a client ultimately represents you. Your personality, talent, interests, are all definable by your work; and you should, therefore, be taking great effort and pride in the work you produce. Focus on quality, not quantity, and you’ll see a nature growth in the number of clients requesting work.
If you enjoyed this article, please subscribe to the RSS feed, and bookmark us.
June 28th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
have read all your post so far and I am loving it, consider me subscribed :D
June 28th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
Great article. I would like to share it on my blog with your permiss!
June 29th, 2009 at 7:47 am
Great article! One thing must be remembered however, some clients are ideal creatively but just don’t have the cash to spend. We can think of our skills as designers as the best in the world but if the money isn’t there, we’ll end up with out payments to pay the bills and more importantly without work to put in the folio. There’s a balance to find here. Stay strong and keep your prices at the rates you are happy to work for. They don’t have to be high, but just comfortable for you to spend your time creating.
It’s a tough world out there, so work hard, learn new things and make each project the best yet!
June 29th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
Cracking post Taiyab – loved it!
I wish we had someone like you design our site.
Cheers
Lance
June 29th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
I suppose it could be debatable whether or not design is art or a science, or perhaps a strange breed of both which delves into psychology and the understanding of how people’s minds work, but either way, I agree with the fact that templating is selling yourself short. I’ve made maybe one custom template in my lifetime, but this was in order to give myself some practice work; I never actually sold the darn thing, nor is it public on my site (though I’ve considered selling it). The thing with templates is that people want “free” site designs – they want a fast design, and they want it to be as low-cost as possible, because they procrastinated whatever the site was for, perhaps for far too long.
Either way, great post.
June 30th, 2009 at 10:27 pm
An interesting article.
September 12th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
I really wonder how you could write a post like this on . You really organized all those thing in a very fantastic manner. I really appreciate it.
September 14th, 2009 at 7:28 am
amount of time spent on project is directly proportional to rewards you get but smart work is the need for the day
October 8th, 2009 at 9:52 pm
I think it’s pretty easy to continually increase your prices. All you do is ask new clients for larger amounts. I started out freelancing about 2.5 years ago, and when I started out, like most freelancers, I was charging below market rates.
Since then, I’ve continually been increasing my prices to the point where now I’m one of the most expensive in town, with only advertising agencies charging more than me.
I have found what works for me is:
1. Don’t bill based on your time, bill based on the value you provide with a fixed project price
2. Don’t sell design work, or writing work, or development work. Sell a solution to your clients problems
3. When you do the above, you realise that every client has different needs, and showing the client you understand those unique needs is 99% of the sale.
4. Don’t sell to prospects who can’t afford you
5. (The most important point) Ask for higher prices. Nobody is going to pay you more if you don’t ask for it