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Freelancer’s price is, among other things, a message about their level of expertise and work experience. The question is: What that message is, if their price hasn’t moved for years? Here’s a relevant quote from The Freelance Way, chapter Pricing:
A price is a message. If you are working with your price correctly, it’s boosting the image that you are also trying to build through your other marketing tools or channels. Or otherwise. If you keep the price that you had a few years ago when you were starting out, what does that say about you? That you are still the same beginner for eternity with no faith in yourself, who makes mistakes, and whose price reflects low quality and professionalism? Because that is how the customer sees it.
Elina Jutelyte is an event manager and freelance angel: As an expat, she founded the Belgian Freelance Business Community and produces large events for European freelancers. In this talk for Freelance Friends, Elina shares her own freelance origins story and lessons learned:
If you’re a freelance illustrator or microstock photographer, the new DALL·E 2 AI image generator is a huge game-changer.
As shown in a recent product demo, Dalle2 can generate high-quality illustrations and generic photorealistic images (in countless variations) from simple text descriptions.
Our take: Instead of replacing humans, Dalle’s AI may enable creators to produce more quality work and focus on creative idea-making, rather than laboriously processing those very ideas. AI power tools like these may be quite common in future creator’s toolkit.
Spec work is when an inexperienced freelancer is manipulated into doing some work for free or with a vague vision of a reward, reciprocal service, or other work. Here are some examples from The Freelance Way, chapter Business Negotiations:
OrgPad is a very handy online tool for visualizing ideas, creating mind maps, planning, and collaborative work on projects. It also allows you to create presentations. The basic version (up to 3 documents and 100MB of space) is free.
The Bulgarian edition of The Freelance Way has just been published! The book is now available from Locus Publishing, and will soon appear in Bulgarian bookstores.
Would you invest your savings in popular songs? Many freelance investors do. RoyaltyExchange.com enables anyone to buy and sell music rights and copyrights, as (arguably) the world’s largest royalty marketplace. For newbies, there’s also a guide How Royalties Work.
Freelance Business Month is scheduled for October 1–31, 2022, as the world’s longest online event for freelancers, organized by our member Elina Jutelyte and her team. Here’s her Call for speakers open until May 31.
When is the right moment to raise your prices as a freelancer? Sooner than most freelancers do, as explained in this quote from The Freelance Way, chapter Pricing:
The vast majority of freelancers make the move to raise prices too late, when their workload is 100% or more — meaning that they are fairly bogged down by work stress. So they intuitively avoid raising prices all the more, because they want to avoid confronting client complaints. The result then is delaying a price increase for months or years, and an unfortunate state that is so chronic it can truly harm your health or reputation.
Jan de Graaf is a German business consultant for European trade with Asia and especially China, where he has spent 15 years. In this talk for Freelance Friends, Jan shared his freelance journey and described the rich cultural background of his successful freelance business: