Blog Posting Rates: 6 Things to Consider Before Lowering Your Rate

Even though my blog posting rates are listed on my site, clients sometimes ask for lower rates. Following are the guidelines I use to determine if how/when/if to lower my blog posting rates:

6 Things to Consider Before Lowering Your Blog Posting Rates

1. Topic/Niche: Some topics are general in nature while others are more technical. For example, a recent client I acquired owns a few sites. He hired me to do some blog posts for each of them.

There’s not a lot of information available on one of the topics, while there is a plethora of information on the other two topics. As he submitted them as one job, I charged him a higher blog posting rate than I had been for some other blog posts I’d done. But, it is still lower than my normal rate, which leads me to the next guideline.

2. Word Count: Many blog posts fall in the 100-250 word-count range. For this last order, this client wanted the topics to be at least 300 words. In most cases, I can churn this out in 10-20 minutes, depending on the topic.

3. Term of Project: As in, how long is it projected to run? The client mentioned here hired me to do at least 9 posts every week, sometimes more. That was a consideration in the blog posting rate I quoted him.

4. Project Parameters: Sometimes, clients will ask that certain guidelines be followed. For example, for this particular series of posts, I have to write 8 paragraphs, in a particular order, following a certain format.

Most times, if it’s not too much of a pain, I won’t my blog posting rate won’t change. But, if the parameters are numerous and tedious I will charge more and/or not accept the job.

Project Parameter Note: I’ve learned that having clients who are detail oriented can cut two ways. Either it works to your advantage because you know exactly what the want. Or, they’re so nitpicky that nothing you do will ever please them. I tend to err on the side of my own sanity in these cases.

5. Turnaround Time: The more time clients give me to get a project in, the more apt I am to lower my fee. This particular and I arrived at a consistent schedule that works for both of us – I’ll turn in the posts every Friday morning. I love working like this because it allows me to schedule things a whole week in advance, which does tons for my sanity and workload.

6. Special Requests: Sometimes, clients will pile on extra wants. I don’t think they do it maliciously; it’s just that in the excitement of finally have someone take over a duty they’d been handling themselves, it’s kind of an “. . . and oh yeah, I need this too,” thing.

For example, with the client discussed here, near the end of our conversation, he threw in that he also wanted resource boxes for each post. I immediately let him know that this was another service that was going to cost extra. He understood and said, “Let me send you some samples of what I want and give me a quote on what it would cost to have a few of these written up.”

What I look for as a freelance writer/blog poster is consistency – in work, pay and clients. The more of this a potential client can offer me, the more likely I am to work with them on blog posting rates.