The Business of Online Marketing

How to charge for services

In this chapter we're going to discuss about how to charge for services. This is a really fun topic because it first of all it directly affects how much money you make in your business. And also there's a lot of psychology behind it. So once you have your packages in place you need to think about how much you want to charge them how much you want to price them out.

The first thing to do is go back to your goals. How much do you want to make and by when. So from there you can just work backwards. Maybe you want to make a monthly revenue of $2000 a month to start. If you price your packages that save $500 a month then you only need to get four clients and that's really not too hard at all.

Think about what you saw when you were looking at the competition. What do you think is fair is what your competition charging? Is that fair is it something that you would pay for or not. Also you need to consider if you want to follow a Wal-Mart model and go cheap and undercut the competition as they say or maybe you want to follow a Nordstrom model and provide top notch service.

But at a premium price or maybe you want to be somewhere in between like a J.C. Penney I suppose. So you have to think about what kind of client you want to have. In many cases the smaller clients can come in that come in a smaller price point will be more of a hassle and they'll demand more.

Whereas in my experience the more Nordstrom like Clients often just trust you to do a good job and they leave you alone. They let you do your job. Just be sure with those clients especially that you deliver as promised the amount of work to actually acquire the client is about the same regardless of their budget.

And that's been my experience that going for let's say let's call it the middle class to upper middle class businesses tend to yield the greatest return with the least amount of hassle. Let me give you an example. Towards the beginning of the company when I started out I had a client paying $250 a month for a set of services.

I also had another client paying a thousand dollars a month can get take a big guess who was more of a hassle. It was a client pain $250 a month besides already getting a great deal on their services they also wanted more personal intention. They wanted phone calls. They even asked me to go to their company meetings. And the client that was paying.

Meanwhile the client that was paying a thousand dollars a month never even heard a word from them. They just expected us to get the job done and let us do our job. Left us to our business. So the moral of the story really is to think about your ideal clients and what they look like. It'll take some adjusting but soon you will figure out who your perfect clients are based on.

Really it's pretty easy based on how much they're willing to pay in. That actually should be a big indicator to you when someone chokes when you tell them that your most effective package is $750 month. If they choke then that's saying something. If they don't even bad night chances are good that you found a good client. While we're on this subject don't be afraid to fire clients.

When you first starting out you may be tempted to work with everyone but you will soon realize that there are some clients that just aren't worth the time invested. Fire them and move on to more ideal clients. This will save you a lot of time. It'll save you a lot of heartache a lot of headaches and you will be able to make more money because you're not dealing with someone that is giving you a lot of hassle.

Another thing to consider regarding pricing is to price your services based on what you think you can get. Obviously there's going to be a little trial on trial and error here for sure but soon you will get a feel for what the market is willing to spend. On the other hand if you can consistently get them ranking on page one and they're getting phone calls every day from new customers most of them would be happy to pay you at least a thousand dollars a month.