Pay Attention to What You’re Already Doing for Free
Here’s a strategy that actually involves active income, but I’ve included it here because it’s such an effective way to increase your revenues without increasing your work hours. It involves looking closely at those little—and sometimes not-so-little—extras you do for clients for free. Those freebies could potentially be converted into services your clients would be happy to pay you for.
Free-to-Shining-Fee Strategy
I discovered this “Free-to-Shining-Fee Strategy,” almost by accident, just a few years ago. At the time, I was doing a booming business writing case studies (a kind of product success story). This type of project requires someone to interview a client’s customer to flesh out the story and get some good testimonials to use in the piece. Sometimes the client would handle this and just send me the recording or transcript. Other times, I would do the interview myself. Regardless, I always charged the same fee for the project.
Then one day I realized that doing that customer interview was additional work I was essentially doing for free. I decided to package that activity as a separate consulting service. My plan was this: my fee to write a case study would still be $1,250, but if the client wanted me to handle the customer interview as well, that would cost an additional $500.
Frankly, I was a little nervous about introducing this separate consulting service, based on something most freelance corporate writers still did at no charge. But to my pleasant surprise, clients were fine with it. In fact, many appreciated and valued my “Success Story and Testimonial Development” service—as I now called it—simply because I made it distinct, gave it a name, clearly communicated its value to clients, and charged accordingly.
Overall, my average income from case study work increased by about 25 percent. And I didn’t have to work additional hours to earn it!
What’s Your Free-to-Shining-Fee Strategy?
Take a close look at the things you do for free for clients and ask yourself, “Is this something I could charge a separate fee for?” You might be surprised, like I was, that clients will be more than willing to do so. One thing for sure, you won’t know until you try.
At this point, you might be thinking that my case study example is a special case and there’s nothing you’re doing for clients now that can be realistically developed as a separate for-a-fee service. Think again. Here are just a few examples of freelancers who have used the Free-to-Shining-Fee Strategy to increase their incomes:
• A graphic designer who now charges a “quality assurance” fee to attend press runs and check that everything is correct.
• A PR writer who now gets a separate consulting fee to submit press releases to media-release companies and monitor results.
• A grant writer who has developed a separate consulting service that involves finding prospective grant programs for her nonprofit clients. (That service, which she used to do for free, now represents the majority of her income!)
• A portrait photographer who now charges a fee for his formerly free service of organizing digital photos into online albums that make it easier for his clients to view and enjoy.
• A freelance corporate trainer who used to provide training binders to participants for free and now charges clients a separate per-person charge for these materials.
• A web marketing strategist who specializes in search engine optimization who used to research keywords for free but now charges for that service.
In all these cases, the freelancer was originally doing the work at no charge. What happened when a price tag was suddenly applied to the service? It was met with little, if any, resistance from clients.
The trick is to package the service in such a way that clients understand the full value and don’t see it as just an expensive add-on. For my Success Story and Testimonial Development service, my package includes the customer interview, an MP3 recording, a transcript, a short synopsis of the success story, and a list of customer quotes that can be used as testimonials. To most clients, the $500 price tag is a deal!
Wealthy Words
When I started writing sales copy for companies in the technology and medical industries, I used to spend a lot of time developing the key marketing messages—especially for first-time clients. Then I created a service called “Key Message Platform” and sold it as a separate consulting program. Not only were clients willing to pay for this service when they hired me to write their sales copy, some companies even purchased it separately!
—Casey Demchak, copywriter and marketing podcaster
So look closely at those little extras you do for clients. Yes, I’m sure they appreciate them. But chances are, you’re not going to lose any goodwill by converting some of those freebies into attractive service packages you can—and perhaps should—charge a professional fee for.
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