Are you a freelancer and wondering how to charge for your services? Some of us share their secrets of charging more for less!
Please allow me to share my experiences on web development.
There are lots of people I am sure would be interested to know the 'market price' or how much to charge for their services.
I been setting up websites about 10 years ago, self thought. I am quite a lousy designer but I am quite good at modifying and better still at understanding what client wants. Today I no longer do web business but hire web developers to run my retail/distribution business.
I use to charge RM2000-RM10000 per site. I do not care whether it is simple or difficult to handle but I calculate myself if I were to work 8 hours a day at a company, probably I'll get paid at RM 2500 a month so I work back my time. If I have to spend with a customer 40 hours a week developing, consulting the clients, I would charge RM 600 minimum. If the project takes a month to complete, I would charge RM 2500 flat and cannot and would not take other projects. I build my referrals based on that.
After few years, I could raise my monthly rate to RM3000 a month and start hiring designers/programmers and it gives me more time to focus on customers. You need to understand what the customer wants, whether the site for promotional purposes, or e commerce, or tracking..whatever the reason, you must deliver.
Always remember the golden rule about business, win-win situation. If you tell a client to develop a website with e commerce to boost their sales, don't settle with RM5000. Ask for 30% profit sharing based on all online sales and maintain the site for them. That way, you will gain lots of respects and boost customer income and make your own pocket money grow. Yeah you can charge them monthly fee for updating site, example RM200 or design their posters, namecards..bla bla bla to cover your operating cost while building their own and your business.
One rule i lived by was I don't try to design local clients if possible. Most of my clients are overseas and due to exchange rate, the pricing for them is very cheap. I don't know about local market as most of them want things cheap, and worst off, they dont know what they want but only what they don't want making the process very tedious.
On how to promote your designs overseas is another topic all together.
Recently few websites calling me up to advertise banner link on their site and charging me RM300-1000 a month boasting their site received million hits a month. When I tell them I don't care whether they have 1 or 100 million hits, I only care how much sales their visitors spend on my cart, they get tight lip. In fact to think about it, if I spend RM500 a month advertising on one site and they have 1million hits and no sales, it shows bad ROI.
Oops out of topic, so set your value, know how much you deserve a month and break it down RM/hour. Remember telephone, transportation and other misc fees include when consulting services so don't undercharge customers.
Make money for your customers and your customers will pay whatever price you want. (as long as ROI worthwhile)
Author: direct2ushop
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