The Lady Programmer

One thing that I like most about freelance sites is that I get to select my clients and select the jobs that I like to work with. A new freelancer is often faced with this question: what is the most suitable pricing for projects?

Where to Base My Price

In oDesk, one thing that I like about their online job marketplace is their oConomy. I can use this graphical data to base my hourly pricing on jobs. I could easily see what others are typically charging on their jobs through their charts. Unfortunately not all job marketplaces do not have such statistics to base one’s hourly rate or fixed bid price for a particular work.

Image credit to Mical Drushal

These are some factors that I have defined for establishing pricing of one’s services:

1. Market price of similar freelancers. If the graphical data is not available, then look into a selected group of freelancers in the job marketplace that you are with and establish your price.
2. Job experience. Generally, if one is new to freelance jobs, bid rates go a bit lower than those group who had worked with several freelance jobs.
3. Location. This is one of that is mostly debated in online job marketplace forums. Freelancers from emerging economies such as India and the Philippines often bid lower than those freelancers from mature economies like Australia and the US. The overhead expenses of doing a job in emerging economies are often lower than those freelancers who are live in mature economies.
4. Project difficulty. Freelancers should be careful on this one especially if the project will be given in a fixed rate. Some projects are easy, but there are some that are difficult. Do similar research in other projects: what are the typical rates that are awarded on such freelance projects? Work on that pricing to establish your own base price.
5. Job competition. This is a lot like to the law of supply and demand in economics. Are you competing with other freelancers? If you do not have much competition then it is possible to put a higher price on the job. Remember that online freelance job marketplaces allow the client to “buy” services which is similar to buying products in the market.

Pricing one’s services is indeed critical in getting noticed. It is easier to “copy” off another freelancer’s price but remember that clients often shop for the best deal. They want to get the best freelancer to work on their project at the most reasonable price.

What’s your price?

Since Sponsored Reviews had made the announcement to their members that 20% of their blogs in their system are overpriced, I took the time to rethink about the pricing that I had set on my blogs. The other blog was priced at $40 per review because of its PR4 rank, while this one costs $20 each. Since I was not getting noticed by advertisers, I might as well pull down the cost of my blogs.

It did not take a long while before I got the first invitation to write a post – surprisingly it was from an advertiser whom I wrote a post not too long ago. Yesterday I even got two more advertisers who invited me to their opportunities. Interestingly, the payments that I’ll receive from those three advertisers are double than what I normally bid.

I’m glad I took my own advice on the pricing and applied it.