Welcome back! This is video number 4 of our Back to Basics Freelancing series. If you haven't watched the first 3 videos make sure to check them out because they're all about getting started and finding work as a freelancer. This all leads us to today's topic, getting paid!

One thing that determines what you get paid is your knowing your worth. Believing in yourself, your value, and that you need to show your value. 

Let's break this down. You can price yourself competitively, or higher than your competition, or lower than your competition. But, if you don't feel you're worth it, it's going to be really hard to sell yourself, to pitch, and to be an asset to someone else's company or the project you want to bid yourself for.

So how do we do that?

We look at what services you offer and the skills your offer. This all combined will equal your worth. If you're pricing yourself $20 lower than everybody, you're going to be overseen because they're going to think your skills are not valuable. Now, if you're priced $20 over the market trend, that's totally fine if you have the knowledge and experience to back that up. If you can sell yourself, you could totally own that.

Pricing yourself competitively on Upwork is fairly easy to do because you can search for other people who are doing the same thing you are doing. Also, when you apply for jobs, they will tell you the range on what you should be pricing yourself for that particular job. This range is based on the number of applications that have been submitted. Pay attention to those little details. 

You have your experience level and your skills so it's up to you to decide what value to put on yourself but also having to own that.

Knowing when to increase your rates is super important. How you go about that does take some strategy. It's going to be harder to increase your rates with the clients you are already working with vs. project-based ones that you can increase over time. 

In my experience, the best way to increase your rates with a client is by explaining to them, "hey Susie Client. I love working with you and we've been working together for a long time now. I've raised my rate before but I haven't raised them for you but I'm at the point now where I need to make that adjustment. Here's where I'm looking going with my rates. Here's the value I've done since working with you." Fill in more information about how you've gained more experience or have gained more credentials to bring to your work and take you from where you're at to where you want to be. The client then has a choice to either agree and say yes or thank you for your services and decide to part ways. It's good to have a backup option just in case they do decide to go that route though.

If you have any questions, please feel free to message me and I would be happy to dive a lot deeper into this with you.