How much can I earn if I work for US clients as a content writer?
Let us assume that you charge USD 10 per hour of work.
This is a very conservative estimate and you can start charging this amount after you have obtained your first 2-3 testimonials from clients for work which may have been done pro-bono or at a nominal amount.
Now, where does charging USD 10/hr get you?
USD 10/hour is very cheap – in the US, you cannot find someone to flip hamburgers at that rate in a local McDonalds, forget hiring a trained freelancer in any of these areas.
Minimum wages in the US, Canada, UK and most of Europe is more than USD 10.
Upwork is currently the prime platform for offshoring work by small businesses and SMEs, let’s take a look at how much you can make there:
Here is what people charge for content-writing work on Upwork:
Here is the average amount:
If you work for 200 hours at USD 10, you will earn USD 2000 per month, or INR 1.65 lakhs!
This is already 3x – 5x more than what most content-writers earn in India!
Even if you work just three hours a day for the lowest per hour rate of USD 10, and you just work for 20 days, your monthly income could be around INR 50,000!
This is just the start, you can charge more with experience.
Once you build your track record of working with international clients, let’s say you get 10 testimonials on your profile, you can charge more, say USD 20 or 30.
If you can do it yourself, and become damn good at getting more work, what stops you from focussing on getting more clients and hiring more people?
This is how you can build your own highly profitable agency.
If every person you hire does work worth 1 lakh per month while you pay them 50k per month salary – you can make a profit of 50k per person.
You can hire highly motivated people or beginners who are underpaid in Tier 2 or Tier 3 cities or work-from-home mothers to perform these roles – 50K is a handsome sum for them to start with, compared to what they earn locally.
Many of them don’t have any jobs at all.
A vast majority of them would not want the responsibility of finding clients every month to ensure a predictable income and would be happy to do it for you
If you have 10 people like this working with you, who are good at getting work done but cannot secure work on their own (the vast majority of people in the market are like this only) then how much do you make per month?
Do the maths and tell me.
This is how you can hire part-timers and juniors to build a consultancy and further scale your earnings to INR 10 lakhs per month or a 1 cr business annually!
This is also applicable to people who are already earning 1-1.5 lakhs per month but find your income to have plateaued, we will also give you a plan to scale this to USD 8000 per month and hire juniors for your business development and client delivery work, which translates into a 1 cr/ year agency.
This is still a commoditised pricing strategy – you are charging for your time and it is not linked to the end deliverable or result.
Over time, you must transition to charging for “solutions” so that you can de-link your work output from the time that you personally spent working and charge based on the value that you added to the client.
Of course, you must know how to take responsibility to deliver results.
This is the difference between content writers who earn USD 2k/month or 10k/month.
How to price your services once you cross the USD 10-20/hr mark to earn more than USD 5k-10k/month
For most freelancers, pricing is a mystery once they go beyond charging for every hour they work.
Let me share a framework you can learn in 2 mins and remember forever
Before deciding the price of any product or service, you need to consider 4 important questions:
1. At what price do your users feel that it’s too expensive to buy (therefore will not consider) – this you can’t afford to do
2. At what price they find it expensive, but they will consider and will think long and hard before spending money (if you have a good sales team and ticket size is largish, or if you figured out product led growth with a lot of organic customers, this might be your sweet spot)
3. At what price point they find it a no brainer amazing deal and will want to lock it down immediately (this need not be necessarily your price point, it could very well be 2)
4. At what price point they will start doubting if you can deliver quality at all (this is no go)
It’s important to assumptions that you can validate or calibrate over time with real data points and feedback received from buyers and leads who do not buy
The pricing strategy we recommend has been to launch something at 3 and then slowly go towards 2 over time
Now, most content writers have no clear pricing strategy at all, and that is why they fail to convince clients.
Of course, there is a lot more than pricing strategy that you must keep in mind to get work:
- Skills
- Track Record
- Outreach