The Secret to Money-Making Relationships

I lied. I told you in my previous post that I bid two cents a word for every word I would write for AlfaBlue. That’s not true.

Here is what I actually wrote:

“My bid is 1.8 cents per word for articles of 100 to 1,000 words. Within your budget (less than $500) that would be about 27,000 words in total, divided into any number of longer articles, including research and tagging, or short stories and descriptions, as you request. Given my current schedule, I can deliver about 9,000 words a week.”

Two cents a word is nice and round and it makes calculations easier, but 1.8 cents has a psychological advantage. It works just like in retail sales, where an item priced at $9.99 rings up many more sales than the same one costing $10 even.

What’s more, if the client was really hoping to pay around a penny a word, I did not want my bid to look like double that amount. Also, if other service providers bid two cents, my 1.8 would look like a 10% discount.

And that brings me to the “secret” mentioned in the title of this post.

If you tell a client you will write 500 words for $10, you should deliver 550 or 600 words for the same price. If you promise to submit a dozen articles in ten days, finish them up and deliver them within a week. Promise to provide good service, and then deliver outstanding service. In other words:

Always deliver more than expected.

Especially in the course of building long-term relationships, I have found that continually surprising clients with better quality, lower prices and faster turn-around results in higher rates of pay and more project assignments over the long term.

Put another way: if I can get my clients to love what I do for them, they will depend on me and pay me what my work is truly worth.

Since winning this bid, I’ve been given additional assignments, such as editing the writing of other contributors, posting articles on web sites, and adding keywords, tags and descriptions, for which I am paid an hourly fee. Without getting into higher mathematics, my net payment per word now works out to at least two cents when everything is taken into account.

The 1.8 cents per word I quoted was just a starting point, like an introductory offer. I knew I could always ask for a “raise” later, but only after I had established the true value of my work—unlike one of my competitors who wanted $800 for a project clearly budgeted for $500 or less. How dumb is that?

Next up in the Diary, I’ll share another secret with you—the one word solution to juggling multiple clients, projects and deadlines.

T.A.J.