When it comes to marketing our small businesses, we’re always being told how important it is to speak to our ideal clients. In fact, not only is there the pressure to find your ideal client, there’s also the age-old debate of whether or not you should find a niche.

But especially when you’re just starting out, it can be really hard to identify who your ideal client is. And if you do decide to niche, how do you go about choosing your area of specialisation?

Besides experience and working with clients, one thing that can help you to narrow down your options and reach a conclusion that little bit faster is having an income goal. In this post, I’m explaining how an income goal can help you identify your ideal customer (and the niche they’re in!).

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The quoting process is one of those things that send freelancers and small business owners into a spin. The excitement of receiving a new request from a customer or potential client often quickly gives way to panic and despair at the thought of having to put a quote together.

How much should you charge? Should you give the client more than one option? And how do you actually go about deciding all this?

Since creating quotes is something so many freelancers struggle with, I wanted to share my own quoting process with you. Being really clear on certain aspects before I put together a quote helps me remove the emotion from the situation, getting rid of any doubts I might otherwise have and speeding up the task as a whole.

Find my four-step quoting process here!

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Do you ever send quotes to clients and hear nothing back? You spend time analysing the project, figuring out how long it’s going to take you, arriving at a price, proposing a deadline, and then… nothing. It’s like watching tumbleweed rolling across the road in front of you. And you’re left feeling as though you’ve wasted valuable time and energy.

You probably had it all planned out too. Perhaps you quoted higher than your minimum and already had a lower fee in mind that you would have been willing to accept. Or maybe you’d already decided how you would suggest reducing the scope of the project. You simply weren’t given the opportunity to get that far.

More often than not, when clients don’t reply to our quotes, we assume that the price we quoted was too high for them. But what if there was something you could do to avoid this kind of situation? In this blog post, I’m sharing some ideas to help you make sure you always receive a response to your quotes.

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As a freelance mentor, I often get asked whether or not it’s a good idea to include your prices on your website. It’s a difficult question to respond to because, as with many of the things we come across during our freelance careers, the answer is: it depends!

Those of us who are service-based business owners often need to take into consideration things like turnaround time, the length of a project, the complexity of the work involved, and so many other factors! It simply isn’t always possible for us to have standard prices. But for those of us who do offer packages or fixed services, do we really want to be sharing our prices online for the whole world to see?

I’ve decided to dedicate this blog post to providing a comprehensive answer to the question of whether or not sharing your prices on your website is right for you. I’m setting out the advantages and disadvantages of doing so, as well as suggesting a solution that might help you get the positives out of both sides of the argument… Read on to find out more!

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Whether your rates are too low really depends on a number of different factors. These include how much you need to be earning to cover all your outgoings (both business and personal) and how much time you have available to earn that amount.

I wrote this post on the back of a conversation I had with another freelancer about pricing. They told me they didn’t actually know if they were charging enough or not, which got me thinking: How can you tell when you're undercharging for your services?

In this blog post, I’m looking at some of the tell-tale signs to help you understand whether or not you’re asking for enough in return for your freelance services.

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All big companies start with their big-picture business vision. But for some reason, this is a part that many of us miss out on as freelancers. We launch ourselves into our work and forget to take a step back to look at where we’re headed.

It’s easy to lose sight of our greater purpose when deadlines are looming or we’re struggling to make ends meet. In fact, not only do we sometimes lose sight of our ‘why’, but we often end up doing the exact opposite of what we intended when we became freelancers, working all hours of the day (and night!).

I personally find it useful to have a long-term vision for my life that helps me decide where to take my business. So in this blog post, I’m looking at how having such a vision could benefit you and support your freelance business.

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Raising your prices can feel scary. It’s not easy to tell a customer that you’re going to start charging them more, especially when you’ve created a relationship with them over time.

But increasing your prices is essential if you want your business to grow and support you in the long term. Your costs will undoubtedly increase over the years, which means that if you fail to raise your rates with your clients, you’ll inevitably end up losing out and will have to work longer hours to cover your expenses.

In this blog post, I’m putting together some suggestions to help you overcome the fear of raising your prices. So if you’ve found yourself putting off a rate increase at one time or another, here are some things you can try to make sure your next price increase happens first time!

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How much should I charge? It’s the fundamental question that all freelancers find themselves asking early on in their careers.

It isn’t an easy question to answer, yet how you respond to it will determine the path your business takes. Will you find yourself in a constant race to the bottom or will you have a clear pricing strategy that enables you to earn enough without having to work all hours?

In this blog post, I’m setting out five of the most common mistakes I see freelancers making when it comes to their pricing to give you a better idea of what you should be taking into consideration when deciding how much to charge.

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