Diana Marinova

Freelance Mentor & Marketing Consultant

How to Calculate Your Minimum Hourly Rate as a Freelancer

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What? You don’t have a minimum hourly rate yet? OK, don’t panic! This is easily fixable, as long as you realize the importance of setting such a rate as a freelancer.

Your minimum hourly rate is the rate under which you will never ever accept a job offer.

Depending on the project specifics, you can always change the rate during the negotiations to reflect the specific project scale or complexity of the tasks involved. But it’s important you set the bar correctly (if you want to make a good living as a freelancer, that is).

Here’s a quick formula you can use …

How to Calculate Your Freelance Rates

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A big portion of my organic search traffic comes as a result of queries relating to freelance rates. I plan to write specific posts to address readers’ questions about how much freelancers of certain professions charge (e.g. social media marketers, marketing consultants, email marketers, etc.) but in the meantime, I’d like to draw your attention to a freelance pricing guide that already is available on this blog. It consists of four parts and I am sure it will address most, if not all of your questions.

Make no mistake – this post will not tell you how much you should charge. It’ll do you one better 😉 It will guide you through the process of deciding what your hourly rate should be, how to calculate your rates on a project basis, and even how to decide whether to charge by the hour or by the project.

How to Get Freelance Work without Experience

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If you are wondering how to get freelance work without experience, you are probably a victim of that no-experience-no-job conundrum where clients don’t award to you projects because you lack freelance experience but you cannot obtain any freelance experience unless a client awards you their project. To make it even more complicated, I’ll tell you that the posed question is a tricky one because the answer might be different, depending on what you really mean.

Should You Bill Time Spent in Email Writing and Skype Calls?

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A reader once asked me if she should bill the time she spends talking via Skype and writing emails to clients. Here’s part of her email:

“Should I bill time for Skype calls and writing emails to my clients when hired on an hourly basis? I have a project with only 8 hours monthly workload but this client holds me on Skype twice per month for at least 1 hour per session. Should I bill her for it?

The same question applies to email writing – should I bill her for that, too? I don’t charge for it but I want to know what the best practice is in such cases so that I take it in consideration when negotiating future projects with prospective clients.”

Working with Freelancers – 4 Tips for Clients for Successful Collaboration

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Every experienced and successful freelancer has most probably crossed paths with i-know-it-all type of clients. Working with freelancers is not like managing an employee. We, freelancers, don’t like clients who micromanage their team; clients who think they could do the work better than whoever they hired and end up wondering why they hired them at all in the first place (although the freelancer’s work is superb).

Today’s post is for such clients – to help them understand what their attitude and mindset should be, if they want to have a successful and fruitful working relationship with a freelancer.

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