September 17th, 2007
Freelance graphic design pricing
Typical publicity designers earn between $40 and $75 per hour (£25-£40). If you’re good you should think about charging $50, then look to increase by $5 each year depending on your situation.
Clients will often ask you to quote on a project. Estimate the total number of hours you’ll spend working on the first proof, add an extra hour-per-page for artwork corrections, then add another two hours for unforeseen complications such as downloading large files for print. Remember to charge for any time you spend working on the project, including downloading and disk burning time. (Unlike freelance copywriters, designers don’t usually charge for meeting time.)
If you have fixed a price and the client changes the original brief spec half-way through the graphic design assignment, tell your client that you will bill an additional hourly rate for any extra time you spend.
How to boost your freelancing job opportunities
The advice above should help you to get your freelance artwork business off the ground, so you can be completely self-sufficient within six months. Now let’s examine some ideas for artists who want to go beyond self-sufficiency. How can you create surplus demand for your services, so you can literally pick and choose your jobs? How can you double, treble, even quadruple your regular income?
Offer something unique
You are most likely to be competing with other freelance artists in your area who offer a similar service and charge a similar fee. The fact that you might be better than them doesn’t guarantee regular work or considerable fee increases. You need to offer something unique to stand out in an increasingly crowded freelance arena. The idea is simple: offer something unique about your service, and clients will remember you; they will also be prepared to pay more for a specialized service, so you can charge a bigger fee.
A unique aspect of your service might be a specific skill you specialize in or a layer of service you provide that others don’t. For example, if you are a graphic designer, your unique selling proposition may be one of the following:
- Specialize in fast turnaround; i.e. newspaper advertisements designed and sent in a day
- Ability to work across media (Leaflet design, Animated presentation design, 3D design, web design)
- On call evenings and weekends: 24/7 design service
- Quick response promise: will respond to all emails and enquiries within 10 minutes
- Accuracy: a free proof-reading service before artwork handover
- Specialize in a particular style; i.e. exceptional picture research, Asian-appeal design, children’s design, etc
Specializing in one particular aspect of your job doesn’t mean you need to narrow the choice of services or design styles you can provide. Indeed, one unique aspect of your service could be its very broadness; that you can do everything from illustration to 3D design.
Even if you offer a highly specialized service, you can still market your general talents—you just make sure that the unique aspect of your offer is in someway highlighted, either when you phone potential clients, or written in your marketing materials.
A unique layer to your service will attract new clients and allow you to charge more. Once you’ve got new clients, you can offer a more general service too, resulting in maximum client lock-in. And of course, you’ll be offering your general service at a higher price for those new customers.
Communicate the unique aspect of your service online
Once you have isolated your Unique Selling Proposition, present it upfront on your website. By repeating your unique offer several times within your copy, you’ll increase your chances of your website being tracked by web-crawlers, boosting your chances of being found on the first page of the major search engines.
If you want to explore search engine marketing, to market yourself on the Web, you need to start by choosing niche keywords in order to increase traffic to your website. www.wordtracker.com is a useful tool that enables you to see what keywords people are typing into the search engines, and how many websites are competing for the same keywords. It costs around $8 per day or $240 per year.
Find a profitable niche
It’s no good offering a unique layer of service if people aren’t interested in it. The key to finding new customers is to offer a specialized service that lots of people are looking for, but that other artists in the area don’t offer.
If, for example, you offer a highly specialized service like “ancient coin photography”, your number of potential clients will be small, thus limiting your profitability. However, if you offer a more general service such as “book cover photography”, you compete against other freelancers and agencies offering the same service, thus reducing your chances of finding work.
You need to find a profitable niche; offer a high-demand and specialized service to a lucrative segment of the freelance market where there is little or no competition.
To do this, you need to 1) Target the most lucrative market, 2) Research the market, and 3) Offer a specialized service that responds to the needs of your market.
1. Target your most lucrative market.
Suggestion: focus on marketing departments
The most profitable freelance artwork jobs are found in the marketing communications sector. If you can design (or provide artwork for) direct selling promotional material such as brochures, adverts, and websites, you can charge much higher fees.
2. Research the market.
Suggestion: get to know the promotions controllers
Freelance designers with an understanding of marketing and copywriting are usually favored above designers with no marketing knowledge. That’s because today’s promotions controllers are likely to be project managers; intermediaries between copywriters and designers, and not necessarily creatives themselves. That means today’s publicity designers often have to work harder at interpreting what the client actually wants, and a knowledge of marketing communications often comes in handy.
3. Respond to the needs of your market.
Suggestion: integrate copywriting into your artwork service and offer full marketing agency creative services
Copywriting and design services have become interlinked in today’s creative freelance arena. Briefing a copywriter-designer duo is a much more persuasive proposition for promotions controllers than briefing a copywriter, then briefing a separate designer.
However, copywriter-designer duos are really only found in expensive agencies. This leaves a gap in the market; where freelance copywriters and designers can get together to offer full marketing agency creative services, without charging full agency prices.
If you are prepared to try a few new tricks, you can get yourself established in this profitable niche market and start making serious money.
Find yourself a copywriting buddy
Buddying up with a copywriter is a good way of offering a copywriting service without doing the copywriting yourself. A copywriting buddy benefits you in two ways: Not only can you offer a cheap copywriter-designer alternative to expensive agencies (a much more persuasive proposition for clients—they know they can hand the whole project to you at a fraction of the cost compared to using an agency), your copywriting buddy will also keep you in mind to design any assignments he or she finds from other clients.
You’ll get to know freelance copywriters as you work on freelance projects. Alternatively, do a Google search for copywriters in your region. Once you have identified a good copywriter, get in touch, send samples of your work, and ask if you can add their service onto your own website (and vice versa).
Related Post
Job Sites
The History of Visual Communication
|
