One of the hardest parts of writing online is knowing what to charge.
For my first-ever writing gig, I didn’t even get the opportunity to set my price…
The head of marketing told me they paid $0.10 per word.
Since I didn’t know any better, I gladly accepted and got to work.
Over the years, I eventually worked my way up to charging $350 per project.
But this was still horrible returns…
To make $3,500/month, I’d have to write 10 articles, which would take me roughly 30 hours.
And if I wanted to make $10,000/month?
I’d need to write around 29 articles.
That’s roughly 87 hours of writing every month.
Meanwhile, I kept seeing people online saying they were making $10,000/month by writing just four hours a week.
And I remember thinking to myself…
HOW THE HELL ARE THEY DOING IT?
Around this time, I started learning about ghostwriting and eventually built an offer around it.
But switching to ghostwriting didn’t magically solve my pricing problem.
I still had to figure out:
What to charge
How to make sure I wasn’t working myself into the ground
Why someone would pay me thousands of dollars every month
Over time, I developed a framework that helped me better work this out, and I’m going to share it with you in this article.
But first, let’s touch on something extremely important…
How NOT to price your ghostwriting offers
I tried three other pricing models before I landed on my current strategy.
Quite frankly, they all sucked.
Simply because they tied how much I could earn to how much work I had to do.
In other words, they robbed me of leverage.
If I wanted to make $10,000/month, I had to either:
Write more words.
Work more hours.
Take on more projects.
But there’s only so much work you can do before you run out of time.
And clients weren’t exactly handing out unlimited work either, because they still needed to review and approve everything I submitted.
So naturally, I felt trapped by each pricing model.
Let me show you how…
A) Per word
This is how I started my writing career.
$0.10 per word.
Write 1,000 words, get paid $100.
Write 2,000 words, get paid $200.
Simple enough.
When I worked with NVIDIA, I managed to get them to pay $0.30 per word.
Not bad, right?
Well, they also had 30-90 day payment cycles, which meant I could be waiting up to three months to get paid.
The perks of working with big businesses, ay…
You get paid more, but it takes forever to see the money.
Anyway…
The problem with charging per word is that you’re getting paid for how much you write, not how valuable your writing is.
For example, let’s say you write a 1,000-word article at $0.10 per word.
You make $100.
But imagine that article convinces someone to book a demo, and that person eventually becomes a $30,000 customer.
Your writing helped create an opportunity worth $30,000, but you only got paid $100.
That’s roughly 0.33% of the potential revenue.
Insanity.
And beyond how little you might earn relative to the value you create, there’s another problem…
You’re incentivized to write MORE.
Every decent writer knows that’s a bad trade.
Because sometimes, saying something in 100 words is far more effective than dragging it out over 1,000.
Yet, under this pricing model, the longer piece earns you more money.
Make it make sense.
B) Per hour
When I realized charging per word was a bad trade, I tried charging per hour.
My first client on this model was an Australian AI startup.
Working with someone 12 hours ahead of your time zone was a challenge in itself.
But I quickly realized the pricing model was an even bigger problem.
I charged $20 per hour.
And it took me roughly three hours to write an article from start to finish, including edits and revisions.
So I made about $60 per article.
Now, this was before ChatGPT launched, so I didn’t have it to help speed things up.
But imagine I did…
Let’s say I used AI to cut my writing time in half.
Instead of spending three hours on an article, I could finish it in 1.5 hours.
Great, right?
Well, not really.
Because at $20 per hour, I’d now make just $30 for delivering the same article.
I’d essentially be punished for becoming more efficient.
And that’s my biggest problem with hourly pricing.
The better you get at your job, the less you earn for the same work.
Sure, you could increase your hourly rate.
But why should becoming faster mean you have to keep renegotiating what an hour of your time is worth?
Your clients aren’t paying you because they want you to spend as many hours as possible writing their content.
They want the work done well.
Your efficiency should benefit you, not punish you.
C) Per project
This was the final pricing model I used before I got fed up and threw in the towel.
At the time, I was charging $350 per article.
And while this was a step up from charging per word or per hour, it came with its own problems.
Especially when I underestimated how much work a project would require.
For example, I once worked with a major corporation that hired me to write a 2,000-word article on a highly technical topic.
The article took me around six hours to complete because I had to:
Research the topic.
Write the article.
Test the code to make sure it worked as described.
Make multiple rounds of revisions.
But here’s where things got frustrating…
The client was extremely slow to review my work and approve revisions.
And because they wouldn’t give me another assignment while one was still in progress, I couldn’t move on to the next project.
The article ended up taking an entire month to get approved.
Thirty days to earn $350 from that client.
Madness.
Now, you could argue that I only spent six hours working on the article.
And you’d be right.
But that wasn’t the point.
My ability to earn more from that client depended on how quickly they reviewed my work and gave me another assignment.
Something I had absolutely no control over.
So even though I was charging a fixed price, I was still limited by how many projects I could complete and get approved.
The problem was what I charged.
With per-word pricing, I was rewarded for writing more.
With hourly pricing, I earned less per deliverable as I became more efficient.
And with project pricing, my income depended on how many assignments I could get through the door.
None of these approaches gave me the leverage I wanted.
I needed a way to charge based on either:
What my time was worth with all things taken into account
The value I helped clients create, while making sure the service was profitable for me to deliver.
This eventually led me to the pricing framework I use today…
The best alternative for beginners
After trying all three pricing models, I realized I needed a better way to charge for my work.
One that accounted for EVERYTHING that went into delivering my service, rather than just the time I spent writing.
This includes:
Research
Strategy
Revisions
Client communication
Admin
Software,
… and a bunch of other things that eat into your time and money.
If you don't account for all of that when setting your rates, you’ll feel like you’re getting the worst end of the stick.
So I developed a simple framework to help me figure out what I should be charging.
It’s probably the best model for beginners just getting started with ghostwriting.
It starts with calculating how long it takes to deliver the entire service, then using that number to set a rate that covers your costs and leaves room for profit.
Here’s how it works…
