How much should you charge for your work? That’s an eternal dilemma for freelancers, and you will find numerous answers if you do research on it.

Don’t charge too much - you’ll scare away customers and lose out to the competition. Don’t charge too little - people will perceive that your work has no value.

Well, the undeniable fact is, there is a lot of competition these days because the internet has made it possible for people from all over the world to compete for freelance jobs.

However, here’s the good news: there are a lot of freelancers who do not provide quality work.

In fact, it’s more common to find poor quality work than it is to find high quality work; you will see people on internet marketing forums lamenting this all of the time.

This is especially true for writers. There are many, many people who call themselves writers just because they can type.

They are responsible for a lot of terrible, barely comprehensible arti-cles and ebooks and Private Label Rights Products and web content.

So if you provide good quality work, then you are way ahead of the game., and you’ll get work.

Now, it takes a while to build up a good reputation, but if you consis-tently deliver quality products to your clients on time, they will not only provide you with testimonials, they will recommend you to their friends and acquaintances.

So even though you are up against a lot of competition from unskilled people willing to work for very little money…remember that there are a lot of business owners out there who actually want quality work.

When you first start out, you may need to price your services a little lower to get clients, but you shouldn’t accept ridiculously low prices.

Some article writers will work for $3 an article. Considering that you want to produce quality work, and that it will probably take you at least half an hour to write a good article if you count in research time, spell checking, and grammar checking, and writing…

Can you afford to work for $6 an hour? Is there any reason for you to do that? You might as well work at a fast food place and at least have some benefits if you can live off of that kind of money.

It’s impossible to say exactly what you should charge given that everybody’s experience level and personal situation is different, but I would recommend against accepting less than $10 per article.

If you have an English degree, or are a former professional writer or published editor, you can command more money.

For graphics and website design, if you worked for a graphics or website company in the past, or have done design work for a big company that will let you use them as a testimonial, then you can also command some more money up front.

If you are just starting out and have only your high quality samples an a few testimonials to show your clients, then you may not be able to charge quite as much in the beginning, but there is nothing wrong with raising your rates as time goes on and you get well known .

You don’t want to price yourself out of the market, but you also don’t want to set your prices so low that people perceive that you must not be very good because you’re so cheap.
It’s a good idea to go do some investigating and see what other people with similar levels of experience are charging.

From time to time you will get people asking you if you can lower your prices for them.
It might be worth giving them a slight discount, say up to 10 percent, when you are first starting out, but don’t drastically slash your prices for anyone.

Again, think of the bottom line. You can not afford to work for very little money - and if you are talented and have the product and testimo-nials to prove it, there are people out there who would love to find you and be rescued from all of the mediocre content providers they’ve been dealing with.