Ghostwriting – What price to quote?
While hiring ghostwriting services generally three factors come into play. These are emotions, expected results and the value for the services. The clients it seems are very sensitive to the cost they are going to have to pay for the ghostwriting services. Therefore if you are a ghostwriter it will be very embarrassing for you to estimate a price offhand. But the clients will always be interested in knowing the price he is going to pay.
Under such circumstances you have to be a bit tactical and divert the attention of the client to what he is going to expect from your service. Describing what entails in ghostwriting and the process involved, the client might get some idea of the prices that could be involved.
There is a methodology that is involved in putting a price to the work that you are going to do. In order to arrive at a correct quote there are certain aspects that need to be taken into consideration.
You should first of all sit with the client and ask him his requirements. This will generally give an idea what the client really wants. Discussion on this will give you an idea whether the work involves ghostwriting or something else that does not involve ghostwriting. In case the work entails ghostwriting then it will be within your skill set and you can then ask the client for his URL. And if on the other hand the job does not involve ghostwriting then you can advise the client the way forward and recommend someone you know who can do the job.
If you can figure out what the client actually want, you will be able to decide whether the job is within your purview or not and accordingly move forward. If the job is within your scope you can show your portfolio to the client in order to impress upon him your capability to assure him that you are capable of doing his work with confidence and meet his expectations.
In order to cut short your live pitch to every client you can prepare some 30 or 60 second spots on each aspect of ghostwriting. You can show these to the client during discussion so that the client can get some idea of the work involved. For example, you can prepare pitch on SEO articles, or website content revision, or brand enhancing etc.
You can have different standard price quote for different aspect of ghostwriting depending on the demand of the situation. After going through the expectation of the client you can quote the price that will be appropriate for the job. There will be clients who will vanish, while some will accept the price after seeing your pitch. But if you are right with your price, some of them will come back to you ultimately.
If you are confronted with a job that is complex and cannot be quoted without proper detailing, then you need to sit with the client for a prolonged discussion. You should ask the client to give you the details of his website along with his URL. You can then ask for some of the URLs of his competitors. You can study the websites of his competitors and device strategies to make your client’s site more attractive and rank high in search engines.
However, in order to be able to sell yourself you need to be very flexible in your working. You should be able to connect with your client in order to understand their requirements and thus deliver what they expect. You also need to understand your client because depending upon the situation you might get to meet the client in person or you have to deal with your client through other means of communication like phone or Skype video meet or MSN Messenger.
You should be very careful in quoting a price for a job and should base it on the nature of ghostwriting the job involves. The client should find your quote reasonable and you should be able to convince him on that score.