The vivacious Chris Marlow coached copywriters from 2003 until her death in 2019, and she was the first to publish statistical pricing benchmarks for copywriters. Her survey figures gave thousands of copywriters a starting point for setting their own rates, myself included. (You can find the most up-to-date pricing guide right here.)
I’m happy to honor her memory today, as Chris’s coaching on pricing and bundling is just as relevant now as it was a decade ago. Really, it’s like the magic trick that turns a client’s nervous “maybe” into a paid “yes!”
Read, enjoy, and here’s to landing that next client AND pricing for what you’re worth,
Mindy McHorse
Executive Editor, Barefoot Writer Magazine
How Copywriters Charge For Consulting
By Chris Marlow
Do you have a “rate” for consulting?
Is consulting even on your list of services?
When I surveyed freelance copywriters for my 2014 Freelance Copywriter Fee & Compensation Survey™, 32.3% said they charge more for consulting than they do for writing.
Most charged the same hourly rate for both. But look at the top tier. 11.3% charged more than $200 an hour for consulting. And 1.1% charged more than $500 an hour.
“Yikes! $500 an hour?” you might be thinking. “How on earth do you get that?”
You have to bring a lot to the table. You need to know how to get leads or sales, or how to reach a goal that moves the client’s bottom line.
[Editor’s note: That’s even truer now. Clients can get a rough draft from AI in seconds. But what they can’t get from a chatbot is your judgment about what to say and who to say it to. That judgment is what a consultant sells.]
One way to land a higher consulting rate is to bundle it. Say a client wants your advice but isn’t sure they’ll hire you for the full project.
Offer a couple of hours of consulting for $500. If they move forward, take the $500 off the bigger project fee.
Of course, everything is relative. The highest consulting fee I’ve ever heard of is $1,500 an hour. It comes from Tina Lorenz, whom I interviewed at length for an audio program.
Tina works with online entrepreneurs who have huge email lists and big paydays. A typical job for her runs about $40,000. Sometimes she credits her consulting fee toward the job itself.
Fifteen hundred dollars sounds like a lot. But it’s not all gravy. Tina admits a lot of work goes into a consult before it ever starts.
She may need to do research. She asks the right questions and studies the answers. She thinks ahead and prepares. Because at that price, the consult had better pay off!
When you charge more for consulting, your goal should always be to “wow” the client.
A client paying a higher fee is putting their faith in you. So don’t stop at keeping your promise. You want them to walk away feeling they got a great deal. That usually takes some prep work up front.
Here’s the catch. You won’t get much consulting work if consulting isn’t on your Services page. After 10 years of coaching copywriters full-time, I can tell you clients read that page. And they react to what’s on it.
If consulting is missing from your lineup, add it now. Then mention it on your LinkedIn profile, in your posts and videos, and anywhere else you market yourself.
Consulting can raise your status.
And your income.
Barefoot Writer checked in with copywriter Tina Lorenz for the inside story on charging higher consulting fees…
“The fact is, consultations can be leveraged into a much larger project as well as an ongoing relationship. For example, I’m just getting ready for a second ‘ultra-consult’ with a two-day private marketing intensive for a client.
“This is her second intensive with me, and I was so thrilled when she got in touch to tell me her first consult had literally saved her business. She has very high-end physical products ($4K to $20K per sale) in a market that is not a typical ‘Internet marketing’ niche, and markets her products all over the world.
“When the economy went south, so did her business. That’s when we had our first two-day consult, giving her a step-by-step plan to bring her marketing strategies into this century with a robust online component.
“That was followed by the next step of her marketing investment, which was to create multiple components of the copy she would need after our two-day intensive. This was, of course, also a second fee.
“She’s an ideal client, because she went full throttle into implementation mode and actually DID what I recommended. Her company has done so well, she is flying in to meet with me again next week.
“By focusing on the scale and value one can bring to their consulting, it can go far beyond an hourly fee structure, especially when you factor in your commitment to delivering high value and your client’s implementation of the strategies you recommend.”
Thank you Mindy.