Never Compete on Price

Why Clients Pay Us $7,500/mo for 4 Blog Posts

I’m a writer and entrepreneur. Over the last 4 years, I’ve grown my personal freelance work into a content marketing agency that’s now a team of 20 and generates $1.5MM ARR.

This piece is based on my experience — and my mistakes.

Follow me on Twitter for more on entrepreneurship, content marketing, SEO, and random pop culture quips.

Asking for money is hard.

That’s why one of the most difficult parts of being an entrepreneur is the element of pricing.

Whether you sell widgets or work as a consultant, you’ve spent countless hours learning, honing your craft, building your product. You’ve invested blood, sweat, and tears into making something that you think other people would be willing to pay you for.

So, when it comes time to put a dollar figure on that effort, it’s no surprise that it can be a scary process.

In a way, you’re not just setting a price tag for what you built.

You’re putting a price on yourself.

What if no one else thinks I’m worth this much?

What if they laugh at me?

It’s these moments where the imposter syndrome, self-doubt, and fear start to take hold.

And because of that, our natural inclination is to dial back our pricing. Lower the bar — lower the risk. Undercut your competitors and avoid having a difficult conversation about why you’re worth more than someone else.

Maybe if I just charge $10 instead of $100, no one will question it.

But, competing on price is a losing strategy.

Instead, consider what that fear means.

The reality is that if you’re worried about the price you’re charging, it likely means:

1. You’re selling something of little value (commodity)
2. You haven’t defined the true value of what you sell
3. You haven’t communicated that value to your customers

Each of these problems leads to the same outcome — a race to the bottom.

Over the last 4 years, starting as a freelancer and now running a content marketing agency, I’ve learned to fight off that imposter syndrome.

I’ve learned to re-frame my value.

I’ve learned to communicate it clearly.

And, it’s worked.

Clients hire us every month to create content for them. And on its face, our pricing may seem astronomical. But I never flinch when I share the cost of what we do. Because I focus on how to communicate the value in a way that makes sense.

Selling 4 Blog Posts for $7,500 per month

How much is a blog post worth?

I run a content marketing agency. So, you might think that this question crosses my mind a lot.

You might assume that the price of our services is related to the cost to create and publish content — because isn’t that how pricing works?

And you might also assume that we have to price our services to be competitive with all of the freelancers, agencies, and offshore operations that sell content for pennies per word.

Maybe you’d do some back-of-the-napkin math and come up with a number.

Say you’re even generous — you might come up with something like $1,000 per blog post.

So, what if I offered to sell you one blog post for $10,000?

You’d probably baulk.

Hell, you might even laugh in my face. (That’s our worst fear when it comes to pricing, isn’t it?)

How could a single post be worth that kind of money?

It can’t take more than 20 hours to create, publish, and promote a blog post. And if you threw a rock, you’d probably hit 3 people who would be happy to write one for $50.

In other words, if Optimist competed on the basis of price — we’d be fucked.

Now, imagine that instead of offering you a blog post for $10,000, I offered to grow your business by 10% for the same price. You might spring at the idea.

Depending on the size of your company, that investment could easily pay for itself — and then some.

Would you care if that outcome only required me to create a single blog post?

Probably not. Because, at the end of the day, you’re no longer paying me to deliver a blog post. You’re paying me to deliver a result — and that has changed the calculus for how you determine its value.

This is how Optimist operates.

The value of our work is not measured by the time spent on production. It’s not even measured by the deliverables that we’re able to produce.

The value of our work is measured by the outcome that we generate.

In other words, our customers are not buying blog posts.

We sell growth.

What that means is that we don’t compete on price per blog post. We aren’t locked into a race to produce content cheaper than freelancers or offshore teams.

Instead, we focus on how we can turn blog posts into value.

We don’t quite charge $10,000 for one blog post.

But, we do charge somewhere in the ballpark of $7,500/mo for packages that often include just 4 posts in total.

What makes this reasonable to our clients is that they aren’t buying 4 blog posts for $7,500 — at least, not in their mind.

They’re buying sustainable, compounding growth.

Even though, functionally, the work that we do might look similar to any content mill on the planet, we’ve managed to escape from the treacherous world of under-selling our competition.

We’ve found ways to disconnect the price of time and materials from the value of the product.

Never Compete on Price: A 3-Step Manifesto

The way that we often think about pricing and value is wrong.

First of all: Price is relative.

Unless you’re selling an openly traded commodity, there is no fixed price for the work that you do. It’s worth what people are willing to pay.

That means that your pricing is only limited by your ability to define your own value.

So, if you don’t want to compete on price, then you need to learn to define that value in a new way.

1. Define Your Value on New Terms

Before you can communicate your value to customers, you need to first understand it for yourself.

Why do people hire you in the first place? Why do they buy what you’re selling?

Chances are that it’s not because of the raw materials or the time that goes into creating it.

Most people buy stuff because it fills a need for them.

Sometimes, that’s purely a functional need. But, more often than not, it’s something bigger or something deeper.

It might be growth, love, happiness, freedom — something big and powerful.

If you’re a freelance writer, you’re not selling time or words.

You’re selling rocket fuel.

Without your work, the company’s marketing plan dies on the vine.

So, how much is that worth?

On a macro scale, it could be worth everything — the whole company depends on what you do.

But, even if we just think about it through the lens of the direct tangible and intangible benefits of your work, you have to consider the whole picture of what you’re selling.

Your work creates value in a number of ways:

1. It fuels growth for the company
2. It creates peace of mind for the person who hires you and doesn’t have to keep looking for someone to do the work
3. It saves, say, 10 hours per month, for someone internally who was previously writing (like the CEO); that time could be spent on activities that generate thousands of dollars on their own
4. If you’re good and reliable, it saves them the headache of chasing down a writer or bugging people about upcoming deadlines
5. You help shape and craft the voice of the company

So, what you’re truly selling isn’t words or time. It’s a package deal.

It’s all of these things.

And the price should reflect the value that you’re providing.

If your writing work frees up the CEO to close $10,000 in new sales, then wouldn’t you say that you helped create some of that value for the business?

Even if your product or service can’t, on its own, lead to some kind of spectacular outcome, it’s better to define its value by its critical role in the machinery than as a commodity or a raw material.

Consider your work not through the lens of time or thought or input, but in terms of the value that it creates for your customer.

All of the value.

2. Elevate the Value

Value creation is not linear.

When people hire our agency to write 4 blog posts per month for $7,500, they aren’t really just paying for that work and that work alone. We’ve strategically added services to the scope of work until we hit a tipping point — where the value that we provide to customers is significantly higher than the time and materials that go into the work.

So, ask yourself: What is the most valuable version of what I’m selling?

Chances are it isn’t a raw material — it’s something that combines multiple products or services to create something that truly solves a problem for your customers.

Let’s say your business builds websites.

If you simply design the sites and send over an image of what it should look like, then the customer has a lot of work to do. They have to find a web developer, they have to find a copywriter, they have to product manage, they have to figure out hosting, etc, etc.

But, what if your business does it all? What if, instead of just designing the website, you provided everything and delivered a completed website.

This unlocks an extra level of value for your customer — they no longer have to invest their time and energy to hire and manage the project. And they will pay for that value.

Plenty of shops do this and they often charge a premium for a done-for-you, white-glove service.

Now let’s take it one step further.

What if, in addition to designing, building, and hosting the website, you also provided some kind of conversion optimization service that could help the business generate 10% more leads once the site is live?

Now we’re really cooking.

Your services have expanded well beyond the range of a specific deliverable and tapped into the realm of potential business growth, which is a true value unlock.

Now, your service isn’t just premium. It’s a must-have for any business owner who wants these kinds of results.

The key to this approach is identifying the level of maximum value creation.

In other words, you want to identify where along the path, you can connect the most dots to maximize the difference between the raw inputs (time x materials) and the perceived value.

Of course, you can’t be everything to everyone. So this should be an exercise in focusing your strategy on where you can move the needle most.

If you can identify this point, now you’ve unlocked a superpower.

It’s time to communicate that value.

3. Communicate The Value (Positioning)

Finally, you need to outwardly communicate and position your product or service on the basis of the value that it creates.

This is the critical piece of the equation where you pull your rabbit out of the hat and stop talking about your product or service through the lens of hours, words, or whatever other arbitrary input stops you from raising your price.

Start by rethinking how you communicate versus product.

Anytime you’re presenting pricing to a potential customer, you should make sure that you are framing it with the value of your work and not the basics of the deliverable.

No one buys SaaS software because they get “1 login and 1 password”.

They buy SaaS software because it saves them 10 hours/week of manual accounting work.

And any good SaaS software will communicate, validate, and reinforce that value creation — even hinting at how those precious 10 hours could be better spent on more valuable work.

Sell the benefits — not the features.

But, you also need to take it one step further. Before there is even a discussion about pricing or deliverables, your customers should be thinking about your product or service not for what it is, but for what it does.

This is positioning.

You need to extract the value that we’ve worked hard to define and turn it into a specific, desirable result that you can communicate to potential customers.

“Freelance Writing” is a commodity.

“Writing that Drives Business Growth” is a benefit.

And, as a customer, once I am thinking of your product or service in terms of the benefit that I will get from it, then my perception of its value has officially shifted.

This should be reflected in every communication that you have with potential customers:

1. Website
2. Emails
3. Proposals
4. Twitter
5. Whatever else

When you do this, you’ve reframed the conversation that you have with potential customers.

More importantly, you attract a completely different customer.

They no longer come to you to buy a commodity.

They come to you to buy an outcome — business growth.

In this space, there is no race to the bottom.

Your differentiator is not your price. It’s your ability to deliver the results.

Optimist (my content marketing agency) has done this since day one.

We’ve never sold words and pictures. We’ve never really even tried to sell “content marketing” directly.

Instead, we’ve sold growth.

In particular, we’ve sold the promise of sustainable, compounding growth for startups.

And we’ve sold it in a done-for-you, don’t-even-have-to-think-about-it, we’ve-got-it-from-here kind of package. That creates even more additional value — time and resources to focus on other parts of the business.

By and large, this strategy has worked. Almost without trying, we’ve been able to attract our target customer (startups), have value-based discussions (growth goals, targets, and revenue), and price according to that expected value rather than the day-to-day work.