Increasing Your Hourly Rate

The most efficient way to increase your hourly rate is to forget about hourly pricing. You want to put yourself in a position where your revenues scale with your performance instead.

Let’s take my work as a technical writer for example. On platforms such as Upwork, it’s not unusual to find gigs for as low as $25/hour. You put in two hours to write an article, you’ll get paid $50.

What you want instead is a project-based or metric-based pricing: “I’ll write one 1000-word article for $100.” No matter how long it takes, you’ll still be paid $100. However, if you are confident in your skills as a writer—you write fast and well, your work doesn’t need much back-and-forth before being published—you can use that to your advantage to be paid more by the hour: if you spend one hour to write this article, your hourly rate becomes $100.

You still have to take into account the time you spend researching, editing, and communicating with your customers, but proposing your services like that is how you acquire the leverage to increase your hourly rate.

This is not only great for you, but also for your customers since the whole point is to provide value as fast and efficiently as possible. 

What I personally love about this way of thinking is how it pushes you to constantly surpass yourself. The more you master your craft, the more reward you gain: it’s an incredible source of satisfaction when the client approves of your work.

This is also why productized services have a bright future when it comes to empowering both providers and clients alike.