One of the toughest decisions in any business is how to price your product. As bloggers, our main products are sponsored blog posts and social sharing campaigns.
So how do you decide what to charge? Is it enough? How often should you raise your
rates?
These aren't easy questions and it can take some testing to determine what is best. But I think one of the most important strategies is talking to other bloggers in your niche who have traffic and social channel followings similar to yours.
A couple of years ago, we really were NOT
charging enough for our sponsored posts.
Fortunately, a few of our long term blogging friends encouraged us to increase our rates.
We were scared because we almost doubled our rate at that time. But do you know what? We still stayed just as busy.
And recently we increased our sponsored post rate again.
When you increase your rates, you will lose some jobs... that's okay.
It's better to work longer and harder and produce better content on fewer campaigns that are paying well.
We've found that many PR companies and brands are now budgeting reasonable rates for high quality content with good images.
The key is really strong content with
lots of social sharing.
Your rates may be less than a site with higher traffic and social followings. But I encourage you to focus on investing a good amount of time in each sponsored post that you write.
The posts on your blog are an example to future clients of what they can expect.
So work hard and be proud of each post you publish.
And then, consider raising your rates.