How much should you charge to blog?

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Wednesday, February 27th, 2008 Subscribe To Our Feed

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I’ve had questions this week about how much Web writers should charge to blog, so Web writers seem to be having challenges with this.

Here are some ideas on how to approach setting your blogging rates.

Will this project help me to make my monthly income goal?

My one-size-fits-all “how do do I charge?” rule, which trumps every other consideration is: will this commission help me to make my monthly income goal? If the project won’t, then it’s a non-starter for me.

So how do you assess what fee to charge, by looking at a blog, or when reading a project description?

Here are some criteria:

* Is this a specialist topic? A real estate blog, a financial services blog and a diabetes blog are all specialist areas. If you have the experience to write such a blog, you can charge more;

* How much would a print magazine pay? Let’s say that you’re considering a home decorating blog. I’m not au fait with print magazine rates in this area, but let’s say that a magazine would pay $900 for 1500 words.

On a blog, 1500 words would be approximately five blog posts at 300 words each. So, rounding things up, ($900 becomes $1000), you could charge $200 per blog post.

$200 per blog posts assumes that you’ll do some research. If the blog posts are written off the top of your head with no additional research, you could charge $100 per blog post.

* How easy/ hard will this blog be to write? This is a vital consideration. When I first started blogging, I took a couple of gigs at great rates. Unfortunately I had zero interests in the topics (mortgages and stocks) at that time.

Those gigs, although they paid well, poisoned my life. They turned writing into sheer drudgery. Finally I had the good sense to give them up.

So there you go - criteria you can use to set your blogging rates. Check out my Blogging For Dollars manual to learn more about how you can make money blogging.