Success in Sweatpants

A big advantage of working the online project boards is the ability to dial your pricing up and down without having to go through a lot of explanation or have artifacts of previous pricing structures floating around the market.

Generally speaking, buyers who post projects to online boards don’t study the existing posts of other buyers as part of their selection process. 

If you bid on Joe Blow’s job with one kind of price or fee structure, you can bid on Susie Cue’s job with a completely different number, and the twain are highly unlikely to meet.

The ability to price your services without having to broadcast them loudly to the market has several advantages:

• It lets you dial your prices up and down according to your workload, pricing jobs higher when you have a lot of work and lower when you have holes in the schedule.
• It lets you test the market and gives you a barometer reading of what particular types of services are going for in the virtual space.
• It lets you tailor your pricing for a particular type of buyer.

For example, I target prospects who are as interested (if not more so) in value as they are in price. These buyers will be looking for experience and quality, and will be willing to pay a higher price if they feel that the end result will be worth it.