It Costs Money to Make Money
Posted On: 2007-06-26
For almost as long as I've been involved in providing copywriting and other text work for clients here in online adult I've had a problem with what people are prepared to pay. Perhaps they've had a problem with me too and haven't much liked what I've wanted to charge them for the work they've wanted me to provide but there's not much I can do to fix that.
That might sound like a rather off-handed approach to what is a real problem but the fact is that you don't get quality work without paying a reasonable price for it. Sadly that's not a concept that many people in this industry seem to understand and that's rather puzzling really.
Here we are working in adult, we make lots of money from selling fantasies to surfers and the better fantasy we can weave the more money we make. Yet despite the fact that there's lots of money to be made in adult there are a lot of people out there who aren't prepared to spend a lot of money to make a lot of money.
They expect content providers to provide quality work for rates worse than what a burger-flipper gets paid. Think of this way, how much would you be prepared to work for per hour? How much would expect to earn in a day? If you have an expectation of making a reasonable income per hour and every day then why should you expect others in this industry to work for less?
Yet that's exactly what so many people do expect. Just recently I was asked to quote on a job that was going to take two to three days of solid work and the quote I gave the client reflected that fact. Now if the work we provided to that client was good and contained effective sales and search engine text then the chances were that what we provided to this client would go on earning him good money day after day for many months and possibly even years.
However I don't think he saw it quite like that. Instead, when he got the quote, he saw one figure that was obviously a whole lot more than he was expecting to pay and never bothered to get back to me.
Another client who we had provided custom stories for in the past hit me up the other day and asked for a quote on some more stories. Unlike the previous work we had done for him these stories were going to be about 10 times the length and so the price I quoted reflected that. In fact writing just one of these stories was going to take an entire day but it seems he still expected to have to pay the same rate as he had paid for the much shorter stories.
Now I don't know about you but I don't work for $30.00 a day and I don't expect any of my writers to work for sweatshop rates either.
Fortunately a few people are beginning to realize that you have to spend money to make money and some are coming to the realization that if you want to make a lot of money then you have to be prepared to spend quite a bit too. That's definitely a positive step because more and more providers are realizing that they're skills and services are definitely worth more. I've mentioned before the coder we use for mainstream projects; he now charges on the basis of what the client will make from the scripts he provides and he's never short of work.
It's also timely that portions of the industry are coming to terms with the idea of paying more for the services they need because more and more adult marketers are beginning to understand the importance of ranking well in the search engines. For many the ability to achieve good rankings is a skill they don't possess and don't have time to acquire so they understand that they're going to have to pay for it. And the amounts they're going to pay can be quite scary.
Just recently one SEO practitioner took a look at the prices the SEO industry was charging and they're a little breathtaking. Site review and consulting seems to start around $500 at the low end of the scale and rise to $2,500 for the mid range. You don't really want to know what the high end of the range was.
Hands-on editing of pages and code starts around $2,000 and hits $10,000 by the time you reach the mid range. Web design, development and marketing start at $5,000 and reaches $25,000 in the mid range and if you want to retain an SEO for ongoing optimisation you're looking at something that starts around $2,500 a month.
Now you might think that all those figures sound like a real waste of money because there are some people out there who guarantee a page one listing for as low as a $150.00 but then $150.00 is a lot of money to pay for absolutely nothing.
The bottom line really is: if you want to make money then you have to be prepared to spend it. 'Nuff said!