I am so pleased to share that a lot of the folks that have been following the travel content marketing webinars are already getting responses to their pitches, setting up calls, and sending proposals:

“I just wanted to let you know that I have a phone call set up later this week with a tour company in Tokyo who have approached me about writing for their company blog. Thanks to your webinars over the last month, I feel like I have so much more knowledge going into the call. So I just wanted to say thank you for all your advice! Fingers crossed it all works out!”

“Listening to your webinars it has encouraged me to seek out social marketing jobs. I have landed 1, have a conference call with another and emails into 6 others.”

Congratulations to these go-getters, and I can’t wait to hear more stories like this from more of you!

But what often happens at this step in the equation, when the bites start coming in, is that you need to figure out what to charge and that can present its own challenges, marring the initial joy of getting a response. Last week, I got this email:

“As I am completely new to this kind of collaboration, I have no idea how much to charge for such services. From your experience, how much do such packages cost?

In a previous webinar you mentioned at some point, $500 for one post per week (4 per month), so am I right to think that for an 8-post package, such as the one you mentioned in the webinar, you would charge 1000USD per month? Or more, since a calendar month would require at least 9 posts, as you explained.

Is this a “sensible” fee to ask, in your opinion, or would it scare a prospect away?”

As much as I wanted to help, the truth is that the answer totally depends.

At that rate, I usually think of it covering for four posts plus the strategy for around 500-word posts, without doing the formatting or photo research. If you’re doing shorter posts, you could make offer two a week for less, but I try to make sure the client is on the line for at least $500 so they’re invested.

What determine if the fee is sensible is how it sounds to the prospect, and part of what controls that is how your set it up. So at that rate, I would ask:

  • how long are these blog posts?
  • are they all the same length?
  • what goals are you accomplishing?
  • are you also formatting the blog posts and uploading them?
  • are you doing the content strategy?

The reason it’s so hard to give a straight answer about pricing is that it is a strategy, not a series of set rules.

So this week, I want to review different pricing and negotiating strategies that you can not only use for travel content marketing gigs, but also for your magazine article negotiations.

Join us for Pricing, Negotiating and Contracts (for Travel Content Marketing and Magazine Writing) on Thursday, February 2 at 3:30 pm EST / 12:30 pm PST. Register now.

If you aren’t able to make it to the webinar live and want to watch it later, make sure you register to get the replay via email after the call. The replay is available to registrants for one week, at which point it becomes available to members of our coaching programs or for purchase on demand in our webinar library!