Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by Bamidele Onibalusi a blogger, freelance writer, and the founder of WritersinCharge.com. Get better, high-paying, writing clients by checking out his free course on how to get freelance writing clients by blogging!

If you’re a freelancer, you are probably getting paid much less than you’re worth for the following reasons. One, you are influenced by what your competitors are charging – why charge $1500 for that web design project that everybody else is charging $600 for? Two, you are afraid clients won’t pay your rates. Three, you are competing with a sea of "professionals" who will happily charge one-tenth of what you’re supposed to charge.

Recommended Reading: 6 Important Tips To Getting More Design Projects

Good news is, no matter your reasons for charging low, you could be getting paid double, triple, or more. Here are some tips to help you.

1. Upgrade Your Belief in Yourself

If you find it difficult to convince yourself that your service is worth a premium, nothing can be done to help you get paid what you are worth. This first step is often the most difficult and everything else becomes easy once you get it right: make sure you believe strongly in the value you’re offering to your clients.

If you are a freelance designer, start thinking about how your client will benefit from your design for the next 1-2 years; your design will probably help your client make back 50 to 100 times what they are paying you. If that is the case, why not double your rates?

Read Also: Why Don’t People Want To Pay For Good Design?

You should also look at the top people in your field to see what they are doing right as well as how confidently they are charging what they’re worth; you will be surprised that they are easily charging 10 to 50 times more than what you are charging. Motivating yourself by studying these people and their experiences will surely go a long way to help you solidify your belief in yourself.

2. Have a Clear Unique Selling Point

If you are "just another web designer" or "a top WordPress designer," then, I’m sorry to burst your bubble, no one will pay what you deserve. Almost everybody is "just another web designer" or a "top WordPress designer," so it will be very difficult to convince your clients to pay you a premium if that’s how you position yourself.

Read Also: 7 Insane Habits To Destroy Your Freelance Writing Career

Have a clear unique selling point (USP) that helps your client realize that they are getting a service that they can’t get anywhere else. Your USP could be about your approach, the kind of clients you work with, the kind of clients you actively send away, the niche you work in etc.

Having a USP will send some clients away, and that’s a good thing; you are carefully repelling the clients you don’t want, who probably won’t pay what you are worth, so that you can get clients that will value what you have to offer. For a detailed guide on finding your USP, this article is a must read.

3. Values In Premium Service

When it comes to selling your services, there are two kinds of value you can offer to a client. They are:

• Inherent value: the main value in your offer; what will result in long-term results for your clients (essentially the quality and effectiveness of your work).
• Perceived value: the value your client believes/feels they will be getting; the reason for hiring you

Perceived value is not necessarily inherent value but it is often just as important. No client will hire you without feeling strongly about the perceived value of your product. Besides making sure your service can stand the test of time, you also need to make sure your client is convinced they will be getting a premium service (perceived value), otherwise, you would have little luck closing deals with clients.

No matter how great the value of your services, if your client don’t feel like they’re getting a deal, it would be difficult to get them to work with you.

Tips To Increase Perceived Value

#1. Increase your prices: double it, triple it, whatever. Just increase it. Increasing the price of a product or service has been psychologically proven to increase its perceived value. In a study where subjects were asked to taste the same wine but were made to believe that one is worth $5 and the other is worth $45, they reported more satisfaction after tasting the $45 wine. It had nothing really to do with the quality of the wine; they just felt that they were getting premium wine. So, want to make clients feel that you offer a premium service? Charge a premium rate!

#2. Offer exceptional support: This will make a client feel that they’re not just buying your service but they also feel that they’re buying you. Offering exceptional support even before you close a deal with a client can go a long way to convince the client that your service is worth a premium.

#3. Use Social Proof: When potential clients see that a lot of people are using your services, they feel it is worth a premium.

You could use just one of the above 3 principles and still get great results. However, if you can combine all 3 you’ll be surprised at the results you’ll get.

4. Attract Your Clients the Right Way

When you are bidding for clients on sites like oDesk or Elance, where the average hourly rate for writers and designers is around $10, you can’t expect to get away with charging $80 per hour no matter what you do. It will simply be difficult to convince your client that you are offering more value than the 20 other writers who want to charge a fraction of your rates.

This is why you should be careful with how you get clients; if you are getting them on bidding sites or by competing with dozens of other freelancers, they already have lots of potential candidates to choose from, it will be difficult convincing them to choose you and pay your "heavy" rates.

Alternative Attractions

Instead, take charge of how you attract your clients. I favor an approach where I get a client to come to me instead of having to seek out the client. Basically, this can involve having a website or blog and then advertising your services in one way or the other – it could be via social media, PPC, or by appearing regularly on authoritative blogs in your niche.

Read Also: Powerful Branding Techniques Through Social Media

My suggestion is to build a blog about the type of service you offer, regularly publish content on it, showcase case studies in your niche, and appear on relevant blogs to contribute value while promoting your brand.

5. Sell Value, not Money

Your clients are making a business decision and as a result they do not care about the money they are spending but about the value they are getting by spending that money.

If a client pays $500 for your design and makes $2,000 back in one year, that is a ROI of 400%. If a client pays $2,000 for your web design and makes $100,000 back as a result in one year that is a ROI of 5,000%. In this case, your client would be willing to spend $2,000 instead of $500.

The key to closing deals isn’t to tell your client how much they will be saving if they pay your rates but to tell them how much they will be making. To most real clients, it probably won’t make much of a difference to spend $2,000 instead of $500 but it will make a lot of difference to make a profit of $98,000 instead of a profit of $1,500.

Read Also: How To Calculate Your Breakeven Point With 4 Simple Concepts

This is what you should use to convince clients to pay your rates. If possible, look for relevant case studies from past clients who have gotten great ROI from using your services. Use these case studies to convince your clients to pay your rates.

Wrap Up

Your clients won’t come and hand you what you deserve and your market won’t determine a fair price for your work. Instead, use the above tips to get clients to pay you what you are worth.

Here at hongkiat.com we have always admired the creativity of artists who can create all sorts of art on all sorts of mediums: coffee cups, toilet roll or even coffee (and in 3D). Thanks to great apps like Paper, Procreate and Sketchbook Pro, we are now seeing more and more digital artists showcasing their talent: iPad finger painting.

Make no mistake, it isn’t easy to draw on iPads (give it a try) and yet these artists made quite wonderful masterpieces. Through an amazing array of techniques, incredible talent and a love of art that is not limited by the choice of canvas, this collection of 20 amazing iPad finger paintings will make you rethink what you can do with your iPad.

Recommended Reading: 20 Beautiful Examples of iPad Finger Painting

iPad Portraits – Celebrity Guests. For the 2013 Macworld iWorld Expo in San Francisco, Kyle created 5 portraits of celebrities on his iPad using Procreate. (Image Source: Kyle Lambert)

Red Tail. Michael Acosta made this masterpiece with Paper by FiftyThree iPad app. (Image Source: iPadInsight)

Bryce. Dennis painted this artwork of American actress, Bryce Dallas Howard, on Sketch Club. (Image Source: Dennis Huff)

EyeCandy. Nikolai created this amazing piece on Procreate. (Image Source: Nikolai Lockertsen)

Owl. This is just one of the many untitled artworks that Flickr user dcannell5, has created on his iPad. (Image Source: dcannell5)

Colonnade At Stanford University. Digital artist Christianna took the original photo with her iPhone and edited it on her iPad. (Image Source: Christianna Pierce)

Newer Model. For the release of Procreate 1.6, Laurent was commisioned to paint this masterpiece. It is a painting of a broken-hearted and disillusioned robot sitting on the floor eating ice-cream. (Image Source: Laurent Canniccioni)

Study of Jules Bastien Lepage. This iPad artwork was done by London-based artist Edward Ofosu. (Image Source: SaatchiOnline)

Chinatown. This piece was designed with the intention of having it divided horizontally in the middle, which would result in two separate parts that complement each other. It was done on Procreate. (Image Source: Nikolai Lockertsen)

A Beautiful Flower. Veronica uses Sketchbook Pro to create this painting of a rabbit taking a nap on a flower. (Image Source: Veronica Minozzi)

Fairlane. Susan’s grandmother used to have a car like the one depicted in this artwork. This was created using Sketchbook Pro. (Image Source: Susan Murtaugh)

Whale. Jake Larson finds creating digital art very soothing because he can easily erase or add anything with ease. (Image Source: Telegraph)

Surprised Kitty. This almost real-life painting of a kitty is an artwork by Olechka. (Image Source: society6)

Self-Inflicted. Salnavarro drew and painted this caricature painting of Hollywood actor, Sylvester Stallone on his Sketchbook Pro App. (Image Source: iPadpainting)

Dad & Son. Nikolai painted this piece using Procreate to celebrate his son, Felix’s 4th birthday. (Image Source: Nikolai Lockertsen)

After The Storm. This painting emphasises the cloud formation above the barn. (Image Source: TRShootr)

Kiss. Digital artist, Veronica Minozzi painted this on Sketchbook Pro. (Image Source: FineArtAmerica)

13. Whenever Susan was coming or going to Chicago, she would stop by at Tenuta’s (hence the jar on the right). She created this using Sketchbook. (Image Source: Susan Murtaugh)

Golden Retriever. The reference photo of the dog is from a Purina ad. Rafael used Procreate to create this almost real-life painting of a dog. (Image Source: Rafael Co)

Still life with Japanese trawler. Matthew Watkins has painted a Japanese fishing vessel crashing into The Flatiron Building in New York City. He used Procreate on his iPad. (Image Source: Matthew Watkins)

Do you reach out to your readers and clients via email newsletter campaigns? If you do, then this course is for you. In this course, you will be able to learn how to produce an HTML email layout that can work across a wide range of email clients on both Web and mobile.

By adding CSS to the HTML email, you will be able to take advantage of the capabilities of newer email clients and produce a design that can respond to the varying screen sizes it will be viewed on. You will also learn how to ensure that the design will gracefully degrade in older, unsupported email clients.

On top of that the course will also explore tools and services that can be found online to help you test out your email campaign and optimize it for more impact. Lessons will be conducted by Chris Converse, designer, web developer, photographer and regular speaker.

Want your email to work on Outlook 2003 or Gmail, on Android, Apple or Windows phones? Sign up for the course today for only $49.

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When I first began my career as a web pro, I thought that all I had to do was to create amazing websites, and then the phone would start ringing off the hook with new business. Sadly, this wasn’t the case at all. In fact, the more time I spent building these amazing websites, the less time I had to devote to growing my business.

I needed a way to bring in new prospective clients while taking care of my current commitments and deadlines.

For me, cold calling was out. I simply didn’t yet have the time needed to make that successful. Email marketing was out, as I didn’t yet have a list. And then, I found it: a three-step process to marketplace domination. In this article, I’m going to share with you how to build a never-ending stream of new clients that will pursue you.

Recommended Reading: How To Handle These 9 Client Types Like A Pro

Step 1: Create Your Cult

Ask yourself, "Who do I need to become to attract my cult to me?" One of my favorite examples of a "Cult" following is Apple. From day one, they were different.

They came out with marketing and messaging that challenged the way we look at computers. To the Apple crew, their computers were not simply workhorses, but pieces of art to be revered, even loved. Remember their most famous commercial, "Are you a Mac or a PC?" To this day, we still refer to ourselves in this way! That’s amazing.

So, how do you go from nobody to somebody? How do you get buy-in from your entire marketplace and stand above the crowded messaging? You simply need to create your cult. It’s easier than you might think… 

1. Identify your perfect cult member.
2. Ask, "what is the right offer to convert my cult members?"
3. Create awesome events, offers, and downloads to give to your cult members.

Stand For or Against Something

There are no real secrets to getting clients to pursue you. But, there are some strategies that truly work. One of these strategies is to stand for (or against) something. I often refer to this as a company’s "Cause." It’s all about getting people to rally around you.

What is the dirtiest secret in your industry? Give away your knowledge and educate your marketplace on how much you know by exposing the industry’s dirty little secret(s). This is the best way to begin creating your cult following.

One more thing: when you’re creating your cult – be who you are, be yourself. And most of all, become the ultimate example of your brand!

Read Also: 20 Creative Branding And Identity Designs For Your Inspiration

Step 2: Identify Your Cult’s Problem

The single most important strategy to getting clients to pursue you is to profile them. Check out this post by Addison on how to create ideal client profiles. Be as specific as possible as this is going to help you identify your cult’s problem from their point of view.

At first, your goal is to attract cult members – but now your goal is to prove to them that you understand the problem that they face. This isn’t a new tactic. It’s the oldest marketing tool in the book. Who wants to buy crap they don’t need, right? So, prove it. Show your cult that you understand their problem – otherwise they will never trust your solution.

In understanding the value of what you’re about to offer your cult, there’s a big difference between actual value and perceived value. You need to see the value of what you’re offering through their eyes, through the eyes of your cult members. Then offer them a solution they can’t refuse.

Step 3: Offer Your Solution

One way to introduce your offer is to create demos or freebies that will help you generate leads from your cult following. You could hold a free webinar, or give away downloads on your site. There are probably 100 different things you can do to "advertise" your offer to your cult.

Pick three and do them, and in the process turn your cult members into your clients; remember, you still need to make sales! After you get going, you are going to have an amazing amount of fun with this cult creation venture.

Reminders!

Lastly, here are 4 friendly reminders to ensure your clients keep coming:

1. Model What Works – Use tactics and strategies that are simple in your sales process. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel.

2. Make It Easy – Whatever your offer is, make it easy to purchase. Forcing a client to fill out two pages of on online form would be the opposite of easy.

3. Hustle – Stay involved and stay committed to your Cause and to your Cult. Once you have a following, you’ll need to be able to do sales and production, it’s a good problem to have!

4. Be true to who you are – Don’t try to be something or someone you’re not. If you stay true to who you are, you will attract others who believe in the same things your cult stands for.

I’d love to hear your comments and/or questions, please make sure to post them down below and I’ll do my best to answer every single one of them. Now, go create your cult!

Editor’s note: This is a contributed post by Jonathan Hinshaw, who has been building web solutions for clients in a variety of industries since 2006 at EBWAY Creative Solutions. He recently launched a course on uGurus.com teaching web professionals how to close more deals for higher prices. You can follow Jon on Twitter.

When we are building or prototyping a responsive website, we need to give the website a test in numerous viewport sizes to check to see if the layout and pages are displayed well. There are several ways in doing so: you can use Adobe Edge Inspect, XIP.io, a responsive bookmarklet, or a browser extension such as Dimensions for Chrome.

The problem is that these tools do not always work seamlessly in every case. Adobe Edge Inspect requires your laptop and mobile devices to be connected under the same wireless connection, XIP.io also requires your devices to connect to the Internet, and in my experience it is quite painful to debug responsive website under iframe or having to repeatedly resize the browser window.

Emulate Viewport Size

Chrome recently introduced a new built-in feature that bypasses all the above mention problems. It is called Device Metrics. To enable it, open the Developer Tools Setting.

Head over to the Override panel. Select Device metrics, and you can specify the viewport dimension.

The result should take instantly.

You can swap the length between the width and the height by clicking on the button next to the input fields.

Not sure what screen resolutions to use? You can also change the browser’s User Agent. And the screen dimension input fields will be filled up with the actually viewport size from the selected User Agent.

For example, selecting "Android 2.3 – Nexus S" will set the dimensions to 480 by 800 pixels, selecting "iPad – iOS5" will set it 1024 by 728 pixels.

For the rest, you can find a complete list of mobile device viewport sizes in Screensiz.es.

Conclusion

Google Chrome has a lot of helpful features that can streamline the development process. Now, by using Device Metrics, you can debug your website for specific viewport size without having to deal with restricted connectivity, using third-party browser extensions, or trawling through an iframe.