How to Make $500 an Hour as a Writer
By: Jason Mcbride
Tags: Freelancing, Make Money Online, Business, Writing, Marketing

When I was a freshman in college, my English professor wrote a letter to my parents praising my writing skills and trying to impress upon them my potential to be a professional writer. My parents never showed me the letter. Instead, they threw it away and pretended it never existed.

I didn’t find out about the letter until 23 years later.

Why wouldn’t my parents tell me that one of my college professors thought I could be a professional writer? Because they were afraid that I might decide to be a writer instead of a lawyer.

My mom and dad wanted me to be financially secure. In their minds, being a lawyer was a much more economically prosperous path than being a bohemian writer.

I played the game like I was supposed to. I went to law school and became a lawyer — then I quit the law to become a writer.

My parents were wrong. Being a writer has been much more financially stable than being a lawyer. I even have a higher billable rate.

On a per hour basis, I charge my freelance writing clients more than I charged my clients as a lawyer. I often make $500 an hour doing client work. As a lawyer, I topped out at $300 an hour — and being a lawyer is much more expensive than being a writer.

I’m not even that good of a writer.

There is nothing special about me — and that’s great news. It means anyone can repeat what I have done. You can’t make $500 an hour by manifesting or magical thinking. You can get there with some hard work and strategic marketing.

Here are the five steps you need to take to make $500 an hour, or more, as a writer.

Write for Businesses

There are millions of ways to make money from your writing. But the fastest and most lucrative way to make money is to write for businesses. Businesses have the budget to pay you, and they have a massive need for content.

I have written for print magazines, paid guest blogs, books, and online articles. Nothing else comes close to the hourly rate I make writing for businesses. If you do it right, you also get paid much sooner from a business client than you do from anyone else.

Writing for businesses isn’t glorious or glamorous. Most of my family still have no idea what I do for a living, and I’ve been doing it full-time for eight years.

Nobody thinks I’m cool at parties when I mention that I write marketing materials for businesses.

Luckily, I care more about the cash in my bank account than I do about my social status.

It’s possible to make great money writing books, blogs, or magazine articles. However, it often takes a long time to build an audience, portfolio, and reputation. You may spend years making minimum wage or less, on an hourly basis. If you are patient, hard-working, and a little lucky, all of that work can come with a big payday.

It’s also often unpredictable. You may have a book or article go viral, but it’s impossible to replicate that kind of success.

I love seeing my name in print — it helps keep me motivated. Writing for businesses allows me to have a comfortable living now while I take on occasional projects that fuel my ego and fulfill my creative desires.

If I never sell another book or another article, I know I can earn a good living writing for well-funded small and medium-sized businesses.

Don’t Charge Per Hour

If you want to make $500 an hour as a freelance writer, you need to know how to bill for your services.

The key to making $500 an hour is to not charge per hour.

You need to charge per project. Clients are willing to pay you based on the value you provide them. Your client doesn’t need to know how long it takes you to write their content. They only need you to deliver what you promise.

You do need to figure out what your internal billable hour rate is. How many words can you consistently write in an hour? If you can write and edit 1,000 words an hour, you know that to make $500 an hour, you need to charge $500 for projects that are 1,000-words long.

Almost any client would laugh if you quoted a rate of $500 per hour. They won’t think twice about paying you $500 for killer web copy or a powerful autoresponder sequence.

If you want to make a lot of money for each hour of client work you undertake, you need to bill based on the value you provide.

Write Content With a Clear ROI

Not all content is the same. Like most freelance writers, I have written a lot of blog posts in my life. When I started, that’s all I wrote.

I still enjoy writing long-form blog posts. But, blogs are not the most profitable content for a freelance writer.

Businesses often want a clear return on investment for their marketing efforts. Blogs can take months or years to pay off.

Content like videos or emails often pay for themselves in less than 30 days. These types of projects have a higher perceived value. That means you can charge more for them.

When I make $500 or more an hour, I am either writing emails, video scripts, or chatbot scripts. When you can consistently make money for clients, you will be able to charge higher rates and work fewer hours, while always having a steady flow of new clients.

Clients are eager to invest in projects that will bring in revenue in the next 30 to 60 days.

Learn The Biggest Client Pain Points

Freelance writing is like every other business. If you want to succeed, you have to understand your customers.

Who are you serving, and what problems are you solving? If you want to make a lot of money, you need to solve an expensive problem that needs to be solved urgently.

The biggest problem many businesses face is that they need to earn revenue quickly. They need to convert browsers into buyers.

If you can create content that drives revenue, they are happy to pay you a lot of money. However, every business has a different business model. Their exact pain points are different.

It takes empathy to figure out what your client needs and what their customers need. The more time you spend learning about your clients, their industry, and their customers, the more successful your content will be.

I learned that clients had more success with my email sequences when I included different subject lines and calls-to-action (CTA) that they could split-test with their email list. I also learned that many businesses struggled with when to schedule the messages in a sequence.

I changed my service-level to include multiple subject lines and CTAs and to provide life cycle management advice for email autoresponders. This allowed me to increase my fees and close more deals with clients. I solved the pain point of not knowing how to use the service I was providing them.

The more successful your content is, the more you can charge.

Climb the Pricing Ladder

Clients don’t try and negotiate my prices with me because I target businesses that can afford me, and I have a proven track record.

However, it wasn’t always like that. I started out making pennies per word. At one point in my career, I was writing 500-word posts for $2. I was making $4 an hour. I now make more than 100X that much while doing client work.

What changed?

Three things:

1. I became a better writer 2. I got better at marketing myself 3. I climbed the pricing ladder

After floundering for a year, I realized that my problem was I was attracting horrible clients with my low rates. I was too scared to raise my prices drastically. I decided I had to change my pricing strategy.

Every four to six weeks I would double my prices. Once my internal billable rate was $100 an hour, I increased my rates by $50 every six months to a year.

As I gained confidence and built my portfolio, I increased my prices.

I now raise my rates once a year.

If you’re scared to raise your rates, you have two choices. You can continue being underpaid, or you can close your eyes, raise your rates, and see what happens.

Will you lose clients if you raise your rates? Yes. I lose some clients every time I start charging more. That’s okay. I always end up replacing them with a client that pays me better.

Every time I increase my fees, I make more money, and I need fewer clients to meet my financial goals.

If you want to make $500 an hour, it is up to you to set your prices at that level. If you can’t find any clients willing to pay you, you can always lower your prices. There is no law against changing your prices frequently.

You are a business. You should be charging what the market will bear for your services. That means you need to stop worrying that you could never afford a writer that charges what you charge. You are not your target market.

You need to think strategically. Your prices are part of your brand. Do you want to be a discount brand or a luxury brand? As a writer that has been both, the clients who pay luxury prices are much nicer and easier to work with.

Because I am expensive, I only need to do a few hours of client work a week to meet my financial needs. I can spend the rest of my time finding new, high paying clients, and working on other types of writing that I love, but that doesn’t yet pay me very well.

Making $500 an hour is possible for any writer willing to treat their writing as a business-to-business (B2B) enterprise. That means you are a business that provides services to other businesses.

While your writing skill does matter, making $500 an hour is about your confidence and marketing more than your writing ability.

You need to convince clients that you can deliver value that exceeds what you are charging. Then you need to deliver on that promise. That is all it takes to succeed as a freelance writer.

Chances are you have read hundreds of articles about how to succeed as a freelancer. You already have all the knowledge you need to get started or to level-up.

Now it’s time for you to put all of your knowledge to work. Start by following these five steps so you can start making $500 an hour for your writing.

I’m rooting for you!