Why I cut my rates to FREE — again
OPEN LETTER
I offer clients two choices when it comes to my rates. Pay a one-time flat fee. Or a royalty for the results my work produces.
Also known as “free.”
While pay for performance may be the next big thing in business — as reported by brilliant “Long Tail” author and Wired editor Chris Anderson in his recent article and forthcoming book “Free” — it’s not new to me. Indeed, when I opened for business it was my first big idea.
I had the quaint notion I would get paid per response. I’d be a contingency copywriter. The marketing equivalent of lawyers who dare to take the tough cases. I wanted to own the biggest promise and best offer any agency could make: “No results? No charge!” The very definition of earned income.
The idea was I’d get rich on my talent. And become so renowned in the world of subscription marketing I’d soon be turning down less-than-plum assignments among the flood of work flowing my way — just as soon as publishers and circ directors discovered it “cost nothing” to hire me.
Much to my surprise, few magazines — Inc., The Atlantic — took me up on it. Instead, clients overwhelmingly preferred to pay per project regardless of results. Inquiring why, I learned the big concern wasn’t that my work might fail. The worry was it might win. And there is nothing quite so vexing as unpredictable spending. It’s hard to plan and budget for. Near impossible to get approved.
Worse, paying a royalty to an outside vendor brings him inside the publishing house. Creating a sudden business partner with whom one must share results. A money-hungry camel nose under the tent wanting to look at the books and perhaps glimpsing corporate secrets in the bargain.
To these clients, I wasn’t so much offering a work for hire, but a lien on their business. The kind of commitment a mid-level manager could not make. And the kind of albatross even a cash-starved owner cum publisher was loathe to feed.
Well that was then. Before the Internet. Before eBay, Google, Adwords. Before results-driven, upside-only, pay-as-you-go direct marketing made it possible to test infinitely, learn instantly, and measure accurately what really works. In exacting ways that keep score so tellingly, they reveal anew who’s worth how much and why.
It’s a beautiful thing. Giving me a way to create e-mail and direct mail, banners and space ads, landing pages and bangtails for “free” when my competition won’t. In turn, giving my clients a fail-safe way to build circulation, test subscription ideas — even launch whole new magazines — on a zero-based budget.
But don’t be misled. “Free” doesn’t come cheap. My royalties reward me handsomely. And understand, too, if I am to be paid for performance, I am necessarily careful with whom I partner.
Of course I’ll always work — gratefully and diligently and well — for most anyone who can afford my fee. But for those who still find my rates are prohibitively high, I have a new, easy-to-afford, low-risk rate plan:
