Pricing Strategies When Your Audience Is Small

Money. You can’t live without it, so you can’t sustain your content business if you don’t earn the revenue.

But how do you earn that “meantime” money when you have a small audience? Austin Church, consultant and author of Free Money: Nine Counterintuitive Moves for Life-Changing Freelance Income, says you need to set strategic prices. Then, on the content side, you should start charging for what people will likely buy – advice. 

At the Content Entrepreneur Expo, he suggested every startup business owner do these five things to balance the meantime and the content business revenue:

1. Optimize prices on the service side: You’ll make more money in less time by establishing better pricing on your consulting or service side of the business. Then, you can spend the newly freed-up time on the content side of the business.

2. Calculate your survival rate: Use these seven calculations to generate higher yet realistic hourly rates on which to base your service pricing. The first three include:

• Survival number: How much does your life cost? Think personal life, business life, and taxes.
• True availability number: How many weeks will you work over the next 12 months? How many hours in an average week? How many hours can I realistically bill? Austin calls this last number your effectiveness rate because you can’t bill for every hour worked. 

For example, let’s say your hourly rate is $100. Of the 10 hours you work a week, you spend six hours directly on client work. So, your effectiveness rate would be $60. (The $600 earned from client work is divided by the 10 hours you spent on the business.)

• Survival rate: Your survival number divided by your true availability number equals your survival rate.

3. Dream and actualize bigger: You don’t just want to survive; you want to earn additional money to move toward a lifestyle you really want. So, keep calculating. 

• Dream number: What’s the total amount you want to make in a year?
• Dream rate: Divide your dream number by your total available hours to know the dream hourly rate that covers your immediate needs and helps you progress on long-term goals.
• Pessimistic price: Your dream rate exists in a dream world. Account for human nature, such as delays, revisions, communication hiccups, etc. Add up the time for the project. Multiply it by your dream rate. Then, add 20% to account for the inevitable “bad behavior” that will happen. 
• Weirdly precise: If your pricing ends in round numbers, turn the zeroes into weirdly precise numbers. So if it’s $500, charge $575, or make it $10,125 instead of 10K. The incremental increases won’t lose you the client, but they will add up over a year.

Austin says you probably won’t be able to get your dream rate for every project right out of the gate, but you can move closer to it with each new project. 

“We’re all better advocating for ourselves when we have an emotional attachment to the outcome. But if the number really was arbitrary, it’s no surprise that our belief in those prices is wobbly,” Austin says.

4. Treat advice as a content product: Spend time on the content side of the business to offer content products that will return revenue even if your audience is small. Advice works well in many content product forms. For example, you could sell one-off strategy sessions and offer premium one-on-one coaching.

To determine what advice would sell, ask yourself these questions:

• What are my top 10 pieces of content?
• Why did they resonate with my audience?
• What smaller symptom problems do they have?
• Based on your experience, what’s the right order for solving them?
• What bigger root problem do they need help with? And what’s the transformation?

With those answers, you can create content products that take them along that path to transformation. Think about a low-, mid-, and premium-price point offerings. And don’t shy away from charging a high price, thinking people won’t spend that much. You may be surprised like Austin was when he started doing that.

5. Build a funnel: Create a business path to turn the audience into buyers. Here’s a simple way to nurture them to the sale: 

• Publish posts about your signature offer.
• Invite people to schedule a discovery call (free “strategy call”).
• Get the yes and send the payment link.
• Downsell to a one-off coaching session.
• Invite them to apply for your premium signature program.

You also can promote your content products by publishing a post about the low-tier product (and pinning it to the top) on social media emails. Add a booking link to your email signature. Email your subscribers about your premium program before you launch it in your newsletter. Get creative.

Austin was one of the first Tilt Publishing authors. Interested in learning how you can be the next? Start here.

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