Okay, so we've got some more money advice here, because this is so important. As I've said before, a good web designer will develop a website for a client that if regularly updated will be a powerful marketing tool for years to come for that client. And that's worth money. So part of this lecture is just giving you the confidence to ask for more money when it's reasonable. So usually with the designer client relationship, it starts off with a fixed rate for specific jobs. After that you might develop a good relationship with the client and you go on to an hourly rate, what does a good business relationship mean?

It's trust. So the client will trust you with an hourly rate. And this will be when it's mutually beneficial for you both. One of the problems I had when I was starting out is that I had good clients on hourly rates. But my hourly rates were too low. Because I was just starting out, I didn't have the confidence, and I had them at what I consider to be quite average rates.

And I thought it was time to raise the rates. So here's what I wrote to my clients to tell them that I was raising the hourly rate. And of course, you can copy this and paste it into your own emails. So as you can see, it's not very pushy. It's really very soft. I thought I'd mentioned I've increased my hourly rates for other clients to reflect price rises in the industry, and I'll want to do that to your rates at some points in the future might be better to say I would like to do this next year starting at the beginning of the year, and I went on to say you always get especially rate because we've been working together for a while, however, next year, I will have to review the hourly rate with you.

So I wrote that email off to a few of my clients. And I was absolutely staggered with the response. It was very positive. Here is one of the emails back from the client, and he was happy to pay this higher rates. And he says, it's fine. Let's do it from now onwards, and I was absolutely over the moon with the response from the clients.

So don't be afraid once you've set up a good relationship to ask for more money. But besides asking for more money, there are lots of other ways you can increase your payments that you get. And we've been speaking about a lot of these but I thought I'd include some more in this lecture. So instead of increasing your hourly rate for your existing clients, of course, you can increase your hourly rate for new cards. Now some people might not want to do this. As it gets confusing.

You have to remember where right you're working for with which client but it's something you can think about priority surcharges. This is for when clients phone your email here in the evening and want something doing straight away. You don't want clients to do this too much and you can put in the contracts or you can just tell them before that if they need something during out of hours, there's a surcharge of 30 or 50% on the job. Another idea is generally is always to keep it professional. Don't tell your client that you've been out last night and you woke up with a bit of a sore head this morning. That gives a very bad impression and they may think that you're not doing such a good job for them and they may not want to pay you the higher rates.

Another idea is to put on your invoice align about late payment charge or in the contract that after a certain time 30 days usually a certain percentage, sometimes 4% above the bank rate will be charges interest on outstanding balances. So if your client is over a month late, you start charging interest on the amount he originally billed. Now, obviously use this sparingly only use this really with clients that you don't want to work with ever again, obviously never use it on your good clients get paid for client communication. Always remember when you're billing for a job or you're estimating for a job, you don't only get paid for doing the job you get paid for talking to the clients as well. Sometimes these phone conversations Skype conversation can go on for hours. Sometimes email exchanges can be very time consuming.

You have to get paid for that. You don't even have to itemize it in the bill. Just put it down as hours works. But that is work as much as designing a website is the communication is work. So make sure you get paid for it if you're doing an hourly rate. Now project creep is something we've talked about before.

It's also called scope creep. creep, or brief creep, and it's where you're asked for extra features or functionality that weren't mentioned before. Best way to avoid project creep is by specifying the deliverables and the exclusions in the contract or the proposal specify exactly what you're going to do and what you're not going to do for the project. And anything else will be paid for an hourly rate. So if the client understands that they're asking for something that wasn't originally asked for, then the client must appreciate that you have to charge more for it. It's just very important that you don't get asked to do more and more things that you didn't think that you were expected to do for the money.

And the way to do that is with perfect prior communication. Don't ever advertise or publish your rates. Don't put your hourly rate on your website because then you can't increase it with new clients. It makes things complicated and It's really up to you, I would keep your hourly rate private. And finally, don't get greedy charge a fair price for a premium service. And this is the only way to run a successful web design business.

Okay, I hope you enjoyed that. This has been Rob from Rob cabin.com. Thank you