Home Business - Pricing Your Freelance Projects - Continued

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Setting Your Hourly Rates | Pricing Your Projects
How to Quote a Freelance Project | Should You Take the Job | Naming Your Home Business
Legal Considerations for Your Home Business

FORMULA 5 - ESTIMATION BY PROJECT

Most clients are going to want to hear how much the entire project is going to cost. Even if you have an hourly rate already, probably this isn't going to be acceptable to your future clients. It takes practice but you are going to need to learn how to break projects into individual tasks in order to estimate how long the project is going to take. Make sure to find out what responsibilities the client expects you to take care of. If the client expects you to do everything, then take this into account. If this is the case break up the project into the following phases in your mind:

TASKS	# Hours
Administrative
Purchase Server / Domain
Planning / Flow Charting
Story boarding / Mockups
Optimize Images
HTML / Programming
Create Prototype
Testing
Make Site Live
TOTAL

Now Visualize how many hours you feel each stage of your project is going to take. Add up all of these hours.

Multiply your hourly rate (figured out from one of the above formulas) by the total estimated number of hours for project (from above). This amount would be how much you bid on the project.

So For example, if the following is true:

1. Hourly Rate = $30
2. Total Estimated Project Hours = 50

Then this is how you figure out how much to bid on a project:

$30 x 50 = $1,500

Make sure that your client is very clear on what the scope of the project is. You should write a clear contract to make sure that the outline of the project is written down in clear terms, otherwise the client may take advantage of you.

The bottom line to your freelance business is that you want to make a good living. If your hourly rate seems too low then raise your rate till you feel comfortable with it. If several clients are way too eager to hire you as a freelancer, rethinking your hourly rate might be a good idea. On the other hand, if clients are very interested in you at first and then stop communicating with you after they hear what your hourly rate is, then you need to lower your rates. In other words, feel customers out to see whether your fees are correct or not.

If you have determined that your fees are too high then you might need to lower your overhead in order to lower your fees. Try cutting some of your unnecessary expenses in order to make ends meet. When you make the change over to freelancing, sometimes there is a little suffering at first. Don't worry; it doesn't usually last long if you know how to save when times are good.

Good Luck.

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