A client forwarded me a quote last month: twenty blog posts a month for $400 total, “premium quality, written by experts.” She asked if I could match it.
I could not, and here is the arithmetic I sent her instead.
What the per-word rate hides
Plenty of writers still price by the word, usually 10 to 30 cents. The rate sounds tidy and it measures the wrong thing. A 600-word page that requires two interviews, a walkthrough of your service area, and three revisions costs me the same afternoon as a 1,200-word page that requires none of those. Word count is a rounding error. Research is the product.
When a quote looks like a bargain, ask what the number leaves out. Interviews? Revisions? A second pass after your subject expert reads it? Usually the answer arrives after you have signed.
Where the hours go
Here is a real 900-word service page, timed. Two hours of interviews (the owner, one technician, one customer). An hour reading what the company already has. Three hours drafting. Two hours on revisions against the brief and your expert’s notes. An hour on the final pass: the read-aloud, the fact check, and getting the file into whatever system you use. That’s roughly ten hours, and the typing is the smallest slice of it.
Someone quoting $200 for the same page is spending ten minutes where I spend ten hours. The page will look finished. It will read like everyone else’s.
Real ranges this year
These are the numbers I see across my own projects and the writers I trade rates with. Your market moves them a little.
- Blog post or article, 800 to 1,200 words, one interview included: $350 to $900.
- Service or product page: $450 to $1,200 a page.
- Homepage plus three core pages as a package: $1,500 to $4,000.
- Email sequence, five emails: $600 to $1,500.
- Case study with a customer interview: $500 to $1,500.
- White paper or long guide, 3,000 words plus: $2,000 to $6,000.
- Day rate for a working session or a content sprint: $700 to $1,400.
Anything far below those bands is priced for volume. Volume pricing exists to fill calendars, and it gets filled with drafts you will end up rewriting yourself.
What moves the price up
Four things, and they are worth every dollar.
Interviews. A writer who talks to your technician, your office manager, and one happy customer writes pages full of details no competitor can copy. That takes hours before a word gets drafted.
Specialized subject matter. Medical, legal, industrial, financial: the writer has to read your documentation and get checked by your expert. Cheap drafts in these fields get corrected in the worst possible place, after publication.
Revision depth. I include two rounds against the brief. A third round against a brand-new opinion gets quoted separately, and I say so upfront.
Volume of assets. A page with fresh photos, a diagram, and a short video script to match costs more than one with a single stock photo.
What a real quote line looks like
When a quote arrives, make the lines say something. “Blog post: $600” tells you nothing. What you want is closer to: “Interview with your estimator (60 min) and one customer (30 min): included. Draft of 1,000 to 1,200 words: included. Two revision rounds against the brief: included. A third round, photo licensing, and uploads into your system: quoted by the hour.” A quote that itemizes is a quote written by someone who has done the work before.
The cheap-quote autopsy
That $20-a-post quote deserves its own paragraph. At that rate a writer working full time would need roughly 1,400 finished pieces a month to clear a normal salary. That is a factory. What comes out of the factory is unedited machine drafts with the serial numbers filed off, thin research, and claims lifted from whoever ranks that week. Your name goes on it.
I have rewritten two such archives. The rewrite cost more than the original year of posting combined, and the client paid twice.
The first archive cost the owner about $2,400 across a year. The rewrite ran just under $5,000, plus her own hours answering my questions because the original drafts had captured none of the details. The arithmetic on cheap work includes the second payment and the year of waiting.
How to budget without wasting money
Buy fewer pieces and give each one a job. Four strong pages a quarter, each built around a real customer question and a real proof point, will outwork forty thin posts. Start with the pages that sit closest to money: your service pages, your pricing page, your best case study. Email the rest later.
Ask your writer for one thing before you sign: a sample paragraph about your business, written from the brief you filled in. Two hundred words tells you whether the writer listened.
Six questions before you sign
- Does the price include interviews, and how many?
- How many revision rounds, and what counts as a round?
- Who checks facts in my industry, and at whose cost?
- What happens to drafts I reject?
- Are photo licensing and uploads in the number or extra?
- What is the rush fee, and what counts as a rush?
Silence on any of these is an answer too. It usually shows up at invoice time.
What I charge, plainly
Project rates, quoted after the brief comes back. Small pages start at $600 and packages land in the low thousands. I quote in one number with the deliverables listed under it, and I would rather lose a project than surprise anyone at invoice time. The surprise belongs in the copy, in the good direction.