Dear Unicorns,
We live in a world that wants to put an economic value on everything. If you have an employer, you have a value assigned to your skill set. Your company receives more value from your skills than they pay you. That’s how they make a profit.
If you work for yourself, your value is determined by the price your customers or clients will pay. They have to decide if they are getting enough value from your offer to spend their money.
As creatives, it often feels impossible to figure out the economic value of our work. A book that took a year to write might only sell for $5 a pop. Is that fair? I don’t know.
The wonderful thing is that the value of your skills may be much higher than you think. The key is to get in front of the right buyer.
When I started out as a freelance copywriter, I wrote blog posts. There was a huge demand for them, and they were easy to write. But churning out blog posts, even the high-quality ones I wrote, was not lucrative because the skill wasn’t valued by most of the clients. The large number of writers willing to write for pennies devalued everyone’s work.
I moved on to more specialized work. I wrote landing pages and emails designed to persuade people to purchase products or services. This work paid more and there was less competition.
However, one day I made a discovery that changed the way I approached copywriting forever. A client I had written some emails for asked me if I could write a script for a short sales video they planned to post on YouTube. I had never done that before, but after some initial research, I realized I could do it.
The project was fun, and the client was happy. I then started looking around and realized that hardly any copywriters were writing video scripts and the ones that did were charging a lot more than I just had.
I jumped into this new niche and found I could charge five times more than I had been charging and the work was not much different from the other copywriting I had been doing.
Why was I able to charge so much more? Because the perceived value of the service I was offering was much higher. The script copywriting market was the opposite of the blog market. There were fewer writers, and everyone charges a high fee.
While I have improved as a copywriter over the past ten years, I don’t think I’m 25-times better now than when I started. However, my rates are 25-times higher. I have learned how to align my perception of the value of my work with that of my ideal clients.
Most likely, you have in-demand skills that you are currently vastly undervaluing. There may be buyers willing to pay you a lot of money for the results of your artistic skills, you may just need to find a new way to package them or a new kind of buyer to pitch to.
Business Challenge: Think of a different way to package a skill you have in order to increase its perceived value
Creative Challenge: Try combining two or more things to make something new.
For example, recently I’ve been combining my haiku and collage art with stop-motion animation as a different way to reach people with my poetry.
Here’s the first of what I hope will be several stop-motion TikToks:
Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
If you enjoyed this letter, please consider hitting the heart or leaving a comment. These give me a nice dopamine hit and it helps show others this weird newsletter is worth taking a chance on.
Be the weird you want to see in the world!
Cheers,
Jason
Once again a very astute "nail on the head" post. So many people undervalue or overlook how their core skills can be used in new ways. It's also the perpetual error that all artists commit. Thanks for the reminder to look outside of one's perceived self.
Thought-provoking prompt! Thanks. 😎