I recommend watching this very interesting (and brief) interview of Ramit Sethi on how to charge more for your work. Whether that work is photography, videography, graphic design or anything else, he has some interesting things to say including why charging what others in your territory are charging is a bad idea. Ramit is a motivational speaker/business guru, and the author of the website I Will Teach You To Be Rich.
There is a link to another (90-minute) interview he did with Chase back in 2011, which was originally posted by Patrick Hall.
Via [Chase Jarvis]
Most poeple don't feel guilty about raising rates, they feel fearful they will lose the client. I was just having this conversation with a buddy last night. The key is to have enough money and extra clients that if you do lose a few clients from a price change, it won't affect you. Only then will you have the confidence necessary to raise your rates.
ok i'm gonna raise my rates right know.
Great video! Ramit has awesome and useful tips!
Always a gamble when you do something like that. Hopefully things work in your favor. Depending on the market you can't do so unless you've really developed a solid reputation in the respective industry. In graphics market, whether it's photography, retouching, design, etc. for the most part there's too much cut-throat pricing, with a fair amount of work being shipped overseas to places like India where they work at slave rates. So tread lightly. ;-)
As a person who is not doing photography full time, and is still trying to figure out a way to not just price things on a situational basis, it's hard to charge a lot when people are always pricing for who can take the pictures for the cheapest amount of money (at least those that I have come across in my area, which area certainly not the wealthiest of people). I always tend to cringe a little bit whenever I tell people my prices because I never know how they will react, and yet I know when I do that I am setting myself up for failure because I am sure that some people play the "that's way too much, I can get it somewhere else for cheaper" card and then I feel like a jerk for asking for too much. I realize that this is something I need to work on, and this video definitely gave me a couple of tips on how to better approach this in the future.