 So you want to raise your rate from six cents a word to eight cents a word. How do you go about it? In this video, I'm going to discuss raising your rates, how to make sure you can get paid more or try to get paid more without disrupting your workflow or making your clients angry or anything along those lines. Now, first of all, you can't just raise your rates from one day to the next. And these numbers are pretty hypothetical. Obviously, all languages are different and it will depend on your language combination, on your clients, on your field, etc. But let's say your rate now is six cents a word and you want to raise it to eight cents a word. First of all, you have to announce it ahead of time. You can't just from one day to the next be like, okay, I'm going to raise it to eight cents a word, not only with new clients, but with current clients. And then in your next invoice, you'll have eight cents a word. You know, you can't do that. With new clients, obviously you can just say, hey, it's eight cents a word and then see who wants to deal with you. With old clients, you have to give them some advanced notice at least a month or so. People budget months to months along those lines. But if you have to do it, you know, if they say, hey, I need this translated, you could also just say, okay, from now on, by the way, my translations are eight cents. But yeah, you definitely need advanced notice. This also goes for your minimum amount of translation. Now I've made this mistake. The minimum, by the way, is the minimum that you'll do a translation for. If you charge six cents a word, but they need three words translated, you could do it for 18 cents, but chances are, it's not worth your time to do a translation for 18 cents total. So most translators have a minimum. My minimum was 30 francs and I raised it to 50 francs. And I told, you know, obviously the new clients and some old clients, but I hadn't told all of them, but one of them just saw it on the invoice one time and was like, why is it 50 here? We just gave you like, you know, three sentences to translate. And I was like, oh, that's my minimum. Anyway, it turned into an issue to any change in pricing. You have to let your clients know ahead of time, preferably a month, I think, as long as it's ahead of time, and they have the time to say, yay or nay, then you're fine. Secondly, and this is a mistake I see quite often, you need to offer more. I'm sure as you do translations, you're going to be getting better. So maybe your level of translation is worth more, you know, rather than six cents is worth seven cents. But if you want to start charging more, you need to do other stuff as well. When I hire someone for six cents a word, I'm going to expect something. When I hire them for eight cents a word, I'm going to expect something else. And this isn't only the level of translation. Let's say if someone charges, you know, four cents a word, and I hire someone for four cents a word, I'm going to expect them, obviously I'm going to expect them to do the translation, but it might require some editing and all along those lines. But aside from the translation, I am going to expect, well, nothing else. I'm just going to expect the translation, you know, and that's it. But if I hire someone for 10 cents a word, then I will expect, if I sent them say a chart, I'm going to expect a well-formatted chart back. If I send them a PDF and there's a chart or something, you know, on the PDF, I'm going to expect something back that is well-formatted that looks good. The bottom line, I think the broad thing to keep in mind when you're raising your rates is that for a higher rate, to get paid a higher rate, you need to make your client's life easier. Part of this is having a better level of translation than someone who charges less. But part of it is also just making their life easier in general. You need to almost anticipate what they want. Many times you do need to anticipate what they want. If they send you a chart, you send the chart back or send something that's very easy to fill a chart from or ask them, say, do you need this or that? And so you can give them precisely what they need. But also you need to be quick to respond. You need to be a pleasure to deal with all those things. You need to make your client's life easier if you're going to charge more. And I mentioned this because now I have more than one translator that I've dealt with who's raised their rates and then has lowered it again. You know, they're still translating. And in fact, I still use both these translators. But even if their translations are good enough, they've found that they weren't able to consistently charge these higher rates. While the reasons obviously can differ from person to person, case to case, in many different ways, generally speaking, it's because people, when they pay you more, they expect more. And that goes beyond the translation itself. So yeah, just broadly speaking, if you want to charge more, then by all means charge more, see if you can, but it also means you're going to have to do more for the client. As a good general way of thinking about it, I would say think about ways in which you can make your client's life easier. Try to anticipate what they need or even just ask them. Hey, would you like me to send this as a chart or do you want just a text or whatever the situation might be? That way you will be worth more. Okay. And I hope you found this useful. And if you have any questions, feel free to let me know. And otherwise hit that subscribe button and you'll get more videos dealing with translation, freelance translation. And I'll see you in the next video. Thanks. Bye. Without disrupting your workflow.