4 Skills to Master Before Charging High-Ticket Rates

Have you ever wondered what it would take for you to be able to charge high-ticket rates for your copywriting services??

When you’re first getting started as a freelance copywriter, it can be hard to imagine what it takes to get to six and even multiple six figures a year writing for clients. You’re still trying to land clients in the first place.?

But once you have the client attraction thing down, you start to wonder "How can I uplevel? I want to make more inside my freelance copywriting business … but I don’t want to burn myself out working around the clock."

If you want to uplevel your income without burning out or working even more hours, you're going to need to raise your rates. However, I strongly believe that the rates you charge should reflect the level of results you can get for clients. So before you can raise your rates, you need to make sure you've upleveled your skills.

So let's talk about four skills freelance copywriters must have before charging high-ticket rates. In this article, I'm going to give you all the lowdown skinny on the exact skills you need to develop to be able to get the kind of results that will help you land high-level clients and charge high-ticket rates.

Target Audience Research

The first skill you need to sharpen as a freelance copywriter is research, specifically target audience research.?

You may be writing FOR your client, but you’re writing TO their ideal client or customer. You have to really KNOW them in order to write copy that meets them where they’re at right now, builds trust, communicates clearly, and moves them to action.

To get to know target audiences, you have to research them on two levels. The first level is demographics. Demographics are the basic who, what, and where of the target audience. You’ll need to be able to answer questions like:

• What gender are they?
• How old are they?
• Do they have kids?
• What do they do for a living?
• What kind of hobbies do they have?
• What kinds of books do they read?
• Where do they live?
• How much money do they make??

Demographic information is relatively easy to get. Your client has probably already spent time figuring this out. Ask them for any demographic information they have, but don’t only rely on that. Do your own demographic research on the target audience too. Sometimes the client is so close to the offer they miss things.

You also need to do research on the target audience's psychographics. Psychographics are the internal needs, desires, and motivations of the target audience. Ask questions like:

• What problems and pain points are they struggling with right now?
• What have they tried to solve those problems?
• How have those solutions worked (or not worked) for them?
• What result do they want?
• Why haven’t they invested in your client’s offers yet?
• What do they think about themselves?
• What they want others to think about them??

Do not underestimate the power of psychographics. Understanding what’s going on inside the target audience is even more important than understanding their demographics. Researching target audience psychographics is what will help you get in their heads so you can grab the target audience’s attention and keep them reading.

Sales Psychology

The second skill you need to master to start charging high-ticket rates is sales psychology. You need to know and understand how language works to persuade people to take action, and certain tried-and-true frameworks and strategies employ sales psychology ethically that have been proven to work for decades upon decades.

For example, you have to know the types of objections people have when it comes to buying and how to break those objections down. You need to know the most frequently asked questions the target audience will have and how to answer them. And you absolutely MUST understand how to determine the target audience’s level of awareness when it comes to their problem, the solution, and your client’s offer.

If you don’t know where the target audience is in their level of understanding about what they’re experiencing, what’s causing it, and what the solution is, you won’t be able to reach them with the exact message they need at the right time to get them to buy. And that leads us to the third skill you’ll need to master – messaging strategy.

Messaging Strategy

Once you’ve thoroughly researched the target audience and have immersed yourself in sales psychology, you’re ready to start creating the messaging you need to meet them where they’re at and move them to action. You’ll be able to create copy that leads them logically from point to point in a way that builds trust, creates hope and belief, and helps them self-identify as the right person for your client’s offer.?

You’ll be able to pinpoint the stories and illustrations that will capture attention and create a connection while educating them on the client’s offer and why it’s the unique solution they’ve been looking for.?

Copywriting is part art and part science. It’s part storytelling and creative illustrations and part proven technique and watching the numbers. And that brings us to the fourth skill you’ll need to master to get high-ticket level results and charge high-ticket rates … data analysis.

Data Analysis

Data analysis isn't one of those skills that people talk about very much – or at all – when it comes to freelance copywriting, and I get it. We're word nerds, not numbers people. But if you want to get the best results with the copy that you write, you have to learn how to figure out if the copy is working. For that, you have to know how to read the analytics in your client’s funnels, ads platforms, and email software programs.

The thing about data is that it doesn’t lie. Target audiences vote with their watch time, clicks, opt-ins, and purchases. But it gets even more specific than that. Different types of data reveal specific pieces of information about how well your copy is performing.

Most copywriters never learn data analysis, and that’s such a bummer. Understanding how to read the numbers gives you the ability to tweak, adjust, and improve the copy so your client can get better and better results. A copywriter who can do that is worth their weight in gold because sometimes even the client doesn’t know what their numbers mean. If you do, and you can use that data to make informed decisions on split testing and hooks, then you can get high-level results and charge high ticket rates.?

I don't have time to go into how to read the data in this short article, but this is something that I train in detail in my Written Results Copywriter Certification program, where I teach freelance copywriters how to get consistent conversion results no matter who they write for, who they're writing to, or what they're helping their clients sell.

Conclusion

So what do you think? Are you ready to dive in and start up-leveling your skills so you can charge more and land better clients? Drop a comment below and let me know which of these four skill sets you want to focus on first.