EPISODE 21: Knowing Your Worth as a Content Creator

Jessi:
Welcome to the Brand Your Voice Podcast, where we’re digging into how you can create personality-driven content that connects and converts. I’m Jessi…

Marie:
…and I’m Marie. We’re the co-founders of North Star Messaging + Strategy, where we support business owners in outsourcing content without sacrificing authenticity.

Jessi:
Every brand has a unique voice that sets it apart. We're digging into how to capture the way your brand communicates from the words you use to the stories you tell. So you can create more compelling content that strategically helps you meet your business goals.

Marie:
And if you choose to outsource that content, you'll be able to do so with confidence, knowing your brand voice is in good hands and you can reclaim your time. We're so glad you're here and hope you enjoy this episode.

Jessi:
All right, welcome to the next episode in a series where we are talking to content creators directly, although business owners who are not content creators, primarily, please feel free to hang around because some of this may apply to you or to people who are on your team. And today's topic in particular may apply to some of the people that you hire within your own business. I'm also going to add a caveat today. We try to keep these episodes short and sweet, but we have a couple of soap boxes today. So we may talk a little bit longer than we have in the past. Just a really, because this is an important topic. This is something that's really near and dear to us. And so today's topic is knowing your worth as a content creator.

Marie:
Yes, and I really do believe this bullet applies to every business owner. So if this is a triggering a little like, interesting response within you, please do stick around. So, I think we wanted to just start off by, acknowledging the fact that we have also battled with this, um, with a couple of stories. So, what was it like when we first started this company? Jessi, did we know our worth?

Jessi:
You know, I think to answer that question, I have to go back even further, which is too, you know, growing up as someone who knew from third grade that I wanted to be a writer. And I think you had a similar experience right. Where that knowledge was constantly being put up against a narrative of, okay, that's great, but what's your plan B?

Marie:
Yeah. You're going to be a starving artist, Jessi.

Jessi:
Yeah, exactly. That was the only option that or a teacher, which I did end up being. I ended up going into teaching because after going through college and continuing to hear that narrative deciding to get an English degree and then realizing that, Oh, society thinks that the only thing I can do with this degree is become a teacher, which is a wonderful career and can have a huge impact, but was also not where my passion was. It was just the thing that I thought all I could do with my degree, because I'd heard my whole life that's what writers can do. They can be a starving artist. They can be a teacher. They need a plan B.

Marie:
Yep, exactly. I definitely heard the same thing. And in fact, I don't want to throw my wonderful university into the bus because I didn't love them, but there was one negative experience, where I went to a career counselor and my senior year, as I was preparing to apply for jobs in 2008, by the way, as the recession was literally just beginning, and, you know, just wanted some help basically, you know, standing out against the crowd because, yeah, Times were getting tough. And I remember clear as day, she said, okay, so do you want to be a teacher or would you like to be like a business consultant for like a company like Deloitte? And I was like, well, I only have, like, I really had a frame of reference for one of those. I mean, as a student, my whole life, I knew what a teacher was and I thought that sounds great, but really hard. And I didn't have any idea what somebody who works at Deloitte does. And so it was like neither. And she was like, well, you should have picked a different major... four years in... like three weeks from graduation. By the way, I ended up becoming a nonprofit grant writer, which was not one of the options that she presented, but it was a completely valid way for me to use my degree anyway.
There's a very narrow view of what is possible for creatives. In fact, I had this conversation with a client who is also a wonderful friend just yesterday. She is a brander. She is an incredible visual designer and has run against the same experience in her life. Another one of our clients is an incredible videographer and, you know, he runs against this as well. This idea of, you know, well, everybody has a cam quarter. I mean, everybody has an iPhone. Everybody can record a video, everybody can shoot a photo, everybody- like, right. Everybody's taking English classes, so everybody can like write a website, you know, like it's- I think it's great that we all have exposure to these things and that we can democratize access to creative mediums. But I think sometimes what happens is then everyone assumes that I'm operating at a high professional level in one of those areas is just as simple as picking it up for the first time.

Jessi:
Yeah. And I think that these days, there, you know, obviously it's a lot easier to create a business virtually to work virtually too, you know, freelancing has really exploded since, you know, 2008 when Marie and I were both looking for our first jobs out of college. And I think that this mentality has transferred over to the realm of service-based businesses. And so that's kind of where we want to start today talking about when we started our business, which was back in 2010 and the playing field was a little different then. Freelancing was around, but not nearly to the degree that it is today. And it was still then the type of business that we were starting, which back then we started with writing resumes and cover letters. Although we very quickly shifted into helping support with other types of content creation, like writing blog posts. It was something that not only did we feel like we were entering this industry, having to face this fight for what we do is actually worthwhile, but we didn't actually believe in ourselves because we'd heard those messages our whole life. We didn't believe that what we did was worthwhile. We knew that we wanted to make a living for ourselves as writers. We knew that we wanted to be able to take our creative pursuits and passions and turn them into a real thriving business. But we also didn't believe that we deserved that because that's what we've been told.

Marie:
Yeah. I mean, if you're not an engineer or a medical doctor, like what's the point, right. That's totally the message that we heard from so many different directions, forever. And I'm guessing if you are a creative yourself, you may have heard some of that to you. And so early on, you know, we actually just recently in the last six months or so found our initial pricing list and we found that we were charging $20 for blog posts after the research, the writing and the revisions. I think, you know, we're probably making about $2 an hour. Like it is no wonder that we were not even surviving at poverty levels and really only able to continue doing this by the grace of, you know, partners and other circumstances like having a second job for many years. And part of that is society's fault. And part of it is we didn't... we were not on board with what was possible for us.

Jessi:
Yeah. And, two things sort of along those lines, one is if you are charging $20 for a blog post right now don't feel bad, right. We're not trying to shame anyone for that because we were absolutely there. And you may not, at this point, be seeing your writing profession as your full-time gig. Like Marie said, you know, when we first started, we also both had full-time jobs elsewhere. And so we had a little bit more room to play and that was good and also led us to take a lot longer to be able to really build our business. And the other thing that I wanted to say around that is we were approaching it from the perspective of, we just want to get whatever work we can get so that we can just kind of prove that we could do it-
Yeah, exactly. We didn't really want- we wanted to build a business, but we didn't have a longterm vision for that business. It was really just a, let's see what we can get type of thing, which can be helpful to a degree because it means that you might take risks that you wouldn't otherwise, if you have this carefully laid plan, but it also can hold you back because we didn't think about what was possible for us.

Marie:
Right. Exactly. Many years later, when at that point, Jessi and I both had gone full-time with the business, we were still making an amount that was not exactly comfortable to live on, but at least, you know, it was supporting us. We made a decision. We had been supporting one audience and we decided that we wanted to support another audience. But that audience, it was kind of... it wasn't necessarily a different audience, it was just kind of the same audience, but later in their career. Farther along. There were certain names of people that we thought, someone like that. I want someone like that to be my client. And, it felt completely unattainable. But at that point, we'd started to realize that when well, to quote, or maybe not quote, but credit at least, a mentor in front of ours, as Lisa Carpenter, like what you focus on is what grows, what you love is what grows. And, we had seen that start to happen in our business. We'd seen that when we gave this business our attention and we gave it our sort of creative and strategic focus, it grew. And that's what allowed us to start going full-time with it. And at this point too, we knew that, well, if we decide to focus on this new audience, then that's going to grow too. And it took about a year of publicly talking about who we served. And not only were we starting to serve people like that, that had been on our little, like kind of vision board, literally some of those people who had felt like rockstar pie in the sky, people were actually on our client list at that point. And so I think part of the- this is not about faking it until you make it. This is about pointing your nose in the direction that you want your business to go and then pursuing that.

Jessi:
Yeah. Which means knowing the direction you want your business to go, which I think is really important to the knowing your worth conversation. Knowing that not only can you have a vision for your business in the future, but you can make a vision that feels comfortable, and that feels like a little bit of a stretch. And you can achieve those things, but you have to be willing to set the vision. And I think that this sort of leads into one of our soapboxes. We already kind of got on it,

Marie:
Yup. Can keep us on the box.

Jessi:
Yeah. I mean it's this whole idea of the- one of the things that I think Marie and I noticed when we started shifting into serving a lot of small business owners was that the peer groups that we participated in and when we were, you know, we hired a business coach and it came with a mastermind component, or we joined membership communities and areas where other business owners were troubleshooting, meeting up to talk about what was going on in their businesses and looking for accountability and support. There were not a lot of people in those circles who were content creators. There were not a lot of other writers. Often Marie and I were the only ones. And that was both exciting because we got to meet a lot of people in a lot of other industries and a little discouraging because it was really hard for us to find people who were building businesses like ours.
Many of the businesses that we encountered were building consulting based businesses or coaching based businesses, which were fantastic and great and businesses that are needed, but also had very different challenges than our business, where it was a done for you service. And that wasn't something we necessarily wanted to move away from. We didn't want to stop serving our clients. We didn't want to stop writing because we identified as writers and believed in our processes. And so even once we knew our worth, even once we realized, yes, this business is something that can succeed and can grow in a service-based arena, we were still pretty consistently surrounded by people who did not have that model. And so we had to keep reinforcing it with ourselves that yes, this can work and then proving it to ourselves.

Marie:
Yeah, for sure. It was hard honestly, to not compare ourselves to some of our peers in those communities. To say, Oh, wow, like, look at the effortlessness with which they're able to achieve six figures, which is absolutely not true by the way. I mean, like everybody... sometimes maybe it's effortless for some folks, but, you know, for a lot of the folks we were working with, it was, or, you know, standing beside and, and listening to you and being supported by, you know, there was certainly effort and strategy and time and work that went into that and their expertise. And, but it was such a different model that these messages of this is how this happens, This is how you're able to achieve this kind of level of revenue or whatever it is. Like that started, we started absorbing messages of what were limitations for us to. Not that they were necessarily even meant that way, because we've been fortunate to have some really incredible communities and mentors. But I think just the lack of seeing people, just like us in those communities made it a little difficult to see where we fit in.

Jessi:
Yeah. Yeah. And so I think the important thing here is that service-based businesses have a seat at the table and they don't need to change. They don't need to stop being a service-based business to have that seat at the table. They can, if they want to, or they can introduce other elements. We certainly do consulting work. In addition to the done-for-you work these days, because that's not because we were told to by anyone or not, because we saw other businesses doing it, but because it was what felt right for us in our business at the point where it's at. And I think that's really the key is, you know, the only person who has a say in the limits of your company is you. You get to decide that and you get to decide how you want to serve other people. And as a content creator, as someone who identifies as a service-based business, who is creating something on the behalf of other business owners often or other businesses often, you have a huge amount of worth and value that you are contributing to those people.
And I think that gets lost a lot, especially if you are someone who is finding your work on a lot of the freelancer websites, which is a great place to get started, but often that piece of the conversation gets lost. That piece of, Oh, they're actually providing this huge value to another business owner or another company. It gets lost in this, you know, uh, just, you know, a gun for hire type of mentality where it's like, Oh, I just need a social media post, or I just need some blog posts. And so I'm going to go onto this freelancer website and pay bottom dollar for it. And that's what we really feel where there's been a disconnect and it's not true of everyone on Upwork or Fiverr or any of those services. Like I don't want to, you know, say that those services are bad because there's value to be found in them. But I do think that they perpetuate a misconception around the worth of content creation.

Marie:
Totally agree. There's this mentality that like, we're so surrounded by content and by the creative outpouring of people who are service-based creatives. We're so inundated by that, that we- two things happen sometimes. And it's two sides of the same coin. On one side it's Oh, well, this stuff is everywhere. Right? Everybody look there's copywriting. For instance, you know, every ad I see on social media or on television or YouTube, every single magazine that you see at the grocery store in the checkout line, every label on a jar of food in the grocery store, like writing is everywhere. It's everywhere all the time. It's in your inbox constantly every day, right? Like there is a flood of creation of content coming at us. And so therefore one side of that coin is to think this is, you know, I can pay pennies for this because there's a lot of people willing to do it. And there's an abundance of it. And so it comes cheap. But the other side of that coin is that stuff was created by professionals who have experience and expertise. And you're one of them. And the reason there's so much of it and so much demand for it is because it works and because it's valuable and because people have messages that they believe are worth putting out there. And so that's the rebuttal that I would suggest, you know, coming back to somebody now, I don't think, you know, if you're having a conversation with somebody who's horrified that you want to charge $20 for a blog post, because they think it's way too expensive. You may be able to change their mind on these things and you may not, and that's okay. You're not here to necessarily change minds. What we're talking about with this, like pointing your nose towards the type of direction you want your business to go in is just saying, these are the types of people I want to work with. Somebody who isn't going to haggle me over, you know, is it going to be $18 or $20 for this blog post? But instead if you say it's going to be $500, they say, okay, where do I sign?

Jessi:
Yeah, absolutely. I think to add to what you were saying about, you know, things like copywriting, for example, being everywhere... There are sort of two things that get perpetuated there as well. One is, it's everywhere, so anyone can do it. Which means that often that sort of content creation, copywriting type task ends up getting handed off to someone who's not the best person for the job. You may have someone who is less experienced in the area who finds it on their plate because the person who is looking for the service doesn't necessarily find it worth their time or energy or money to go out and hire the professional. And so that's something to think about too, when you are looking at finding as a content creator and making sure that they do value the services that you're providing. I think looking at who has provided those services in the past, have they invested this in the past? Have they not invested this in the past and realize that, Oh, it makes a difference and I need to. What has their journey looked like in hiring service providers? I think that's really valuable because there is a point where a lot of people are either doing it themselves or handing it off to the wrong person, the person who may not be the best fit for that particular job. It's not their zone of genius. And then there comes a point where they're like, Oh, well actually, if I invested in the person who's the professional who knows this particular area, I can get a lot further. And I think that it's really benefits service providers to find people who are beyond that point.

Marie:
Absolutely. So are we soapboxed out?

Jessi:
Yeah, I think, I think maybe we should, we have more soap boxes for future episodes. But I think we should probably switch gears and talk about some of those questions that you, as a content creator can ask yourself to start thinking about not just the business that you are currently in. And I'm speaking, even to freelancers, if you're a freelancer, you are a business owner and at the very least you have the seeds of a business. And what kind of questions you can ask yourself that you didn't think about the business you want to become, pointing your nose in the right direction, as Marie says, as opposed to where you currently are. Where I think a lot of us get stuck in this is where I am. And so this is just, I kind of have the blinders on. I'm just focused on where I am now.

Marie:
Right. Two points on this, you know, we don't have to take what comes at us. We can be intentional. We may say no to things, but that doesn't mean we have to burn it all down, either. In the meantime, if you have revenue consistently coming in from something or reliably coming in, when you pitch something great, you can work on increasing the price on that. Or you can work on adding some other type of service that you prefer to offer without necessarily burning that to the ground first. I may even come back to this point, cause I think it's important. Some people that doesn't work for them, they want to like burn it all down and then start a fresh. And that's fine if you want to do that, but you don't have to do that. That's not what we're telling you to do.
Because sometimes that thing that's maybe not a perfect alignment for you, but like is helping a little bit, can be what helps you bridge that gap in terms of cashflow or whatever in the meantime. And that's fine. So we're going to ask a series of questions here, for you to ponder. These are going to be in the show notes. So please feel free to head over to northstarmessaging.com/podcast, find this episode. And you will be able to go through those questions more slowly. If you want to journal on them, hint, hint, that's going to be really helpful for you.

Jessi:
Yes. That will be your homework. So listen up, we have some question and this is not an exhaustive list of questions either. There are probably more, but these are the ones that have helped us the most when we start thinking about the future of our business and where we want to be, not just today, but a year from now, over two years from now, or three years from now, 10 years from now. Although we'll talk about that. So-

Marie:
Because I have no idea what that looks like.

Jessi:
So I think that the first kind of place to start is, you know, what do you want your working day to look like? How much do you want to work? When do you not want to work? How much do you want to get paid? How much do you believe that your experience and expertise should be worth kind of starting there with the, you know, what do you want that day-to-day to look like and allowing yourself to paint a picture of that? Not based on where you are, but based on what you would ideally want it to.

Marie:
Right. And remember if it sounds, if you decide, Hey, I would really like to make 70k a year by working 28 hours a week so that I can then go pick up my child from school at three o'clock every day or whatever it is. And that sounds impossible to you because it's so far from where you are right now. Just know that that limits is false and you can get there. It probably won't happen overnight and that's fine. But again, setting your nose in the direction you want to go and then your feet will follow.
So then the next set of things. Sorry, did you have more to add on that, Jessi?

Jessi:
No, go ahead.

Marie:
So the next set of things to think about is, you know, what do you want your pricing model to be? Are you paid? Do you want to be paid hourly? Do you want to be paid by the project, et cetera. When it comes to hourly, Just a quick note on that. If you have read Mike McCalla, what's his book and a great writer, by the way, a great creative, Profit First, you'll know that. Okay. Again, say you want to make, you know, that 70k a year or whatever. Not necessarily just looking at how much do I need to charge hourly so that I can, so that I basically make, you know, and I want to work 28 hours a week. So then divide that out. That's my hourly rate. That's actually not going to be your hourly rate. Your hourly rate's going to be higher than that because your hourly rate needs to cover yes, your salary, but also all the other operating expenses and the profit that you want to have coming in.
So chances are whatever you think that number is, You're probably gonna like double it or at least 150% it. You can do the math if you have a business budget, which I definitely recommend you have, Sorry, writing creatives, we are not out of budget land. We are not immune from all these fun business things like every other business. It actually is fun because it's empowering and it's at some point like you literally can just sort of guarantee if you're able to say, okay, well that means that my hourly rate needs to actually be this. And that's just what you charge. And you actually guarantee that not only are you going to be able to pay your expenses and that you're going to be able to pay your own salary at the level you want. But also you're going to have this level of profit that you can either reinvest in the business, give to yourself or some combination.

Jessi:
Yeah, absolutely. We're going to do a whole episode on how to price yourself as a creative, so stay tuned for that. But that was a really solid preview on something that I think is important, which is that your pricing model needs to fit your vision for your business. And there's not necessarily a right or wrong way to do it. But, I mean, I guess the wrong way to do it is undercharging for what you are producing. But you know, hourly versus project-based versus, you know, all of these different ways of doing it. It's just a matter of coming at it with that perspective.
Okay. Some other questions. How do you, once you have this, this vision of what you want your working day to look like, what you want the day-to-day in your business to look like, how do you message your value? How do you message that value that you provide to other people? What are your boundaries and how do you uphold them? We talked about boundaries on a previous episode and if you haven't listened to that, I really recommend you go back and do, because boundaries can be such a fuzzy thing for content creators sometimes. And it's so important that we manage to not only establish them, but also uphold them and remind people of them periodically. Who do you want to serve? We talked earlier about how we changed our audience. You may serve someone now and decide that you want to serve someone else in the future, a different target audience, which we did an episode on target audiences as well, which talks about, you know, it's not necessarily one perfect ideal client avatar and the dartboard is a little faster and it may change over time. Think about who you want to want to serve moving forward. It may not be who you are serving right now. And then how do you want to communicate with them? How do they communicate? How can you kind of meet them in the middle and build a bridge between what they need and what you offer?

Marie:
Absolutely. There's another question here around, like, what do you want the business to look like in terms of the size of the company and the team? Do you want it to just be you? That's totally valid. Do you want it to be you and maybe like a virtual assistant or somebody who can help you with things like invoicing, or just managing your inbox? That's also totally valid. Do you want to have a full blown agency with, you know, 50 writers and project managers? That's totally valid also. Do you want to expand eventually and to not only having writers, but also having designers and, you know, website developers and videographers? That's also totally valid. Like you can pick any of these things, anything in between, anything outside the box that I've just mentioned. This is a non-exhaustive list.

So what, what do you envision for that? Do you really love management? And so maybe it makes sense for you to slowly transition yourself out of being, you know, the freelancer who does all the things to having that support. Or maybe that is your passion and you just like, could not imagine not being in it with your clients. And that's fine too. But just have that in mind. If suddenly this is opening up your eyes to other possibilities that sound enticing or that you want to learn more about. Great. That's really all we're trying to do here is just give you more options.

What is the scope of your services? So I kind of just mentioned some of that a second ago. Like it can get bigger and broader than even what you're able to do if you're willing to hire or train yourself on those things, but also just within your wheelhouse of expertise. I mean, there are people who really make a name for themselves only creating sales pages, right. Or you look at, you look at the book, what's it called, A StoryBrand Building. A StoryBrand it's literally like an entire business built on like how to write a home page, right? Like it's not even just website copy. I mean, there's more to it than that, I suppose, but like, you can get granular, you can go large, it can be whatever you want it to be. And ultimately, you know, how do you want to serve your clients? Do you want to be writing for them? Do you want to also do consulting for them? Do you want to be a great connector for them so that you're able to like maybe work together with email automation company to say, Hey, I'm going to write the emails and then they're going to get everything set up on the tech end and we come here together and we're going to introduce you to them, and you're going to love them, like whatever you wanted to be. You can have that, but like the way you can serve your clients probably can be bigger, or smaller than what you're currently thinking of. And that is fine.

Jessi:
Yeah. I think, you know, thinking about these things can feel a little overwhelming if you haven't before, but it can also be really empowering to think about not just trying to get by with wherever you're at, but also thinking about, okay, what do I want to build? What do I want to grow? And I want to also add that it's important to remain flexible. This is what I was talking about earlier, about planning for 10 years down the road. We can do that, but 10 years ago, we had no idea that we would be sitting where we are right now. And I think that it's important to have a glimmer of a long-term vision. I think it's important to know that you are on a certain trajectory. And I think it's also important to check in periodically on that trajectory and make sure that it is still where you want to be going.
It is still aligned with your values and it is still responsive to the needs of your community, your society, your home, your family, all of those things are important to consider. I mean, you know, I think we may have mentioned this in a past episode when COVID hit in March of 2020, we had some really elaborate, fancy well-planned out content plans that immediately needed to get completely redone, not just for us, but for our, a bunch of our clients, too. Everything got tossed out the window. So stay flexible, but also have a plan.

Marie:
Right. And one more quick reminder that you don't have to, if you decide suddenly, yeah. You know, I do want to have this, whatever, this or that, like, as you're listening to this, like, you don't have to burn down what you have in the meantime, you can make a gradual plan to get there. And that's totally fine too.
So homework time. So we want to invite you to take a look at your calendar and sometime in the next 30 days, go right now, put it on the calendar a visioning day for you to answer these questions, go to the show notes again, it's at northstarmessaging.com/podcast. This is the episode titled knowing your worth as a content creator. And you need to block that full day. And I humbly suggest you do not do any client work that day or client communication that day, that this day is built for you and your company and the future of it. And that is a boundary that you were able to set and only you are able to set and honor it.

Jessi:
Absolutely. So go through these questions, take some time to vision about what you want your business to look like, and then maybe some initial steps towards getting there. You don't have to have it all figured out, but the most important thing is that you recognize that it is possible and a service-based business, a content creation business does not necessarily need a plan.

Marie:
Absolutely.
Thanks for joining us for this episode of the Brand Your Voice Podcast. Make sure to visit our website northstarmessaging.com, where you can subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, and more.

Jessi:
If you found value in this episode, we'd love for you to leave us a review on iTunes and share it with your friends. Thank you and happy content creating.