Your writing services business - how to get paid for consultations

Once your writing services Web site is online, you'll get loads of email queries every single day.

While it's great that people are interested in your writing services, many/ most of these queries are a huge waste of your time.

There's no way you can run a profitable writing services business and hand out free information day after day.

So, what do you do? You can't ignore these queries, can you?

No, you can't ignore them all, but you can qualify these prospects. Every business qualifies its prospects, so it's something you must learn how to do too.

Here's how.

1. Create a Web form so prospects can brief you

This is the first step. Create a reasonably detailed online form, so your prospects can tell you more about their needs. As you can see from the form on my Hot Web Copy site, it's detailed, but not overwhelming. If someone is serious about hiring you, they're happy to brief you.

Once your form's created, every email query is answered automatically with a link to this form. (Check your email program's Help files to see how to send auto replies.)

You'll never hear from 95 per cent of the people you send to this form, and that's fine. If they're too lazy to fill in a form, they're not going to hire you, and you've just saved hours of time.

2. Consultations: Yes, you can charge for the time you spend answering questions

You'll get plenty of work from the clients who fill in your form.

However, some prospects will need more hand-holding. They're not sure quite what they want, or they don't know what to do.

You'll get lots of these people, and they can eat up lots of time.

For example, let's say someone has heard about article marketing, and wants you to write some articles for them. However, they have no idea of WHY article marketing is effective, and what keywords are, etc.

This is where you can either spend time and energy and not get paid, or decide that your time is worth money, and so is the information you provide: charge for consultations.

Here's one of my Consultation pages.

Will people balk at paying? Occasionally, yes. But please realize that the people who balk at it have no intention of paying you for anything ever, they just want to pick your brain, so don't worry about it.

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