Many freelancers, especially those in creative industries, tend to be emotionally attached to their work – dedicating a lot of time and energy to each and every project.
While this doesn’t sound like a bad thing, it’s not always sustainable in the long term.
To grow your freelance business, you need to be smart and optimise your services and your workflow. This will help you get more done without compromising on quality.
A great way to do this is to think about how you can package your freelance services and have productised services.
Table of contents:
- What is a productised service?
- Why should you package up your freelance services?
- Package your freelance services in five steps:
- Check out our Pricing Masterclass
- Related articles
What is a productised service?
A productised service is, simply, a set of services bundled and sold together.
Think about how you can best meet your clients’ needs – and wrap up the answer to their problem in a nice package.
So, as an example, maybe you’re a graphic designer. A nice, simple package could be to offer a social media package. This could include 10 templates, header photos etc.
This makes it easy for clients to pick up your services and get going.
Once you have an idea for a package, it can really help to have three different variations. These will have three different price points – allowing you to meet the needs and budgets of different clients.

One of the main benefits of starting to think like this is that you can start to reuse work. You may be able to create some basic templates that you then tweak for each client – saving you a lot of research and development time.
Doing this will save you from doing a lot of hands-on work on each project without compromising the quality.
When a client buys a package, you are not starting from scratch, but rather building on and adapting your core templates for your clients’ needs.
Why should you package up your freelance services?

The main reason to think about offering your freelance services in a form of a package is to be able to serve more clients at the same time.
By serving more clients in the same amount of time as before, your income, and business can grow.
You can even create opportunities to expand your business by adding more services – and it’s easier to introduce and sell new services in a package with your standard services rather than promoting them alone.
When you start offering freelance services as a package, you know exactly how much money you will receive at the end of the project, which allows you to have better control over your cash flow.
Finally, because with packages you set the prices upfront and list everything that’s included, that usually doesn’t leave space to clients to try and negotiate your fees down.
At the same time, it will save you time from going back and forth with clients who don’t have a budget for your services.
It can add a refreshing level of simplicity to everything.
Package your freelance services in five steps:
Step 1: list and rank all services you can offer
Write down all your skills, expertise, even hobbies – everything that you know and love doing.
At this stage, it doesn’t matter if it’s connected to your main freelance service or not – just get it all out on the paper.
Once you’ve created the list, go through it again and this time think about each skill whether you’d be comfortable and confident to offer it as a service and charge for it.
To make this easier, you can evaluate your overall experience in it and confidence about offering it as a service using a number scale from 1 to 5, where 1 would be the lowest and 5 would be the highest grade.
Once you have finished the evaluation, eliminate all skills and entries that you gave grade 3 or below.
Put the rest of the skills onto a new list and see how you can package them with your existing freelance services.
For example, say you are a copywriter who does photography as a hobby.
But your photos are good enough that you feel confident charging for them. So packaging article writing with original photos to accompany the written content might be a good package for your business.
Step 2: assess your clients’ needs
The idea of packaging services is to be able to serve more clients – so you need to make sure that you create packages that they actually need and want to buy.
So spending some time now doing market research can save you a lot of time later, and is more likely to pay off – rather than simply relying on your intuition and what you would like to do.
So don’t hesitate to ask for inputs from your target market, and even reach out to your previous clients and ask them for their constructive feedback.
You can also ask your fellow freelancers who are offering the same services as you for their experiences and avoid mistakes they have made.
Of course, in this step, it helps to know what type of clients you want to work with and who would be your ideal client, but we talk about that in a separate article, so give it a read if you need to!
Step 3: Start putting together package(s)
Once you have a list of potential packages and understand your clients’ needs, it’s time to combine the two and refine the final packages you can offer.
You can create just one package (and then create different options for it in the next step), or you can create different packages – it all depends on the previous steps.
But it’s important to understand that packages are supposed to free time up for you, so you can dedicate more effort to high-paying, complex projects, while still serving other clients without compromising the quality.
Step 4: Create different pricing options
In one of our previous articles, we talked about lessons on pricing, and one of them is to create three pricing options.
Three is a magic number in marketing, but it also works perfectly in pricing as well.
If you have only one package, price it as a middle option.
Then add more value to it to create a top-tier package with the highest price.
Similarly, remove something from the middle option to create the cheapest package. Make sure you do list in bullet points what’s included in each option so your potential clients can understand different pricing for each of them.
If you have more packages, you should still aim to position them at different pricing points, and clearly communicate the difference between the value the client will receive from each of the packages.
It’s also worth noting if you get into psychology, having a high price for your premium package is said to anchor your reasonably priced item to seem more appealing.
Step 5: Test and tweak as you go!
Once you publish your packages, it’s important to stay flexible and make tweaks as you go.
You can even test your packages by taking on beta clients and perfecting the packages based on their feedback.
What you want to aim for is a package of services that will bring value to your clients, while at the same time optimising the time you put into it. This is a win for everybody.
It allows you to serve more clients more effectively and efficiently.
Packages are also a great way to be transparent about the price range upfront, as potential clients get a clear picture of the investment they need to use your services.
Used well, packaging up your freelance services can really help you to grow your business. It’s also a great way to standardise your workflow into a simple process – which you can then start to outsource if you choose to.
Will you start offering your freelance services as packages? Let us know your thoughts in the comments section below!
Until next time,
Maja
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Related articles:
Three lessons on pricing and negotiations (free eBook included!)
How to price your freelance services right
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