There is nothing more daunting than going out into business on your own. When you decide to become your own boss you may take the leap into freelancing. After fine tuning your skills and deciding what you will be taking to market, how do you know what is the best rate to charge your potential new clients?

Start with some research

Complete a SWOT analysis. Any business owner knows that a SWOT analysis is a valuable tool to find out your business strengths and weaknesses compared to your external business threats and opportunities. In case you haven’t already completed one, why not jump online for some helpful templates and find out what’s what.

Know what you are selling and how you are promoting it

When your customers are purchasing your services they expect a high level of skills and customer contact, make sure you deliver. If you’re providing creative based skills, develop a portfolio to showcase your scope of skills and examples of work. You could try using services like Behance or Carbonmade to put your portfolio online. For other industries, you can setup a simple and cheap website to give yourself presence and way of referral. For this, Squarespace allows you to quickly build and launch your business website.

See the bigger picture

Most freelancers don’t see the big picture. To figure out what you should charge, you need to understand how your skills and services fit into a client's budget. You may know your client's budget, but not how they came up with their budget. What is the relationship between the budget and what you are working on?

How much to charge?

As a freelancer, you will be making the move into your own business for a whole bunch of reasons. One of those reasons may be to make more money than you do as an employee. So you may need to figure out your hourly rate based on your current salary. Working on the fact that you have enough hours of work to sustain that kind of cash flow. If you can’t figure that one out why not use an online site like Motivapp or Creative Live to figure out the best rates to charge your customers. You can also look into some competitors or ask around your network to see what others are charging.

Make it professional

To ensure that your contracts and legal paperwork have a professional finish, use Millo for a bunch of contracts for creative and freelancers alike.