How to Set Your Rates as an Influencer

In all honesty, setting your rates as a content creator or influencer can quickly become a high-stress situation. While you want to charge your goal rate, you might be scared of pricing too high and losing the work altogether. What you need to do is find a happy medium; for that, you’ll need to learn how to set your rates competitively.

Setting your rates competitively mainly depends on a few factors, here are the things you need to consider:

Your Engagement Rate.

Your followers don’t mean much if they’re not engaged, which is why the engagement rate comes first today. While audience size/follower number DOES play a part in setting your rates – your engagement rate is more important. 

How to Determine Your Engagement Rate:

Your engagement rate can be calculated by taking your likes, comments, and followers and finding the average among your last five posts. Your formula should look like this:

What Should I Expect as My Engagement Rate?

Not everyone’s engagement will be the same – sometimes, it depends on your niche and how much content you’re creating (and the quality). It can also depend on how long you’ve been a content creator! Here are the current industry standards to compare to:

• Average Engagement: 1%-3%
• Above Average: 3%-6%
• Extremely High: 6%+
• Possibly Fake: 10% or higher

While it is possible to have a 10%+ engagement rate, it is VERY unlikely. If you find that this is the case, you should check your followers for bots & spam accounts. Why? While the numbers LOOK good,  fake accounts and bots won’t shop from you/your links – and this will affect your ability to show good ROI for your brand partners.

Worth noting: The smaller the account, the higher the engagement rate. Some micro-influencers (under 10k) are showing much higher engagement rates because it’s simply easier and more likely to directly engage with fewer people. The opposite is true for mega influencers (500k+). Their engagement rates tend to be lower as engaging directly with that many people on a daily basis is not likely.

Your Content

It’s all about quality – not quantity. Quality is king and more is NOT better. Better is better. This is true for both in-feed photos and video content. The main question that I’m asked about content quality is how do you know if you have quality content? 

Quality content is typically preferred by your audience, meaning it’s going to generate more attention vs. poor quality content. Here are a few things to check for to see if you have quality content:

1. Are you getting good engagement?
2. Is your content converting? Are you getting clicks/sales/action on your CTAs?
3. Are you shooting in good lighting?
4. Are your photos and videos edited well? I.e. clear , non-blurry, realistic, minimal retouching etc.

Level of Professionalism

I’m not referring to how you look or act (although that is important to landing deals in your niche), I’m referring to how you treat the partnerships you take on. After successfully delivering and completing a partnership, you begin to develop a reputation as a content creator and influencer that will either help or harm your future partnerships. Here are a few things to consider:

• Do you/Can you deliver on time?
• Do you/Can you deliver all agreed upon deliverables?
• Do you/Can you adhere to contractual obligations?
• Do you treat your brand work as a partnership where both parties need to win, or is it more one sided (focused on you)?
• Are you getting work over and over again with the same brands, firms, or agencies?

How to Set Your Rate Competitively as an Influencer

Now we get to the fun part: setting your actual rate! This is going to be different for everyone, but a good place to start is setting your rates at $100 for an IG post and 1 set of stories. This is going to be your base for your future rates. 

Even if you’re missing all of the stuff I mentioned earlier – the exception being quality content, you ALWAYS need quality content – you are STILL providing a service that has value. From there, take the number of followers you have and divide them by 100, this will be your multiplier. For each of the categories mentioned above, you can add this number to your base to get your rate!

Let’s assume the answer is YES to all of the above. Your rate for (1) IG post and 1 set of stories would be $300. 

With a yes for everything, your rate would be $900.

Final Thoughts: Setting Your Rates as a Content Creator

The goal is to be able to answer yes in each category – don’t overthink it though. It’s a yes or no answer. If you are iffy on your conversions and feel like it’s a yes, but on the lower end, then lower your rate. This formula is designed to give you a jumping-off point. Only you know what your conversions are and how “good” your content is. 

Also, remember that there are creators out there creating for a lot less than this – and a lot of creators creating for a lot MORE than this. If you can meet all the criteria above and price yourself somewhere in the middle, you’ll be setting yourself up to earn at your highest potential! Ready to start pitching yourself to your DREAM partnerships? Get access to everything you need in The Influencer Blueprint!