Low-paying clients are like cheap toilet rolls.
A big temptation when starting freelancing or when business is slow is picking off the low-dangling fruit. Desperate for any work, it is all too easy to accept low-paying jobs.
Taking on low-paying jobs in itself is not always necessarily a bad thing. If you’re lucky enough to take on jobs that you can easily bash out and get paid for, they can become a great little stopgap.
My main issue with low-paying jobs is they’re normally served by clients who don’t value freelancers enough to pay them their worth. And when a client doesn’t value your worth, you can bet your arse they’ll become a huge pain in it, your arse, that is.
Chances are, that neat little job of writing a 500-word blog article will turn into a monster headache of multiple revisions, and at the end of it, the client still won’t be satisfied.
I’m in plenty of Facebook groups and see this sort of problem pop up all the time. Not surprisingly, it often happens on Fiverr where cheap clients find a way to cheat the system and get the work done for free by cancelling the order after the work is done. Sadly for freelancers, Fiverr is weighted in favour of the buyers.
So, why are low-paying clients like cheap toilet rolls? Because they’re a false economy. Buying a cheap toilet roll means you end up having…
