While posting your prices may seem like a good idea, I'd recommend not doing it in most cases. I say most cases, because I think it depends on the type of client you're going after.

In my experience, most clients that actually pay a fair amount of money are those that understand what their getting into. These clients understand that they'll be forking out $20k - $40k for a project. So, in these cases, posting prices is irrelevant. They just want the best person for the job. Your sales challenge will be elsewhere.

Now, if you're targeting the mom and pops in town and their average budget is $2k, then posting your price MIGHT help. BUT, this is simply a race to the bottom. If your rate for a project is $2k, but a competitor will do it for $1.5k, who will the budget minded client choose? Based off of the price alone, you've just scared away the client. You probably won't even get the opportunity of an in-person meeting.

Bottom line, choose your clients carefully. If they pick you because you're the cheapest, you might have bigger problems ahead of you...

The difference is posting a price for your consulting product, which should be well-defined by the consultant and with a pre-determined scope and time budget. Every example mentioned is for a product.

For your typical client engagement, yes, you won't want to post prices. Unless your business is well-defined enough to be able to target specific types of clients, each with its own landing page and predictable project scope.

Sure. But the idea is to do a quick ice breaker project that can later turn into a larger one down the road. Hence in that case a $500 - $2000 structured project makes sense, I think.

I used to work in the printing industry. I thought that if I got a small order, like a set of business cards, it would be a great way to break the ice. It almost never worked.

Businesses are in business to make money. If you can provide value (I'm not saying you can't) and they see an ROI on their money, they'll pay. They want a solution to their problem AND they want to work with someone they like and trust.

This is a fascinating article, thank you.

When I was a freelancer the goal was always to set up small recurring tasks with a number of clients to smooth the peaks and troughs of work and bring in a regular income. These examples are a great way of showing how this idea can be marketed and scaled without having to rely so heavily on word of mouth or existing relationships - though I'm sure they do still play a part.

The change in approach from 'See what I've done for others', to 'Here's specifically what I can achieve for you' is key.

This is an interesting trend. You've got great insight into this, Rob. I think ultimately, we have a sales and positioning problem in our industry, not a productization problem. Products assume our work has a set value to every client. But they don't and we artificially limit our income potential by assigning prices before understanding value.

What's the best way around this? A 3-tier pricing structure, with the 3rd being a custom amount? Customers, myself included, also hate when prices are obscured on a website and will just go away - have you seen any good solutions to this yourself?

I've evaluated a lot of design portfolios in my life and it always amazes me how self-titled "User Experience" designers fail to apply the most basic UX process to their portfolios.

Stuff like defining who is the user, what are their needs, performing basic user research, establishing an information hierarchy and testing their designs against potential candidates.

It's been my experience that too many designers these days are more into the "fun stuff" of picking a color palette, creating awesome background textures, geeking out on CSS3 animations and other things that help enhance your dribbble profile at the detriment to applying themselves to the craft of design.

I've been considering setting up my website to be nothing but a work calendar, with empty blocks the visitor can buy. I'd have control to shut down unbought blocks if I want free time. I'd have some copy on what I do best, but essentially the customer could buy my time for anything they want, and could buy it right away.

I don't think customers want to buy YOUR time. They want to buy THEIR results for THEIR business with as less of your time as possible.

Depends on the service. Sometimes the service explicitly is my time. Tutoring, for example, or job candidate interviews. I didn't mention this in my first post, but I think I would emphasize that you're explicitly buying time with me, i.e. we'd be on Skype together, working through something. Pair programming for hire!

The benefit is never just time it's whatever is the outcome of how you spend your time. Id read the article

You would? Go ahead then.

Still a good idea, instead of your service being some ethereal product that they don't really understand, if you do it the way wptheory does it where you have one day dedicated to the customer and they can buy out that day, they'll know exactly when to expect a return, will know exactly when they can talk to you, and roughly know how much it will cost.

As a customer, I would like to know what are you doing exactly and how much time do you need to do it (and, so, how much will you charge me for doing what I want).

A calendar does this.

The question I recently have asked myself was this: on these structured or productized pages, should we push the customer to a low friction gradual engagement lead generation action, or close the sale with a payment? I'm now trying out the former. Thoughts?

Which option has the most valuable result to the customer? Regardless of payment, I think delivering something that is going to really blow them away upfront is going to be the best thing... And you have alot of amazing work to do that :)