Content services are usually sold by the number of posts. It's easy to understand, and it's exactly what drags the trade down.
The problem with volume-based packages
Twelve posts a month for a fixed fee: the client counts deliverables, not results. The day they cut the budget, they cut the number of posts, never the quality they expect.
You end up defending a quantity instead of an outcome.
The pure-results trap
Charging only on performance makes you dependent on things you don't control: the client's offer, their profile, how fast they reply to DMs, how good their sales calls are.
You carry a commercial risk that isn't yours.
The setup that holds: a base fee plus a variable
A monthly base that covers your time and makes you independent of the outcome, plus a variable share tied to a metric you actually influence.
The metric should never be the client's revenue. Use the number of qualified conversations, or meetings booked. You influence them without being solely responsible for them.
Charge for what you produce, not for what the client does with it.
What to put in the contract
- An approval deadline, or your calendar slips and you get the blame.
- A set number of revision rounds, beyond which you charge.
- Ownership of the accounts and the content, in black and white.
- A monthly review of the metrics, not of the number of posts.
How to defend the price
With numbers, never with a pitch. Show the engagement rate before and after you came in, calculated the same way on both sides: the calculator makes the comparison indisputable. And keep the per-client approach described in managing several clients without mixing everything up.