Strategy · November 4, 2026 · 8 min read
How to Price a Blog Writing Package for Clients
Price a blog package from your cost stack, not a competitor's rate card: brief, draft, edit, publish and report. At an assumed $50/hour that is 5.5 hours and $275 before margin.
By FluxWriter
Blog writing service pricing usually starts in the wrong place: a competitor's rate card, a per-word figure lifted off a freelance marketplace, or whatever the last client agreed to pay. Price that way and you find out your margin at the end of the quarter instead of before you sign. The alternative is to add up what a finished, published, reported-on post costs you to deliver, then decide what you want on top of that. This walks through the cost stack, why per-word rates pay you less as your work improves, and what a package has to include to survive its second renewal.
Per-Word Rates Pay You Less As You Get Better
Per-word pricing was built for a transaction that ended when the document changed hands. At $0.10 a word, a 1,200-word post is $120. Write the same brief tighter, 900 words that answer the query and stop, and the same rate pays $90. Better work, less money.
The incentive that creates is obvious, and buyers have learned to spot it. Padding is the single thing every content client eventually recognises, and a 2,400-word post that should have been 1,100 is a fast way to lose the renewal you were trying to protect.
Per-word rates also ignore everything that is not typing. The keyword decision, the angle, the fact-check, the internal links, the images, the CMS work, the monthly report. None of that has a word count and all of it takes hours.
Buying a draft from a subcontractor per word is reasonable, because there you are purchasing a defined input. Selling a package per word is not, because there you are selling something with six or seven steps in it and only one of them is measured in words.
A Post Is Six Steps And Most Quotes Cover One
Write down what actually happens between a client saying yes and money being earned. Somebody picks the keyword and the angle. Somebody drafts. Somebody edits, checks the claims and runs the approval round. Somebody sources images, formats the piece and adds internal links. Somebody logs into the client's CMS, publishes, and checks the result on mobile. Somebody sends the monthly note explaining what went live and what it did.
Most quotes price the second step and quietly absorb the other five. That works until volume arrives. At one post a month the tail is an annoyance. At twelve posts a month across four clients it is most of your week.
The tail is also where the unplanned time lives. CMS access takes three emails to arrange. The client's theme mangles the H2 styling. A stakeholder who did not read the brief wants a paragraph changed after publication. None of that shows up in a per-word estimate, and all of it is billable work you already agreed to do for free.
Build The Price Up From The Cost Stack
The figures below are illustrative. They assume a blended internal cost of $50 an hour, which is a rough stand-in for a small team where a strategist, a writer and whoever owns the CMS all touch the same post. Substitute your own hourly number and the shape of the answer holds.
| Step | Hours per post | Cost at $50/hour |
|---|---|---|
| Brief, keyword and angle | 0.5 | $25 |
| First draft | 2.5 | $125 |
| Edit, fact-check, approval round | 1.0 | $50 |
| Images, formatting, internal links | 0.5 | $25 |
| Publishing and QA in the client's CMS | 0.5 | $25 |
| Reporting and client communication | 0.5 | $25 |
That totals 5.5 hours and $275 of delivery cost on a post many agencies sell at $150. Three hours at $50 is exactly $150, so a $150 post breaks even only if the entire stack fits in three hours and returns nothing for the risk. Hold it to two hours and the same post returns $50 gross, a third of the price.
Scale that to a package and the problem stops being theoretical. Four posts a month at $150 is $600 of revenue against 22 hours of delivery, which is $1,100 at the same blended rate. The agency running that retainer is paying for the privilege, and usually blames the client for being demanding rather than the rate card for being wrong.
The Second Renewal Is The One That Fails
The first renewal is often goodwill. The client likes you, the posts look professional, and nobody has asked hard questions yet. The second renewal is judged on evidence, and this is where retainers priced as a writing service quietly die.
By month six or nine the buyer wants to know what the spend did. If your package contains only drafts, you have nothing to show but drafts. Whoever is defending the invoice internally has no material to defend it with, and the line gets cut in the next budget review.
Nobody can promise a ranking and you should not try. What you can commit to is measurement: a short monthly note listing the URLs that went live, the impressions and clicks they picked up, and what you plan to do differently next month. That note is the cheapest thing in the package and often the single item most responsible for renewals surviving.
Two more inclusions earn their place. A refresh allowance, where one older post gets updated instead of a fifth new one being published, because existing pages usually respond faster than new ones. And one named person the client can reach, rather than a shared inbox, which costs nothing and removes the most common complaint about agencies.
Tiers Beat A Single Per-Post Rate
Per-post pricing invites the client to order one and see. Monthly tiers give you predictable capacity and give them a reason to commit. Using the same $275 delivery cost, a defensible ladder looks like two posts at $900, four at $1,700, and eight at $3,200.
Those tiers work out at $450, $425 and $400 a post. The gross margins run about 39%, 35% and 31% as the volume discount widens. That falling margin is the part most rate cards get wrong: a discount for volume is only affordable if your hours per post actually fall with volume.
They can fall. Batched research, a shared internal-link map and one publishing session instead of eight scattered ones might take the stack to roughly 4.5 hours at the top tier. That puts the eight-post package at $1,800 of cost against $3,200 of revenue, a gross margin near 44%, better than the small tier rather than worse. If you cannot show where the saved hours come from, do not offer the discount.
Delivery Cost Is The Only Lever That Does Not Cost You The Client
There are three ways to fix a thin margin. Raise the price, which some clients will not accept. Cut the quality, which buys you one renewal and loses the next. Or reduce the hours, which is the only lever the client never feels.
Look at where the hours sit. Drafting is 2.5 of the 5.5. The tail after the draft (formatting, publishing and reporting) is another 1.5. Four of the five and a half hours go into work that is necessary but is not where your judgement adds the most.
Assume drafting drops to an hour because you are editing a generated draft rather than producing one from nothing, and publishing drops close to zero because the post goes into the client's site directly rather than being pasted in by hand. The stack lands near 3.5 hours, or $175. A $450 post then returns about $275 gross instead of $175, on identical output and the same price.
That is the whole argument for automating production and publishing rather than negotiating harder. The brief, the angle and the edit are where a client is actually paying for you. Everything after the draft is cost you should be trying to remove.
FAQ
Should I charge per post or per month?
Charge per month for anything you intend to keep. A monthly tier gives you capacity planning and gives the client a reason to stay past the first invoice. Keep a per-post rate for trials and one-off requests, and price it 20% to 30% above your tier rate so it is not the cheaper option.
What do I do when a client points at a $50 post elsewhere?
Show them the stack rather than defending your rate. A $50 post is a draft handed over as a file, which means the brief, the editing, the publishing and the reporting are still their job. Then let them choose: buy the draft cheaply and do the rest themselves, or buy the finished, published post from you.
When should a client judge whether the work paid off?
Agree the review date before you start, and put it in writing along with what will be measured. Month six is a reasonable point to look at impressions and rankings trends rather than revenue, because most new pages take months to settle. Judging a content programme at week four produces a cancellation and no information.
The Practical Takeaway
Time one post end to end this week. Start a timer when you open the brief and stop it only when the monthly report is sent, including the CMS wrestling, the approval round and the emails. Multiply the total by your blended hourly cost and compare it to what you charged. If the gap is uncomfortable, work on the hours before you work on the price, because the hours are the part you control without a conversation. Do that one measurement first, on your very next delivery, and you will have a real rate card instead of an inherited one.
With FluxWriter the images, formatting and internal links row shrinks as well, because a generated post can arrive with its featured image, up to three links to the earlier FluxWriter posts on the client's site where the wording matches (not yet on Wix) and, on WordPress sites running Yoast or Rank Math, the SEO title and meta description already in place.