Why this is free

Why we wrote it anyway

Most people reading a post about what to charge your first client are not going to buy an approval tool. Many don't have clients yet. We knew that when we wrote it. We wrote it anyway, because the alternative was staying quiet until we had something to sell you, and everything we'd learned on the other side of this work would have just sat there.

Some of you will be running four clients a year from now, and the approvals will start eating your evenings. When that happens, we'd rather you already know who we are.

That's the entire strategy. It takes months, and it might not work.

What you get, and what we get

You get the articles, the rate calculator and the checklists. The calculator runs without an account. Everything on the blog is open to read.

We get your attention now, and a chance you remember us later.

If you leave your email, we'll send the monthly rate benchmark and the word-for-word scripts for the price conversation. From August we re-pull the market data every month, so the numbers stay current instead of quietly rotting on a page. One click to unsubscribe, and we mean the click, not a form. What we do with your email is in the privacy policy, linked right where you sign up.

Who writes this

Pauline runs business development here. She spends most of her week talking to social media managers about how the client work actually goes, which is where most of these articles start.

Grig founded SMMapprove. He is not a social media manager and has never been one. He spent his career running companies, where social media belonged to somebody on staff who wrote the posts and published them herself. He never read them. What he can speak to is only his own side of that: he handed an entire area to somebody else specifically so that he would never have to think about it again.

If you'd rather just look at the tool

It's at smapprove.com. If it turns out you don't need it, we'll still be over here writing the next checklist.