A content marketing proposal I sent to Popicorn, an angel investing platform in Singapore, in November 2023. Published with the pricing intact.
Almost nobody publishes their proposals, and the pricing is the reason. So here is one with the numbers left in, because the useful part of a proposal is not the deliverables list. It is watching how a scope gets built and what each piece is worth.
Three options, and why three
I sent Popicorn three, which is one more than I usually would. The reason was that I did not know their appetite, and giving a range lets the client tell you where they actually are instead of saying no to a single number.
Option one, everything, $2,000 a month. Three long-form blog posts on industry insight and investment strategy at $300 each. Weekly LinkedIn content covering platform features, customer stories and positioning in the angel investing space, at $150 a week. Then a content calendar, scheduling and monthly analytics reporting on engagement, reach and conversion, bundled at $500.
Option two, drop the reporting, $1,500 a month. Same blog posts, same LinkedIn cadence, no calendar and no analytics layer.
Option three, a fixed series. A ten-part blog run, one post a week for ten weeks, with two LinkedIn posts a week riding alongside each piece.
What the pricing is actually saying
Look at option one against option two. The difference is $500, and what disappears is the calendar, the scheduling and the reporting.
That $500 is the only part of the engagement that tells anyone whether the other $1,500 worked. Cutting it is the most common thing a client does and the most expensive thing they can cut, because you end up twelve weeks in with a pile of content and no view on whether any of it moved anything.
I priced it separately rather than baking it in, which in hindsight made it too easy to remove. If I wrote this today the measurement would be inside the base price and the volume would flex instead.
The third option exists for a different reason. A ten-week series with a defined end is easier to approve than an open-ended monthly commitment, particularly at a company where nobody has bought content before and the person signing has to defend the line item. Sometimes the obstacle is not the amount, it is the word "ongoing".
The onboarding month
Month one produced nothing publishable. Immersion into the platform, understanding how angel investing actually works for their users, and building the first content calendar.
Clients occasionally push back on paying full rate for a month with no output. I keep it anyway. Content written by someone who does not understand the product reads exactly like content written by someone who does not understand the product, and in a financial category the readers notice faster than anywhere else.
Regular publishing started in month two. Analytics reporting only from month four, because before that the sample is too small to say anything and reporting on noise trains everyone to ignore reports.
Why I am publishing the rates
$300 a blog post and $150 a week for LinkedIn was Singapore-market pricing in late 2023 for a solo consultant. It is not a benchmark and I would charge differently now.
The reason to show it is that people entering this work have very little visibility into how any of it gets priced, and the advice they get is mostly "charge your worth", which helps nobody. A real proposal with real numbers is more useful than that, even if the numbers are dated.