how much would you pay to a helpful associate?

apprentice wants to know how much he is worth

[yaainfo]

Hi there,

I'm a college senior majoring in infosystems with a strong passion for web development. i am happy to possess both, graphical and technical, sides to it. i am currently doing some freelance work which is quite diverse in nature (just finished a PHP-based e-commerce store with admin back-end and mySQL and inegrated merchant-payment solution, right now working on a flash website, also another e-commerce store under way).
I do things quite quickly, reply to e-mails and phone calls promtly. I feel comfortable "taking orders" and doing things the way "boss wants me to"
However, what i lack at this point are business/negotiating skills.
I'm wondering how much would you be willing to shell out for my services? (hypothetically). i know the X3 rule where you have to make 3 times more from what you pay me.
So please, give me a hypothetical figure.
What would my fair market value be?
Thank you for reading and hopefully posting.

[ritualcoffee]

i don't want to post specific sites, but do a quick Google search on "salary" and there are a number of sites with calculators, articles, and forums with hr reps and such that might be able to give you a really good range depending on your location.

I've used this a bit to prepare for salary negotiations.

[Robino]

This might help:

[salary.com...]

[Travoli]

Hi yaainfo, welcome to WebmasterWorld.

I don't think you are going to be able to get a good answer to this question. There are so many variables.

Does the customer know of you / your work? If they are and they liked what they heard about you, they might be willing to pay a lot more. If you are doing local work an hourly rate also depends on where you live.

In the end, you need to charge what you believe your time is worth. Be realistic about your expectations, but if you aren't happy with the rates, walk away from that particular job and look for other, better paying opportunities.