My toxic feelings about money
Note: Before migrating this post, it was originally published on my website on June 6, 2021.
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As with all the pieces I write, I had a skeleton of what I wanted to cover and ended up jumping from one section to the other as I wrote it. This first paragraph you're reading is the final thing I'm writing. I started writing this piece to share my recent thoughts about building a Buy Me a Coffee page for Women in Tech SEO. But I went into detail about my toxic feelings about money throughout my career—everything from my salary to speaker fees to sponsorship for Women in Tech SEO events. I'm sharing all this because I hope it inspires us to have open and honest conversations about how we feel about money.
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I've wanted to start a Buy Me a Coffee page for Women in Tech SEO for over a year. I finally started one last week. Why did it take me a year to build a page on a platform that takes less than 5 minutes to build a page on?
Because there is a deep-rooted belief that asking for money might be perceived as you not being a good person, if you ask to be paid for your time and energy, you don't genuinely care about the work you're doing and only do it for money.
This is far from true. We tend to be unkind to ourselves, and we put up barriers and restrictions on how we might or how we might not be perceived, and we base our decisions around that.
I usually show off everything I build for Women in Tech SEO. This time round, I didn't even write about it - I simply added an unannounced Buy Me a Coffee button on the website navigation. I baked in a tweet about supporting projects and initiatives, and I left it at that.
Why did I want to start the page in the first place?
I started noticing Buy Me a Coffee on tons of websites: community websites, freelancer websites, and newsletter-based websites, and it got me thinking this would be perfect for Women in Tech SEO.
The community is fully run on a voluntary basis as a passion project alongside my full-time job. Most weeks, I spend approximately 15-20 hours working on it. Everything from launching new initiatives, organising WTSWorkshop, WTSPodcast, moderating it's FB/Slack group, running its social accounts, publishing weekly interviews... Buy Me a Coffee would be a way to make money on the time and energy spent growing the community.
Questions that went through my head during the year of overthinking starting the page
Let me take you on a journey of my brain - the ongoing battle of telling myself an unkind thought, overthinking that unkind thought, and then a few hours (or days or months) later, responding back to myself with a kind thought.
Unkind Thought 1: People will think I only run Women in Tech SEO for money purposes.
Kind Response: Really Areej? So, after 2 years of pouring your heart and soul into a passion project, people will question that? More importantly, let's say that some people think so - why should it be something you put any time or consideration into worrying about?
Unkind Thought 2: No one will bother buying me any coffee.
Kind Response: Every time you launch any kind of initiative, you are this close to stopping yourself from doing it because you think that no one will bother, but you're always proven wrong (The best example is sold-out WTSFest tickets). Also, there's nothing to lose by launching something and then seeing how it performs.
FYI: As usual, I was wrong. I raised £120 worth of coffee in the first week
This then got me thinking of the amount of times I've had toxic feelings around money. Here are just some examples:
1) Sponsorship Money
The first time I asked for sponsorship money was due to WTSFest. This was the first full-day conference that I organised from scratch myself, and I was convinced it was going to make me go bankrupt. I was keeping conference tickets very low (and I was convinced no one would buy them), and I needed to ensure that everything would get paid for. I didn't know the first thing about sponsorship fees or packages, so I started reaching out to different people and asking for their help.
The most help I received was from the brilliant Aleyda Solis, who was not only speaking at the conference but also signed up to be a sponsor herself. She put the time and energy into emailing many potential sponsors and putting in intros; knowing Aleyda, she probably forgot that she'd done that, but I'll never forget it. It was an extremely kind and selfless act on her part, and I'll always be grateful for it.
I started organising the conference only a few months after launching Women in Tech SEO, so I got a bunch of No's because people didn't know me or the community, which is more than fair. It wasn't easy, but I knew that was going to be the case the first time around.
Fast forward a year later, and I'm launching my new WTSWorkshop initiative. At that point, my primary goal was to pay my speakers. I remember spending an evening overthinking the format:
How much do I charge sponsors?
How do I do the speaker/me split? Should it be 50/50, 60/40, 100% to speakers? (Unkind Thought: After all, they're putting in all the effort. Kind Response: No, Areej, you're organising the whole event from scratch and paying for the webinar subscription)
What should the sponsors get for what they pay?
Will anyone even bother sponsoring?
I don't know what started it, but the next thing I knew, me and Kirsty Hulse started DMing on Twitter, and I shared with her my thinking. Kirsty has done tons of workshops and talks on money. She told me that anything I'm thinking of charging sponsors is too low and I should charge higher. We talked about paying speakers, we talked about my feelings on money...we had some back and forth on Twitter DM and I went to bed feeling much better.
The next morning, I woke up earlier than normal and launched WTSWorkshop. I decided to openly and honestly lay out my fee breakdown. I didn't want to have different discussions with different sponsors and speakers - I wanted everyone to pay the same and get paid the same. I would charge £500 per exclusive workshop sponsorship, where 60% went directly to the speaker. I even listed out bullet points of exactly what the sponsorship package includes.
I launched the initiative in September, and within one week, I had enough sponsors to cover fortnightly workshops until the end of July. Looking back at it now, I think this happened due to a number of reasons:
My pitch was public, open and honest - it was there on our website for everyone to see. Exactly how much I'm charging, what they're getting for it and how I'm splitting the money
It was easier than my first WTSFest because by then, I'd been running the community for over a year, and it was growing successfully. Rather than needing to reach out for sponsorship and getting a No, companies were simply filling out a Google Form and reaching out by email saying they'd like to sponsor us
Ever since, I've felt much more comfortable asking for sponsorship money with new events and initiatives, such as WTSNewsletter and WTSPodcast. I had a plan, I had a process, and I was open and transparent - and sponsors appreciated that.
2) Speaker Fees
I've written a whole piece about speaker fees and my thoughts on them. As usual, I overthought publishing it, but I'm glad I did. It raised some really important conversations, and I've had so many people reach out to me after letting me know that my piece inspired them to request a speaker fee (and they got one!) I also had people inform me that I'm lucky even to be invited to share my knowledge, but it's okay, to each their own. Speaker Fees is yet another example of initially associating toxic feelings with it.
Unkind Thought: Who am I to ask for a fee from someone who is providing me with an opportunity to share my knowledge?
Kind Response: You're someone who will spend countless hours and energy doing research, putting together slides and practising your talk to share it with an audience who is paying ticket fees to a conference that is expecting you to speak for free.
3) Salary
And finally, salary! Where do I even start with this one? I remember the first time I felt off about my salary. I was 2 years into my first SEO job, I was getting paid a 25K annual salary, and it was review time. A few colleagues who started their job around the same time as me received a raise to 30K so I was going into the review with the assumption that I'll get the same. [Yes, agency owners, most of us share our salaries with one other.] Instead, I was told I'd get a raise of 2K, which would raise me to 27K instead of my expected 30K.
I remember feeling inadequate like I wasn't good enough. My review was positive all around, so how come I only got raised to 27K, and my colleagues, who were at my same level, got raised to 30K? I then started thinking about the Tech SEO retainers that I solely worked on from start to finish we charged at an £800/day retainer when my daily retainer was 10 times less than that.
I changed my job a few months later, BUT it never got easier. A big part of the reason is that I was on a work visa, so there was always the added pressure of:
I need to feel grateful that a company is willing to sponsor me on a work visa, so I have no right to ask for a fair salary.
The biggest raise I ever received was 2 months after receiving my permanent residency (no longer requiring work sponsorship). This was 5 years in my SEO career. For the first time ever, I didn't leave the Expected Salary field empty in the application; when I filled it, I didn't write a range. Instead, I wrote a salary of 20K more than my current one. The funny thing is, no one ever questioned my salary expectation at the interview stage, and I got offered the job the day after my interview. This made me realise that I spent the past 5 years being underpaid and I never had the courage to ask for a raise because I was too busy feeling grateful that someone was even willing to provide me with a work visa.
I've felt much more comfortable asking to be paid what I deserve since. I think with all these examples I've shared:
If you take one thing from this piece, it's the fact that the first time you do something, it can feel terrifying. But once you do it, it'll feel much easier the next time around.
So, why did I bother writing this piece?
Because more of us need to feel comfortable talking about this out loud.
If you've read this far, then thank you.
It's only through being open and honest about our experiences, that we can start challenging our own feelings on money and our expectations. Just like the Salary Fees piece, I'm sure there are others who can relate to many of these points - whether it's related to your passion project, getting sponsorship support or the salary you're getting paid...the more of us who talk about this, share our learnings and experiences, the more we'll feel comfortable with the idea of money and let go of these toxic associations to it.
