It depends on what your portfolio looks like, honestly. If you've got a bang-up portfolio, by all means do the $150-$200/hour people are recommending.
If your portfolio needs a little more polish, charge lower to get the experience.
When I started freelancing, I would purposefully undercharge and over-deliver, and let the client know that.
If you need to turn work down while you wait for those kinds of higher-paying gigs to come along, you can always sharpen and hone your skills by creating ecommerce templates for theme stores, and make money off of those sales.
It may not be the _most_ profitable, but it will keep you in practice in-between clients. The most important thing is that you remain prolific in your work and create a large body of content.
Plus, people like Elon Musk and Richard Branson have built up enough credibility in their own names, that when they say "we're going to make commercial space travel possible" you tend to believe them, because they don't make those kinds of announcements without having done significant research ahead of the announcement.
I'll agree you need bold commitment, but the last thing you want is to commit to a concept that doesn't have any outlooks on whether or not people want it, much less, pay for it.
I'm sorry Matt, but that is a pretty silly thing to quote. After all, what's the point of building a strategic network, or making friends, or any other long, grueling white-hat tactic that takes forever to pull off?
Under that same logic, Google Adwords should never know in advance where their ad clients are coming from, and if you have someone out there trying to on-board big clients (or increase their spend) that's the wrong path.
You say "if they get caught" when sometimes, there is nothing to catch. You're dinging people who have grinded to forge relationships, in the name of trying to keep spammers out of the index.
It makes it too easy for me to hire a spam company to blast an overwhelming amount of crappy links at my competitors who may or may not be well equipped to disavow those links.
Which, if my company has the budget to hire someone to monitor & disavow, and my competition does not, well... somebody's still gaming the system...just not in the same way...
If your portfolio needs a little more polish, charge lower to get the experience.
When I started freelancing, I would purposefully undercharge and over-deliver, and let the client know that.
If you need to turn work down while you wait for those kinds of higher-paying gigs to come along, you can always sharpen and hone your skills by creating ecommerce templates for theme stores, and make money off of those sales.
It may not be the _most_ profitable, but it will keep you in practice in-between clients. The most important thing is that you remain prolific in your work and create a large body of content.
Not for them, but for your own skill set.