Marketing Tips for Translators have another 10 episodes under the belt, and this 20th episode is another solo-show. In this episode I am expanding on the blog post about creating a marketing plan, and providing more substance to the one-page marketing plan that I have distributed to the subscribers of the Marketing Tips for Translators newsletter. If you would like the one-page marketing plan for freelance translators, you can subscribe to the monthly newsletter, and receive new checklist every month to help you with your marketing efforts. In this episode I am going through the marketing plan and it's element step by step.

In this episode we cover the following

The basis of a marketing plan - analysis of your current situation

The elements of a marketing plan - objective, communication goals, financial goals, product or service, market niche, budget, competition, unique selling points, prospects,

Media campaign

Tracking and following up

Useful links for this episode

Get Clients Now, by C.J. Hayden

The Insider Guide to Strategic Marketing of Translation Services, by A.M. Sall

The Wealthy Freelancer, by Slaunwhite Steve, Pete Savage and Ed Gandia

Thank you for listening! Please let me know if you have anything to add or any comments, and don't forget to click on the share buttons below if you liked what you heard. Remember, it does not have to be very difficult or time consuming to create a marketing plan. It is nothing more than setting goals and making a to-do list to get your there. As I mentioned earlier, I have tried to make it even easier, with a special one-page marketing plan for freelance translators, which you can get by subscribing to the newsletter. Good luck with your marketing and planning!

Tess Whitty is an English-Swedish translator and owner of Swedish Translation Services, which provides English-Swedish-English translation, proofreading and editing services. Aside from her regular translation work, she serves as language chair and grader for the English-Swedish certification program, and chair for the Chapter/affiliate group committee for the American Translators Association.  She holds training seminars and presentations on translation and marketing skills for translators and has launched the Marketing Tips for Translators podcast and blog. For more information, and to connect, go to www.swedishtranslationservices.com or www.marketingtipsfortranslators.com.

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

n April I attended a Proz.com webinar on pricing strategies for freelance translators, held by Gwenydd Jones. I liked it so much that I wanted to share some of her insights with you. Many of us have struggled with pricing our translation services, knowing what to charge, when to charge a higher fee and when we could accept a lower rate. Gwenydd talks about what we should think about when pricing our services and negotiating fees with our clients. This episode is a great complement to the previous episode on value pricing by Luke Spear so I hope you will enjoy it.

In this episode we cover the following:

How to calculate our translation rates

How to establish earning goals

How to know when to say no to a request

Always converting the project fee into an hourly income, and how to do that

Timing your work to figure out your hourly rate, but also to figure out which projects were not worth the time or money

How we can handle discounts for fuzzy matches and repetitions when using CAT-tools and quoting for a project

A great tip on quoting for a project together with a colleague

Links to items mentioned in this episode:

Gwenydd's blog

Letraduct

Toggl (free online stopwatch and project timing tool)

Gwenydd's Webinar "Getting Your Prices Right" on Proz.com

Tess' Webinar "The Price is Right - Pricing Strategies for Your Translation Services on ECPD Webinars

Thank you for listening and I hope you enjoyed this episode! To get more episodes sent directly to you, you can subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher! Also, reviews on iTunes are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! I read all of them, and feel free to share your contact info there so I can contact you later on and say thanks!

Gwenydd Jones is a freelance translator, trainer and translator coach, based in Spain. A language and translation enthusiast, these disciplines have come to form part of her lifestyle. After starting out as an English-language teacher in 2003, she expanded and evolved in her career towards translation, while maintaining strong bonds with her roots in education. Along the way, she picked up two MAs, the first in Translation Studies and the second in Legal Translation, and passed the DipTrans (CIOL). A full-time freelancer since 2009, Gwenydd draws on her professional, academic and linguistic experience to assist other translators and translation students in their professional development.

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

In this episode I am interviewing Luke Spear, the author of "The Translation Sales Handbook", for tips on how we can boost our income  with direct translation clients and agencies, especially by changing our mindset, and we are also discussing a price or rate calculator for translators. I have read his handbook and found many great tips in it and wanted to share some of his insights here.

In this episode we cover the following:

Pricing based on value instead of commodity

How to immediately boost our income with direct clients and agencies

A rate calculator for translators

The Translation Sales Handbook

Links to items mentioned in this episode:

The Translation Sales Handbook

Luke Spear's website

I hope you found the information useful. Thank you for all your support so far and feel free to suggest topics or contact me if you have questions or comments. Don't forget to leave a review on iTunes if you have not done so yet (or on Stitcher). I would love to know what you think and it would help spread the word about the podcast. Wishing you all the best with our translation income.

Luke is a freelance translator from French and Swedish to English, based in Derbyshire, England. He also runs a small agency and is finishing work on the second iteration of Linguaquote, a site that lets translation buyers manage multilingual projects, working exclusively with a manually vetted database of linguists and agencies. Approved translators thus get the chance to offer their expertise and compete on a level footing with agencies. Luke has also put together 'The translation sales handbook' which features a range of strategies to help readers create a solid framework for growth and sustainability. It offers practical advice for marketing, both online and offline, as well as for streamlining work processes and restoring the work/life balance, handling the client cycle and positioning yourself for better rates. It also features interviews on the subject with 12 top translators. More information is available on the blurb page, found here.

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

In this episode I am interviewing a very specialized French into English translator on how we can market our translation services to direct clients when we are not able to attend industry conferences and network face to face. Joanne Archambault has been able to quickly launch a successful translation career working with direct clients and have some great tips to share on direct client marketing.

 In this episode we discuss the following:

Tips on how to market to di rect clients if we are not able to attend industry conferences

Advertising in trade journals

Referrals

Warm email prospecting

Stealth marketing

Paid advertising

Free marketing tips for direct clients

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Joanne Archambault's website

Warm Email Prospecting

Thank you again for listening and for all your positive feedback and support. You are really motivating me to provide this podcast for you. Feel free to share it with others and I would love to hear from you if you have any marketing tips you would like me to take up. For more tips and marketing checklists, you can also sign up for the monthly newsletter. Take care!

 

Joanne Archambault is an ATA-certified French to English translator specializing in Pharmaceutical and Orthopedics industry documents. She has a Doctorate in Biology from the University of Calgary and was involved in biomedical research for 15 years before becoming a translator in 2009. While working in the life sciences industry, she was intimately involved in the development of new drugs and orthopedic medical devices. Joanne grew up in a French-English bilingual environment in Canada and has resided in the US since 2001. She currently lives in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

Resumes, or CV's are still an important marketing tool for many freelance translators, especially if we want to market to agencies. In episode 2 we talked about CV tips for freelance translators. In this episode I am interviewing an English. Danish, Dutch and Norwegian into Swedish translator who has been subjected for a CV scam, where someone stole her CV and posted it to agencies pretending to be her. She has written an article about it in Swedish and is sharing her tips for how to avoid being subjected for this scam.

 In this episode we discuss the following:

How someone can steal your CV content

Information on CV scams and why people do this

What we can do to prevent people from stealing our information and pretending to be us

Common mistakes translators do that put them at risk for CV theft

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

 Translator Scammers directory

How to protect your translator CV from scammers

Thank you for listening! I hope you have never been subject to a CV scam or theft. I have already implemented several of the tips from this interview to protect my CV and I urge you to do the same. Anything we can do to make it harder to steal our information and to protect our profession and professionalism.

PS! After the podcast was recorded, we discovered that even if you protect a pdf-file in Acrobat Reader, it can still be edited in other pdf-readers, for example on a Mac. Here are some additional tips on how to protect your CV:

1: Create a picture file, preferably .png, of your pdf.

2: Save it with a resolution that works on screen, but looks dreadful in printed format, and is difficult to make a good OCR of. Suggested resolution: 150 dpi.

3: Save the .png as a pdf.

4: Send it to the person asking for it (after you've verified their credentials) and let them know that you've protected it, so it won't look as splendid as it might otherwise.

Ingrid Elmerot was born and bred in Sweden, linguist by birth, got smitten by her mother's historical interest and her father's automotive interest, and the best way to combine these characters turned out to be a translator career. Loves travelling, the ocean (but it's too cold to swim in it) and riding her motorbike, for example to translator conferences.

 

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

In this episode I am interviewing Ted Wozniak, a German into English financial translator and the creator of Payment Practices, an online database where you can research clients and their payment history. We are talking about how to make sure we will get paid for your translation services, breaking it up into what to do before accepting a project, during a project and after we have finished a translation project.

In this episode we discuss the following:

What Payment Practices is and how it works

What we can do before we accept a translation project to make sure we will get paid

What we can do during the project to make sure we will get paid

What we can do after we have delivered the project to make sure we get paid

What to do if we do not get paid on time, or at all

Other resources for ensuring payment

Common mistakes translators do when it comes to ensuring payment

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Payment Practices

Proz.com Blue Board

Nigerian check scam alerts

Payment Practices Tools In The Translation World

The TCR List (Translator Client Review List)

Translation Agency Payment

Thank you for listening! I hope you found it useful in order to make sure you will get paid for your hard earned translation work. If you like the episode, feel free to share it with your colleagues, or write a review on iTunes, to make sure that more translators and interpreters can benefit from the tips. Have a great day!

Ted R. Wozniak holds bachelor's degrees in accounting and German and is a graduate of the German Basic Course at the Defense Language Institute. Before becoming a freelance translator, he was an accountant, stockbroker, Army liaison officer in Germany, and an interrogation instructor at the U.S. Army Intelligence School. After pursuing graduate studies in Germanics, he became a freelance German > English translator, specializing in finance, accounting and taxation. He is also the president of Payment Practices, Inc., an online database of translation-company payment practices, a mentor at the Graham School, University of Chicago in the German to English financial translation program, the Treasurer of the ATA, and owner/moderator of Finanztrans, a mailing list for German financial translators. He resides in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

In order for us to find our ideal client or target clients, we need to do some research. When we have a list of potential clients to contact, we need to know how to contact them, but also how to follow up with them and keep track of all our contacts. In this episode I am interviewing Eve Bodeux, talking about her experience of market research, both as a project manager for her own localization company, and as a freelance translator, with some great tips for both new and experienced translators.

In this episode we discuss the following:

Market research campaigns and how to hire outside help for the research or vetting

How to contact potential clients and follow up

Selection criteria for the market research

Different systems and tools to document and track your potential clients and marketing efforts

Marketing tips for contacting project managers and common mistakes when marketing your freelance translation services

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Martindale - Online database of attorneys 

Salesforce

Nimble

Evernote as CRM tool

Business card tips

I hope you enjoyed listening to this episode as much as I enjoyed making it. How do you research potential clients for your translation services, and how do you follow up? Please share! Thank you and see you in the next episode.

 

Eve Lindemuth Bodeux has 20 years of experience in the language services industry. While Eve translates from French into English personally, her company, Bodeux International LLC, offers multilingual localization, translation, and project management services. She also co-hosts the Speaking of Translation podcast with Corinne McKay. She served as the Vice President of the Colorado Translators Association (CTA) for four years and is a voting member of the American Translators Association. Eve has the equivalent of a Masters of Arts degree in European Studies from the University of Nancy II  in France, a Masters of Arts from the University of Virginia in International Relations, and a BA in French from Lebanon Valley College.

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

Most freelance translators, at least when starting out, receive most jobs from translation agencies. It is important to know how to find reputable agencies to work with, how to contact them to provide your services, and how to provide good customer service and keep them as longstanding clients. In this episode I interview Anne de Freyman, who has been a freelance translator for 20 years and have presented and taught on the topic of marketing to translation agencies before.

In this episode we discuss the following:

Where freelance translators can find agencies to work with

How to vet agencies and find "good" agencies that pay on time and are nice to work with

How to contact agencies and offer our translation services

How we can make agencies find us

How to negotiate rates with agencies

How to handle test translations

How to handle agreements and contracts to sign

Tips for creating a favorable impression with agencies and make them loyal customers

Mistakes freelance translators make when working with translation agencies

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Proz.com

Payment Practices

Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions or comments on this episode, or if you have any tips to share. I hope you enjoyed the episode! Have a great day!

 

Anne de Freyman is an English to French freelance translator from Provence, where she was brought up and studied English literature to MA level. Although she always thought her true calling was academia, she discovered real life and translation whilst working as lectrice at Sheffield university, in the UK. She fell in love with Yorkshire, with translation and with a man from Liverpool and never went back home. This was in the late 80s, well before the days of MAs in translation and like many translators of the same generation, translation is a career she was led into by serendipity. Her first translation jobs were for a very small translation company specialising in video games, as an in-house translator and admin person. She then married the man from Liverpool and moved on to a larger translation company in Nottingham. Then a baby was born and she set up as a freelance translator, just over 20 years ago. She currently works mostly for international organisations and NGOs, both directly and through agencies, specialising in human development and marine oil pollution. She also loves the challenge of translating creative copy in fields such as sports and tourism. Anne is also very involved with ITI, the UK Institute of Translation & Interpreting. She is now in her third year on the board of directors, currently as vice-chair and is heading up the team organising the next ITI conference in 2015.

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

Some of you are already using social media for marketing your translation services, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are the most popular social media tools for translators. But there is a new tool that might be too important to ignore, especially if you want to improve your search engine optimization. Plus that it also has some nifty features that the other tools do not have. In this episode I am discussing Google+ as a marketing tool for translators, together with another professional freelance translator with a strong presence on social media, Olga Arakelyan.

 In this episode we discuss the following:

Why freelance translators should use Google+ as a marketing tool

The advantages and disadvantages of Google+

Steps for creating a profile on Google+

Personal profile versus business page on Google+

Google Authorship and how we can use it

Google Hangouts and how we can use it

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Olga's Website: Your Professional Translator

Google+

Google Authoriship: The future of SEO is you

Google Hangouts

Do you use Google+? I would love to hear more from translators/interpreters using Google+. I hope you enjoyed this episode and I look forward to seeing you in the next one.

 

Olga Arakelyan is a professional freelance translator, a certified ESL teacher, and a blogger. She works in close collaboration with foreign business owners willing to expand their services to the Russian market. She translates from English and German into Russian and specializes mainly in marketing, music, real estate, tourism, and education. In 2011 Olga’s Twitter account @Olenkaarakelyan was included into the list of top 25 accounts of language twitterers, and in 2012 her LinkedIn profile became one of the most viewed profiles in the network. Olga is very proud to be one of the coauthors of the book “Diversification in the language industry” written by Nicole Y. Adams and released in November 2013. You can visit her English blog or, if you prefer reading in Russian, she’d be happy to see you in her Russian blog.

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.

As freelance translators we market our business to other businesses, we are using business to business marketing or B2B. In this episode I am interviewing Sara Colombo, a freelance translator who also has a marketing background like me. We are discussing tips for marketing to other businesses, but also how to use content marketing when marketing your freelance translation and interpretation services.

  In this episode we discuss the following:

What B2B marketing is and how it can be used by freelance translators and interpreters

Lead generation strategies

Market research tips

Tips for B2B marketing and common mistakes

What content marketing is and how we can use it

If we need a content marketing strategy and what it can look like

Useful links mentioned in this episode:

Sara Colombo Translations

Balance Your Words. Stepping in the translation industry

10 simple B2B content marketing tips

Content Marketing Institute

5 ways to generate B2B leads using content marketing

Lead generation

10 Simple B2B Content Marketing Tips for Complex Solutions

Leafleting in your area

I could have discussed much more with Sara about marketing and market research. Do you have any questions unanswered after this interview? Please share below or send me an email. Thanks for listening and sharing. Have a great day!

 

 

Sara Colombo is a qualified freelance translator and interpreter (English – French – Italian) with more than 6 years of experience within the marketing, health and IT fields. She runs Balance Your Words, a blog on marketing with a distinct fun and healthy twist that in 2013 became a popular book. A ProZ.com professional trainer (marketing and social media for freelance translators), consultant and speaker, she is a TESOL certified teacher. Together with InTouch Translations, Sara is the creator of the Brussels Tweet Up (Twitter: #BxlTweetUp) and of the Brussels Tweet Up LAB (Twitter: #BxlTweetUpLab and Facebook), the first international lab for translation students and young translators willing to experiment with fresh ideas and reconnect with the industry in a new way. Fitness instructor and yoga addict, to more about her or connect with her community, simply join the conversation on Twitter using #healthyfreelancer or #tardudanseurs. Oh, and find her on LinkedIn, too!

 

This podcast is a labor of love and brought to you free of charge. If you enjoy this series and would like to show your support, please consider making a small donation to ensure I can keep offering you great content in the future.