Manage & Promote Your Translation Services

Although some translators are hired to work full time by translation companies, the vast majority of translators work as freelancers, small business owners, and have their own clients.

So, for most Spanish translation professionals, promoting your translation services is an important part of their business. There are several methods to choose from when promoting your translation services to prospective businesses. Your strategy may combine them, resulting in a unique market approach that should match your market positioning.

Translation Service Markets / Auctions

Recommeded for: Intermediate / Advanced

Some websites have developed bidding marketplaces. You will find job postings there where you can offer your services detailing credentials and your prices.

The job poster will receive dozens of applications, sometimes hundreds from where they will pick one translator or a few of them.

Although these translation marketplaces are a good place to start your career (since you will be willing to charge less than the average), in the long run, you will not like to use them. The reason is that this reversed service auction pushes the rates down and does not exactly contribute to the translator’s well-being.

Associations For Promoting Your Translation Services

Recommended for: Intermediate / Advanced

The associations are a great way to support a professional translation career. They look after the translators and offer a variety of useful tools and services.

Most importantly, they have directories where you will be listed. Serious companies, especially those not thinking only about price, will access these directories very often. This is an opportunity to get new clients while you improve your credentials for being part of a respectable association.

Networking

Recommended for: All

To build a business network is usually the best way of getting quality clients and jobs. A client coming from a recommendation will usually be concerned with quality, timeliness, and trustworthiness. They will probably be paying higher than the average.

A translator with a good network will have a constant flow of jobs throughout the year.

We consider this the second-best way to promote your translation services.

Reputation

Recommended for: All

This is, by far, the best and strongest way to build a great translation business.

If you offer a high-quality translation and good customer service, chances are you will rarely face a shortage of work. Although there are many translators in the market, a translator combining both a strong command of technical translation and appropriate customer service is very rare.

You may find excellent translators who are difficult persons, and you will find people extremely courteous that is not that do not produce a high-quality translation. When you combine both sides and get that “WOW” from your client, you will achieve the so-fought fidelity. One big client may bring you more than $ 20k in-services per year. Now, imagine if you can retain two big customers per year in a five year period. You would be securing more than $ 200k in demand in the fifth year. Of course, you would need to outsource some of this demand to them. But, it is still an amazing achievement to have a secure annual income of over $ 200k.

The Worst Method For Promoting Your Translation Services

Recommendation: No one

You may be tempted to send spam to translation companies. It is easy to write a short email and send it to as many companies as you find on the Internet. But, do they want to receive dozens of unsolicited resumes every day? A few companies will have a specific area of the website open to new translator applications. Most of them will not have such an area.

The worst case of spam is when a translator will click on a Google Adword (those ads on the top and the right side of the browser after you search) to find a victim for their resume-spam. A translation company pays an average of $ 5.00 every time someone clicks on those ads. Now, imagine dozens of translators clicking on that ad every day. Not surprisingly, the company will get mad at any translator doing that: they spend big bucks to get a customer, and instead, they get several unsolicited resumes in their mailbox. The least thing happening here will be any willingness to add the spammer-translator to their database.