Wednesday 3rd December 2003
Oxford, UK
Dear friend,
Like most people I used to be employed full-time by someone else. Like most people I hated it. Luckily for me I managed to break out of that and become a freelance translator. I quickly realized that the potential earnings in the freelance translation business are very high. At the end of my first year I had more than matched my earnings from my previous job in pharmaceutical development. During my second year I grossed $80,000 - not bad for a startup business with no experience!
My secret? Well, it took me a while to realize why things were going so well - after a couple of years my agency customers were saying things like...
"we now use you for all our Polish-English-Polish translations"
"we always call you first"
"you're more professional than the others"
"if all our translators were like you, our lives would be so much easier"
This was news to me. I thought everybody behaved the same way towards their customers as I did. Don't they? So I started discussing this with my agency customers and heard all sorts of horror stories about how translators do 'business' with their customers. I thought little of it at the time. But eventually I had more work than I could do myself, so I formed the agency ALMAL Translations and started giving out the excess work to others.The Big Realization
It was then that I started to realize what they meant. When I had to deal with other translators I realized that some don't treat their customers the way I do. Incredibly enough some are even rude to customers. Some are not easy to contact. Some clearly have little idea how to market themselves. This was a real education for me.Success in business has very little to do with "luck" or "who you know" or "what you do" or even "where you do it" - it's all about HOW you do it.
I'd like to share my "HOW TO" secrets with you and help you achieve the kind of success you deserve. As part of my helping translators do better business campaign I will show you HOW TO...
- get started as a freelance translator if you aren't one already
- understand what your customers want from you
- realize why they want these things
- understand what potential customers are looking for in a translator
- market yourself more effectively
- find ways to increase your value to customers
- increase your commercial awareness
- grow your business in the best possible way
- keep your existing customers happy so they always come back to you
- survive in the business world
- realize what is profitable and what is unprofitable work and how to get rid of unprofitable work
- protect yourself against legal liabilities
- protect yourself against other disastrous events which can and do happen
- communicate better with your customers and potential customers
- make an excellent profit by being honest and ethical
- avoid the 3 things you should never do when marketing to translation agencies
- know exactly how you should approach translation agencies
- write a really effective marketing letter maximizing the strength of your offer
- keep irrelevant information out of your CV or Résumé
- know the 2 things you should never do when working with translation agencies
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