This is a guest post from Aniello Attianese from Language Reach. I really wanted to share another freelance translators marketing plan and tips. Enjoy!

When starting out as a freelance translator, it is crucial to find the best and most effective ways of successfully marketing yourself to your potential customers. This isn’t a simple case of working hard to get your name out there and then just stopping. Remember, your goal is to stand out from a pool of translators who are just as qualified as you are. Why should the client choose you? What can you offer that others can’t? What are your specialisms and how will working with you benefit the client or the translation agency? These are just some of the questions that we, as translators, need to be able to answer in order to stand out for all the right reasons.

Whether you’re a professional translator that has worked in the industry for over 20 years, or someone who is just starting their career as a freelance translator, you will always be able to find a new client that you could potentially work with. Having successfully worked as a translator for just over 5 years, for a translation agency based in London, Language Reach, and its sister company – Translation Services 24, I think it’s only right that I share some of these tips with you.

1. Brand yourself via your website

I’m what you call “a fairly new translator”, having joined the translation industry in an era where everything is driven by the internet. Fortunately, this has made it a substantially easier start for me in comparison to my fellow translators who have had to market their services before the introduction of the World Wide Web. The internet has been a distinctively divisive tool in helping me to brand myself starting with creating my own website.

To begin, you should definitely aim for a clean layout, making sure that you proofread your content numerous times before publishing, ensuring it is completely error free. While you do want attention, attention in its negative sense definitely isn’t something you should aim for, therefore having unnecessary images or unprofessional colours should be avoided.  Having a great website, with a clean layout and useful content will additionally allow you, or help you to, be more visible in search engines such as Google.

Remember, your website is just the perfect place to showcase all of your services and to demonstrate testimonials and referrals. Having a website is also extremely advantageous in allowing translators the ability to always update their work experience, specialities or projects they recently worked on, something of an online CV.

2. Take advantage of social media

Engaging on social media is yet another great way of marketing yourself. You have the power of engaging with other translators, but more importantly, clients. Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are useful places to respond or interact with people in the industry, and a place to promote your services.

If you’ve written a blog post for example, using social media is, again, an effective way of promoting this. Take an advantage of the hashtag symbol on Twitter to further expose yourself, or ‘favourite’, ‘retweet’ and respond to a client’s post on Twitter.

 3. Create a profile in the best places

Having a profile in all the right places is a great way of increasing your brand online. Many freelance translators use professional associations and directories. Taking advantage of portals such as Translators Café or Proz are great places because potential clients will often post jobs on these platforms. Such places are truly where opportunities will arise from, making it very important to update these profiles with vital information that will make you stand out from the pool of translators who are aiming to do the same thing as you are.

 4. Publish online and on other blogs

Publishing content and articles online is a great way of interacting with other linguists in all areas of the language industry. Publishing work online is an excellent way of broadening your online presence. And as well as engaging with people in the same industry as you, getting this type of recognition is beneficial in how well you rank on google if you link these posts to your website. This will additionally allow you to become somewhat of an expert within your industry, which is a plus!

 5. Use the right language in your email content

The most frequent way a translator gains job opportunities is through contacting clients and translation agencies and this begins in the body of an email. You have to sell your services without writing a book. A client wants to see the languages you cover, your native tongue, rates, specialisms and any professional associations that you may have. Being a member of public bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Linguists or the Institute of translation and Interpreting stands out to clients and agencies so never forget to mention it.

It is very important to keep the content in your emails short but appropriate and effective. If you specialise in the legal industry for instance, mentioning this as well any accreditations and experiences that you have will make your email more effective.

So as you can see building a beaming reputation online cannot be done overnight and is something which takes effort. Gradually building a name for yourself and upholding these efforts, results in increased opportunities. Thanks to the internet, marketing yourself has become more accessible and easier, and taking advantage of these marketing strategies will undoubtingly improve your efforts in working as a freelance translator in this growing industry.

Aniello Attianese comes from Pagani, Italy. He speaks Italian, French and German fluently and has just started learning Swedish. He currently works for Language Reach and Translation Services 24 as a translator and a project manager. In his spare time he enjoys travelling and good music as much as he enjoys learning languages.

For more information and help to create a marketing plan and get your year started right, check out the Quick Start Guide – 8 steps to a marketing plan for translators.