Guest Post: 4 Steps To Becoming A Successful Translator

In this article, you will find some advice about growing your freelance language services business fast. A freelance translator may have excellent language and translation skills, but it is the lack of business skills that causes many freelance translators to fail. In this short article, you will find vital guidance to what every freelance translator need to do to run a successful business.

Harness the Focus Power For Your Translation Services

It is vital to find a tightly defined niche in your translation business. Targeting a narrow niche allows you to become a big fish in a small pond. Freelance translators have got a limited amount of money to compete with big translation service companies. Moreover, if to focus broadly, your marketing message promoting language services will become diluted and weak. Trying to target everyone, in reality, means you’re targeting no one. By narrowly defining a target market, you can deliver huge results for you to become a specialist.

How To Identify Your Customer For Your Translation Services

A key of your translation services marketing success is to be laser focused and to compile a list of your prospects from a certain niche. It is necessary to be as specific as possible about all the attributes that may be relevant. What is their age, gender, geography, what are they afraid of? etc. E.g. your focus is the localization of travel websites. Compile a list of potential prospects and analyze them: what kinds of posts do they publish in blogs, what questions do their customers ask them, what kind of activities do they carry out on their social network etc.

Craft A Compelling Message For Your Target Market

To stand out from the crowd of translation service providers you are to focus on the needs, thoughts, and emotions of the target market. If you shout ”Look at me! I offer the best ever high-quality language services at attractive rates”, it will just become background noise. If you enter your narrowed translation niche by speaking to the needs and problems of the prospects, you will resonate at a deeper level and stand out from other language services providers. E.g. in case of travel website localization, you can start a message with “Don’t you know how to reach your German (Spanish, French, etc.) speaking customers?”

Develop A Unique Freelance Translator Website

Positioning yourself as a freelance translator and offering translation services worldwide alone with other language monsters is a real race. The only solution is to develop a unique selling proposition. An exclusive freelance translator website in a narrow field is something that positions you differently. You can start with creating an exclusive domain name for your services. Read an article on how to choose a domain name for a new online translation start-up.

When developing a concept for your freelance translator website, you have to always keep in mind two questions:

1. Why should the prospects buy my translation services?
2. Why should they buy translation services from me?

The uniqueness of your website doesn't have to be in your services itself. The uniqueness may be in the way you carry out your language services, e.g. technologies you use to reduce the costs or shorten a deadline. The most important is to position yourself what you do in such a way that one day your prospects will stand in line overnight asking for your translation services!

Written by Hanna Sles, a translator and localization specialist, Wordpress website developer, SEO, and online marketing expert. Able to develop and shape your company's voice and style in Russian and Ukrainian to ensure that it’s clear, accessible, and culturally relevant for your customers and partners throughout the Russian- and Ukrainian speaking world. Creative-minded and passionate about impacting business results through localizations.