When marketing feels overwhelming, slow down and simplify

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What’s up with freelancing these days?

Freelancing is in kind of an odd state right now. We’re hearing about mass layoffs at tech and media companies, we’re wondering how AI/MT is going to affect us, there’s a total solar eclipse coming, and the other day, I found myself wondering, “Does any of this matter, given what’s going on with climate change??” It’s an odd time all around.

We know…”always be marketing”

Harder yet, we know that the way to avoid the feast/famine cycle/being overly dependent on one client/making fear-based business decisions because we’re afraid of not having enough work, is to market consistently. Does this mean that we’re applying to 36 new clients a day? Definitely not. Here’s a post I wrote back in November about what “Always be marketing” means to me. But yet, the majority of freelance translators and interpreters do little to no active marketing (believe me, people tell me the truth about their businesses, so I see this first-hand).

Avoiding analysis paralysis

We avoid marketing for lots of reasons. We’d rather translate or interpret (fair enough). We suffer from “be careful what you wish for” syndrome, where we think, yikes, what if my dream clients respond and then I have to be good enough to do their work?? We feel like we shouldn’t have to market; shouldn’t the juicy work be coming to us??? But an additional factor is analysis paralysis: we can’t decide whether to:

• Apply to agencies
• Market to direct clients, and if so, how? E-mail them? Connect on LinkedIn? Send them a postcard? Call them?
• Try some inbound marketing: improve our website SEO, beef up our LinkedIn profile
• Attend a client-side conference
• Forget all of that because our website is horrible and our profile photo is from the 90s

In the face of this, we often get overwhelmed and do nothing. But there’s a better way: Pare it down, and simplify. Do the simplest thing you can think of, and do it consistently. Examples include:

• Nudge a dormant client every Wednesday. This sounds so simple as to be not worth doing, but let’s say you did this even half the time. Did anyone you know nudge 26 dormant clients last year? Probably not; most of us don’t even have 26 dormant clients!
• Apply to one new agency or contact one new client on the first work day of every month. Here again, is once a month even worth it? Yes, absolutely! That would be 12 clients this year! Twelve more than you contacted in 2023!
• Work on marketing for 30 minutes, twice a week. You spend more time than that talking yourself out of marketing (“because it won’t work anyway,” which you don’t know, because you never try it). Challenge yourself to see how much you can get done in 30 minutes and motor away. For what it’s worth, this is what I do. I have a Todoist reminder that says, “Marketing: do something,” every Monday through Thursday.

Questions to ask when you’re overwhelmed

Another pro tip: When you’re feeling overwhelmed, start from the questions:

• Who should I be serving?
• Where can my skills be most useful?
• Who really needs me, and can’t work with me because they don’t know me yet?
• What kinds of work am I so passionate about, that I can honestly say to clients, “I love doing the projects that you need”?

Marketing enough to have a thriving business is a lot of work, but I hope that these suggestions can make it a little less painful.