Online profile mistakes that we’re all making

Greetings, Training for Translators readers! If you’re coming to the American Translators Association conference this week, I’ll see you there! Ahead of that, here’s a topic that’s been on my mind!

Online profile mistakes that we’re all making 

This year, I’ve been teaching a new and fun course: Direct client research lab, where I do personalized direct client research for the participants (the next session will be in November, reply to this e-mail if you want to be on the wait list!). As part of that class, I take a look at the participants’ online presence: it’s not specifically an online presence course, and I’m not an online presence expert, but I want to see what a potential client would find if they Googled you today.

I’ve now had 60 people go through the course, and I’ve found a few patterns that may give you some insights for tuning up your own online presence. Here they are!

Orphaned profiles

Step 1: Google yourself and see what you find. Even in this basic step (just Googling “Jane Doe translator”), I find that at least 50% of people have an online profile that they’ve clearly forgotten about. Typical culprits are: 

• A ProZ.com profile that they haven’t updated in 5+ years (ProZ.com displays the last update date on your profile, so watch out for this!). 
• A profile on a service that barely exists anymore. TM-Town, a service that ProZ.com purchased some 10 years ago, is a common one; it looks to me like lots of people got a free membership to TM-Town, kind of forgot about it, and now it’s hard to update or take down. 
• A half-finished website on a platform like About.me; you started it and then abandoned it, or you haven’t updated it in a really long time. 
• Not so much orphaned, but social media accounts that you don’t realize are public. It’s fine to have a public Instagram or Facebook account, but just don’t forget that clients can see everything you post there. 
• A professional association that you joined and never set up the directory profile, or put one sentence and left it like that.

Publicly displayed rates

Again, a common thing I see on people’s ProZ.com profiles. Publishing your rates isn’t in and of itself a problem; the problem arises when you publish “agency” rates, and now you’re looking for direct clients. The risk: a potential direct client sees these rates, and that’s probably not what you’re going to charge them. 

I understand why people do this: especially on online translation marketplaces, even your standard “agency” rates may be more than most clients on those platforms are willing to pay. So if the average platform client for your language pair is looking to pay four cents per word and you publish a rate of 12 cents per word, it avoids dealing with the lower-end client. But you’re probably going to charge direct clients a lot more, not least of all because you’re doing a lot more non-translation work and probably paying your own editor. So in my opinion, it’s best to not publish your rates, unless you never charge more than what you publish. Clients will be excited if you charge less than what you’ve published, but not the other way around. 

LinkedIn

I’m not a LinkedIn expert, but I’ve now identified some common LinkedIn profile errors, or things that are a personal preference but I’ve realized I have an opinion about. 

1. Profile URL. Make sure to customize your LinkedIn profile URL if you haven’t already, so that it’s not a bunch of gibberish letters and numbers. The custom part can be your name (mine is /corinnemckay) or anything else that no one else is using; like I could have /coloradofrench if I wanted to. Here’s how to do it. 
2. Banner. It’s easy to make a decent-looking custom banner with the free Canva templates, and it looks a lot nicer than the default blue-grey one. 
3. Profile photo. Your profile photo should be a clear headshot that is appropriate to the sectors you’re targeting. Most common pitfalls here: a photo that is obviously a selfie, or that is obviously cropped out of a larger photo (the classic example being a disembodied hand on your shoulder because you’re in a group of people at a wedding or similar). The photo should mirror the formality level of the sectors you target: if you want to work with financial services firms, don’t be in a baseball jersey. If you’re targeting grassroots activist organizations, don’t be hosed down in designer-wear. Also: no animals unless you do veterinary translation, you translate for horse breeders, etc. I say this as someone who shamelessly posts my foster cats on LinkedIn: they don’t go in my profile photo. 
4. Headline. Personal preference: I like a straightforward LinkedIn headline, and I also think it probably does better in search results. Personally I’d go with “French to English translator specializing in the museums sector,” rather than “Helping French-speaking museums find their English voice.” I think that a more creative tagline is totally fine on your business cards, website, etc., but for a LinkedIn headline I would just go with straightforward. Another personal preference: spell out your language pairs. “DE>FR” is obvious to most of us, but not people who don’t work in our sector. Just say “German to French.”
5. Contact information.  By default, LinkedIn now enables the link to your direct contact information (it’s at the end of your headline), but if you’ve never edited it, only your LinkedIn profile link (to the profile that the person is already looking at) is displayed. Add your website and e-mail address here. 
6. About section. The About section isn’t a place for your life story. It’s about what you do for clients. Wayyyyyy too many people are doing an “I learned Russian on my grandmother’s knee” type of thing here. Once you become friends with a client, tell them that story. But for now, focus on the About section on things like “Clients come to me because they need…” “Clients say that I help them…” “Clients rely on me for…” 
7. Recommendations. Try to have at least a couple of recent recommendations. I think two to five recommendations is a good goal, and they can be from colleagues!

I hope these tips are helpful if you’re working on your own online presence! Have a great week!

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