Three marketing prongs: Are you missing something?

Upcoming master class: Breaking into the content writing  and content strategy market

On July 21, guest instructor Lee Densmer (former content marketing director for several major translation companies) closes out the T4T “school year” with a master class on Breaking into the content writing and content strategy market.

Lee knows the language business, so she’ll teach us how to use our translation and subject-matter skills as a jumping-off point for writing from scratch for well-paying clients. Registration is $75 and includes the recording. 

After that, I’ll be running a few self-paced offerings in August and early September, then we’ll kick back off with live classes in mid-September. 

Inbound, Outbound, Relational: You need to be doing all three 

If you want a thriving freelance business, in my opinion you need to be consistently doing three kinds of marketing. Don’t groan yet (“I would rather crawl in a hole than market, and now you’re telling me I have to market in three ways???”). I’ll give you examples of how to do this in a manageable way. 

• Inbound: Writing things that clients want to read 
• Outbound: E-mails and LinkedIn connection requests
• Relational: Maintaining the thread between you and clients to whom you have some connection but you’re not working together right now 

The key is to balance all three of these. What do we see when we go on the website of HubSpot, a massive inbound marketing company? An invitation to chat with the sales team! What do we see when we go to the website of Hunter.io, a massive outbound marketing company? A robust blog and other inbound marketing resources. Even big companies that specialize in one of these things, still do the other two. 

If there were just one way to attract and retain clients, we’d all be doing it, right? Instead, let’s look at how to get these three prongs working for us. 

Inbound: Informational content, referrals, conference presentations, etc. 

The classic inbound marketing technique is informational content: writing a blog, a newsletter, LinkedIn posts, etc. that contain information your potential clients want to read. They find the information, then decide they want to work with you because you’re an established authority on what they need. 

The issue? I’ll tell you, because I use these strategies myself, that they are long-term, slow-burning ways to generate business. Here’s the Google summary search result for the query “Resources for beginning translators.” 

This makes me happy! And it’s the result of more than a thousand (no kidding…and I have more ideas now than when I started!!) blog posts and newsletter articles. And you don’t necessarily have to write 1,500 blog posts to see some results. 

Something you can do right now: Write up a short case study of a freelance project where you really solved a problem for a client. Post it on LinkedIn, post it on your website, e-mail it to potential clients. Write a tip sheet: Three questions to ask before you use AI translations. Post/distribute that. Write cultural-linguistic advice: Top five mistakes German companies make when they write in English. Send that to potential German clients who don’t want to hire a translator/writer! 

Outbound: Cringey, I know, but clients can’t use you if they don’t know about you

When freelancers say, “I’d rather” [eat rocks/swim in a nest of eels/listen to 10 hours of Barry Manilow] “…than market!” mostly they’re talking about outbound marketing. 

Personally, e-mail marketing really doesn’t bother me. People don’t answer your marketing e-mails with hate mail. If they’re not interested, they just don’t write back.

The hard part is something Austin Church talks about a lot: being rejected or ignored is what happens most of the time, but not all the time, and you can learn to live with that reality. Why? Because (as Austin explains in the article linked above), you know that you have something valuable to offer, and some clients will want to take you up on that. 

Something you can do right now: Tell yourself, out loud, “Lots of clients need my help, but they can’t get my help if they don’t know that I exist. And they’re not coming to me, so I have to go to them.” With that mindset, write a few positive, upbeat marketing e-mails. “I noticed that you’re translating your web pages, but not your blog; have you ever thought about using a freelancer to help with that?” “We had talked about interpreting services for your quarterly meeting, and I imagine it’s coming up!” 

Relational: Keeping those warm leads warm 

We all have a long list (at least in our heads) of clients we should keep in touch with. Dormant clients, clients who expressed an interest in working with you but never followed up, clients who could use additional services that you’ve started offering. But it’s awkward. How do we do this without sounding like, “I need work! Do you have any work???” 

Things you  can do right now: Comment on a dormant client’s LinkedIn post with an actually substantive comment (“Your observation about the pendulum swinging away from AI writing is really interesting; I’ve noticed a similar trend among my regular clients” not “Great post!”).

Start a schedule where, on the last day of every quarter (I’m lookin’ at you, June 30!), you compare your accounting records from that quarter and the periods before it. Any client who sent you work in the past, but not in the previous three months, you nudge them. “I really enjoyed working on your patient intake forms in February, just checking in on whether you have anything similar in the pipeline?” 

To me, the three-pronged approach doesn’t feel like, “Ugh, three things I don’t feel like doing.” It feels like, “Three options, surely one of them is something I can make myself do today.” I’m fortunate that things are going well in my freelance business (next week: 2026 halftime update), and I think that these three prongs have a lot to do with that.