Greetings, subscribers! I hope all of you in the U.S. had a great Fourth of July weekend!

I’m writing this on July 2 before taking the long weekend off, and as of now there are four spots left in the July session of Direct client research lab, my class that gives you personalized direct client marketing help. Registration is $195, all past sessions have sold out, and registration is open until July 9 or when all of the spots are taken! 

Registration is also open for this month’s master class; I’m really looking forward to guest instructor Lee Densmer’s tips on Breaking into the content writing and content strategy market. She’ll teach us how to use our translation and subject-matter skills as a starting point for offering writing services, perhaps even to your existing clients! Registration is $75 and the live class is on Tuesday, July 21. 

2026: The halftime report!

Well, here we are at the mid-point of 2026. Kind of crazy, but it’s a good opportunity to look at how things are going, what’s working, what’s not, and where we’re headed for the second half of the year. 

First, a few reminders! Lately I’ve been really enjoying Amelia Hruby’s podcast Off the Grid, and her approach to talking about money and income as a freelancer. Remember that:

• My money situation is about me, not about you. If you find it helpful to read about other freelancers’ income profiles, read on! If it stresses you out and makes you feel bad about yourself, stop here! 
• People will have different reactions to my income report, ranging from “How do you even spend all of that money??” (actual quote from someone on LinkedIn), to “That’s it??? Shouldn’t you be earning more than that??” 
•   I talk about my income because I teach other freelancers how to make more money, and I want to show that it’s possible to earn six figures as a solopreneur in the language business, without working crazy hours or outsourcing a ton of work. That’s my motivation; and I think that in the spirit of transparency, if I’m going to tell you that this is possible, I need to show you how I do it. 
• I tend to consider three factors when I do this analysis: how much I earned, how much I enjoyed the work, and how life is going in general. That might serve as a jumping-off point for your own analysis! 

The first half of 2026, by the numbers 

As I wrote about in my 2025 year-end wrapup post, last year was my highest-earning year in 23 years of freelancing. Finally, I reached the freelance equivalent of a six-figure income (which I would estimate to be about 140K). And yet, I did it partially by doing what I tell everyone else not to do: working slightly too much, having a scarcity mindset, and sacrificing time for my creative interests. 

I also realize that complaining about having too much work is a privilege. When I finished my conference interpreting Master’s five years ago, my dream was to interpret maybe 50 days a year. In reality, last year I interpreted about 180 days, and this year will be somewhat less (by choice), but still well over 100 because I’m already at 79 total. So I don’t want to come off as a whiner who doesn’t appreciate what she’s got. I love my work and I feel fortunate to be doing so much of it. 

 In the first half of 2026:

• I earned US $68,000 after subcontracting. If you’ve read these posts before, you know that when I say “I earned…,” I mean the total amount, minus what I paid out to my guest online course instructors. 
• Of that, $38,000 was from direct language work (interpreting, translating, and writing), and $30,000 was from teaching, writing, and consulting. 
• As compared to the first half of 2025, I did slightly more court interpreting, slightly less conference interpreting, slightly more interpreting for direct clients, slightly less translating for direct clients, and a lot more writing for direct clients 

This is not at the level I was earning last year. I’m guessing I’m going to end this year between 130 and 135K, but my only hard and fast goal is to earn more than 125K. And:

• Life feels good. This is what’s most important to me. I’m on a pretty constant quest to earn more money, because I think that as freelancers, we have a lot of “under” going on. Undervaluing our services, undercharging for them, underestimating what we’re capable of. I’d really like to have a 200K year at some point. Probably not this year, but I have some new ideas for the future that may get my income to that level. 
• As planned, I’m working less by choice. So far this year, I’ve taken two 10-day blocks where I worked an hour a day or less. One was a true vacation (family ski trip in January) and one was my daughter’s university graduation and job move. And I’ve got a two-week true vacation coming up in late August/early September. I’ve also been doing less “working for the sake of working” and allocating more time to my creative interests. I’m happy! 
• I’m feeling more confident about my own resilience. Guess what, the techniques that I teach to all of you actually work, because I landed a large new client through a cold-pitch e-mail about six months ago. This gave me confidence that if I were to lose a major client, I could find a new one to replace them. 

What next? 

Goals for the rest of the year:

• Conference interpreting work slows way down in the summer, so I’m devoting most of August to writing the 20th anniversary edition of How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator
• I’m working on an Interpreter Basic Training class for T4T. This will take a while to put together. Maybe launching in September? 
• I recently took two literary translation classes (yay for ALTA’s summer series!) and I have a book in the public domain that I want to get going on translating 
• I’m finally committing to time tracking!! This has been a big gap in my business data for a long time. I time-tracked at the end of 2024 when I did individual business coaching, and haven’t logged on to Toggl since. Until today, friends! It’s running right now, telling me that so far today, I’ve spent 73 minutes on e-mail and administrative work, and 21 minutes revising this newsletter. I’m also using Toggle as a de facto Pomodoro timer, where I watch it count up to 25 minutes on a specific task and then take a break. 

The bigger picture

No question, the language business has been on a serious rollercoaster ride since the arrival of ChatGPT. And I still believe that there is a lot of really good work out there for us: the key is to adapt, when most of us would rather keep doing what we’ve been doing. 

Most of us also don’t deal that well with situations where multiple conflicting things are true at once.

I’ve talked to a good handful of established translators who I really respect, and who are Just Done. As in, “I’m starting school in September to become an X-ray technician.” “My husband’s family owns a vacation rental business and I’m going to work for them.” While simultaneously, I’ve heard things like, “A year ago I was ready to give up; today I worked for four different clients.” “Pursuing direct clients was really, really hard at first, and now I’m happier and earning more money than at any time in my freelance career.” 

It’s possible. I’m not here to tell you that adapting and reinventing are easy or comfortable, but I’m here to tell you that you can do it. 

That’s it! Over to you! Hopefully this helps you with your own analysis, and you can respond and tell me how it’s going if you want to.

In episode 27 of the Training for Translators podcast, I talk about how to handle turning down work, when to “quit” a client, and the need to have a trusted colleague to back you up. You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or right here!

This episode was inspired by a question from a student in my online course alumni group, and I then wrote a LinkedIn post about it.

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. 

Simple but important tip: When you’re paralyzed by the fear of making a mistake in your business, remind yourself that if you really mess something up, you’ll only make that mistake once! 

Especially if you’re new to freelancing, or to an aspect of freelancing such as direct client marketing, the fear of making mistakes can be debilitating. You literally cannot take action because you’re so afraid of doing something wrong. What if you:

• Call someone by the wrong name in an e-mail? 
• Send a message before it’s finalized? 
• Post something on LinkedIn with a typo? 
• Say something that turns out to be totally wrong or weird? 

Simply put, you channel my grandmother. She was a lifelong seamstress, and was determined that all of her granddaughters were going to learn to use a sewing machine at a young age.

When a friend expressed concern: “Aren’t you afraid they’re going to sew over their fingers?” (sounds crazy, but it’s surprisingly easy to do on a home sewing machine) my grandmother’s response was, “They’ll only do it once!”

As a kid (and still today, honestly) I loved the answer to this question. Not “That would never happen! They’re too gifted to ever do that!” but “If it happens, it will happen a total of one time!”

In our freelance business, this mindset teaches us:

• No matter how careful we are, we’re going to make mistakes and even say or do things we immediately regret 
• When (not if, when) that happens, the real mistake is not evaluating what went wrong, and letting the mistake happen again

Examples include:

• After the first time I accidentally sent a sensitive e-mail that wasn’t quite finished, I learned to add the recipient’s e-mail address only after the e-mail said exactly what I wanted it to say. Adding the recipient is the very last step before clicking Send. 
• After posting something on LinkedIn with a heinous typo, I trained myself to slow down and read my LinkedIn posts out loud before uploading them. 
• I’ve definitely left the previous client’s name in a marketing e-mail. That’s so cringe-worthy that you’re only going to do it once! After that, you learn to double, triple-check the key information every time. 

Especially if you’re exploring a whole new way of doing business, having the courage to try is really, really hard. When I’m trying something new (I’ve been doing this with Training for Translators and in my direct language work), I tell myself, often multiple times: If this is a total flop, I’ll take that as information and I just won’t do it again. No one is going to die because I tried something new and it didn’t go the way I hoped.

I hope these tips are helpful if you’re trying new things these days (and I hope you are!). 

Don’t forget to sign up for the SEO class if you’re interested.

Also: I’m excited to be speaking at next week’s techforword Direct Client Summit. My presentation, on a simple e-mail sequence for direct client marketing, is on Thursday, and there are tons of great presentations (social media, trade shows, LinkedIn, relationship-building, referrals, nudge marketing). The basic ticket is free, and if you buy the Power Pack (longer access to the recordings plus other bonuses) within 20 minutes of when you register, it’s 49 euros. That’s not an affiliate deal, just recommending a good opportunity!

Tomorrow’s free webinar on planning a book translation, with guest instructor Laurie Bennett, is sold out! For future free webinars, I’d recommend signing up as soon as you see the announcement. Registrations tend to trickle in at first, then people realize that the session is coming up in a few days and everyone signs up at once! Thanks to all 250 people who registered.