Thank you to everyone who nominated or voted for my blog and books in this year’s ProZ Community Choice awards. The winners have been announced, and I’m excited to see that Thoughts on Translation won for best blog about translation, and Finding and Marketing to Translation Agencies won for best book about translation. After almost 11 years (!) of blogging and writing, your ongoing support means a great deal, and I appreciate everyone who reads what I publish and (hopefully) finds it useful. Congratulations to all of the nominees and winners!
Blogging
Blogging for business: Five questions to answer before you start
Blogging: it’s dead! Blogging: you’ll never find clients without it! Is one of these true for translators and interpreters? Both are true? Neither? Is blogging totally 2009, or should you start blogging today, if you’re not doing so already? Having written this blog since 2008, I can say that blogging has absolutely been worthwhile for me, and I’ve identified five questions that might help you determine whether it’s right for you.
Question 1: Why am I writing (or considering writing) this blog?
This sounds so basic as to be not worth stating, but it’s really critical. What is your objective?
- To have an outlet for your thoughts on some aspect of the language professions
- To connect and discuss with other people in the language professions
- To attract potential clients
- To establish yourself as an authority about some aspect of the language professions
- Something else entirely
It’s impossible to over-stress how important this is. Without a goal, it’s not worth starting a professional blog in the first place.
Question 2: Who is my target audience?
This follows from the topic above. The number one complaint I get from translators and interpreters who blog, is “I write this great blog, but I never get any work from it.” And when I look at these blogs, they are great…if you’re a translator or interpreter. If you’re a translation client, they are of no interest whatsoever.
Here’s the truth: if you want to attract clients through your blog, you have to write posts that clients want to read. Clients don’t want to read about how to market a freelance business, or how to research legal terminology, or translation software tips, or how to improve your memory skills for consecutive interpreting. In fact, they hire you so that they do not have to think about those types of things. Clients might want to read about:
- Best practices when dealing with employees who aren’t fluent in English
- Avoiding liability in healthcare situation with patients who aren’t fluent in English
- How to publish a translation of a self-published book
- Specific insights about X specialization: “Three must-attend events in the international development sector this year”
- 10 expressions you can substitute for sports metaphors in your writing, so that it reads better in other languages
Question 3: Do I have the time and energy to keep this project going?
So (so!) many blogs suffer from what translation blogger Riccardo Schiaffino refers to as “the three-post syndrome”:
- “Here’s my new blog! I’m so excited about it!”
- “Here are all the fascinating topics I’m planning on writing about in the coming weeks and months…stay tuned!”
- “My apologies for the radio silence here; I’ve been so busy! But seriously, stay tuned, because I have tons of great content coming for you really soon.” Followed by six months to a year of further radio silence, after which the blog dies.
Here’s the best suggestion I’ve heard along these lines, from translator and blogger Sara Freitas. Before you even launch your blog, write 20 posts. Then:
- If you release one post per week, you have your first five months of content in the bag
- You know that you have enough time, energy, and ideas to keep the blog going
Question 4: What’s my niche?
When I started blogging in 2008, there were about three and a half freelance translators writing blogs. It was completely possible to write a blog with rambling anecdotes about one’s life as a freelance translator–not to be all transparent about my blogging strategy back then…-and generate a significant amount of readership. For the first year or two that I blogged, I had no strategy, no purpose, no target audience; and still, readers came, because there was not much else out there.
These days, throwing the blog spaghetti against the wall doesn’t work. You need a niche. Maybe your idea is to establish yourself as an expert in the chemical coatings sector, or as the premier Uzbek translator out there, or the go-to German conference interpreter on the West Coast, or as a translation technology consultant for big corporations. I say go for it. But don’t launch a “my life as a freelance translator” blog, unless you’re writing it purely for your own enjoyment, which is also fine, as long as you’re clear that that’s your goal.
Question 5: How am I going to attract readers to this blog?
The internet in 2018 is a crowded place. If you just build it, they may not come. You have to build it, then shout from the housetops that it’s there. Some content marketing experts even estimate that you should spend 25% of your time creating content, and 75% of your time spreading the word about your content. Again, unless your blogging goal has zero to do with increasing your work volume, income, referrals, etc.
Assuming you do want to drive traffic to your blog, you need to think about:
- How to spread your presence across other social media platforms, so that you can put your blog posts on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc. etc.
- How to attract movers and shakers in your target audience to your blog
- How to start an e-mail list so that you can contact your blog readers directly
- Perhaps, how to re-purpose your blog content into videos, e-books, etc.
- How to get the word out about your blog in “relevant content communities”-that’s bizspeak for “Find places like Facebook and LinkedIn groups that attract the kind of people who would be interested in your blog, and spread the word about your blog there.”
Blogging can be a significant business driver for a freelancer. In the ten years I’ve been blogging, my books and online courses have grown into about 40% of my income, and the main channel through which people find out about them is my blog. It’s so worth it–for me. But I also see lots of translators getting frustrated about what they see as the lack of results from their blogging efforts. I think that using these questions can help you avoid some of that frustration.
Readers, over to you: thoughts on blogging for business?
An open letter to One Hour Translation: stop lifting my blog posts
Thanks very much to readers of this blog who have recently informed me about thinly-veiled rewrites of my blog posts appearing on the blog of One Hour Translation. This dates back to the summer of 2017, when OHT’s CEO responded to me about this issue, blaming outsourced writers hired by OHT and assuring me that it wouldn’t happen again (which it did). In at least two cases, OHT’s blog featured posts presented as their own work, which were substantially similar to posts that had appeared on my blog several years earlier. They’ve since taken these posts down (don’t worry, I have screen shots) but will not respond to my inquiries about how this happened, other than to say “We have forwarded your request to the Relevant department for the investigation” [sic].
Let’s be clear, One Hour Translation. When you publish thinly-veiled rewrites of an independent author’s work, you are not taking advantage of “the man” or some other anonymous entity. You are taking advantage of that person’s hard work, reputation, and expertise. You may blame outsourced writers hired on an online platform, but ultimately you published these posts; you took credit for them, and therefore you’re responsible for them.
Let’s be clear about something else, and this “something” makes me sad and angry for a variety of reasons. I talked this over with my lawyers. Yes, One Hour Translation, when I told you (in perhaps the fifth or sixth e-mail to which you didn’t respond, other than to remove the posts in question from your website, so I was sure you were reading my messages) that I was discussing this with my legal team, I was being honest, not bluffing. And in talking this over with my legal people, I found that in these types of copyright infringement cases, “playing dead,” as OHT is doing, is actually a pretty effective defense, because nothing other than a court complaint can compel them to respond. If OHT wanted to operate in an ethical manner, they could do something like:
- a) respond, and apologize to me directly
- b) negotiate a financial settlement with me that would reflect the fact that they claimed credit for my work
- c) publicly apologize for claiming credit for my work
That would be a responsible way to acknowledge that they made a mistake and that they’re doing what they can to make it better. However in the absence of that, my only potential recourse is to file a legal complaint and threaten to sue them. Were I to do that, they would be legally compelled to respond. But in the end, I don’t want to do that. It’s expensive, and time-consuming, and I’d rather put my energy into constructive projects rather than into suing people who claim my blog posts as their own. But I also realize that’s part of the reason these things keep happening: big companies that stuff their blogs with lifted content think that small-time authors will make a big fuss and then ultimately go away, because…well…the vast majority of the time, that’s what happens. So I’ll just say this: One Hour Translation, despite your assurances that my request has been forwarded to the relevant department, it most assuredly has not been, and I would venture a guess that this is not an isolated incident. Note that One Hour Translation is suspended from the American Translators Association until 2021 due to violations of ATA’s code of ethics and professional practice.
This blog, by the numbers
Here’s a short post inspired by a question from a reader, who asked, “You seem open to ‘ask me anything’ types of questions, and I wonder if you could give us some statistics about your blog. How much traffic does it get? How many people are on your e-mail list? Do you make any money directly from the blog? How many posts have you written, and are you thinking about doing anything different with it in the future?” As this reader observed, I’m pretty open to AMA questions, so here goes, for those who are thinking of starting a blog, or who like to geek out on these things.
I published Thoughts on Translation’s first post on February 2, 2008 (that’s officially 100 years ago in Internet time). The first post was called how to succeed as a freelance translator, and two people commented on it: my friend and blogging mentor Beth Hayden, (who taught me how to start the blog in the first place), and my friend and colleague Judy Jenner. The blog now includes 702 posts, and 6,482 comments. So, back of the envelope, that’s about two posts per week, and about 10 comments on each post. It won the 2016 ProZ.com community choice award for the best blog about translation.
Traffic: about 20,000-25,000 views a month. On a day when I post something new (usually Mondays), traffic goes up to about 1,200 or 1,300 views, and if I haven’t posted for a while, it goes down to 600 or 700, but in general it’s about 1,000 views a day.
Subscriptions: 3,169 people subscribe to the blog directly, and I have 2,485 people on my e-mail list.
Monetization: I don’t make any money from the blog itself. I’m not a huge fan of affiliate deals in general (“my unbiased opinion” and “I got something for free in exchange for this opinion” don’t really jive in my mind), and I find ads distracting on an informational-content site. However, this blog is the primary way that I market my online classes for translators. I started them out of a feeling that if I struggled with the business aspects of being a translator, other people probably did too, and the classes really took off. After over 10 years of teaching it, every session of Getting Started as a Freelance translator still fills up, and my classes for experienced translators have done well too and are a lot of fun to teach. In reality they’re limited only by the time I have to put into creating them. So that’s a big monetization factor that has grown to about 50% of my income. There is definitely a cost to running a good blog; I pay about $25 a month for robust hosting, and I paid a bit over $2,000 for the recent redesign to update the look of the site and add an automated course registration system.
Plans for the future: Mainly I just want to keep doing what I’m doing, but I’m also planning on adding a podcast version of some posts (just me reading the post, not an interview format), and I’ll probably add sponsors to that. I guess I have semi-conflicted feelings about monetization: I find website ads kind of tacky, but I’m OK with podcast sponsorships. Call me weird.
Is a blog worth it: Absolutely! Definitely not! It depends on your perspective. For me, absolutely, because about half of my income comes from writing, teaching, and consulting for other translators. But lots of translators are disappointed when they start blogging and don’t get any translation clients from it; this seems obvious if you’re writing a blog that only other translators would be interested in reading, but it happens a lot. Blog for your clients, whoever they are. If you want to get work from international marketing companies, then blog for them, not for other translators.
So, there you have it. Any other questions, just leave them in the comments and I’ll answer if I can!