Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

Productivity


Corinne McKay

Is it better to market by e-mail or on paper?

Over the past six months or so, I’ve been experimenting (sometimes with my translation partner and sometimes on my own) with cold-marketing to potential direct clients. Because a great deal of our work is in a very targeted subject area (international development), it’s not hard to find potential clients but it’s often hard to know how to contact them. Here are some thoughts on whether you’re better off making the initial contact by e-mail or on paper; I’m not even going to touch cold-calling because I am the worst phone salesperson ever. Ever. Really. But if you’re interested in low-stress cold calling, The Freelancery has some excellent scripts that you can work from.

The great thing about e-mail marketing is that:

  • It’s fast. If you’re reading a business news article and see a tidbit that shouts “potential client” to you, you can fire off the e-mail right there.
  • It’s less formal. You can get away with “Just wanted to tell you that I loved staying at your inn this summer; if you’re ever inclined to translate your website/marketing brochure/menu into English, I’d love to talk,” whereas it would seem a little weird (at least to me) to print out a paper letter with that sentence and pop it in the mail.
  • The recipient can easily forward the message. I’d say that at least half the time I cold-contact, I don’t hit the right person on the first try. Especially with larger entities, it can be hard to tell who hires freelancers for the kind of work we do. But your prospect can quickly forward your message to the right person.
  • It’s cheap. If you’re looking at a paper marketing campaign to a few hundred prospects, the paper, envelopes, business cards, stamps, etc. add up over time.

But then again…

  • Unsolicited marketing e-mails always feel a little spammy. The person might just delete the message, or might receive so much e-mail that they just don’t have time to respond. In some countries, sending unsolicited marketing e-mails may be technically illegal, and it’s never fun to break the law to find new clients.
  • If you don’t personalize your e-mails in some way, the recipients may assume that they were auto-generated, or that you’re just sending the same blanket e-mail out to thousands of potential clients. And if you do personalize them, it takes time.

So what about good old paper? On the plus side:

  • In an era when most people’s postal mail is 95% ads and bills, a lot of people respond really favorably to something fun or personal in the mail. I know I do when I’m on the receiving end; a client recently sent me a “thank you” postcard for a large rush project, and I pinned it on my bulletin board to inspire me when I sit down to translate.
  • It shows a classy touch. A marketing letter with a little handwritten note at the end and a business card enclosed is kind of the anti-spam.
  • The recipient has something tangible to keep. If the person needs your services months or years later, it’s unlikely that they’ll be able to locate an e-mail, but if they keep a file of business cards in their desk, you’re probably still in there.
  • You can write more. Not many people want to read a 400-word e-mail, but you can get away with a 400-word paper letter because it’s still one page.
  • Nice postcards and brochures appeal to people who are visual. You really don’t want to send a massive PDF to someone you don’t know, but you can send them a cool postcard and they’ll love it.

But then again…

  • Paper marketing campaigns are time-consuming. In the time it takes to personalize a paper letter, print it, sign it, stuff an envelope with it and your business card, put the stamp on and mail it, you could probably send out five quick e-mails.
  • Paper marketing campaigns can get expensive, at least compared to e-mail. Sending out marketing letters doesn’t cost much, but if you get into fancy postcards or brochures, you could be spending as much as a dollar per potential client just for the printing, not to mention graphic design.
  • Paper marketing campaigns also require more research; it’s pretty easy to find an e-mail contact on someone’s website, but sometimes you have to search for the right mailing address.

I don’t really have a verdict on this one. My translation partner and I did a modest (maybe 150 potential clients) direct client marketing campaign in the winter and spring and we did get some business from it, but it took a lot of time to put together. Now I’m experimenting with shorter, punchier marketing e-mails to see how that works. Any thoughts?


Corinne McKay

Coping with e-mail overload

In planning for our recent seven-week trip to Europe (of which I worked for four weeks and took three weeks off), I spent some time reconfiguring my e-mail setup to make it easier to manage, and I think that I was at least somewhat successful. Here are some thoughts, and feel free to share your own tips!

These days, I think it’s a given that we’re all in e-mail overload. The sources are almost too many to count; I receive e-mail from my clients, colleagues and friends (thankfully), from every professional association that I belong to, from Google Groups and Yahoo Groups that I’ve joined, from my daughter’s school, from Facebook and Twitter, from all the schools I went to, from the yoga studio I haven’t been to in six months, and so on and so on, to the point that even our garbage collection and electric companies send me e-mail newsletters every month. Part of an e-mail coping strategy has to be logistical (setting up better ways to deal with your e-mail) and part of it has to be conceptual (having the right mindset about e-mail).

First, logistics: If “checking e-mail” means that you’re deleting 90% of what’s in your inbox, you need to do some unsubscribing and filtering. This was step #1 of my pre-trip e-mail plan. Whenever I checked my e-mail during the month before we left, I took a look at each message and tried to assign it to one of three categories:

  1. I want/need to read this as soon as it comes in (messages from clients and colleagues)
  2. I want/need to read this at some point, but it’s not urgent (groups, some e-mail newsletters)
  3. I don’t want/need to read this at all

If a message fit category 2, I created a filter for it that bypassed my inbox. If you use the Gmail interface, here’s the Gmail support page on creating labels. Gmail also allows you to “bypass the Inbox” when you label something, so that you never see that message until you want to. If a message fit category 3, I unsubscribed from it. I tried to be merciless, because I really needed to slash my e-mail volume. This triage system cut my inbox volume by about 60%.

Now, concept: I’ve found that for me, the best way to cut the amount of time I spend on e-mail is to answer messages right away. I’m not great about this if something requires further thought or research before I can reply to the person. But a few years ago I read The Personal Efficiency Program, which promotes the concept of “processing” e-mail rather than “reading” e-mail. PEP advocates an e-mail strategy that’s similar to the “one touch” rule for dealing with paper; you only touch something once, either to deal with it or to toss it, and I think this is a good concept.

I’m efficient about replying to urgent e-mails, but I’m less good at replying to e-mails that are not urgent but need a reply. I feel like these strategies are helping, because I was able to get through my vacation backlog of 200+ e-mails in only one day. Any other thoughts on e-mail management?


Corinne McKay

Goals for 2012: are you halfway there?

Shockingly enough, June 30, and with it the end of the second quarter of 2012, is on Saturday. It’s a great time of year to evaluate your progress on your 2012 goals, while you still have six months left before December 31. Before you panic and refuse to think about any goals at all, give yourself some slack. You still have six months, maybe your goals have changed since January 1, and now is a good time to refocus. So ask yourself:

  • What exactly were you planning to do this year? Did you write down some goals in January or just formulate some ideas in your head? Were some of your goals more critical than others? Have you achieved something that you hadn’t set as a goal but that felt good nonetheless?
  • How are you doing on your critical goals? If you haven’t made any progress on them, why? If you’ve branched out in other directions, why?
  • What’s your plan for the next six months? Keep chipping away at your general 2012 goals? Set some new ones? Take a break?

I know it’s always hard to go first, so I’ll go first! Overall, I feel good about the first half of 2012. In terms of work volume and income, the first quarter was slow-ish; not scary slow, but slow enough that I wanted things to pick up for the rest of the year. After finally getting my act together to do a direct client marketing campaign that had been on the back burner for approximately forever (one goal achieved!), the second quarter roared along at almost double my target income. So from the financial standpoint, things are looking good. My family is spending the summer in Switzerland for my husband’s job and I don’t have to stress out about how much I work while we’re here, which is a good feeling.

I also did a bit more marketing for my online course and my book, and three consecutive sessions of the class were full. Another goal achieved! My next book, a compilation of entries from this blog, is ABC (all but cover) and just today I updated my professional website for the first time in about two years. My super colleague Eve Bodeux motivated me to buy and learn Trados Studio 2011 and whaddaya know, I love it.

Not that 2012 has been all roses and kittens. During the past few months I’ve been largely in survival mode, working nearly every evening and barely keeping up with my non-translation tasks. On the day before we left for Switzerland, I answered 97 backlogged e-mails and my Inbox still wasn’t empty. In addition, I put a fair amount of time into some direct client bids that didn’t come to fruition; of course we all know that this is just part of the ebb and flow and freelancing, but it’s still a downer when it happens. So, my primary goal for the second half of 2012 is to try to achieve a better balance between sanity and income by continuing to work on marketing, finding new sales channels for my book and having specific tasks that I want to work on when I’m not translating.

Readers, how about you?


Corinne McKay

Speaking of Translation call recording

On June 13, Eve Bodeux and I broadcast the latest installment in our series of Speaking of Translation conference calls. This call focused on “taking your freelance business on the road,” and we talked about issues related to working while you’re in another country for an extended period of time. With some great input from Tess Whitty of Swedish Translation Services, we answered questions related to technology, mobile communications, choosing a location for your freelance sabbatical, including your family in the sabbatical and managing your money while overseas. You can listen to the recording (it’s about 45 minutes) without downloading anything; just hop on over to the Speaking of Translation website!


Corinne McKay

Using Gmail with your own domain

Do you ever read The Meh List (subtitle: Not Hot, Not Not, Just Meh) in the New York Times Magazine’s One Page Magazine feature? Well, if I were assembling a Meh List for the translation industry, “Translators who own their own domain but still use a Gmail address” would definitely be on it. I always try to refrain from criticizing other people’s decisions, but here I have to make an exception: just as free business cards with the printing company’s marketing message on them scream “I’m not willing to invest the princely sum of $25 in my freelance business,” owning one’s own domain name but still using Gmail screams (to me, at least) “I’m not willing to spend half an hour figuring out how to set up domain name e-mail.” For anyone who’s not familiar with it, domain name e-mail is like “corinne@translatewrite.com.” You buy a website domain name and then create e-mail addresses to go with it.

But, here I find myself preparing to spend two months in Europe this summer, and my current e-mail solutions are problematic. I love my ISP (Front Range Internet), but Gmail gives me more storage space and a fuller-featured webmail interface. And I don’t want to use a non-webmail interface for this extended stay abroad, because I don’t want to be tied to just one computer. So, all of a sudden I was faced with the prospect of becoming one of those translators who owns a domain and uses Gmail anyway, but I’m here to tell you that yes, you can set up Gmail with your own domain. If I set it up without having to call tech support, so can you. Here’s how:

The issue is that it’s easy to forward your domain name e-mail to Gmail, so that people can *send to* your domain name address. It’s a little harder to *reply as* your domain name address, so that people never see the @gmail.com domain. First, read Gmail’s knowledge base page on “Sending mail from a different address.” You’re probably “A Gmail or Google Apps user sending from an external address,” so open that section of the page and read it.

Basically you just follow the instructions on that page; Gmail advises that if this is your work e-mail address, you should use your domain’s SMTP servers rather than Gmail’s servers. My Unix admin husband tells me that this is to avoid your messages being flagged as spam because the SMTP server domain and the e-mail domain don’t match. In my case, my ISP helpfully has all of their SMTP server information in their knowledge base (you need to know the mail server address, the correct port to use, your username and your password) and all of that worked the first time I entered it. Then I simply forwarded my mail from my ISP to my Gmail address and it seems to be all set. This way, my clients do not see my Gmail address but I can take advantage of Gmail’s massive storage allocations and excellent webmail features.

For more on solutions that can help you work while on an extended trip abroad, you can listen to Eve Bodeux’s and my Speaking of Translation call tomorrow (Wednesday, June 13) at 12 noon New York Time. Or listen to the recording afterward! Here’s the link to the call access information (it’s free and you don’t have to preregister) and we’ll post a recording afterward.