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Two habits of successful freelancers

Amid the chaos that is the world right now, it’s easy to focus on the negatives, particularly in our freelance worlds. Each hesitant peek at LinkedIn reveals more people complaining about AI; more people complaining about the people who complain about AI; more people leaving the language professions, you know the drill.

But what about the opposite? Lately, I’ve been doing some speaking engagements where I’ve talked to a number of freelancers who are doing well, and even really well. Like “best year in 15 years of freelancing” kind of thing. Obviously, success is made of many factors, and success is made of a lot of grunt work that no one sees. But I’ve zeroed in on two habits that I think successful freelancers have in common right now, and I think these can be helpful to all of us!

Habit #1: They place the responsibility on themselves, rather than blaming “market forces”

Admittedly, there are plenty of market forces to blame right now: AI, corporate budgets being slashed to make room for yet more AI, the collapse of USAID, more offshoring of work to low-wage countries, multiple wars on multiple continents…it’s not hard to find a villain if you want to.

However, I find that successful freelancers have one outlook in common: While they may lament the state of the world, the economy, the language business, the freelance market, they see themselves as ultimately responsible for their freelance success. They’re a lot more likely to say, “I saw some scary indicators in my own business two years ago, so I started thinking, where am I going from here? Where’s the intersection between what I like doing and am good at, and what clients are still willing and able to pay well for?”

Contrast this with what I hear from a lot of struggling freelancers, and by this I mean absolutely no shame or judgment, just data. “For 10 years, I made 75% of my income from three agencies. In the past two years, one went out of business, one sends mostly minimum charge jobs, and one has switched entirely to MTPE at an hourly rate that’s about half of what I used to make per-word as a translator. So my income is down by 60% and I don’t see things changing.” This may be objectively true, but the issue is the mindset: seeing yourself as a passenger rather than the pilot.

While you alone are certainly not going to change the market forces that shape our work, and “toxic positivity” (believing that everything will be fine, even in the face of evidence to the contrary) isn’t the answer, you can work on reframing. Given these changes in the market that I’m really not thrilled with, what’s my role in the language business now? Do I want to keep freelancing? If so, what kinds of clients have work that I enjoy and am good at, and have the budget to pay someone consultant-level money rather than Fiverr-level money?

Habit #2: They’re sweating the small stuff and pursuing every single lead

This week, I posted on LinkedIn about how to create a company page for your freelance business, to make your Experience section look more professional. In my experience, this is the kind of thing that successful freelancers will jump on (“Oooh! An easy way to make me look more like a business and less like a gig worker!”), whereas struggling freelancers (again, no criticism, just data) are more inclined to say, tons of freelancers use Hotmail; tons of freelancers don’t have a website; I think clients don’t really notice or care; all of that takes time and costs money that I don’t have.

Likewise, I find that successful freelancers right now are pursuing every single lead that looks promising, even if it seems unlikely to pan out. I recently talked to someone who nudged a dormant client that they hadn’t worked with in six years. The person remembered them and wanted to revive the relationship. Another freelancer told me that their agency client lost a large government contract, so they immediately started combing the internet to find out who won it; they found that agency, applied to them, and are now working for them. Another person told me that they wanted to attend an expensive medical conference, but the registration fee wasn’t in their budget. They noticed that one of their direct clients was a sponsor, so they asked whether that client had any free passes to the conference (they did!).

Another decided to start pursuing consecutive interpreting classes because a number of clients have asked for it.

These examples are specific: you don’t have to follow them exactly. The goal is to show you the mental habits of successful freelancers, thinking, “How can I acknowledge this issue and try to find a solution,” rather than, “Oh well, that’s definitely not going to work out.”

I hope these tips are helpful! Have a great week!

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This month’s master class is next Thursday! Get out of your own way: Overcoming the mental roadblocks that hold back your marketing. Registration is $75 and includes the recording. This is your master class, if you find yourself…sabotaging your marketing efforts before you start (“Because it won’t work anyway”). Doubting your own abilities (“Surely clients want someone with more experience than I have”). Blaming market conditions (“No one is finding good work in this economy”) instead of accepting market realities for what they are and then finding profitable pathways for yourself. I hope to see you there! In this two-hour session, I’ll talk about the most common obstacles that we put in our own way, and how to think more constructively.

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Upcoming master class!

March Marketing Madness is off and running with 100+ participants; if you’re itching to sign up and you don’t mind playing catch-up with the first three days, you can still join the group ($99).

Next up: this month’s master class is Get out of your own way: Overcoming the mental roadblocks that hold back your marketing. Registration is $75 and the live session is on March 19 (registration includes the recording). If you feel stuck, overwhelmed, or resistant to marketing your freelance business (even when you know you should, or when your business is really struggling), this two-hour master class will help you dig into the why and how of creating a new marketing routine.

What’s the perfect LinkedIn headline?

Well, that’s a trick question, because there is no perfect LinkedIn headline! But those 220 characters sure can cause us a lot of angst and stress!

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about LinkedIn lately (shoutout to the Northeast Ohio Translators Association and Kent State University for inviting me to speak to their members and students in person a couple of weeks ago!), and here are a few tips:

• Most importantly, inhale, exhale, and just write something that represents you and tells potential clients what you do. You can change your LinkedIn headline as often as you want, and it’s really not something to lose sleep over.
• The only thing I’m begging you not to do: please, no generic headlines that are pretty much useless to potential clients. “Freelance translator.” “EU conference interpreter.” “Crossing language barriers.” At least give us your language pairs! Other than that, you can write whatever you want!
• When you comment on someone else’s LinkedIn post (a strategy I would highly recommend if you’re looking for clients, something I talked about in this article), only the first 70-75 characters of your headline will be displayed. Don’t let this hold you back, but make sure the important stuff is at the front.

Direct, Descriptive, or Hybrid

When it comes down to it, you have three options for a LinkedIn headline. Let’s look at how the same freelancer, an English to Spanish translator specializing in international development, might word them:

1. Direct: “English to Spanish translator specializing in international development.” Short, sweet, we get the point, and it’s search-friendly.
2. Descriptive: “I help entities in the international development sector communicate more effectively, increase stakeholder engagement, and attract more funding through high-quality English to Spanish translations.” That’s pretty long (168 characters), but it’s more descriptive, although the language pairs would be cut off on a comment.
3. Hybrid: “English to Spanish translator for the international development sector | I help NGOs communicate more effectively between English and Spanish.” Personally I like this one the best!

Obviously this exercise gets harder when you do multiple things. I do three things (interpret, translate, write/teach), so I’ve struggled to create a headline that I really love and that looks good when I comment on someone else’s post. But I think that this framework (direct, descriptive, hybrid) can be a helpful starting point!

Have a great week!

Is it tacky to ask for referrals?

Thanks to reader Laurie R. for suggesting a newsletter on the topic of referrals (if you have a topic you’d like me to write about, drop it in the comments!). Laurie wrote to me:

I’ve been listening to quite a few business podcasts lately on the topic of referrals. Some say you should never ask for a referral, but should instead simply offer exceptional service and make sure to touch base with your clients often, so you are always top of mind. Some say you should ask for referrals often and make it a part of your workflow with clients. Some say that offering clients a discount on their next invoice in return for a referral is a great idea and others say it devalues your services. What have you seen work well in the past? To ask or not to ask? Referral discount or no?

This is an interesting topic, and one that I haven’t written about before! There’s no “correct answer” to this issue, but here are my thoughts:

The key: The type of client

In my opinion, the whole referral issue, what’s a good business practice and what’s in poor taste, what devalues your work, depends on the type of client you’re working with. Specifically:

Agencies: unlikely to work

• Agencies: I don’t see referrals being particularly effective with agencies. Honestly, agencies want to keep their favorite freelancers to themselves, because they want you to be available when they need you. If you want to get more work from an agency client, I honestly think that nudging, as annoying as it feels, is probably the best strategy. Here’s everything I’ve ever written about nudging dormant clients. Even if an agency client isn’t dormant and you’re working for them regularly, you should still nudge them: “I have some availability this week,” “Just wondering if the annual report project I worked on last year will be going ahead for this year,” etc. With agencies, it’s not that I think that a referral system would be a bad idea, I just think it’s unlikely to work.

Individuals: go for it!

• Individuals: I do a fair bit of official document translation work for individuals, and I actually think that actively asking for referrals and offering referral discounts could be a good strategy with this client base. Personal document translation is straightforward: it’s the only translation service for which I nearly always charge the same price. And, most expats know other expats: I’ve had official document clients who have referred me to four or more other people from their country. So here, I’d say go for it. I don’t think you have to be too specific, because you don’t want to commit to a certain amount. Just say something like, “Thank you for contacting me for your official document translation; if you have the occasion to refer a friend or colleague to me for this type of service, please ask them to mention your name. I’d be happy to offer them a courtesy discount, and I would also offer you a courtesy discount on any future translations.” I’ve never done this, but I think it’s a good idea.

Direct clients: Frame it as them giving you access to their network

• Direct clients: Here’s where things get tricky, because your contact at a direct client could very well be in a position to refer you to other people. Maybe it’s a large company and they know people who work in other departments. Maybe they have friends who do similar jobs at other companies, like they’re the international communications director, and they know other international communications directors. And yet, Laurie perceptively points out that this approach might devalue your work. Here’s what I’d do:
  • I’d be very hesitant to offer an actual monetary discount to a good direct client. In my freelance business, these clients pay me well, and I don’t want them to think that the rate I charge them is something that I pulled out of the air because I thought they would say yes to it.
  • For example, I’ve had a couple of direct clients ask me to do translations for them as individuals (“My daughter is applying to graduate school in California and needs a few pages translated”). In those cases, and I’m not saying this is the right answer, just that it’s my answer, I chose to do the translation for free as a courtesy gesture to the client, rather than charge less than my regular rate.
  • Pre-COVID, I also used to send my best direct clients a nice gift at the end of the year as a thank-you gesture, but so many of them now work from home that I’ve stopped doing this.
  • Rather than outright ask for a referral, I’d position your client as someone who is in a position to help you (something that they’ll likely be flattered to do) and phrase it differently. Something like: “I’m always looking for more clients to whom my skills might be helpful; are there other people in [that client’s sector or role] who you think I should get to know?” Or, “I’m looking to connect with other people in the luxury travel sector; does anyone spring to mind?” Or, “I’m really glad you were happy with the annual report translation, and I’d be interested in helping more people who need that service. Do you know anyone else who’s trying to get a report translated for this year’s deadline?” The key here is the wording: you’re not pumping your client for work, you’re positioning them as having access to a valuable network.

Adjacent topic: referral fees

Laurie didn’t ask about paying referral fees to colleagues, but let’s talk about that briefly. Here, I mean that when a colleague refers you for a job, should you pay them a percentage of what you earn?

In general, I’m a “what goes around, comes around” kind of person. I typically refer colleagues without expecting anything in return: simply because I like helping clients, and I like helping colleagues. I do keep a list of colleagues who either repeatedly send me referrals, or who refer me for a large-ish project (maybe $1,000 or more), and I send them a gift at the end of the year.

However, in 20+ years of freelancing, I have on a couple of occasions paid a referral fee to a colleague. For the record, the colleagues who referred me didn’t ask for this, and insisted that I didn’t need to pay them. But in all of these cases, the referral was for a project that morphed into something so large (in one case, $30,000 of work in one year) that I felt like a box of chocolates was an insufficient way to thank them, so I insisted on paying them a monetary referral fee. It’s worth noting that if you live in the U.S., you should ask your accountant whether referral fees might be tax-deductible. My accountant felt that they were, and told me to keep documentation of them for my taxes.

Great question from Laurie, and I hope these tips are helpful! Don’t forget to sign up for March Marketing Madness!

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Last week, I taught a free webinar called “What now?” directed primarily at mid-career translators whose freelance businesses are struggling.

Why mid-career people? Because, in my experience, mid-career people are having the hardest time adapting to “the new world order” of freelancing.

• For early-career freelancers, “it is what it is,” as we say in U.S. English. There’s nothing to adapt to, because they never knew a world in which translation agencies paid by the word for you to translate 10,000-word PDFs into Word documents using whatever technology you felt like using, or none at all. In my experience, early-career freelancers accept the things that mid-career freelancers are struggling with: they’re more likely to have a diverse business from the get-go; they’re more likely to aim for direct clients; they’re more likely to accept that they need to always be marketing.
• For people who were already established in the direct client marketing when ChatGPT hit, not much has changed. In my case, my translation clients never cared about technology and still don’t, because they’re not paying me for French word = English word, they’re paying me to solve a problem (translation) that they don’t want to deal with. Additionally, when a client comes to someone with 20+ years experience, most of it in the direct client market, they know that it’s not going to be cheap, and they either need/want that level of experience, or price is not a huge concern.

It’s not the service, it’s the type of client

One point I tried to make the webinar: if your business is struggling, you really want to focus on what kinds of clients you’re working for, less than the services you’re offering. My concern here is that people are looking for a magic bullet, like “Translation is dead, but if I can only offer the right service that clients want, then I’ll be fine.” For example, I mentioned on the webinar that content strategy and content marketing writing are one of the fastest-growing areas of my business right now; and a couple of people on the webinar mentioned that when they see copywriting and content writing jobs posted on LinkedIn, they often have hundreds of applications within a couple of hours.

My reaction: That doesn’t surprise me at all, and I would definitely not depend on LinkedIn (or any other online job board) as a source of well-paying work. Personally, I think that nearly any “word work” job posted online these days is going to get hundreds of applications, simply because a lot of people are struggling to find work. The key is finding clients who want your unique expertise, and who want an ongoing relationship with a freelancer they trust and who understands their needs. If you can hit that sweet spot, then you’re going to have a lot more success with charging rates at or above $100/euros an hour rather than the $25/euros an hour that you’re probably seeing on LinkedIn. Editing for translation agencies may not pay much, but editing for C-level corporate executives who have to write in their non-native language could pay really well.

The six ideas

If your freelance business is struggling, there are way more than six things to try, but I identified six that I think are worth considering for mid-career translators. If you’d rather listen to these six ideas as a podcast, you can do that by finding Training for Translators on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or using this direct link.

A number of people have recently asked me, what would I do right now if my business were really struggling? I’m happy to tell you, but the problem is that I’m not you. If you’re the main wage earner in a family with small kids, a big mortgage, and a spouse who’s home full time, that’s a lot different than being single, unattached, and having the option to store your stuff in your parents’ basement while you go digital nomad-ing and decide what to do with your life. I hope that these six options will at least give you some food for thought, particularly if you had a difficult 2025 and are trying to move forward.

1. Keep doing what you’re doing, and hope that things improve. Could we see the AI-fueled pendulum swing back toward human translators? Possibly! A couple of people on the webinar mentioned that they’re seeing this happen in some sectors, specifically gaming. And I think that clients are realizing that good translations cost money either way: you need IT and QA people to maintain your large language model, or you need translators to do the translations. I’d put this in the category of stranger things have happened, but I wouldn’t count on it and I definitely wouldn’t make this your Plan A unless you have another job or enough savings to wait this situation out.
2. Offer the same services, but to different clients. This, in my opinion, is the best option for most people, but also the most challenging. “Just keep being a translator, but for clients who appreciate you more and pay better” is a great idea, but if it were that simple, you would have done it already. Working for direct clients involves a lot of selling, at least at the outset, and the truth is that most freelancers have a hard time making themselves do that, with enough consistency, to establish a solid base of direct clients. But if you’ve been “thinking about thinking about” marketing to direct clients, it’s never too late to go for it, and I’ll take the liberty of mentioning that March Marketing Madness could help you get started!
3. Branch out into work that agencies still pay well for. There’s a reason people enjoy working with agencies: they find the clients, and then you just do the language work, which is what most of us are here for. And agencies still pay well for certain types of work: two that spring to mind for me are conference interpreting and medical/scientific linguistic validation (where you’re checking the actual scientific content of the document, not just the translation). Here, the issue is how long it takes to develop these skills if you don’t have them already. For example, I decided to branch out into interpreting in 2018, passed the court interpreter exam in 2019, did a conference interpreting Master’s in 2020-2021, and 2022 was the first year that I had a significant amount of conference interpreting work, so three to four years between the idea stage and the income stage.
4. Branch out into other “word work.” Again, this is going to require selling to the right kinds of clients, but I’d personally look at a) fact-checking, and b) writing and editing for companies or corporate executives who don’t have the writing skills or the headspace to do it themselves. I recently attended a presentation by a journalist turned fact-checker who started an agency in 2024 and already has 40 (not a typo) fact-checkers working for her! Caveat: if one of your struggles is that you can’t make yourself market to direct clients, this could be more of the same.
5. Look at salaried jobs that you could do with your current skills. Three options I’d consider: language teaching (we may see people streaming from translation into teaching, the reverse of the usual pattern), working in-house for a translation company as a salesperson or project manager, or working in-house in the localization department of a non-translation company, for example a software company or medical device company. I honestly think these are good options. If your freelance business is struggling, the income volatility can get pretty terrifying, and this is something you could start doing right away.
6. Finally, you could change careers completely. In the spirit of putting all the options on the table, let’s include this one. My advice: just make sure that you’re moving toward something better. As someone on the webinar commented, don’t become an entry-level coder and have that be eaten by AI too. Here in the U.S., there’s a huge demand for people to do education and healthcare jobs where you cannot work remotely. The “Careers” page for my local school district (not even an enormous city), includes no fewer than 10 pages of job listings, many of which don’t require a teaching license. I think I’d also look at IT jobs where you could study for some type of credential on your own, then apply for a salaried job. This occurred to me after I talked to someone with no IT background, who studied on her own for the Salesforce Platform Administrator certification (using Salesforce’s free training site) and subsequently found a salaried job paying $88K a year.

If your freelance business is struggling, you’re 100% not alone, and I hope these ideas are helpful! Just leave a comment if there’s anything you want to add.

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