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Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! I hope you’re all doing well! Scaling back your work with a client, or discontinuing your work with them completely, is honestly a sign of a healthy freelance business. It means that you’re progressing beyond what some of your clients have to offer, and hopefully working with more interesting and better-paying clients.

And yet, it can be very stressful to decide how and when to do this: Do you outright break up with the client and tell them not to contact you again? Sometimes! Do you just passively become “too busy” to take their work? Sometimes! It depends on the context…let’s take a closer look.

When to break up with a client

If you feel like a client treats you poorly, just dump them. Freelancing, and life in general, are hard enough as it is. You don’t need:

• Clients who you repeatedly have to chase for payment
• Project managers who disrespect you
• Anyone who constantly haggles about rates when you’ve already discussed that; like you’ve agreed on a rate, and then they continue contacting you for work that pays less than what you agreed on
• Clients who repeatedly renegotiate working conditions that you’ve already objected to (i.e. you’ve already told them, “I don’t translate more than 2,500 words per day,” and then they keep asking if you can do 10,000 words in two days)

Here’s how I handle this, in an effort to be polite. I tell the client, “To save your time and mine, you don’t need to contact me…” (in X situation). Such as:

• “…you don’t need to contact me about additional work until my last invoice has been paid”
• “…you don’t need to contact me for interpreting assignments with less than a two-hour minimum”
• “…you don’t need to contact me for machine translation post-editing work”
• “…you don’t need to contact me for rush work if a rush charge is not applicable”

Here, I’m talking mostly about agencies. For direct clients, I think it’s always worth trying to accommodate them, and charging accordingly, unless you really hate the work (I hate MTPE and I won’t do it at any price). But for example, if the client insists that they can only pay for one hour, that may just be a company policy. Ask for double your hourly rate and see what happens. If they have a hair-on-fire rush job, charge what makes it worth your while. I’m surprised at how often this approach works with direct clients.

Always consider keeping them as a KTLO

client

There is zero shame in what Ed Gandia calls KTLO (keep the lights on) clients. Clients where, there’s nothing particularly great or horrible about them, they send you work that pays the bills. Unless you really dislike a particular client or their work, consider keeping them on your KTLO list, or only working with them when you have nothing else in the pipeline.

For this reason, I honestly don’t mind clients who use automated assignment systems (I have a number of interpreting clients who do this). Instead of having to explain that you’d really love to work with them, but you’re busy, you just click Accept or Decline.

Even if you have to respond to the client directly, consider something generic like, “Thank you for this request! Unfortunately I’m not available but I appreciate the offer.” Honestly, I like this approach. So often, we feel the urge to overexplain when we turn a client down. You don’t owe them that; you’re not available, that’s it.

I think this is a particularly good option if something about your business is in transition: you’re trying to work with more direct clients, or you’re starting out in subtitling or non-native editing, or whatever. Personally, I try never to give up my existing KTLO clients until I’m really, really sure that I no longer need them. In many cases, I never actually give them up, I just politely turn them down indefinitely or until they stop contacting me.

Option three: raise your rates

To do this, you have to be willing to lose the client, but it’s an option. Think about what bugs you about this client, then raise your rates until the work feels worthwhile. Lots of businesses impose unilateral rate raises: no negotiation, no apology. Each year, my accountant sends me what he calls an “engagement letter,” getting my approval of his terms of service for that year. One aspect of that is his hourly rate, which goes up by about 5% a year. He doesn’t say, “I hope this is OK with you!!” He simply says, if you want to work with me again this year, here’s the cost. This is a totally valid option if you don’t mind losing the client abruptly.

If you started the year with a marketing push (Marketing: Do something!!), hopefully you’re starting to see some results. I hope these tips are helpful if you’re looking at paring back some of your work with existing clients!

Have a great week! Don’t forget to sign up for March Marketing Madness by Sunday if you’d rather pay $95 versus $99! Here’s the free preview if you’d like to try before you buy.

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Year eight of March Marketing Madness, my month-long freelance marketing challenge group, kicks off on March 2! MMM is:

• Daily motivational videos to get the marketing juices flowing
• Daily marketing challenges, with at least three options so that there’s less of an excuse to not do anything!
• A library of marketing resources: e-mail templates, how to nudge a dormant client how to research direct clients, various money resources, and more!
• An optional but fun Slack group
• New this year: three live sessions with recordings provided

MMM is always a fun time, and I’ve honestly never talked to a participant who didn’t get some good inspiration from it! However, if you want to try before you buy, I’ve created a free preview that you can access here.

Registration is $95 through February 15, and $99 thereafter! I hope to see you there!

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

Hello, and Happy Monday! Here’s an update on Training for Translators’ upcoming classes:

• This month’s free webinar, “What now?” is sold out. Join my mailing list in the sidebar of any blog post, to stay informed about future free webinars!
• There are six spots left in this month’s session of Direct client research lab, my personalized direct client recommendation class. Registration is $190.
• If you like free stuff, you should do the free preview of March Marketing Madness! Back for its eighth year, MMM is a month-long challenge group combining motivational videos, bite-sized marketing tasks that will take you 15-30 minutes, an optional but fun Slack group, and, new this year, three live sessions!
• If you just want to sign up for MMM, here’s the link! Registration is $95 until February 15, $99 thereafter

Thanks and have a great week!

Lots o’classes coming up!

Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! It’s high season for professional development, and we’ve got a variety of options on tap for you:

• Direct client research lab: Get personalized direct client marketing recommendations, tailored to the kinds of clients you want to work with. I know, I said I wasn’t going to offer another session until April, but with a pretty full waitlist, I decided to go for it in February. Registration is $190, currently 11 spots left, registration closes when those spots sell out or on February 10.
• Free webinar: What now??: Free! The live session is on February 12, and everyone who registers will receive the recording. Everyone is welcome in this one-hour session, but it’s particularly targeted at mid-career translators trying to regroup and move forward in the world beyond “three agencies and a Gmail address.”
• March Marketing Madness challenge group: Back for an eighth year, MMM serves up the motivation that you need to get that marketing done! Twenty daily challenges, 20 motivational videos, an optional but fun Slack group, and new for this year, three live sessions (recordings provided). Registration is $95 until February 15, $99 thereafter.

This week’s topic: Some thoughts on relational marketing

When it comes down to it, there are two basic types of marketing: pitching, and relational marketing. Note! My business coach Treasa Edmond uses the term “relational marketing;” I’m not sure if she coined it, or if it’s a common thing!

For most of us, pitching means sending “warm” e-mails to people we don’t know, pointing out an intersection between their needs and our skills. In my opinion, the resource for that is Ed Gandia’s e-book, Warm Email Prospecting: How to use short and simple emails to land better freelance writing clients. That’s not an affiliate deal but I’m definitely biased, because after I took Ed’s e-mail prospecting class, I tried it for myself and immediately landed two book contracts.

Pitching has a lot of advantages: it’s fast, it’s cost-free other than your time, it’s low commitment (a student recently said to me, “I remind myself that no one is going to come after me with a pitchfork for sending an e-mail”), and according to entities that study such things, it still works, even though it’s kind of a “dated” marketing method. Here’s an article from Hunter.io on how to write more targeted e-mails that people are more likely to respond to.

Then there are the icky parts of pitching: lots of people think it feels spammy (TBH I don’t have this issue, I honestly feel like lots of companies out there need my help, but they can’t get my help if they don’t know that they exist), it can be kind of soul-sucking to send out 100 e-mails that 95 people never respond to, and you have to find a steady stream of prospects to keep it going.

In our profession, you also have to consider the cultural factors: in many European countries, direct e-mail marketing to people you don’t know is a) frowned upon/seen as tacky and desperate, b) illegal or close to illegal because of e-mail privacy laws, or a combination of the two. So what’s an eager freelancer to do?

The other option: relational marketing

If you don’t want to pitch, your other option is relational marketing: building a connection and establishing a relationship of trust and authority with the potential client before you directly ask them if they want to work together.

Hands-down, the most effective form of relational marketing is in-person client-side events where you can rub shoulders with the people who need you. For example, the American Bar Association’s international law section recently held a three-day conference in Mexico, and it was open to non-members. Topics included mergers and acquisitions, international arbitration and litigation, international trade, and legal technology. Just as an example, translating and interpreting for international arbitration cases has been the subject of a couple of great presentations at recent American Translators Association conferences. At this type of event, you could a) learn a lot about the sector and its needs, and b) connect with people at the top of the pyramid.

Whenever I meet a freelancer who says, “I went all in on direct client marketing and doubled my income in a year,” they’ve almost always focused on client-side events. And, you can probably envision some of the challenges:

• Client-side conferences can be costly and time-consuming to attend. The non-member rate for the ABA conference was $1,200+ (but let’s also say that even a medium-sized translation job would have paid for this).
• You may need to be comfortable speaking your source language(s), which a lot of translators aren’t.
• You need to be comfortable interacting with high-level people in person, which a lot of human beings (not just translators) are not.

I often suggest: if you’d like to dip your toe in the client-side event waters but you’re intimidated, start with something online. Go to a one-hour webinar or an online conference. Tons of specialized professional associations offer this type of thing. Again, random example, the Museums Association is having a one-day online conference in May, Championing accessible museums, it’s 69 UK pounds (around $94) and is on a hot topic in the museums sector, an area that a lot of translators and interpreters are interested in.

How about LinkedIn?

For many of us, LinkedIn is going to be our most basic form of relational marketing, especially for clients that we can’t meet in person. We can do things like:

• Comment on our target clients’ posts and tag them in conversations that they might be interested in
• Post things that speak to our clients’ pain points, and post things that are helpful, regardless of whether a client ends up working with us
• Find natural reasons to reach out to potential clients: “Congratulations on the new office in Munich!”
• Collaborate: Co-write posts or articles on LinkedIn; feature other people in our posts

The goal here is to create a human connection without the hard sell, and to “organically” grow our reputation among potential clients, who will (hopefully) then think of us when they need a translator or interpreter.

My take

I think that relational marketing can work well for specific types of freelancers:

• People with the time, money, and social skills to attend client-side conferences
• People with the patience and persistence to create relationships with potential clients online (on LinkedIn and similar platforms), without an intense focus on “the payoff” of getting work from them

The positive side of relational marketing? To a lot of freelancers, relational marketing is more palatable than pitching, because it feels less salesy. The negative side? It’s generally a longer-term, slower-burning strategy than pitching, and a lot of people don’t stick with it for long enough to see results.

The point of this comparison is mostly to show you various options and help you find a marketing method that you can at least tolerate (you don’t have to love it!). Remember our guiding principle for this year: Marketing: Do Something. Relational marketing is another “something” to have in your marketing arsenal!

To get our weekly posts directly in your inbox, sign up for the Training for Translators mailing list!

• Greetings, Training for Translators subscribers! Don’t forget that February 1 (that’s this Sunday!) is the last day to secure last year’s price ($90) for this year’s edition of March Marketing Madness. After Sunday, the price goes up to $95. Back for an eighth year, the MMM challenge group is Training for Translators’ largest program of the year, giving you 20 business days of marketing challenges, motivational videos, an optional but fun Slack group, and this year, three live sessions!
• If you’re a podcast person, are you listening to the Training for Translators podcast? I’m excited that it’s reached almost 10,000 downloads, and the latest episode is an audio version of my 2025 year in review. Listen directly on the T4T website, or subscribe via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or the Training for Translators YouTube channel.

Things to try, if you’re paralyzed by marketing anxiety

Lately, I’m hearing from a lot of freelancers who are struggling with some hard realizations:

• It’s difficult to impossible to have a thriving freelance business in 2026 without actively marketing your services
• Lots of people know this (translators and interpreters, after all, being very smart people) but still can’t make themselves do it

First, it’s important to remember that the freelance landscape changes all the time. When I started freelancing in 2002, I applied to over 400 translation companies during my first year in business. Marketing to that many potential clients never seemed odd to me, because I didn’t know anything different. And yet, the generation of freelancers ahead of me, people who started in the 80s and 90s, said, “That’s crazy!! When I started freelancing in 1993, I had a phone number and an AOL address, I did only a tiny bit of marketing, and through word of mouth and referrals, within six months I was so busy that I had to hire another translator to work with me.”

Moral of the story: things change. The other day, I overheard a discussion at my coworking office; two middle-aged guys, one lamenting the changes in the freelance landscape. “I wish I could still make good money making simple websites, now everyone uses WordPress or Squarespace!” To which the other guy responded, “Yeah, and I wish I were still 25 and not bald. But the world doesn’t work that way.”

If you’re really stuck

Two truths about me, as context: I’m not a fundamentally anxious person, and selling doesn’t bother me. I don’t love selling, otherwise I’d work in sales, but I don’t dread it. People respond, people don’t respond, I don’t really see it as a reflection on me as a human. And, I realize that a) we all have “outreach anxiety” from time to time, and b) some of us have debilitating outreach anxiety, as in we just can’t do it.

I’ve got three things for you to try, all very different strategies:

1. 
   If you’re a fundamentally spiritual person, *or* you struggle with the feeling that things in the current world are just stacked against you and you’re constantly swimming upstream, do this. Before you work on marketing, say to yourself, out loud, “The universe is conspiring in my favor. Everything in the universe is pushing me toward success.” This is pretty woo-woo, but it’s actually a take on a quote from Paulo Coelho, and honestly, I think it’s helpful. Why shouldn’t you be destined for great success and even wealth? What if you assumed that that’s what the universe wants for you? Then get after it with your marketing!
2. Less woo-woo. Start your marketing sessions by asking yourself these questions: Who should I be serving? Where can my skills be most useful? Who really needs my help, but they can’t get my help because they don’t yet know that I exist? This is the approach that I find most helpful because it has the advantage of being true. We’ve all had the experience of a client telling us, “You really saved us.” “I’m so glad we found you.” “You’re just what we needed.” So now, go find more people who are waiting to be helped by the skills you have.
3. A tip I gleaned from a freelance writers’ group I’m in. Give yourself a little distance from your direct marketing efforts by scheduling your e-mails and posts rather than sending/posting them as soon as you write them. As mentioned above, I’m neither an anxious person nor super-anxious about marketing, but I was amazed by the number of people who chimed in to say that they do this and find it helpful. Instead of writing a pitch e-mail, sending it, and then sitting there sweating bullets over whether the person is opening it, reading it, are they going to respond, you can avoid all of that by scheduling the e-mail to send the next morning. The person who suggested this tactic said that by that time, she’s probably forgotten about the e-mail anyway, or it seems less terrifyingly immediate. All modern e-mail programs can do this: in Google Workspace/Gmail, click the little arrow on the “Send” button and it will offer you various options, i.e. “8 AM tomorrow morning.” You can do the same thing with LinkedIn posts (click the clock icon on the post interface).

If you’re struggling with marketing paralysis, I hope these tips are helpful! Have a great week!

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