2 Blogs: 1 for Colleagues, 1 for Clients

In Everything You've Been Told is Wrong - The Truth about Marketing Your Freelance Business with a Blog Michael Martine writes about freelance bloggers who achieve a decent number of followers for their blog, but no actual business from it. That is so because advice about business blogging is usually not geared towards freelance service providers such as translators. This results in blogs being written for peers, not customers. His assessment certainly rings true for this blog.

I've been pondering how to change this. Mr. Martine's advice to simply change the targeting and content of blog posts to attract customers instead of colleagues leaves these colleagues behind. Based on comments I have received on this blog and the associated Twitter account, Language and Translation does appear to be useful for fellow translators. I don't just want to cut off my colleagues.

The obvious answer would be to start a separate blog aimed at potential clients. This is an attractive idea, but I don't really have time to write two blog posts each week - one for translators, the other for translation buyers. So here is what I will do: set up a separate client-focused blog and continue this blog less frequently. I will still be blogging once a week, but one week it will be this blog and the next week the client blog.

Next on the agenda is to pre-write several client-focused blog posts before actually setting up that second blog and going to the bi-weekly schedule on each blog. Given my other commitments, this may take a few weeks, but I'm trying to have the client blog up and running before I head to the STC Summit in late May.

Speaking of the STC Summit: As a presenter there I have been asked to add the Summit logo and a link to their website to my own online presence: see image above, therefore.