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.

How to Proceed With New Clients

An e-mail I received recently made me think that it would be good to post a standardized procedure for handling requests from potential new clients. Some of my colleagues, such as Corinne McKay in her blog post "Responding to a request for quote", have written about their own procedures. To contribute to that debate, here is my approach:

1. I receive a general e-mail inquiry.
   
   
2. I check the background of the e-mail's sender (see my earlier blog post on Checking Out Potential Clients).
   
   
3. If the results of that search indicate a professional company without complaints about non-payment, I reply to the inquiry requesting the following information (unless already supplied in the initial inquiry):
   
   
   
   1. Exact word count of source text
      
   2. Field of specialization/type of text
      
   3. Format of source text (Word doc, PDF, Excel spreadsheet, ...)
      
   4. Deadline requested
      
   5. Text sample
      
   
   If the results of my search do not indicate a professional company, or I see repeated complaints about non-payment, I decline the project.
   
   
4. The client supplies the information requested.
   
   
5. I evaluate the text sample, source format, total length and deadline requested in light of other pending projects. If I can handle this project, I confirm the word count and deadline and state my standard per word rate, as well as the total price and payment terms:
   
   
   
   1. A deposit of 50% of the total price prior to starting work on the project.
      
   2. If the project is expected to take less than 2 weeks, I'll invoice the remainder of the total price at project completion and expect payment within 15 days of invoice date.
      
   3. If the project is expected to take 2-6 weeks, 25% of the remaining total price is due after 2 weeks, with the final 25% again invoiced on project completion and due within 15 days of invoice date.
      
   4. For long-term projects (more than 6 weeks), I propose a schedule of partial deliveries, with due dates for partial payments.
      
   
   
   
6. The client agrees to my price and terms, confirms the order and sends the entire source text.
   
   
7. I send an invoice for the deposit, including information on where/how to pay it. Depending on the timeframe involved and the client's location, this may be my PayPal account or a bank account.
   
   
8. The client pays the deposit and notifies me by e-mail or Skype, or I receive an e-mail from PayPal.
   
   
9. I confirm receipt of the deposit and start work on the translation, backing my work up as I go along (see my earlier post on Backup Procedures & Disaster Preparedness).
   
   
10. At the latest the night before the deadline I e-mail the completed translation to the client, asking for confirmation that the file was received.
    
    
11. The client confirms receipt of the translation.
    
    
12. During my next invoicing cycle (usually once a week), I generate an invoice for the remaining price of the project.
    
    
13. I receive payment of that remaining amount and mark this project closed.
    

Checking Out Potential Clients

A recent question in the Translators Worldwide group on LinkedIn prompted me to write this post. An English-Spanish translator was describing a potential job offer she received by e-mail which raised a few flags for her. She wanted to know whether that e-mail might be a scam, rather than a real translation project.

As small-scale businesses providing services to far-flung (sometimes international) clients, we face this situation not infrequently. How do we know that a potential client will, in fact, pay us after we deliver the translation? Worse yet, how do we make sure the bank account information we may provide on our invoice for purposes of direct payment is not abused to hack into our account digitally and syphon off our money?

The short answer is: we can't make sure. But we can take a few precautions. When I get a request from a new client, I check a few things:

• I google their company name and look for:
  
  
  
  1. a professional-looking company website with physical address information (i.e., a house number and street, not just a PO box)
     
  2. other websites/forums referencing this company
     
  
  
• For U.S. companies, I use whitepages.com's reverse lookup function to check the name and address connected to the phone number. If the phone number is unlisted, it's probably not a real company.
  

For agencies I also:

• check the ProZ.com blue board for other translators' experiences with that company.
  
• check paymentpractices.net for other translators' experiences with that company's payment practices.
  

If there are no references at all on the web to this company and/or the company has no website, I assume it's not a real company -- at least not one that would work internationally and therefore need translation services.

I have sometimes taken calculated risks with jobs for which I wasn't sure I'd get paid, but I generally only do that with small jobs.

If the client looks like a potential payment problem, I ask for 50% of the estimated cost up front by PayPal. That way the potential client has no bank information. I transfer incoming PayPal payments to my bank account, so if anyone could get at my PayPal account, I wouldn't lose much money.

Granted, there are legitimate potential clients out there who are just not good at marketing their business -- or don't need to market it on the web, e.g., because they have enough word-of-mouth referrals. My brother's niche business manufacturing high-end musical instruments is such a case, for example. But how do I know this is not just someone who thinks they have a great idea the world will pay for, but then finds out that the world is not interested and consequently has no money to pay their suppliers (including me)?

In the end, I generally trust my instincts. If it looks fishy, it probably is. I may have lost out on some potential assignments, but in the end I have gotten paid most of the time -- even by private individuals in Australia.