Freelancer! Increase your revenue? How?

When chosing the freelance path, no matter the geography or industry I doubt your main driver was to get lots of money short term (ok, maybe for some this could be true). The usual reasons are: seek of personal freedom, independence, need of self organization, sometimes even a seek for recognition you were not getting in a "corporate" world.

I'm not going to tackle now the dilema, so popular in the coaching industry, of technical worker versus enterpreneur (if you want to know more about this just type "e-myth" in google).

Back on track: If you are not doing bad, you are probably at a point when you are getting a decent amount of revenue based on the amount of work that you can handle.

There is the entrepreneurial path if you want to increase the amount of revenue (basically creating an organization that will per se generate revenue, based on your ideas and based on the fact that you will be able to sell your service higher than it costs you to generate it).
But aren't there other paths to follow if you want to increase your revenue? I believe there are.

Stop selling hours, stop selling words (if you are a translator) and start selling value. For your clients, value is that indefined, hard to perceive feeling that they are getting much more than they are paying for.

We all believe we are the best at what we are doing. Reality is (I know you know :-) ) that there is someone somewhere that is probably better than you are...(similar to the reality that there will always be someone cheaper). But still, it may be that your clients care about something very specific that will make them feel at ease when working with you.

Identify that need, try to make it as specific as possible and build your identity around that. By making this analysis you may realize that we are not all exactly the same, that your specific niche values a certain characteristic much more than another. The important switch comes here: do not use this to get more work...but concentrate on using your specificity to market the kind of clients that are willing to pay that little extra to get what you do best (that value).

Let's put a simple, not very ellaborated example: Consider you charge 15% more on urgent jobs. What would happen if all your jobs are considered as urgent by clients but you manage to organize yourself in a way that delivering urgent jobs does not mean you have to work in urgent mode?

I'm sure that adding value, looking for the right niche and right costumer is the strategy to follow.

Machine Translation is here (to stay?)

It was announced. We were seeing the trend (or should I say the threat?). It's starting to happen.

No strange internet web pages, no short strings from an indie mobile application.

No: a long, hard, financial report, received by a partner/client that has been preprocessed by a TM (Translation Memory) plus, for no matches, gone through a Machine Translation engine.

The request: Please provide a quote for editing this material.

"We don't do this", "Editing this to get something decent would take us more time than translating from scratch"…

But wait: that's not what the client is asking... The client asks for a quote, a proposal.

Why not providing the client with what he needs? Wouldn't it be a matter of establishing a productivity based on the documents to edit, calculate the amount you want to charge and make a proposal?

The only switch would be to quote on a project basis (based on the number of hours the project takes: don't we do it already for many proofreading human material projects?). Why is it so different from quoting on a per word basis? The per word rate is not the same (or shouldn't be) for all materials, so why quoting on this particular project be an issue? Just establish how much you want to charge. It is very possible that the final pay would not be less than it was on a per word basis, the job would just be different.

The translation and localization industry is living a period of change. And with change come opportunity :-) (sorry for the cliché).

Maybe it is the time to establish a new relationship with clients. Maybe these changes allow service providers to get deeper into the process. You shouldn't be charging less for an editing job (no matter how the material you have to work with was generated), you have to charge what you have to charge. If the effort is finally more: charge more; if the effort is finally less…than maybe charge less? It may be that the amount of content you will work with, will increase. It may happen that the amount of content to edit will grow exponentially. It may happen that your revenue will increase too. It's just a switch, it's just an adaptation.

Some will argue that the intention of the client is to get cheaper and cheaper translation and spend much less on your services. Well: you know what? We are not going to stop this. You may chose to look for different clients, but you may also chose to start looking at your process, your way of doing business and adapt. The GILT industry is a perfect market after all: lots of demand and lots of offer.

In this sense, nothing has changed: position yourself where you want to be. If there is a new service to offer, then offer it and charge what you find fair to charge. There will always be someone that will be charging less, don't even worry about this (there is always, always, always, someone cheaper), but that's not the league we are in, or are we?