Although some translators are hired to work full time by translation companies, the vast majority of translators work as freelancers, small business owners, and have their own clients.

So, for the majority of the Spanish translation professionals, the promotion of their services is an important part of their business. There are several ways to promote your Spanish translation business. Your strategy may combine them resulting in a unique market approach that should match your market positioning.

Translation Service Markets / Auctions
Recommendation: for beginners / translators with low demand

Some websites have developed bidding marketplaces. You will find job postings there where you can offer your services detailing credential and your prices.

The job poster will them receive dozens of applications, sometimes hundreds from where they will pick one translator or a few of them.

Although, these translation marketplaces are a good place to start your career (since you will be willing to charge less than the average) in the long run you will not like to use them. The reason is that this reversed service auction pushes the rates down and do not exactly contribute for the translators well-being.

Associations
Recommendation: intermediate / advanced translators

The associations are a great way to support a professional translation career. They look after the translators and offer a variety of useful tools and services.

Most important, they have directories where you will be listed. Serious companies, specially those not thinking only about price, will access these directories very often. This is an opportunity to get new clients at the same time you improve your credentials for being part of a respectable association.

Networking
Recommendation: every translator

To build a business network is usually the best way of getting quality clients and jobs. A client coming from a recommendation will be usually concerned with quality, timeliness and trustworthy. They will probably be paying higher than the average.

A translator with a good network will have a constant flow of jobs throughout the year.

We consider this the second best way to promote your business.

Reputation
Recommendation: every translator

This is by far the best and strongest way to build a great translation business.

If you offer a high quality translation and a good customer service, chances are you will rarely face a shortage of work. Although, there is a myriad of translators in the market, a translator combining both a strong command of technical translation and an appropriate customer service is very rare.

You may find excellent translators who are difficult persons, and you will find people extremely courteous that are not that do not produce a high quality translation. When you combine both sides and get that "WOW" from your client, you will achieve the so sought fidelity. One big client may bring you more than $ 20k in services per year. Now, imagine if you are able to retain two big customers per year in a five year period. You would be securing more than $ 200k in demand in the fifth year. Of course you would need to outsource some of this demand by them. But, it is still an amazing achievement to have a secure annual income over $ 200k.

The Worst Way Ever
Recommendation: translators wishing to destroy their careers

You may be tempted to send spam to translation companies. It is easy to write a short email and send to as many companies as you find in the Internet. But, do they want to receive dozens of unsolicited resumes everyday? Some few companies will have a specific area of the website open to new translator applications. Most of them will not have such area.

The worst case of spam is when a translator will click on a Google Adword (those adds on the top and the right side of the browser after you do a search) to find a victim for their resume-spam. A translation company pays an average of $ 1.00 every time someone click on those adds. Now, imagine dozens of translator clicking on that ad everyday. Not surprisingly the company will get mad at any translator doing that: they spend big bucks to get a customer, and instead they get several unsolicited resumes in their mail box. The least thing happening here will be any willingness in adding the spammer-translator to their database.