Category Archives: Business

This week we’re looking at GDPR and email marketing. It’s one of the biggest worries for entrepreneurs, as a lot of news articles and blog posts paint a pretty grim picture for businesses who want to keep growing their subscriber lists. But first…. Read More

GDPR (or the General Data Protection Regulation, to use its full title) is everywhere you look at the moment. And understandably so. It’s a big change. But is it as scary as everyone keeps saying? I get it. On the surface, marketing & GDPR don’t seem obvious BFFs. When I started to do my research on the topic, I was crapping myself just like everyone else.

How would it affect my marketing?

Would my email subscriber numbers fall off a cliff?

What about my ad strategy – would anyone actually opt in to my opt ins anymore?

There are two kinds of writing for your target market…

There’s the kind that gets you featured in magazines your clients read and makes you money directly, and there’s the kind that gets you in the magazines and blogs they read and brings you publicity, which in turn brings you clients, who then pay you money to work for them. Read More

I say it a lot, but I like things to be easy. That’s not to say I’m lazy (okay, maybe it says I’m a little bit lazy), but I think we can all do with getting on with the stuff that makes us feel on fire and alive and, importantly, earns us money. I think we waste a lot of time (especially online) and if we only realised how much, we might be able to figure out some tricks, or get some help, to focus on the stuff we love. Read More

Designed in Canva

Yeah, I know it’s superficial. I know it makes me sound shallow. But I can’t help it. I think style and substance can go hand-in-hand. Actually, I think they should. I always hated those movies where women (it was usually women) were dowdified to signify that they were smart. Read More

Happy New Year!

How has 2017 been for you so far? Have you been rushed off your feet with new clients? Or enjoying a leisurely easing back into working after the holiday season? Maybe you’ve been busy planning for the year ahead. Lots of colleagues I know fall into that last category – myself included. I’ve had several new projects, but mostly I’ve been using my time to work out my goals and plans for the coming year, and figuring out how I’m going to achieve everything I want. Read More

You might remember me talking about a little thing called Challenge 500. It was a free challenge for freelancers designed to help them put the “free” back in freelancing. By “free” I didn’t mean working for free, but rather the freedom to work the way we want to, to set our own rules. Read More

During last month’s Let’s Talk Clients live chat, I trialled a new approach. As well as having panellists share their experiences and answer my (rather nosy) questions, I decided to gather some anecdotes and stories from colleagues about their client strategy. Funnily enough, despite all the different approaches, one of the common themes was colleagues’ reluctance to even call their strategy a strategy, and in my chats with them prior to the session, words that often came up were “luck” and “contacts”. Read More

Dear New(ish) Translators,

I delivered this talk as part of the MA in Translation at Queens’ University, Belfast, and decided to turn it into Part 3 of my Focus on: New Translators series, as a sort of an open letter. As you’ll see from most of my material, I’m big on openness in the translation industry. I think that new translators should start as they mean to go on, by putting practices in place that mean they’re running their business as a business, right from the start. So let’s get going. Read More