Perfecting your ProZ.com presence

Objective: enjoy a relaxing weekend activity while reviewing and enhancing your ProZ.com profile to see it through the eyes of potential clients.

Materials Needed

✓ Your favorite bottle of wine (or any preferred beverage)

✓ Comfortable seating (couch, patio, garden, etc.)

✓ Laptop or tablet

✓ Notebook and pen (or a digital note-taking app)

✓ Snacks (cheese, fruits, etc.)

Lucía Leszinsky

As a freelancer looking for opportunities on ProZ.com, your professional profile is your most important tool. Here are some ideas to take your profile from good to great, and attract clients' attention at a higher rate.

The first thing you need to know is that, while many agencies and end clients post public job openings on ProZ.com, the great majority (up to 80%!) of the work volume that flows through the site actually comes from job offers sent privately via profile messages. 

Mike Donlin

Year 2021 is almost over and the site team would like to thank you for spending it with us!

Lucía Leszinsky

In the fast-paced language industry, it's essential to have a strong and attractive resume always ready to go. Of course, what makes a resume work for one language professional may not do the trick for another, and there's no one-size-fits-all. On the contrary, you should aim to stand out from the crowd: your resume, like your ProZ.com profile, will be more effective if it's personalized.

These suggestions are meant to help you arrive at your ideal resume, or even resumes: plenty of freelancers will have different CVs to use in the various markets they target or to represent their different services. Remember that you should update your resume regularly, so don't stress about landing your perfect CV on the first try —it's likely you'll find something new to improve every time you look at it with fresh eyes.

Andrea Capuselli

A web widget is an independent application that can be embedded into a web-page, blog, or profile on a social media site and that will enable the display of information (your client feedback) or the call for an action ("Follow me").

Lucía Leszinsky

As a language professional, do everything you can to boost your chances of success. Here's a short video from director of training Paul Urwin with some tips for connecting with translation agencies via email.

Mike Donlin

By now, the entire world knows that the current Covid-19 outbreak has --and will continue to have--  an enormous impact on freelance financial lives. However, language professionals who usually work on-site --interpreters, project managers, teachers-- don't necessarily have to live off savings during the current quarantine. ProZ.com has a few tricks up its sleeve to make money starting this weekend and while at home, and supplement your income during these uncertain times.

Lucía Leszinsky

Some recent minor improvements have been made to better connect the What I am working on  feature (WIWO) with the Project History feature in profiles, and to help you better market yourself in your areas of expertise to potential clients and collaborators through both. In relation to these improvements, an adjustment has been made in the Find directory to help clients find you based on the projects you have worked on.

Jared Tabor

Do you have your own website? Now, if you're a Plus subscriber, you can show your visitors the feedback you've received from clients and colleagues on ProZ.com without ever having to leave your page.

"WWA" (Willingness to Work Again) feedback is a ProZ.com feature that provides translators, interpreters and other service providers with a means of requesting, collecting and displaying in their profiles feedback from outsourcers and colleagues with whom they have worked.

The translator feedback page provides a dedicated interface to those willing to request or provide translator feedback, and with this widget, you can embed your WWA feedback card on your own website. You can find it under the Tools menu at the top navigation bar of the site:

ProZ.com's web widgets allow you to generate a code that you can easily add to your website. This widget will automatically be updated whenever somebody makes a WWA entry to your profile. Your site visitors and potential clients will be able to see your full feedback card, sorted by the most recent to the oldest entry.

Rocio Palacios

ProZ.com the website has been around since 1999, and so have those who have volunteered to foster and protect the positive, results-oriented atmosphere of the site: the moderators.

Lucía Leszinsky

Blogs started to appear in this format at the start of 2018. The content at ProZ.com has been used to discuss language industry trends, inform of site enhancements, and sometimes just to share a laugh. 

Of the 98 posts shared in 2018 from 12 different authors, here are the 10 that were most read.

Mike Donlin

Thanks to everyone who made nominations for this, the sixth annual ProZ.com community choice awards. Voting is now open, so be sure to check out the nominees and cast your votes for your favorites in the categories for translation and interpreting at https://www.proz.com/community-choice-awards

Jared Tabor

Every year since 2013, the ProZ.com community choice awards are held to place a spotlight on language professionals who are active, influential or otherwise outstanding in various media, in both translation and interpreting. Nominees and winners are determined entirely by the ProZ.com community.

Jared Tabor

ProZ.com Mobile, the application developed by ProZ.com for use on mobile devices, now offers the possibility of updating basic profile information even when your are away from your computer.

Lucía Leszinsky

• 55% of freelancers spend 3 hours a week on their online marketing efforts
• 51% of respondents considered marketing too time-consuming, and 41% felt marketing was too costly
• 83% are investing financially in online marketing of some sort
• 72% say they are spending less than but up to 100 USD a month in marketing (those who spend more than that report earning more)
• The average survey respondent had reached their income goal within two years of starting out

The survey sample were some 2,000 US freelancers of all types, so it is reasonable to expect those numbers to be somewhat different if we narrow it down to translators and interpreters, expand the sample to other countries, or both.

One number in particular that caught my eye was the monthly investment in marketing. 100 USD a month sounded pretty steep to me, but maybe I'm wrong. 1,200 USD in freelancer marketing a year. Do you spend that much on your marketing? If so, drop me a line, I'd be very interested in hearing about it and if you find it to be a good investment.

If you are already a paying ProZ.com member, you are spending between 12 and 18 dollars a month on marketing through your membership, though you get all the rest of the tools and opportunities available along with it. It's a kind of marketing that is easy to do, what we'd call passive marketing.

Jared Tabor