A few months ago I was honored to become a moderator of an FB group “Successful Freelance Translators” (SFT) launched by Simon Akhrameev. If you are a freelance translator or you intend to become the one, and you are still not in this group, I would encourage you to become a member. You will get lots of useful information and tips on how to build your personal brand, start and promote your services. And it is the SFT group’s activity that inspired me to write this post about comment marketing.
With the increasing use and reliability on social media, comment marketing strategy is a good option to stay in the minds of your colleagues and your prospective clients who are looking for translation or localization services. With high-quality contribution in the comment sections, you can win hearts of the readers and can encourage prospects to buy your translation and localization services.
Comment marketing has not lost any of its power and influence. In fact, in Rand Fishkin’s view, because fewer people are doing it today than were five or six years ago, especially in the digital marketing world, it’s actually become increasingly influential. Crafting useful, insightful and interesting comment requires time investment. You can’t take a comment you’ve left in one blog and just use it in another article. Compared to other forms of marketing, comment marketing is hard to replicate and scale. There can be various reasons behind investing time and efforts in comment marketing. It can be just to get links, new followers or to engage influencers with you to make them a voice for your brand in the future.
Actually today most of the translators are commenting on each other pages just because of link building tactics. Taking into account translation & localization industry-specific features, this is inevitable. “Awesome Post”, “Thanks for Sharing”, “Wow, very meaningful post “: Most of the freelance translators use this type of words for commenting, they are trying to appreciate and get backlinks for a website or a blog. It is worthless. But the real marketing techniques for websites offering translation services have to do with sharing meaningful opinions as well as ideas in a discussion format of the related topic in order to encourage interaction, make connections and also earn exposure. Website visitors are not stupid and catch immediately if someone comments for achieving some sort of personal brand advantages or not.
Through comment marketing, freelance translators can propose themselves as experts in their fields in a place where their audience is present and active. In other words, on websites where the target audience asks for help. The more helpful are the comments for the readers, the higher will be the positive attitude that the target audience will have towards translators. Hence, that will open great opportunities in terms of collaboration, work, customers and being asked to express an opinion about topics related to translation and localization business.
Blog commenting strategy
To build a strong online presence that can generate traffic and leads for months and even years to come, a freelance translator has to develop the right strategy for blog commenting. How to set the freelance translator’s strategy which will reveal goals and provide a roadmap for how those goals can be achieved has been much discussed in my previous articles.
With the set strategy, you will be able to develop a personal branding tactic rather than SEO or even link building. You will earn friendships with bloggers from translation and localization field. That will help you do research or get answers or solve difficult issues. But first and foremost, you may also win a client from a comment on a blog.
In the last case, that should be a blog targeting the specific niche in translation services. You can leave comments to clarify some of the information in a particular blog post, respectfully disagreeing with the blogger and providing the value to the conversation. I would like to highlight again that the primary objective of commenting needs is adding the value to the conversation, adding solutions to the problems that are under question.
Then, along the years I discovered a few things that work for me and makes my comments relevant and valuable:
- Determine goals.
- Talk both to the author of the post and to the readers.
- The structure of the post should be like a mini-post (a beginning, a middle and an end). It should be insightful, positive and interesting, encouraging the author to respond.
- Present links to sources that reinforce what you are saying.
- If possible, give actual data, sources, and facts to back up your statement.
- Always express your disagreement in politely and respectfully.
- Provide value and be consistent.
- Comment on posts that are in Google’s top 10 search results, in FB groups, etc.
- Leave a signature.
Following these steps, you will be able to increase your brand identity as a freelance translator, and propose yourself as an expert in translation and localization field in a place where your target audience (prospective clients) are present and active.
Integrating into communities of your target audience, you will be able to propose yourself as an expert in translation and localization field in a place where your prospective clients are present and active. Besides that, you will be able to increase the referral traffic. And this is one of the simplest ways to connect.
Tactics and networks I strongly recommend for freelance translators
Commenting on seasonal articles is a very insightful way. For example, if I read an article “Translation and Localization trends in 2017”, I bookmark it and go back in December to comment and see which predictions or trends panned out. Many people don’t go back to their predictions, so this may be even an opportunity to write an article.
I would recommend participating in Quora, Reddit, Facebook (in particular, SFT group) and, of course, personal blogs. You will need to find the topics/groups/communities that are most relevant to what you are offering.
In fact, there are hundreds of resources that will allow you to meet people and offer tips and drop links. You just should take some efforts and start providing valuable information that will solve someone’s issues.
Would you like to share your success stories of comment marketing that have brought you great results? Or maybe you could recommend other places where freelance translators could participate?
