Passive marketing. Passive marketing strategies are strategies that one set up can be left alone, still allowing you to reap their benefits. Obviously, many of them such as a personal website or LinkedIn can be active if you wish, but the sites listed here can all be passive, especially if you prefer to concentrate your efforts on other marketing endeavors. The first passive marketing technique is to be online. Now this ties back to having your own website from the pregame section. An online presence is pretty much essential for people to find you.

This can be done via your personal website or blog, a ready made sites such as about me, or even your profile page on proz.com, etc. Remember that each one of these has pros and cons. But the important thing is that you do have an online presence. If you have your own website, you can personalize it as much as you like and even maintain a blog if you wish, along with a resume or past clients or anything else. You'd like then again, that would likely come to cost around $1,000 or so after domain registration, web hosting, hiring a web designer and coding, and having someone for periodic updates or fixing bugs, etc, etc. Also, it's much harder for people to find your website via a search engine than it is to find an established website like proz.com.

This is due to search engine optimization or SEO, which websites like proz.com have a lot of experience with and this is why I like about me pages. about.me allows you to create pages that can be personalized to a certain extent, but they are free, easy to update and have a certain amount of SEO built into them already. As a reference, this is my About Me page. The second technique to keep in mind for passive marketing is your email signature. Again, this is passive and it's an easy addition that can help you out. Most email programs allows you to add an email signature or a few lines below each outgoing mail.

The best option here is to make a few lines at most, and anything else is probably overkill and might seem like an advertisement. For example, this is my current personal email signature is short and simple. My current business email signature is longer because it's business and so I don't mind a bit of marketing. Along these lines, you can also personalize other things like your status on Skype or Google Chat, or your tagline on forums and meetup groups etc, etc. The next technique for passive marketing is very important. It's LinkedIn.

This is the main social network for business professionals, and you should definitely join it if you haven't yet. For the setup, you can refer to the pre game section since the format pretty much follows the same format as all other professional websites. Once you're done, you should add your website if you have one, as well as links to your proz.com account, translators cafe, comm account and any other accounts you might have. Once your profile is complete, you can search for organizations and groups to join. For more information on this, you can refer back to organizations under active marketing earlier in the course. Obviously, you can be very active via LinkedIn if you wish and over time, you'll get a better idea as to what works for you.

But for now, you should just make sure that you at least have an updated and searchable profile. The next passive marketing technique is Facebook. Chances are you already have a Facebook account. The important thing here though, is to have a plan ahead of time since Facebook tends to be for personal use, decide ahead of time, how many work related posts you want to be sending to your friends and how often obviously, some work related posts will be good and you want to keep your friends updated and be able to use them as well. Possible contacts. But you also don't want to annoy them with daily sales tactics or to harass them for more business.

What I do is I've created a friends list called professional made up of business contacts, and every now and then I send out posts and links only to these. For the most part. However, I say Facebook post just for major news. The next technique for passive marketing is Twitter. Twitter is similar to Facebook in that it is a social network, but many things are different as well. First of all, there's a cap of 140 characters for each post.

This keeps things short and sweet, although you can include links and images as well. Secondly, you don't have to follow people back for them to follow you. In fact, they don't have to follow you at all in order to see your posts. And likewise, you can see everyone else's posts unless they make them private. Of course, if you follow people, you're guaranteed to receive their posts. Anyway.

It's worth setting up a Twitter account as well. In fact, you can then Search Twitter using something like looking for translators and see if anyone is looking for translation to be done. You never know. The next point to keep in mind for passive marketing is connecting accounts. Now this can help all the accounts you have set up, and it can pay exponentially. This is especially valid if you have a blog, but also if you have any type of social media.

The idea is that anytime you write a new blog post, you automatically say send out say a Facebook message or a tweet and or a LinkedIn message with a link to the blog post. However, if you don't have a blog, you can also set it up so every new Facebook message or every Facebook message with a certain hashtag say creates a new tweet and or LinkedIn message etc, etc. The best source for this is ifttt.com. IFTTT stands for If This Then That. You can connect your accounts and set it up. So if something happens in one account, it should happen.

In another account, this saves you the time of writing it more than once or trying to remember which accounts to update each time since one update will update all connected accounts. It can also be personalized as much as you like. So check it out@www.ifttt.com and this is the website I should specify that obviously I have no affiliation, and no association with IFTTT. I just really like it and use it a lot. If you find yourself repeating the same post or update on more than one place, then chances are you can have it done automatically on IFTTT. So I think you should it's a major time saver.

The next point in terms of passive marketing is stickers, postcards. Now, remember that all the other translators looking for jobs will have a resume and possibly business cards, so why not stand out? have stickers or postcards with your name or logo. This can make you more memorable and help you stand out from the crowd. Then again, these should be in addition to normal business cards rather than as a substitute, since no one wants to put a sticker or postcard in their wallet or Rolodex. Other ideas could be pens or notebooks.

So potential clients will constantly be reminded of you whenever they use them. I would not recommend shirts or baseball caps because people might not want to wear stuff with your logo. They don't want to consciously be marketing your stuff. On the other hand, a notepad or a pen is perfect because it's something useful, and they'll use it without thinking and therefore be reminded of you. If design is not your strong suit, you'll have to find someone to design a sticker or a postcard for you. Since it takes a bit more skill than a normal business card.

You can always ask a friend for a favor or worst case scenario, feel free to check out fiber dot com or 99 designs. com design jobs can be done for $5 they can be more expensive but they start at $5 which is nice 99 designs comm is a bit different here designers compete for your business and you only pay for the design that you choose to use. And then as for ordering the stickers or postcards or even your business card for that matter. I have used vistaprint in the past as well as zazzle.com and I like them both. I know mood calm also offers a similar service but I haven't tried them yet.