Create your translation website and start promoting your language business
When you start your career as a freelance translator, you need to be found by your potential clients. You can go door to door asking if someone needs translation services (but we don’t really think that works…) or you can advertise your services online. In other words, you need to create your translation website. If you’re thinking, “Wait a minute, I’m not a programmer and I have no idea how to make a website,” you’ve come to the right place. I’ve created a few videos to show you how it’s done, otherwise read on as I walk you through the step-by-step process of creating a professional website in under an hour.
First: all your options to create a translator website
If you want to create a website you have several options:
Reading: How to create a translation website
1. You can ask a marketing agency to design a professional looking website. However, be prepared to give them what you earn in two to three months of work. It’s an investment, I hear you say. However, remember that if you want to change it in the future, you have no control over it, so the investment needs to be constantly reinvested.
2. You can program it manually. It will take you a few months to learn the basics of HTML and a few other programming languages (if not years) before you can get anything done.
3. You can go with a free one like the ones you can create on weebly.com or on blogger.com. However, if you want a professional website, you will soon leave this option. Can you imagine putting a blogspot.com address on your business card?
Here we are and we have no idea how to proactively promote our services. We can resume writing resumes and “spamming” agencies that already receive hundreds of resumes a day. This method yields few results and doesn’t fit our new job title: Freelancer. Freelancer means “solopreneur”, an entrepreneur who works for himself. Sending out CVs is not his strategy.
If you want to go the CV route, get in line with the others. If you want to stand out from the crowd, start building your website and attracting direct customers.
In this quick guide, you’ll learn how to build your website
in less than one Create an hour for less than $100.
If you’re ready to get started, welcome on board.
Content – What you will learn in this guide
- – Introduction: How do you find customers if not with a website?
- – First things first
- – Get a hosting service with Bluehost
- – Access your website’s dashboard
- – Upload a theme from ThemeForest
- – Conclusions
1. Introduction – Why you need to create your translation website
When you start working as a freelancer you have two choices: you can think of yourself as an employee looking for work, or you can think of yourself as a business owner looking for work for clients.
When you decide to become an “entrepreneurial linguist” and present yourself as the company you really are, you need to start making your to advertise services. A few years ago, the only way to promote a new business was through expensive advertising. Nowadays the internet has changed everything. The internet allows you to do very cheap marketing through social media, websites and SEO as well as paid campaigns with advertising platforms like Google AdWords.
The first step in your freelance career is to create a website. Your website is your business card, your presentation and your best marketing tool.
Your website needs to be memorable, professional and attractive. It needs to show off your skills without boring your prospects with information they can’t understand.
Experts have told you that a professional website costs hundreds of dollars (or pounds or euros). That is not true. However, it is true if you don’t know how to do it and you need to contact a digital agency for help. But if you have a few hours and want to learn, you can get up and running today.
The first thing you need to know is that you will be in charge of your website. This means that you must be willing to take responsibility for it even if you are not a programmer.
Secondly, you must be aware that there are many services available to set up a free website . For example, there is Yola, Weebly, Wix, Blogger and Tumbler just to name a few. When I first built a website many years ago, I used Yola without knowing any better.
But the method I’m going to teach you today involves a self-hosted website and a WordPress CMS (Content Management System), that’s a completely different method.
FAQ for creating your own website
1 – What is a self-hosted website? It is a website hosted on a private server as opposed to the free websites which are hosted on this company’s server (a Weebly site is hosted on Weebly’s servers for example).
2 – Ok, but what is a server? A server is a large computer in a room of a building that you will probably never see, that stores your data. When you create a website, you will generate a lot of data. Where does this data go? It goes to the storage space you pay for on the server. Every time someone wants to see your website, their computer makes a request to this server to show it to them.
3 – So what do I do with this server? You “rent” a place on it where you store all your data; e.g. your website.
4 – Why should I prefer a paid service when I can have a free website with other services? Since your website is hosted on a server that you personally rent, you have more control over your data, you can customize your website a lot more and if one day you want to move it to another server or hand it over to someone to manage it for you will be much easier to do. It’s the same difference that exists between buying a holiday organized by a travel agent and arranging your trip. In the second case, you have full control. However, I used a free service myself for a year before switching to a more professional website.
5 – How do I choose a name for my website? Usually, the hosting provider will also sell you a domain name. Actually, you could buy the domain name from one company and the hosting service from another, but let’s keep it simple. You can buy the domain and then host that domain on a server. Once you have bought a hosting service, namely part of the space on a server, you can host many domains on it.
6 – So, who will design my website? That’s the fun part. You don’t really need a designer, you just need to buy a “theme”. A theme is like the dress of your website. If you manage your website with WordPress, you can change the dress without changing the content. Isn’t that pretty cool?
Okay, so I need to buy some server space, a domain name, a theme… seems pretty expensive! How much will this cost me? Well, let’s do a little math. Suppose you want a website for 1 year:
- – Hosting: $5.45 x 12 months = $65.40 (including the first domain name)
- – Theme : $30 on average
- – Total: $95.4 per year
But as you’ll see later, the monthly cost is even cheaper if you opt for the Decide on a 2-year plan. Let’s calculate how much it would cost then for 2 years:
- – Hosting: $4.95 x 24 months = $118.80 (including the first domain name)
- – Theme: $30 on average
- – Total: $148.40
So you can keep a website for 1 year for $95.40 or 2 Run for years for just $148.40. Not bad, right? Also, remember that since you have complete control over your website, you can change it from your room without having to give extra money to the agency that created your website!
See also: How to create an email account for your own domain name
So , are you ready to start? ?
Get a hosting service
There are many hosting providers out there. You might want to go with GoDaddy, Dreamhost, Hostgator, Eukhost, etc. What I’m going to show you today is the procedure you need to follow to get a hosting plan with Bluehost. There are two main reasons I suggest Bluehost: they allow you to install WordPress in seconds, and they have chat support that is active 24/7. The customer support they offer is the main reason I stay with them. Not many companies offer this type of customer support, and it’s really good to know that if you have an issue, you can talk to someone who will fix it for free in just minutes.
First of all, head over to bluehost .com by clicking here:
Start with Bluehost
then click the Get Started button.
Then you need to sign up for a decide to plan. As you can see in the image below there are several options, but if you’re just planning to make a website for yourself, you can stick with the simple one, which is also the cheapest.
You need to select domain names and check if it is available. Most basic domain names are already taken, so you’ll have to experiment a bit. What I really like about Bluehost is that they don’t charge you for the domain name like other providers do, so that was an extra reason for me to go with them (BTW, TranslatorThoughts.com is hosted on Bluehost)
Once you’ve found an available domain name, you’ll be taken to a form to fill out.
Here you also need to decide how long you want your website to last. Note that the longer the plan, the lower the monthly fee.If you go for the 3 year plan, you will end up paying only $3.95 per month.I would suggest that you go for the 2 year plan at least because if you are using your If you want to be successful in freelance work you need If you need to go for the cheapest option in the short-term then of course you can go for the yearly option but if you want the cheapest option in the long-term then go for the 3 years, so after you have chosen the duration you want complete the form, add your payment information and submit.
Once you have submitted the payment information, you will receive a welcome message inviting you to purchase a special offer like the one in the Show image below but you don’t have to assume it so you can just skip the option.
If you prefer the video format, this is a simple video I made so you can see the process step by step:
Then you will be prompted to create a password and login:
If you have a website with Bluehost set up, they already install WordPress for you. In the past, you had to access the control panel and look for WordPress or any other content management system (CMS) that you wanted to install. It wasn’t super complicated, but I have to say it’s much, much easier now 🙂
So you’ll be taken straight to a page where you can choose a theme (the “dress” you on your site or, in technical terms, the design)
You can also do this later, so don’t feel pressured to choose your site’s look and feel now, as WordPress always comes with a default theme. And remember, with WordPress you can always change the dress (ahem, the theme) without changing the content.
And you’re done! Whether or not you’ve already chosen your theme, setup is now complete.
And this is the “back end” of your WordPress site. The backend is the control panel where you can write all your content, add images, change the design and do things like that, while the frontend is what your visitors will see.
Remember : To your To view the website as a visitor, just go to a browser and type in your domain name.
See also: 5 Tools to Create a Professional Website for Free
To view it as an administrator, go to your browser and type your website name/wp-admin to start fitting. But we’ll see about that in a moment.
Your website isn’t live yet, you can test it and work on it as long as you like. When you’re ready, you can launch it!
And this is the second part of the video that shows you the process step by step:
As I said, If you To access your WordPress admin panel, you can go to any browser and type:
Name of your site/wp-admin
Paste Enter the username and password you wrote down earlier, and you will be taken to the WordPress dashboard, which looks like this:
From here you can create and customize the content of your website.
But first things first: You need to upload a theme.As we said before, you can think of the theme as the “dress” of your website.WordPress comes with a default theme, but since we said we want a professional website, we don’t want anything that everyone else has. So we’re going to change it. We can go to a theme marketplace, ThemeForest.com, and choose a theme from there.
Go to ThemeForest
There are hundreds of themes and everyone New ones are uploaded every day. If you need more inspiration, you can read our review of the best themes for translators. I’ve made a selection that I think are more appropriate, but if you go directly to ThemeForest.com, you’ll find even more interesting layouts find.
Upload a design
Soba Once you have selected a theme, you will need to purchase it, download it as a ZIP file, and then re-upload it to WordPress.
Click Appearance > Theme
Once you have uploaded the theme you will want to go to the left menu and explore all the features that WordPress offers. The main features are here shown:
It will take you a while to discover all of WordPress’ features and options, but it’s worth the effort, you now have a professional website, a powerful marketing tool that you can use to promote your Present services and reach potential customers.
To learn more about Bluehost and WordPress, you can You go to this YouTube playlist created by Bluehost itself.
Once you are logged in you have access to a variety of resources such as videos and tutorials.
Think Remember that Bluehost gives you 24/7 access to customer support via a chat service to help you with all sorts of technical issues. This is the number one reason I stay with them and this might be why you love Bluehost. First, click the button below:
Create your website
If this guide was useful to you and you think some of your friends might find it useful, share it Page with them!
Thanks for reading, we wish you a great career as a business linguist!
See also: How to Get High Quality Backlinks in 2022 (7 New Strategies)
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