It’s to believe that I’m already almost finished with my sabbatical from the translation world. I haven’t logged into my Proz account in 9 months. I haven’t participated in any of the grammatically immaculate arguments in the Facebook groups, and I’ve only translated maybe 5,000 words. Working in search engine optimization has been a big change for me and my wife. And now, as we approach the end of our experiment, we have to ask ourselves: do we really want to go back?

Well… let’s talk about that.

There are three main things that I’m thinking about right now: how much money I make (’cause, let’s be honest, we’re in this for the money), how much stress I’m under, and how much time I actually spend working and how mobile I can be.

I think it’s safe to say that I make more money as an SEO than I do as a translator. However, I find that I’m still facing the same basic problems. Namely, I’m still not charging enough. During my first years as a freelance translator, and now as a freelance SEO, I was happy to just pay my bills. I was taking on $0.03 per word projects (13,000 words due in three days) and exhausted. Now, as an SEO, I’m building websites, ranking websites, managing Amazon stores and social media accounts (putting in about 11 hours a day). Sure, I’m making a bit more money, but I’m still working a lot more than I would like to for the amount that I’m earning.

I think that both examples stem from the same issues. First, I didn’t have a clear idea of how long these projects would take. 10,000 words in a day? If it’s text that I’m comfortable with and that doesn’t require any research, I can probably knock out about 1,000 words an hour. I can only do that for the first three hours, though. After that, I start to slow down. Even more so if I haven’t replaced my blood supply with caffeine. That being said, working under ideal conditions and limiting myself to 2,500 words per day, I can $500 in about 2.5 hours and call it a day. That rarely happens. I normally translate about 500 words per hour, so I’ll spend 5 hours working on a 2,500 word document and still make those same $500. Not too bad.

With SEO, I generally have to spend a long time researching and crunching numbers. I can easily spend 5 hours just sifting through keywords, but that’s not always an effective use of my time. YouTube optimization is the most efficient thing that I can do, since it’s what I do best. I can turn an afternoon of work into $4,000, but these projects are also few and far between. Right now, I’m working for the SEO equivalent of $0.03 per word.

I think that the key is to find industries or niches where your knowledge and experience can be used to their greatest effect. I wonder, if I were to stay with SEO, where I would be five years from now, or even just one year, once I have developed my client base and found the most effective uses of my time as I have with translation.

I used to think that translation was really stressful. There was this constant doubt in my mind that I chose the wrong word, or that I sent the wrong invoice (did I even send that invoice?), or if I would be paid for my work. Again, over time that went away. I gained confidence in my skill as a translator, set up an automated invoicing tool and found a good lawyer for those clients that tried to screw me over (and charged in advance).  The key was to stop thinking like an employee and to remember that I was a business. I was a professional and, in the end, they were just another client. The key was to set boundaries. I would not answer emails after a certain time nor on weekends. I would not negotiate my rate. And I most certainly would not take any crap from anyone. It was that simple. Just learn to say “no”, please!

This is something that I’m still working on with SEO. It’s funny how we have to learn the same lessons over and over again. Now that I’m a little more experienced in this field, I know how long it will take me to do certain things. I know how hard other tasks are, and I know how much my competition is charging. For example, I’ve taken on a couple of clients that are paying me only a fraction of what they probably should, given the benefits that they receive from my work and the amount of time and resources that I have to dedicate to their projects. These also happen to be my two first clients. The problem is that we now spend so much time working on these projects that we don’t have time to go out and find new ones. We have severely limited ourselves in regards to how much we could be making. One of these clients even recently cut our budget in half, but we’ve been working on that project for so long and we were so invested in it that we took the project anyways. At this point, it’s too late for us to back out and the client continues to add more and more to our plate. Honestly, I think that we will fire them as soon as we are able. We didn’t learn to say “no” at the beginning and now it’s very hard to start.

All of that has led to a lot of stress for us. The client calls before we start the work day and continues calling and emailing us well into the night. I’m about to send off our invoice for the work that we’ve done this month and we wonder whether or not they’ll fight us over it. I should mention that rent is due tomorrow and if we’re not paid, we could end up on the streets (again, even though I could make $4,000 in a day with a YouTube video, I spend all my time working for this one client).

The last thing that I wanted to compare and contrast between translation and SEO is our mobility – or our ability to work from other locations besides our home office.

With translation, it’s actually pretty easy. You just grab a good laptop and go to your favorite cafe. You need a solid internet connect to share and receive files, to bid on projects, and communicate with your client. You can, in theory, translate while on vacation. The downside to all of this, though, is the amount of time and focus that translation requires. You will have a hard time translating at a disco or on the beach.

SEO is even more mobility friendly. In many cases, I can perform most of my work from my cellphone or tablet. The other nice thing is that I get to charge a monthly fee. If nothing goes wrong with the site, I only hop in for an hour or two, make some updates, and create a report for my client, and get paid. Some of that can even be automated. It requires more time and work to set up, but you can enjoy the benefits of that work after it’s complete. Unless, of course, you pick up a client like I did that requires constant attention. But, in theory, I could make a full-time income using only my cellphone.

There was one time that I wanted to buy a video game, but my wife said that we were on a strict budget and couldn’t spend any more money on games. So, I recorded a quick video and posted it to YouTube with an affiliate offer. By the time we had finished our shopping, the video and affiliate had actually generated enough money for me to buy the game without taking anything from the budget. That made my wife a little angry.

I have also translated simple texts from my cellphone. I bought a neat little tablet just for that reason. I have Word and a keyboard. I can print documents out, so I have a hard copy to work from, and I’m all set.

– I am going to continue working in video game translation when the opportunities arise
– I am going to focus more on helping other translators to grow their businesses and get found online (using what I’ve learned in SEO)
– I am going to start a training program for translators that want to learn how to translate search engine optimized texts
– I’m going to fire that client
– I’m going to start another YouTube channel just for translation content. The other one has grown out of the industry
– I’m going to keep working as an SEO, but focus on different countries and languages. So, I’m going to need SEO trained translators

– I’m also going to travel with my wife and dog