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Changes in my life and business

Hi! Hope your week was good and now you're ready for a new blog post :)
This post is about some changes in my life and business that occurred since I wrote about my goals in winter. Do you remember my post "How well I have achieved my goals for 2010"? It's time to see what's changed.

First of all, my goal was to reach 150 readers in 2011. Right now I have 17 email subscribers to my posts.  I also have 4 members who joined me through the "Become a reader" top menu option. So that makes 21 people. Many thanks to each one of you who found my blog interesting enough to subscribe for it! I also have 114 Facebook fans and about half of them read my blog on a regular basis. I also have some readers on Twitter (to be honest, I have about 380 followers. I don't think all of them read my blog, but I do know of at least some of them), so I can say that right now about 100 people read my blog regularly! I'd like to thank each one of my readers! It's such a pleasure to know that my experience is valuable to you as well! That's a great honor for me.

I am also very happy when I get comments on my blog from my readers. I love to hear what you think and learn from your experience! I have to admit that I have a little problem here with Blogger. I noticed that people from other countries who have blogs on Blogger can make the comments open for others so they don't have to serve as moderators for their own blog. For some reason the Russian interface doesn't let me do that, so I have to approve of the comments before they appear. Please don't get unhappy with me if you want to comment something and don't see the comment right away. I don't want to be the Big Brother but so far I haven't been able to solve this problem. There are instructions how to open the blog for comments, but they are for the English version of Blogger (mine is automatically in Russian) and I just don't see this button I need to click :(

As for my second goal - growing in quality - it's harder to measure. But thanks to Twitter and Facebook I read a lot of useful materials about translation and freelancing business and I am learning so much! I can also see that I'm getting better and better in finding the right words in my own language when I'm translating, so I like my translations a lot more than I used to :)

I am also starting to see the power of social marketing and networking. I've already done some projects for clients who found me through Twitter or through my colleagues who met me on Twitter. This is just so amazing!

This year has also brought an important decision to serve as a ProZ.com moderator. As much as I'm used to free-lance.ru, the latest changes that the website administration carried out have really made me think about quitting my membership there and concentrating on ProZ.com and my own marketing efforts. I hope and pray that the Lord will bless this decision.

I've also made some changes in my life to bring more balance between personal life and work (and I do believe that it makes a direct influence on my quality!). First of all, no matter how busy I am I still go for a two hour walk with my daughter every day. Well, sometimes it's a bit shorter and sometimes it's longer, but I do it every day and I've done it during the whole summer. It is so refreshing! The other thing that I resumed is reading for pleasure: not for my Sunday school classes or for my work, but just for myself. It feels so good to have even 15-30 minutes a day just for reading. Besides, I hope it will help my daughter to see that reading IS an important skill. So far she doesn't like it and tries to avoid our reading lessons as much as possible, so maybe my own example will teach her (hopefully).

And the last thing that I've learned is that I should never procrastinate. I know it sounds trivial, but there are some things that I used to put away all the time which led to problems in various spheres of my life. So now I'm in the process of re-prioritizing my life to make sure that all the important things get done first and all the other things are not neglected.

So far, these are the most important changes that have happened in my life. Hope that their result will be more balance in my life and more productivity in my business.

Comments

  1. Олечка, как всегда-молодец! Слава Богу!Оля Э

    ReplyDelete
  2. Оленька! Ты такая молодец! Ты приняла такое правильное решение насчет книг и прогулок! Но самое главное, что ты можешь вот так ставить перед собой цели и стремиться их выполнять. Это то, что я пока так и не научилась делать. Таня М.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Olenka, is Twitter really worth it? I know that social media marketing is becoming more and more popular, but is it effective? I only have FB account, but I already find it time consuming to post something there from time to time. I know I probably should be more active in social media, but I am not sure it really helps to attract high profile customers. Magda Szymańska

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi Magda! Thank you for your valuable comment. I do think that Twitter is a useful tool for people who use it right. Some people make it very clear that it's all about marketing for them. They retweet every single message that has their name, seldome interact with others etc. To me, twitter is not just about marketing. It's about networking, learning from my colleagues, getting to know other professionals in my field and sharing some good links that I find. It's more about sharing our experiences with one another. I haven't made a research yet about how many translators actually land jobs through Twitter. I got two projects thanks to my colleagues I met there. Given the fact that I haven't been using Twitter very long, I think it's a good result. Hope that answers your question. I am planning to write a blog post abaout social media in the near future so I'm doing a lot of thinking and analyzing now.

    ReplyDelete

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