tranfree issue 25 - 5th February 2001

How To Earn Money From The Clients You Refuse

by Alex Eames

Do you ever get asked by clients to handle jobs in languages you don't do?

We quite often do at ALMAL. Our site generates quite a lot of traffic from direct clients who actually don't seem to bother reading that we specialise in Eastern European languages (principally Polish).

They're always asking us for languages like French, German and Spanish. It's a bit annoying that people can't be bothered to read the stuff we've painstakingly prepared and put out on the web. (Please don't send CV's for French Spanish and German - we deliberately don't do all languages. Specialisation gets you MORE work, not less!)

But these days what we do is send these referrals to one of two agencies in London that we have referral arrangements with. What happens here is...

if a lead turns into a client,
we get a lifetime commission (10%)
on all the revenue from that client.

For one phone call or email, that's a fantastic deal. Obviously, these are agencies that we know, and have a long working relationship with. We trust them. That is the key to this kind of arrangement.

You Have To Trust Them To Pay You Your Commissions

Ultimately, there's no point in referring leads to someone who will not pay you your commissions. So it's got to be someone you know you can trust.

You will be surprised how many of your existing agency clients will be willing to form this kind of a referral relationship with you (almost all of them). If you can get 2 or 3 of these, you can offer the leads a choice and you get paid no matter who they choose. Nice one!

"Hands-free" Income

We're not talking megabucks here, but new clients usually start small and the workload grows over time. Since this is a lifetime arrangement (meaning that it lasts as long as the client remains a client) you will benefit from all future jobs.

Once you've passed over the contact, your involvement ends. So this is a lifetime stream of "hands-free" income - WHEHEEEEY!

It's the closest you can get to royalties without actually being an author - Top Quality Income.

$2,000 A Year For One Phone Call Every 2 Months

You don't know how much this will bring you. Probably it won't be enough to retire on. But over the next 20 years it could grow into a substantial...

...money tree.