OK, so you've taken the first step and signed up for your free TM-Town account. Awesome! You may have also already added a profile image, spent some time deliberating over a great tagline, and composed some catchy prose for your 'About Me'. Now what?

Well, you have only scratched the surface of what TM-Town has to offer...and you have only just begun to improve your chances of finding success on TM-Town. To unlock the true potential and benefits that TM-Town offers you need to upload your prior work to your account. This could be a translation memory file, a glossary you created on a recent project, or even a sample translation you show prospective clients.

You might now be thinking - "Upload my work? Why?". Well, good question. TM-Town is a different and unique service that doesn't fit the mold of what many translators are used to. Sometimes we receive chat messages and emails thinking we are a translation agency (hint: we are not) or a typical translator portal (hint: nope, not that either). In fact, TM-Town is a new type of translation enablement platform that uses patent pending technology to match you to incoming translation jobs based on your prior work - while ensuring your work stays your work and always stays private and secure.

Without further ado, here are 10 reasons you should upload your prior translation work to your TM-Town account:

1. Get discovered by clients using our Nakōdo translator search engine
   TM-Town's first-of-its-kind translator search engine takes the text a client needs translated and returns translators who have uploaded similar work to TM-Town. By uploading your work you have a chance to get matched with clients searching for help in your working fields.
   
2. Improve your rank in TM-Town's traditional directory
   One of the important driving factors behind your ranking in TM-Town's traditional directory is the amount of work you have loaded to TM-Town. The more work you load, the higher you will rank. Even loading one document can greatly improve your standing by bumping you above translators who have not loaded any work.
3. Search your TMs and terms
   Work you load into your TM-Town account can be easily searched using TM-Town's simple yet powerful search tool. Not only can this be done in the browser, but TM-Town also has CAT tool connections (currently SDL Trados Studio 2015 and CafeTran) to help you search your work directly from your CAT tool.
4. Receive more visibility throughout the site
   Did you know that the translators featured on the home page are those translators who have most recently loaded work? Not only can you increase your visibility on the home page which is the first landing page for many clients and agencies but you can also increase your odds of getting discovered in other areas of the site such as the Browse Translators by Language Pair and Browse Translators by Fields of Expertise sections.
5. Automatic term extraction and easy glossary creation
   TM-Town will automatically extract terms from your translation memory files allowing you to quickly create a new glossary.
6. Sell your terminology glossaries
   Join the 169 translators who have already made 857 sales on the TM-Town Terminology Marketplace. It is super easy to get started and become a seller yourself.
7. Convert file types
   Do you have a Wordfast TM that you'd like to convert to TMX? Want to export your translation memory files into Excel? Do you have some dead PDF source and target documents you'd like to turn into a translation memory file? TM-Town makes it super easy to convert to and from many formats including TMX, XLIFF, TBX, CSV, and XLSX. Not only that but you can use TM-Town's alignment tool to turn your monolingual source and target documents into a translation memory file which you can than easily export to use in your CAT tool of choice.
8. Back up your work
   TM-Town makes it easy to back up your work off-site. We have already been contacted by 2 translators who benefited from having their work backed up on TM-Town.
9. Collaborate with colleagues
   Need to share a TM with another translator who you are collaborating with on a project? TM-Town makes it simple to share files with other TM-Town members. Not only that, but using our CAT tool integrations you can collaborate in real-time on a shared TM with multiple translators.
10. View your productivity data
    When you upload a TM file TM-Town will automatically analyze any productivity data stored in the file and present the analysis of that data to you in some cool charts and visualizations so you can better understand how you work.
    

Remember, merely creating a TM-Town account is only the first step. The real value you get out of TM-Town will be based on what you put in - in the work you upload. The more work you upload the more you can benefit from everything TM-Town has to offer.