Is translating a website really worth while?
1 March 2007It’s surprising that very few marketers talk about translating websites. Why do you think that is? Could it be something to do with “do as they do, not as they say”? You guessed it. Translations of websites have been around for a while now but very few online marketers have really bothered doing anything with it. Why?
Did you know that English speaking internet users only account for around 35% of the total online market. That means that you can overnight, without bringing out any new products, virtually triple your market. If you have a product whether it is jewelry or a digital product like software, translating your website into other languages makes a lot of sense. Another way you can significantly benefit from translated websites is with adsense or another pay-per-click sponsored advertising program. The really cool thing is that if you use Google Adsense on your sites, when their translated, the ads are translated too!! Check out this translated site I’ve started to do. At times, English ads still pop up but once Google caches all these pages, they’ll know it’s in the translated language and automatically bring up the appropriate ads in the translated language. There’s a couple of improvements I will do in future translations such as not necessarily have the RSS feeds, and translate the breadcrumb navigation separately but overall, translating is a very profitable thing to do. The main points to take notice of is that not only are you tapping into a larger market, but generally, the competition is much, much less than the hugely competitive English-speaking marketplace which means that (a) you’ll typically sell more, and (b) you’ll get your site more highly ranked in the search engines due to the lower competition. This additional traffic will have very positive effects for your primary or root site which would still be in English.
Now, like everything in life, their is a right way to do translations and a wrong way. To start with don’t use on-the-fly translation services. Why not? Well, you won’t get any additional pages/content written. Therefore, you won’t get the benefit of the extra content. You won’t get ads displayed in the translated language (they will still appear in English which is pretty useless for a person that only speaks Japanese or Spanish). You won’t get the additional benefit of creating traffic from non-English sources as there will be no non-English pages indexed.
I could go on and on, but probably the best thing to do now is check out what I think is the best website translation solution for online marketers. Yes, I do use it so I can personally vouch for it. It is Search Engine friendly which is really important. It’s quick. It’s easy. It gives you real benefits in the marketplace. And it’s relatively cheap. No monthly charges and only $67 bucks. If your serious about improving your site, your traffic, and your profits, check it out. Non-English people are not going away and they’ll become an ever increasing part of the online community so remember, if your only marketing to English-speaking customers, your only marketing to a third of the market… that’s a lot of money your leaving on the table.
I would love to hear your comments on translating websites. Personally, I think this is one of the biggest (if not the biggest) opportunities that are currently available to online marketers.
Written by Michael Constantinos - SmartInternetBusiness.org
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