Achieve more in life.
Christian Arno
This user hasn't shared any biographical information
Homepage: http://www.lifehack.org
Posts by Christian Arno
5 Strategies for Marketing Your Foreign Language Ecommerce Website
Oct 19th
In my last two articles for Lifehack, I looked at why small ecommerce businesses should embrace the foreign language internet, and the tricks companies need to look out for when selling overseas on foreign online marketplaces.
This time, I’d like to delve into the five simple strategies you need to employ on an ongoing basis to make sure that your foreign language ecommerce website is performing in the search engines.
Let’s say that you’ve done your research online using a tool like Google’s Global Market Finder, and you’ve identified an overseas market where your product or service might have a customer base.
You’ve had your website content professionally translated and localized, your website set-up has been optimized for its new markets (navigation, design, etc) , you’ve researched the top performing keywords for your product in the target language and used them to optimize your content, and you’ve launched your new site on a subdomain off your main site, or better yet, its own country-code Top Level Domain.
Now how do you get your site to appear in the high traffic top three results on Google (or the local equivalent) for your chosen keywords? Here’s how:
Link-building
The number one way to climb the search results for your chosen keywords is to build links to your website using your keywords as the anchor text. The key here is that quality is more important than quantity – a few links from editorial websites with high Alexa rankings will be far more valuable than a bunch of links from low value directories or unrelated blogs.
The best way to build links is to engage native speaking PR and copywriting experts, who understand how to contact the editors of relevant industry websites in the local internet to pitch expert content, and can then write that content and optimize it with your keywords.
Ongoing Keyword Research
Keywords are not static – search trends are constantly changing across all languages. So while you may be doing well for your main keywords for which you’ve been building links, you also need to have your search specialists monitoring the performance of your top keywords and identifying new ‘long-tail’ keywords in the target language which are generating significant traffic.
New Optimized Content
But what do you do with these new keywords once you’ve found them? It’s not always feasible to add a new static page to your website for every new keyword opportunity, bulking it up until your site becomes a misshapen Frankenstein monster with pages tacked on all over, like the New York subway of websites.
This is where a blog on your foreign language website will come in handy – not only does it keep your content ticking over and fresh, but you can also use posts to address new keyword opportunities.
Paid Search
Paid Search is the best way to get to the top of the search results immediately, and to test the performance of your chosen keywords, with a guaranteed return on investment (since you only pay per click). Your multilingual search specialists should use your paid search campaigns to monitor the performance of your top keywords, as well as testing out new opportunities.
Social Media
Last, but certainly not least, is social media – and while it’s near impossible to calculate social media marketing’s ROI, online businesses simply can’t afford to ignore social media in the 21st century. You should set-up profiles on the popular social networks in your target country (Facebook and Twitter are good bets, but local champions such as Qzone in China and Orkut in Brazil are also important) and keep your profiles updated regularly (several times a week at least) with useful, engaging, correctly translated content. Videos, competitions and other interactive content is particularly good!
Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation agency Lingo24, and a regular industry pundit on the foreign language internet. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries, including the likes of MTV and World Bank. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.
5 Tips for Taking Home Businesses to the Retail Worldwide
Sep 1st
Thanks to the explosion in popularity of shopping at online marketplaces like eBay, Etsy, adflyer, Folksy and others, small retailers and home businesses are now able to sell their goods to customers around the world.
If you’ve got a home business selling anything from handmade jewelry or vintage clothes to pet accessories, chances are you’ve already dabbled with an online store at the major English language online marketplaces like eBay. But have you considered expanding beyond English?
There are nearly two billion people online worldwide, but only around 34 million are native English speakers – and the vast majority of online shoppers require information in their native language before making a purchase. That means if you’re only selling online in English, you’re reaching less than 2% of your potential online audience!
Here’s how you can get a greater slice of those international markets…
1) Look into foreign online shopping platforms
eBay is undoubtedly the world’s biggest online marketplace for small retailers, with 38 localized versions for all the main European and Asian ecommerce countries, and it makes a great starting place for international versions of your online store.
However, there are also other popular online marketplaces in different countries, which are worth looking into. Taobao is China’s largest online marketplace, generating an annual turnover of more than $80 billion USD. It operates similar to eBay, and there’s also a thriving economy of Chinese consultants helping foreign businesses to sell via Taobao.
Likewise, PriceMinister is the most popular online marketplace in many European countries, and MercadoLibre has established itself as the ‘eBay of Latin America’. It’s worth doing a little online research before entering a foreign market to find out where people are shopping.
2) Get your sales pitch properly translated
The key difference with foreign online marketplaces, of course, is language – eBay España is in Spanish, eBay Portugal is in Portuguese, etc. This means that you’ll need to get your shop and product descriptions translated into these languages by a professional.
Online machine translation programs ought to be sufficient to understand incoming orders, or to create your profile in the first place, but they’re not accurate enough to be trusted for your sales pitch – incorrect terminology or bad spelling and grammar will destroy a potential client’s view of your trustworthiness.
3) Set your prices for the local market
Before you jump in with an online store for Taobao or MercadoLibre, though, it’s worth checking what price you can charge for your goods in the local economy, and whether that will present enough of a margin to make it profitable.
One of the major barriers to shoppers around the world buying from foreign stores is the comparatively high prices, created either by high exchange rates or differing local product values. For instance, the current strength of the Australian dollar means that it’s often cheaper for Australian shoppers to purchase goods from foreign online shopping sites and pay for the shipping than it is for them to buy locally. Conversely, small Australian retailers are finding it hard to sell overseas without dramatically reducing their prices.
By looking at the exchange rates and the prices set by your competitors in foreign markets, you’ll get a good idea for potential profit margins. Even if the profit margin is small, you may find over time that the sheer quantity of goods sold makes up for the lower prices – or you may gradually whittle your international efforts down to just a few foreign stores.
4) Be aware of foreign payment systems
The second major barrier for online shoppers is payment systems – if you only accept credit or debit card payments, but your customers in China don’t use credit cards and prefer to pay by Alipay, then you’re going to see a lot of abandoned shopping carts. Before launching your online store, it’s worth doing some online research, or purchasing market reports from consultancies like Econsultancy or yStats, to figure out which payment systems you’ll need to offer for each country.
5) Research postage and shipping carefully
The last step to ensuring profitability and practicality is making sure that you can actually ship your goods to the foreign countries in question, and at a cost which won’t price your goods out of reach for the locals. How reliable is the local postal service? What postage options can you offer to make your products trustworthy and attractive for local consumers? Indeed, would it be cheaper to ship your goods en masse to the country in question and employ a local agent to post purchased items locally?
These are all questions you need to consider before going multilingual across foreign online marketplaces – but the potential for new sales vastly outweighs the hassles of making your home business international.
Source: Common Sense Advisory
Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation agency Lingo24, and a regular industry pundit on the foreign language internet. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries, including the likes of MTV and World Bank. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.
Small Business Ideas for Going International
Aug 4th
Congratulations – you’ve taken the plunge and launched your own small business in a difficult economy. Since you’re a Lifehack reader, it’s likely that your business has an online element – an ecommerce website, social media presence, etc. It’s also likely that your web presence is English language only, and you only receive patronage from English-speaking customers.
But why? Only 27% of all web users speak English – that means you’re missing out on nigh-on three-quarters of your potential online audience. In fact, no matter what sector you’re in, you’ll find it easier to rank on search engines in languages other than English, because there’s comparatively far less content and search engine competition.
It may seem daunting to think about exporting your products or services to countries where you don’t speak the native language, but in fact it’s a relatively easy process to test the waters in foreign markets with micro-sites – and thanks to tools like Google Translate and others that we’ll come to later, it’s also inexpensive. It’s a relatively simple five-step process to take your small business ideas out to the world.
1) Brainstorm markets
Your first step into international export is to use your knowledge of the global economy and world cultures to brainstorm countries where you think there may be a gap for your product. Let’s say you’re a designer of indie video games. You know that emerging markets like China and South Korea have rapidly growing economies, and you also know that culturally they’re very fond of technology and gaming – so it’s probably worth looking at launching a micro-site for those two countries!
2) Google Global Market Finder
This handy tool, Google’s Global Market Finder, can help you test your theories. Brainstorm your list of English keywords (for instance, ‘videogames’) and select your region to test the traffic for its local equivalents. With the example above, it turns out that the markets with the highest search volumes for ‘videogames’, or the translated equivalent, are India, Japan and the Philippines – interesting…
3) Translate your micro-sites
Now you know which markets to target, your next step is to create your micro-sites (around five pages is average), get your content translated and localized (which means paying attention to local references, measurements, currencies, etc) and launch it – preferably on a local domain hosted in-country, or otherwise on a subdomain off your main site (you can always shift it to a local server later).
4) Optimize
But make sure before you launch that your website is optimized with your top keywords, which you will have decided upon by brainstorming, researching your local competitors, translating your English key terms and researching all of these using Google’s keyword tools.
5) Promote
Last, but not least, spread the word, by content marketing to relevant local websites (and building links), putting out press releases, and establishing your local social media presence (a foreign language Twitter account is a great way to quickly make a splash, but that’s a topic for another blog).
To turn your cottage industry into an international exporter, the steps are simple but the rewards are many – remember, on the internet no one knows your company is just one guy and a dog.
Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation agency Lingo24, and a regular industry pundit on the foreign language internet. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries, including the likes of MTV and World Bank. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.