Recommendations for Multilingo
There are two main reasons for you to maintain sites beyond the borders of the English-speaking world.
The first and most obvious is to promote yourself and your products on the respective markets with the intention of direct sales.
The second reason, less obvious but most likely more important is to build assets which can provide relevance and link juice to your English sites.
If you want to directly sell on foreign markets, you most likely will want to have the content of your English sites straightforwardly translate into the respective languages. If you look at the really “worldwide” markets, this would most likely imply Mandarin, German, Japanese, Russian, French, Arabic, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. With these languages and including English you would address about 95% of world’s spending power.
As decent translations into any of these languages would not really come cheap, you would first want to check if the respective markets would appear promising for your product. If you sell bibles, Mandarin would not bring you many customers, nor would Arabic boost your pork sausage sales or German increase your turnover for incense or pickled tea leaves…
So first check your markets, then hire your translators and find out: you’ll make more money.
Things are different when you just want to build web properties to boost your English sites rankings.
In this case any language will do, and you will not need to have anything professionally translated.
You most likely will not even need any specific content. All you are looking for here is unique content that provides meaningful links to your English sites.
Preferably in a language for which you can purchase content cheaply. So let Hungarian students write about soccer in Hungarian and link to your sport site, Filipino masseuses about spa products in Tagalong and link to your health sites – take whatever you get cheaply in any language.
You can hire your whole personal crew for ten bucks a day to supply you with multilingual content and indeed should do so to increase the relevance of your English sites.
If these people supply their articles to fill domains you own, you have finally become a developer of truly worldwide online assets.
No matter what you are building your non-English sites for, make sure that each language gets its own domain. Only then will the SE’s reward you fully.
By Jose May 28, 2012 - 8:09 pm
You have at least convinced me enough to give it a try. It’s quite some work after all and I am not so sure if I feel comfortable right now when looking at some text in Cyrillic and thinking that this is (or at least should be) my own content from my own site.
By admin May 30, 2012 - 4:19 am
Hi Jose
I would suggest creating a separate site for Cyrillic. This way it doesn’t look like spam to your English readers, and feels like home to your Cyrillic readers. Keep them separate and the search engines will reward you more.
By Lee May 29, 2012 - 7:37 am
That was back to the roots for me. I speak Chinese actually only with my parents. It was kind of a strange feeling for me to actually start writing writing Chinese for my own website. But hey, it really brings traffic… thanks dudes
By Frank May 29, 2012 - 3:57 pm
Proper translations can get expensive, so i would suggest that route for people with their own products. If your marketing someone else product and only earning a small commission you could copy/paste into babblefish or the G translate tool. That would be a quick and free way to test different languages for a niche. Conversions will always be higher with the properly translated and well written stuff though.
By admin May 30, 2012 - 4:24 am
Hi Frank
The auto translations work too. However the output will smell a bit spammy to a native speaker of that language. So you would want to redirect the traffic to a properly translated sales page for maximum conversions.
Cheers
Ryan
By Son of Spam May 29, 2012 - 9:59 pm
World domination here I come!
By admin May 30, 2012 - 4:27 am
I like your name. If you spam, might as well spam with glam!
By Brian May 30, 2012 - 1:12 am
Sounds all quite cool to me, but could you not possibly also give some recommendations about where to find good and cheap translations? You seem to have quite some experience in this field, so maybe share some suggestions?
By Terry Chadban May 30, 2012 - 7:05 am
Hey all,
If you want to test the waters before you go ahead and start hiring translators, have a look at a free WP plugin called Transposh. I have used it on a number of websites, and got great results from it.
One of my websites actually made it to no: 2 in Google China for a very tough keyword, so I was stoked with that! Definitely worth a try, and if you start to get traffic from it, then you can look at hiring native-speakers to translate your pages — or leave it to Transposh!
Terry