Associate Programs Newsletter #239
Tim Warnock has identified a huge market that you’re probably overlooking.
Tim, who used to live in Silicon Valley, is now in Italy, where he speaks at seminars teaching marketers how to write for the Web.
Today he discusses info that some savvy marketers would prefer was kept secret…
CONTENTS:
1. How to tap a huge undervalued market to win more sales
2. How to increase your conversion rate
3. Why nerds are unpopular
4. Are you new to affiliate programs? Start here
5. Thought for today: What we need to make us happy
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1. How to tap a huge undervalued market to win more sales
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By Timothy Warnock
Whether you’re an affiliate or a merchant, it’s time to go global.
The Internet is growing exponentially worldwide. Some figures and statistics of this global growth that I have carefully watched and gathered over the last few years are truly mind boggling.
Some wake-up call figures:
* For 2005, English will represent only 27% of ALL Internet users – that’s nearly 800 million Internet users who won’t understand an English-only offer or site.
* Regarding online spending in 2004, the English language will represent about 56% of all online spending. This includes ALL English speaking countries put together.
* This means that an English-only offer will NOT be a part of the nearly $3,000,000,000,000 (3 trillion) of transactions that will happen outside English online. My calculator doesn’t even have space for a number that big.
* One last thing, did you know that… “A web site visitor is up to four times more likely to purchase a product or service if it is presented in his/her native language”? (Source: idc.com)
To get more detailed statistical info regarding Internet language use and ecommerce spending, you can take a look at:
https://www.translate-to-success.com/world-statistics.html?imk=stats
I don’t know about you, but I think that it’s about time that we “English speakers” should wake up and start smelling the international coffee.
This enormous market, which is literally just waking up to the Internet, like America did from ’94 to ’99, has the potential to dramatically increase our exposure and online income in time.
Allow yourself to think beyond English. It WON’T become the universally spoken or read language of the Internet overnight, perhaps never.
Before too long, there will be more Chinese people online than English.
If anything, the Internet is teaching us to adapt. It doesn’t mean we have to learn Chinese, but it IS important to recognize these new influences and possibly use them for our own growth.
Now, it would be great if it was just a matter of translating your site, and all these huge, mouth-watering numbers just transferred over, but it isn’t that easy.
Have you ever received a customer support question in another language and then tried to translate it with a machine translation, such as those offered by Google, Alta Vista, Systran, etc? It’s a great source for humor, but NOT a way to run a business!
Don’t use machine translations, except for personal use, and NEVER use them to translate your site for visitors to see, unless you want them to think that you’re a fool, just trying to make them laugh. This is NOT a solution to going global. Technology is a long way away from being able to correctly translate a human language.
I think that it’s best to have a whole view strategy of what you want to offer outside English, to whom, and how to go about it in small, relatively risk-free steps.
Increase your international investment as your international return on investment increases, step by step, till you have a full blown bilingual or multi-lingual global operation running.
If you’re an affiliate who speaks different languages fluently, consider using this skill to tap your native or acquired language markets. I’ll get to the HOW of it shortly…
This is the strategy that I suggest you use for approaching a non-English market:
1) Determine the country/language that you want to make your offer visible towards.
Right now, based on my international ONLINE SPENDING stats (more important than LANGUAGE USE stats), the two best countries/ languages to approach are Germany (for Europe) and Japan (for Asia). This is a purely ecommerce spending statistical consideration.
Perhaps one of the most important considerations to make is, do you or someone within your company or circle of collaborators speak another language?
Ideally, you need someone to help you with customer support. Preferably this should be a native speaker, but this isn’t essential. So, for example, if you have a French collaborator who is willing to help you, go for French.
2) Determine what you want to offer to this new language/country. Start small.
Don’t go and translate your whole site or 200-page ebook without doing some tests first. This could be an expensive investment and could backfire painfully in your face.
Start with a page or two, perhaps your sales letter page, and run your tests.
If your French visitors are responding positively to your sales page in French, then instead of sending them to a translated product (this will come later), send them to a page that explains to them (in French) that you are running tests towards making your product available in the French language.
Kindly explain that for now the product is available only in English. Ask them to leave their name and email address if they are interested in a French version, which you will give to them at a great discount if you do translate.
Also ask them if they would be interested in promoting such a product in French for you (create a base of ready French affiliates to help you), and a survey base of information.
Your test results will show you whether it will be worth the investment to translate the whole product for that particular language.
For physical products, it may be much easier, especially considering that international shipping is getting better all the time. Just make sure you have someone on call to help you with your target language customer support questions.
I can help you find a translator to help you long term (at a low price) if you need it. Just write to me at
translators AT translate-to-success DOT com
3) Doing the actual translation. Be careful!
If you are translating a sales letter or some other landing page(s), make sure that you do it right the first time. Make sure you get someone who really knows what they are doing, even if you have to spend a little more.
You may need a translator who understands copywriting in their native language and/or search engine optimization. In this case, it may be best to go with a quality translation agency that already has a huge database of available translators and experience in these matters. A good agency will also guarantee their work.
I offer a service (free of charge and obligation) to help you find such a qualified translator for your specific needs. It will save you time, help guarantee quality, and you will have my experience and willingness to help you out directly.
You can see this service by clicking here:
https://www.translate-to-success.com/translation-service.html?imk=find
4) Gather your target language visitors.
If you simply translate a page, you will receive some traffic from Google. However, just as in English, if you want to win the search engine wars, your page needs to be optimized in the target language.
If you get a search engine optimization professional to do it for you (you can also ask for a translator who knows his/her stuff), it will certainly cost you more.
There may be a middle ground that you can take. Do some homework in advance on your own, and help out a normal (good) web translator.
You can find out which foreign keywords to use with Overture, Google, and a couple other PPC engines (Espotting comes to mind), and if I’m not mistaken, even SiteBuildIt! is working on something similar towards finding international keywords, to be released – I hope – soon with their Super Brainstormer – at least Bob (VP at SiteSell) has told me this personally.
Anyway, to start, you need a good translation dictionary. I use Babylon Pro from https://www.babylon.com . It’s a fantastic program. I believe they also have a smaller free version.
Babylon will help you determine the translation of a general keyword that represents your web page theme.
In my case, let’s say the keyword is “translation”. Using Babylon, I can see that in Italian the keyword is “traduzione”. Then I go to Overture, Espotting, or Google Adwords, and type in “traduzione” in the Keyword Suggestion Tool and – voilà! – I find a nice list of keywords to use for my Italian page.
Give this list to your translator, and ask them to use four or five of those keywords interwoven generally and one keyword in particular, in your Title, Headline, Meta Tags, outgoing links, and about 10% density throughout the text (at this point the translator will not necessarily do a literal translation). They may not do the best job of search engine optimization, but this is better than nothing.
You can also use Google Adwords in most countries and languages. This is a great way to test your offer and foreign language conversion rate.
You might be surprised at what a translation can do for your rankings and traffic in Google.
I have seen some very interesting cases, in the travel industry in particular with highly competitive keywords, of high rankings showing up for sites with translations. It may be worth experimenting.
I have seen international marketers try to keep this info secret… Shhh!
Contact me if you want more info and I will point you in the direction of some very interesting articles:
seoarticles AT translate-to-success DOT com
Wrapping it up…
Don’t just dive head first into the world of translations – you might find the pool empty. Take it slowly, testing along the way.
However, don’t let the unknown scare you into inaction. The world is much bigger than English and there is no reason why you can’t tap this enormous resource. I am convinced that it is the wave of the future.
Also, don’t let certain statistics fool you.
For example, Chinese may even surpass English as an online language in the next few years, but the Chinese are coming from a cash culture and don’t yet believe in credit cards or online purchases. Their online spending stats reflect this.
Relatively smaller countries like Japan, Germany, Korea and France are much stronger spenders, or at least on the same level as China, with many fewer Internet users – a much sounder business consideration.
If you have questions or doubts, let me help you.
I am originally from Silicon Valley – when it was just fruit orchards – and have been living in Italy for 12 years now. I know what it means to translate daily, and work in a slightly different culture.
In most cases, the language and culture barrier is quite thin. We laugh at the same jokes and cry at the same tragedies. You just need the appropriate caution and willingness to try.
I am always happy to hear from sincere folks and help you if I can to penetrate these thin barriers.
—
Timothy Warnock is the founder of https://www.translate-to-success.com?imk=tran-info
Contact: warnock AT translate-to-success DOT com
Uniting Worlds and Opening Doors
Translation and International Marketing Info and Solutions
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2. How to increase your conversion rate
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Tim Warnock enjoys giving affiliates tips to help them improve their conversion rates.
Sometimes, he says, a small modification to a page can quadruple your response rate.
If you want to spice up your articles and make more sales – and who doesn’t? – you’ll find Tim’s tips well worth studying.
Here are some of his posts on the Associate Programs Forum:
https://www.associateprograms.com/discus/viewtopic.php?p=15465
https://www.associateprograms.com/discus/viewtopic.php?t=3587
https://www.associateprograms.com/discus/viewtopic.php?t=3691
You can easily find more of his helpful posts by clicking on “profile” at the bottom of any of his posts in the forum.
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3. Why nerds are unpopular
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Remember the nerds at school? Perhaps you were one of them.
The following article by Paul Graham isn’t about affiliate marketing, so you can skip it if you’re in a hurry, but I found it fascinating.
“Why nerds are unpopular”
https://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
(A link popularity check at https://www.marketleap.com/publinkpop/ shows more than 31,500 links to Paul’s site – a nice example of how writing interesting articles earns free publicity.)
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5. Thought for today: What we need to make us happy
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“We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.” – Albert Einstein.
All the best
Allan Gardyne