It’s often during a downturn that business people realise they’ve got to branch out to get more clients. One easy source of new customers that you may not have considered before is to optimise your site for international visitors.Gaining international traffic this way could land you with plenty of new customers, and prove to bring in valuable revenue.

Did you realise that there are now more non-native English speakers than there are native ones? The good news is that these people are obvious candidates to be new customers, since they should alread by able to understand your site.

However, you do still need to be quite careful. Non-native English speakers are all at different levels of ability. Your sales pitch may therefore have to be cleaned up to make it more readable. For that reason, try re-writing your core sales page to lessen the effect of slang or jargon confusing your new potential audience.

Another option would be to create a ‘localised’ website – one targeted specifically at an audience (say, India) which does not use the local language but keeps the language simple.You might also choose to show your cultural credentials by including country-specific information on your new site.

To go even further, a site that is serious about attracting customers in other countries could opt for a full site translation. Every page could be translated into a different language, though this is quite a costly and time-consuming exercise.

The compromise solution is to translate only part of your website.Alternatively, you could focus on a language-specific email marketing campaign that stays in touch with your international audience and at the same time addresses them in the language they find easiest to understand.

Are you looking for a customized calendar for your business? We make a customize calendar that contains holiday dates for over 200 countries – brilliant if you’re operating over international borders.

Tags: Business, clients, doing business, international, websites

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 at 4:40 pm and is filed under Business and Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.