Do They Speak English?
 by: Charles Jr Jean

Double your customer base… by repeating the same things!

Are you unknowingly restricting your market to more than half of your potential customer base? Are you alienating an important number of your visitors? If, your site is only in English and not translated in other key languages, you’re undoubtedly are! Did you know that as of 2005, around 300M users accessed the Internet in English, while almost 700M users accessed it in another language? If we were to make a crude assessment, strictly English localized website are loosing 70% of their potential customer base from the start.

To be more specific, the top ten languages used in the Internet, are in order, English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French, Korean, Portuguese, Italian and Russian (internetworldstats). Even in the United-States, over 45M users access the Internet from home in another language than English, Spanish being the main language with over 26M users.

The major companies recognize this situation and offer their website in different languages, some even going to the length of implementing specifically targeted version of their website, based on the target language. However, many websites or small business are neglecting this aspect, and hence loosing out on a chance of increasing their market… simply by not repeating the same thing! Ironically, it’s the smaller companies that should use the benefits of an easy and affordable method of increasing their customer base.

So, what do I do now?

Well, first you must determine the potential market your website’ service or product should target. Indeed, the necessity to translate your website in certain languages may be constrained if your site usability is confined to specific regions. Another good thing to do is to determine the specific web pages that need to be translated. Opening your website to the world doesn’t require the translation of your entire website. If your site has a page that promotes the Whistler Mountain in BC Canada to snowboarders, there’s probably no need to translate it in certain languages as some markets wouldn’t be concerned.

Once you’ve established the languages worthwhile for your site to be translated into, you should then have a website like www.eWebSolving.com translate your content. This affordable service will increase the audience for your business and undoubtedly generate more conversions.

About The Author

Charles Jr. Jean is a computer engineering graduate and Law bachelor student. He is the owner of www.eWebSolving.com which provides web solutions for small business and web based entrepreneurs.