A while back we were undergoing a bit of change. We had decided that as an international business we ought to really be focusing on countries outside of the USA and our company center, Shanghai. However, my company was a fairly frugal one and we couldn’t figure out what to do. Should we translate a thousand pages of content? That didn’t really seem justifiable since we were planning to do quite a few different languages. We ended up with a bit of a hybrid translation that works well to this day even in competitive markets (in this case, health insurance).

Features:

• Easy implementation
• Low costs to get into foreign markets (some are fairly untapped markets)
• Cheap link building campaigns still give large benefits
• Quick rankings

Benefits:

• Plenty of leads/cash/impressions
• Larger customer base outside your normal streams of income
• Live on a sandy beach drinking a Pina Colada since your clients are all over the world

So how can you get all these crazy benefits? I said it’s easy and it is. All you need is somebody to translate about 5 pages of your website content and of course your keywords. Instead of translating your entire website just translate your most important landing pages. Pop up a form, a home page, about us page, contact us pages, and a couple information pages. This will give the customer plenty of opportunity to look at your product and understand it. It will also give you a decent quality score for AdWords.

Your customer might want to browse around to some of your other content, which might be in English. So put up a javascript confirm button (code below) to check. Most of your customers are likely going to be able to speak English anyhow, so it shouldn’t be a problem. One thing though, try to translate your entire page! All of those pictures that are annoying to change, well, change them. Make that landing page just as good in Chinese, or Japanese, as it is in English.

Why is the link building easy? Because you're doing a small section of your website in a language that’s not competitive. An easy directory submission (on directories that likely aren’t that spammed because they’re not in English) can net you quite decent rankings. If a directory submission spree can benefit you, then you can likely imagine quite a few other ways to grab a few links.

What other costs go down? Adwords plummets! As we’ve been saying all along, these are fairly untapped markets. Instead of bidding against dozens of websites, you’re bidding against a couple. You’ll likely see the costs going down. What's more, you can translate your existing Adwords campaign for fairly cheap.