I promiced to post about running an affiliate business in an international market so here goes.
First of all:
Why would you want to do it?
1. English is one of the most popular languages among the Internet users but it surely isn’t the only one. There is also a huge Spanish, French, Italian, German-speaking audience and so on.
2. With many affiliate programs translating their sites to target these audiences, it makes sense from the point of view of monetizing that international traffic.
3. As a rule, the competition in these international markets is much lower - resulting in much lower costs per click in PPC and much lower compatition in organic SERPs.
What do you need to do it?
1. Ideally, you should know at least a bit of the language of the market you’re targeting - doesn’t mean you need to be a fluent speaker, but knowing just enough to select the most targeted keywords surely helps.
2. If you don’t speak the language but feel it’s still worth it, you might want to hire a native speaker to help you with creating your site and selecting the keywords.
3. Also, have this native speaker check the quality of the translated site of the affiliate program you’re promoting - sometimes their translation quality is rather low which might hurt your conversion rates and then it’s a lot of effort wasted on your part. You might want to have a couple of words with the affiliate managers in such case and ask them to improve the quality of their translation.
4. And NO, Google language tools just don’t cut it! As a person with some linguistic background, I can tell you that machine translation will never be quite the quality we expect from human translation.
Possible Drawbacks of Targeting International Markets
1. You might be unaware of some cultural specifics of the market you are targeting - which may render your campaign ineffective.
2. What seems like an affordable price for the US audience might not be that affordable for people in some other countries - again, this bearing negative impact on your conversions.
3. What has been a familiar product for the English speaking market migth be a totally new product for the international market - so it might take some time before people get to trust your offer and those conversions start rolling in.
4. While for the English speaking markets, affiliate programs typically provide plenty of advertising materials such as banners, buttons, articles and so on, these may be scarse in other languages - so you will have to do most of the work yourself.
All in all, international market is a totally new experience, with its positive and negative sides, but let it not stop you from trying to conquer it - it is really worth the try. Currently, several affiliate programs I am using provide translated web sites:
- Leading Edge Cash - French and Spanish
- JoeBucks - Italian, French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Dutch
- MoreNiche - they are currently playing with Google translation of some of their sites into german, Spanish and Japanese so I guess the real translation is coming soon as well.
Go ahead and give them a try and let’s compare our notes later on.
