Profit from Two Languages in Promoting Websites and Business with Bilingual Marketing

If you run an internet business you should benefit from these tips about bilingual marketing. If you are running your business in an English speaking country then you should analyze which second language your potential customers would like to use to find your website and buy from you.

If you are running an internet business in a non-English speaking country you should make sure to have an English version of the site, too. That will give you access to millions more of potential customers.

When you plan your online visibility in two languages you have 3 options:

1. Bilingual website divided on two domains

You can keep your two language versions on two different domains. That will give you the advantage that you can have key word rich domain names in the relevant language or use national domains, like we have with google.com and google.fr.

2. Bilingual website divided on one domain, but two subdomains

This is another option, as the subdomains will function as two domains. But it can also be set up, so the main site is in the root of the domain and the extra language is in a subdomain, like we see with Yahoo: yahoo.com as the general English language version, and fr.yahoo.com/ as the French version of Yahoo.

3. The bilingual website is divided with the second language version in a subfolder.

This is a very common approach to a bilingual website and it will function fine for a smaller site. On the other side you will not benefit from some of the special possibilities for the promotion through bilingual marketing.

For some time it has been possible to include an automatic translation script on the English language web pages. The script using Google's translation service will then translate the concrete webpage to the desired language when the visitor is just pushing a button. Scripts exist at the moment to translate English texts into Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Chinese language.

At the moment such translator scripts are more for marketing purpose, as the quality of the translated text is very different from what a human translator could do. On the other had the translated text will definitely give the visitor an impression of what the webpage is about. If you make links to the translated urls from other websites you might get some extra traffic through the search engines.

Improving visibility with free articles

Many marketers have realized that writing and distributing articles for free reprint and use is one of the very best marketing tools we have today. Such article marketing rides on the power of viral marketing. When each article is uploaded to article directories like EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, website-articles.net and ArticleCity.com they will live their own life in cyberspace and promote your ideas, back links and branding for years to come.

When you have a bilingual capability yourself it will give you a nice advantage, as you can distribute your articles in two languages.