More than 60% of the world’s population uses the Internet. Do you know how many potential customers that represents?
4,880,000,000, give or take.
For many companies, their digital presence on the Internet is a crucial part of their success: websites, e-commerce, social media, marketing, etc. Blogs have also become a great way to attract attention and generate engagement, and increasingly, a key method to increase exposure. There are multiple benefits to adding a blog to your online presence, not the least of which is the ability to craft your own content that helps readers and lets you share your ideas and stories with the world.
However, if your company’s blog is in only one language, you are potentially missing out on a huge audience. However, it can seem overwhelming to add a language or even create content in another language.
How do you start? Which languages should you consider blogging in? How do you avoid mistakes that could alienate an entire country or culture?
In this article, we will discuss the benefits of blogging and how SIJIHIVE can help you take your business to the next level with multilingual blogging services.
Blogging for businesses
While blogs were at first popular for individuals to share their ideas and interests in everything from cats to recipes to outdoor adventures, blogging has become a mainstream activity for businesses. Successful B2B and B2C marketers know that blogs are a great tool to reach their audiences and increase SEO.
Some benefits of business blogging
Increase website traffic: Attracting attention is a key step to success, and blogging is one of many ways to bring visitors to your website. The Internet rewards well-written, well-researched, and engaging blog posts that people actually want to read, primarily because they share them with their colleagues, friends, and family.
Build links: Every time your blog post is shared, a relevant hyperlink is created that connects to your website from an external site. These connections strengthen and improve your SEO results which in turn increases your visibility.
Develop brand loyalty: By providing readers with relevant and useful information that helps them, you create invaluable goodwill and trust with your community, a key step to making new customers and retaining current ones. People tend to trust their friends who recommend a website, service, or product, and this kind of word-of-mouth like marketing can help increase your exposure and potential customer base.
Create social media content: You always need new content on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn to stay current and visible. Blog posts are an excellent and flexible way to create fresh content to share on all your social media. Photos from blog posts can make eye-catching Instagram posts, and quotes from blog posts allow you to easily link back to the post, your website, or even product pages.
Control the message: With blog posts, you can craft the message that best reaches your audience and creates the image you want. You don’t have to rely on other people, such as reviews, external articles, or influencer pieces to do that for you. Blogs also allow you to target and highlight new projects, services you perform best and tell the story of how that came to be the case, and more.
However, these benefits and more exist across the whole Internet and around the world, regardless of language and culture.
Are you missing out?
Language matters
Even though globalism is changing the business landscape, there’s no denying that English is still the dominant language of the Internet. Of the top ten million websites, more than 60% of them are primarily in that language.
So, of course, by the numbers, English language blog content is a great place to start, but there’s so much more potential for companies that are willing and able to embrace multilingual blogging.
Languages and nationalities of Internet users
At the beginning of 2020, English was the language of the largest number of Internet users (about 25%). However, with the largest population in the world, Chinese speakers were not far behind at 19.4%, with Spanish speakers coming in third with 7.9%. As populations and demographics change around the world, that difference is likely to decrease in the future.
In the same year, in terms of the number of Internet users per country, China was by far the leader of the pack with 854 million users. With the second-largest population in the world, India followed with 560 million users. The United States, with the third-largest population in the world, was third with 313 million users.
Room for growth
However, if we look a little more closely at the numbers for these countries, we can see that the real potential is in China and India. Those 854 million Internet users in China represent only half of the Chinese population, while the 560 million Indian users are just one-third of India's population. Yet, the 313 million American users are more than 90% of those in that country that already use the Internet.
While the US population has reached near saturation, the numbers from China and India offer a huge number of people who have not yet started surfing. However, when they do, they will probably not be searching in English.
Which languages?
Perhaps you’ve already done your research and have created a plan to expand into new geographical markets, taking into account the differences between languages and cultures. If so, we look forward to writing about you in the future!
However, there are others of you who may not be at that point yet. You are perfectly aware that there are millions of potential customers out there, but how do you know who they are? How can you best reach them? One easy way to begin approaching this topic is to look at the traffic that is already coming to your page. This information will give you an idea of who your international visitors are and what they are searching for.
It’s also helpful to visit your competitors’ websites and blogs to see which languages they offer their content in.
Once you’ve identified the language(s), it’s time to get started.
The benefits of multilingual blogging
Improve your SEO in other geographical markets
Multilingual blogging is an easy way to create content that will expand your company’s international presence on the Internet. The blog’s contents will be indexed by search engines for the best results in the relevant language. However, remember: it is not just the content of the blog but other aspects, such as metadata and unique URLs with language-specific subdomains and subdirectories. Regardless, if your company content isn’t there in that language, you are missing an opportunity.
Reach prospective customers all over the world
Of course, Internet users can use machine translation to search for information in other languages. However, that process can be quite time-consuming, and machine translation is still not accurate enough to be reliable for big decisions, especially when business and money are involved. People prefer to search for information and read about it in their own language as they do their research about what to buy or who to partner with. They also understand the information better and are more likely to trust it and the source.
Increase brand awareness, engagement, and sales
Trust is an extremely important part of building business relationships. Many customers worry about the trustworthiness of the information in companies’ marketing and on their websites. They worry about the quality of the products or services. They worry about getting a good price. Well-written, clear, helpful, and reliable blog posts in the customers’ own language are a great way to encourage them to click on the link to your website or on the “Buy” button to complete the transaction by lowering potential barriers and raising the level of trust.
Save money
One of the great things about multilingual blogging is that you already have content to work with. (You do already have a blog, right? Right?) There is no need to spend more time and money writing new content. Your current blog should already be part of your online marketing, providing relevant and useful information to your readers. It is much more cost-effective to translate that great content into other languages than starting from scratch.
SIJIHIVE: Your multilingual partner
Here at SIJIHIVE, we take great pride in helping our clients successfully expand and improve their digital presence on the Internet. To see some examples of our success stories, please visit the Achievements section of our website.
Our experienced and professional team offers multilingual services that provide you with high-quality writing, localization, and translation in Japanese, Chinese, and English, as well as other languages.
We are confident that SIJIHIVE can help you create a multilingual blog that takes full advantage of all the possibilities and reaches a broad, international audience.
Please feel free to contact us today to discuss how we can work together to make yet another success story!
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Author Profile
RICH BAILEY
Originally from Ohio, USA, Bailey is an experienced freelance writer and editor, especially for technical and scientific content. With an MA in English and a background in science, he also has more than 20 years of experience in teaching English around the world.