by: AskPat 461 Episode Transcript
Pat Flynn: What's up, everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 461 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today.
We have a great question today from Sam, but before we get to Sam's question I do want to thank today's sponsor, which is AWeber.com. That's A-W-E-B-E-R, that's how you spell AWeber. I love AWeber because they helped me build my email list to over 120,000. They were the first email service provider I used and recommend for people who are just starting out. It's great pricing, excellent customer service, amazing live chat feature if you have any problems. A lot of templates you can use and put on your website, plus they connect to a lot of the top email service tools out there such as Leadpages and OptinMonster. There's so many different other ones; AWeber is connected to all of them because everyone knows that AWeber is the one that most people use. If you want to check it out for 30 days for free, you can have a 30-day free trial in your hands right now if you go to AWeber.com/askpat. Again, that's AWeber.com/askpat.
Here's today's question from Sam.
Sam: Hi, Pat. My name is Sam Mettler, and I run a blog called EDMProd, which teaches electronic music producers how to make better music. My question for you is that a lot of readers from different countries have been telling me that I should make different versions of my website for different languages. What are your thoughts on this? Is it worth the time and effort? Cheers.
Pat Flynn: Hey, Sam. Thank you so much for the question. EDM, for those of you who don't know, is electronic dance music, and it's awesome. That's cool that you called in and have this question. I can see how somebody who's providing service or information to people in EDM or in the EDM space is getting requests for multiple languages, because it's a worldwide thing, of course. My first question is Sam, how worldwide is this? I'm guessing your primary language that you're serving is English. What would be the second one, and what is the percentage? I've had a lot of people from different countries ask me to do the exact same thing.
It is not an easy task. The hard thing about it is you lose a little bit of control because you don't exactly know what's going up. That's probably my biggest reservation into doing that. Plus, is it worth the time and effort? It's hard to know. You could test it, however, and that's what I would recommend. I would recommend the next blog post you write, instead of trying to change your whole website or create a whole different version of your website, you might want to create a different version of an upcoming post, for example, or maybe it's an upcoming podcast episode that you transcribe in different languages. Just test it out; it's going to cost a little bit of money to do that unless you have some connections, which you could use as well. You can test that to see and gauge what the reaction is like, and actually how much that moves the needle. If it does not, or if it just doesn't seem like there's a high percentage of your audience who really cares, then you know that that's not a way to go.
Again, you're sort of validating this before you actually put a lot of money, and time, and effort into it so that you don't put a lot of time, money, and effort it and look back and say, “Wow, this was a waste of my time. Why did I do that?” Everybody should be doing validation strategies to make sure that these big things we want to do, they're actually something we should be doing. This is a great way to do it; write a blog post, pick languages that are popular with your particular audience and go.
The question from this point forward, however, is, which language do you choose to start out with? I wouldn't go with necessarily the ones who are asking you to do it. They might happen to be just the people who are the most outspoken, but not necessarily the largest percentage. You probably know where I'm going with this: what I'm trying to get at is go into your Google Analytics and get the insights on where your audience is coming from outside of your primary language zone, and start with that. If I were to go to Google Analytics, for example—I'm going to do this live right now, actually. Sign into Google Analytics, and I'm going to share with the SPI audience the top countries that are visiting SPI other than the United States. You can also check on the front page of your audience overview in Google Analytics. It will actually tell you the other languages that people are coming from. They're usually done in symbols; for example, EN-US is English US. My second highest one, which is 7 percent, is EN-GB, Great Britain, so that's also English. Then there's DE, which is German, ES Spain, and other ones. France is in there too, Philippines. They're very, very small percentages, so not necessarily worth the time and effort. It depends on the percentage, but if you have a language that is quite a high percentage that is visiting your website, you're not serving them if you're not providing an easy way for them to access your content.
Then, you might want to test out with that language first, see what the reaction is like. I would have somebody onboard come to help you, obviously, not just with writing that or translating the content that you have, but actually gauging the comments as well. You're going to get comments and emails from people, especially because in this particular post you're going to say or have the person who's translating for you actually add a part that says, “Let me know what you think of this. If you like this translation, go and do this action.” Maybe it's sign up to an email list, you can have a separate email list for those people who are in that particular language. Then you can have the translator, if this works out, swipe your email copy if you have an autoresponder, all your sales copy, and pitches and all that stuff, and put them in your autoresponder in your email for that other language. Setting up that email list is going to be a great way for you to validate on a second level whether or not this is something people want more of. You could have it go out there; you can actually have it see that, “Wow, there's a lot of traffic. There's a lot of people visiting. That's great.”
What kind of action are those people going to take? That's a level-two validation strategy within this entire setup here. Validate with a small sample, next blog post or one that's upcoming that you know is going to do very well. We always have a sense of the ones that we know, that we're working on and it's going to be great; translate that one into one or two of the top languages that you have—if the percentages are, I would say, more than 3 percent or 4 percent, that's a significant amount. Currently, German is the top non-English speaking country or language that people are visiting my website on, and that's 1.44 percent of all my sessions, which is still kind of significant. That's 1 percent of all visitors, especially when you consider over the last month I've had over 250,000 sessions. Let's see how this differs from the audience's location. The location and language is going to be a key difference there, because just because they're coming from a certain location, they could still be reading in English. You want to make sure that the language is the one that you're going toward. That's where, if you actually go into your audience section in the sidebar of Google Analytics and go to Geo, you can select between language and location. I have for example, United States is number one, United Kingdom, Canada, India, Australia; all primarily English speaking in those countries who are visiting my website. Then it's Germany and then Spain, Netherlands, Philippines, Singapore. Total, that's most of my audience in that top 10 for sure.
Again, that's the strategy I would give you, Sam. Hopefully that gives you some direction. I didn't want to say yes or no, because I don't know. You're going to have to get those numbers, and validate, and see if it works for you. Sam, thank you so much. I appreciate you. We're going to send over an AskPat t-shirt your way for having your question featured here on the show. For those of you listening, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat.com, hit that record button, and speak your mind. I will be there to help you as much as possible. I can't get to all the questions, but I get to as many as I can five days a week here on AskPat. Thank you again, because the show wouldn't exist without you, so I appreciate you. AskPat.com, that's where you go.
I also want to thank today's sponsor, AWeber.com, making it super easy for all of us to build our email lists, especially when you're just starting out, they make it very easy. They've just recently undergone some design changes making it really easy to set up your emails and create templates, and that sort of stuff so it's even easier down the road too. You can create different lists based off of different interests and all those kinds of things. I recommend you check it out, great pricing for those who are just starting out. AWeber.com/askpat, if you want to try it out for 30 days for free. Again, that's AWeber.com/askpat.
Thank you, and then finally, a quote from Brian Halligan to finish off the show: “To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products.” That's a great one. How people find out about you is going to matter, whether or not people are going to follow through with you too, to summarize that. “To be successful and grow your business and revenues, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products.” Cheers. Take care. I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Thanks so much.