AP 0360: Should I Make My Website Bilingual?

AskPat 360 Episode Transcript

Pat Flynn: What's up everybody? Pat Flynn here, and welcome to Episode 360 of AskPat. Thank you so much for joining me today. As always, I'm here to help you by answering your online business questions five days a week.

All right, here's today's question from Jordi.

Jordi: AskPat. AskPat. AskPat dot com. Dot com. Sorry, having a little fun here, Pat. Your intro is so catchy. Anyways, I'm Jordi [inaudible 00:01:20]. I'm a graphic design entrepreneur. First of all, I want to thank you for everything you do. You're amazing. My question is regarding targeting. I've been having a lot of people coming to me for their guide, and all of them are my friends or my peers here in Mexico. I want to help them out. I don't know if I should only target them with my website, or target also all the other people around the world who speak English, because I want to make a website that helps graphic designers find success and start their own business. I'm not sure what to do here. Maybe I should do a website that's both in English and Spanish. Maybe I should target one of those markets more specifically. I don't know what to do. Do you have any advice here? Thank you so much, and have a great day.

Pat Flynn: Hey, Jordi. What's up? Thank you so much for the question and the amazing start of your question there. It's funny, a lot of people mention how catchy AskPat is, and I even have my son doing the AskPat; he goes, “AskPat dot com, a-a-a-a-ask Pat dot com.” It's hilarious, I've got to get that on video at some point. I'll try to do that sometime soon. Anyway, here to help you Jordi. It's interesting, because I've gotten a number of emails from people asking me this same exact question, who are actually from Mexico or doing Spanish websites. And it's interesting, because that's been a sign to me over the past couple of years, that the Spanish market online is growing. It's not close to where the US is obviously, but it is getting there.

I think the Spanish-speaking community is becoming more online savvy now, and I think it's a great opportunity, so I think you know what my answer might be. I think, especially if your friends who are Spanish-speaking are coming to you for advice, I really think that there might be quite a need to have a Spanish version of a graphic design website where your teaching them certain things how to do because, simply put, the competition is going to be far less. That's your unique ability over other people who are potentially creating the same kind of content. If you were to go solely into the US market, you're going to be competing with so many other people. For example, I have some numbers here. On YouTube, if you type in “graphic design,” there are 730,000 other videos. If you type in “graphic design” in Spanish, there's only 10,500, and they aren't that good at all. If you type into Google, the US version of Google, “graphic design,” you're going to get 364 million results. If type in “graphic design Spanish,” you're going to get 24.5 million results, and if you go to Google.es, which is for Spanish-speaking websites, or at least the Spanish search engine version of Google, there's far less than the US version as well.

I really think that you should go specifically to the Spanish market, and then you could branch out from there. The riches are in the niches, as they say, and I think the Spanish market is a great niche to get into. I've actually had a few people emailing me saying that I should convert or translate the SPI content into Spanish and I'm really considering that, and also translating into other languages as well. Jut trying to think about the logistics, I know there are companies and even translators that have offered to do that, but it does cost money obviously, and I do want to take a smart approach to it and pick some of the most popular foreign-speaking countries that come and visit the site already, which I can just simply find using Google Analytics, of course.

I think there's a big opportunity for you, Jordi, and I would test it out and if you feel like you have opportunities to share certain things that are also going to be helpful for the US-speaking crowd, you could definitely have both. I don't think it's bad to do both, if you don't feel like it would sacrifice the work flow and your ability to be productive with the content. I think that's where a lot of people struggle when they do try to go bilingual, is trying to do twice the amount of work. I feel like you could do a couple tests to see what happens, especially on YouTube. If you do some videos and you have both a Spanish-speaking version and a US version, it might be interesting to see which one does better, and you might even be able to cross-promote those too and have them help each other out for SEO purposes. I know some people on Instagram, for example, who do a really great job of building a Spanish-speaking community, specifically in the fitness industry, by posting their status updates on Instagram in English and then followed by Spanish. They have a lot of people who I can see are commenting and tagging their friends in Spanish as well. That would be great opportunity for you, especially as a graphic designer, just to start to build your following on Instagram. That might be a cool way to have both the US version and the Spanish version in one post there, and then you might be able to split it out on your website if you choose to go down that route.

I think primarily you want to go with the Spanish version, the only question is, do you want to also include an English version? Yes, own the Spanish market, that's what I would say. That would be my final piece of advice to you, Jordi, is, yeah, people are coming to you for advice. There isn't as much competition; there might not be any competition. Own it. Absolutely own it. You want to be the one that, when they talk about graphic design with their friends, you're going to be the resource that they mention.

Hopefully that helps you. Jordi, thank you so much for the question. I really appreciate it. We're going to send you an AskPat t-shirt for having your question featured here on the show. Thank you so much. You'll hear from my assistant in the next couple of weeks or so to collect that information so we can send that to you free of charge. I'd also like the see a picture of it on Twitter at some point @patflynn; you can send that that way.

For everybody else out there listening, if you have some input on this particular question, use the hashtag on Twitter #AskPat360. Again, #AskPat360, and we'll hear from you and continue this conversation on Twitter as well, if you'd like. Also, if you have a question you'd like potentially featured here on the show, just head on over to AskPat, and you can ask right there on that page thanks to the Speakpipe.com widget.

Thank you so much, and as always I like to end with a quote. Today's quote is from Pablo Picasso. He said, “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.” Only put off until tomorrow, what you are willing to die having left undone. Cheers, take care, and I'll see you in the next episode of AskPat. Bye.