Blog optimization for multiple languages is a complex and potentially expensive exercise. O.K., but how bout starting with one language? Small business bloggers in America are increasingly becoming aware of their Hispanic market and wonder how best to design their site and produce blog content that can easily travel the language barrier.

Blog Marketing to Your Hispanic Market

When you are Johnson & Johnson, who launched a Chinese version of their award winning Baby Center parenting blog earlier this year and plan their Hispanic release this September, you can afford to hire a bevy of native translators.

Laurel Wentz from Advertising Age quotes Jon Stross of J&J BabyCenter:

“As we looked around the world and rated each market, the U.S. Hispanic market, for size, growth and priority with big advertisers, was very obviously up there along with the U.K. and China,” said Jon Stross, general manager-international, BabyCenter.”

B2B marketing is also wide open. Questamente Network (questamente.com) has announced the launch of it’s dual language site, catering to the ever growing community of Hispanic business owners in America, hoping to be the one-stop-shop library and resource for the Hispanic entrepreneur and businessman  for the estimated 2 million Hispanic-owned business in the U.S.

So what do you do if you do not have a J&J budget to translate your site and write relevant blog marketing content for your Latino/Hispanic market?

WordPress Plugins, Google’s Translate Language Tools, or Alta Vista’s Babaelfish will get you part of the way there. However, if your analytics demostrate a good percentage of your traffic and sales originating from the Latino market, you have justification to budget for a bi-lingual blogger, preferably Hispanic, in order to produce relevant content that actually addresses the cultural nuances of your target market.

Multi-lingual SEO

Before you make any final decisions regarding the additional budget or staffing, consider this (my emphasis):

“That being said, this hesitance to invest in multi-language search engine optimization provides an enormous opportunity for marketers who wish to rise above their competitors and take advantage of the void. With significantly less saturation of Spanish-speaking SEO, there is little competition for brands looking to reach Spanish-speaking searchers with the strategic use of multi-language SEO.
(Source)

How can you pass the opportunity up without exploring your options? Contact your SEO experts and get your multi-lingual ducks in a row.

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Tags: Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization, google-translate, hispanic_market, language_barrier, multi-language-SEO, SEO-experts, small_business

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 5:32 pm and is filed under Blog Marketing, Blog Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.