The blogosphere is by its very nature a truly global phenomenon. Anyone with an Internet connection can, in theory, access your blog, no matter where they are in the world. But that doesn’t mean they will. To blog for an international audience, you need to make sure your content is appealing and accessible across cultural and linguistic divides.

Target your blog

Christian Arno

On the day The Huffington Post launched its French edition, founder Arianna Huffington said, “While we will be importing the platform, technology, and tools from across the pond, Le Huffington Post will be rooted in French culture and will reflect France’s own unique personality, rich culture, and diversity of voices.”

As with the preceding Canadian and UK versions, the news giant has tailored its French content to appeal to a specific international audience. We can’t all have the resources of Technorati’s current top-rated blog, but we can focus our efforts on markets that are likely to pay dividends.

The exact nature of your blog will help determine where you should start. A blog about soccer will have a wide potential appeal throughout much of the world but may have a more select, niche appeal within the USA. Concentrating on the Major Soccer League (MSL) could help reach that niche audience while in-depth coverage of leagues based in South America or Europe could give you inroads into those markets.

Beppe Grille has proved that a relatively narrow topic does not necessarily rule out an international audience. The Italian activist blogs largely about politics in his homeland but his blog – available in Italian, English and Japanese – has gained a huge international following.

Use simple words

Unless you’re writing a blog on the joys of circumlocution (that’s general wordiness for the non-enthusiasts) it’s a good rule of thumb to keep the language relatively simple and accessible. This is even more important if you’re aiming for an international audience. English is still the single most widely used language online according to Internet World Stats. An English-only blog may attract a limited number of foreign visitors. But if they speak English as a second language, simple words and structures will make things easier to follow.

While English is the most widely used language on the ‘net, it still represents only around a quarter of total usage. To successfully cross over to international audiences you will also need to translate your blog. Using simple language in your original posts will help make this easier.

Consider your translation options

Once you’ve decided which markets to target, you need to decide how to translate your blog There are many automatic translation programs available that offer a quick, free solution. The drawback is that even the best machine translation is prone to contextual errors. They don’t deal well with slang, abbreviations, acronyms and other cultural and linguistic variations. All this can leave parts of your blog looking stilted and amateurish or may even change the meaning entirely.

Enlisting the help of native speaking translators is a better option by far. This will help ensure an accurate translation, retain meaning and nuance and avoid any embarrassing cultural faux pas. Of course, it is more expensive, so you’ll want to choose your languages carefully. You could test the water by translating some of your best posts into a few selected languages. If you find you’re attracting interest, you can go ahead and translate more.

When to post a blog

The best time to update your content is in the morning. This can give your blog an up-to-date feel but can also present a problem when crossing international boundaries and time zones. It makes sense to stagger the times when you publish your international content. Make a schedule based on the relevant time zones and publish your content as the sun comes up all around the globe.

Make use of social media

Social media is an ideal platform for promoting your blog. All the big hitters like Facebook and Twitter have international audiences and settings but it’s worth remembering that local competitors can be every bit as important within their own spheres of influence.

The home-grown Mixi is a massively popular social network in Japan for example, while Russian-based Vkontakte (commonly known as VK) claims to be the largest European social network with more than 100 million active users. In addition, there may be local specialist sites, forums and social networks that are worth checking out depending on the theme of your blog.

Create separate (but linked) profiles on all the relevant social networks. Keep them up to date and be proactive. Don’t just put links to your blog and hope for the best; write guest posts, leave comments and join in the online conversation.

Taking your blog to an international audience can be a lot of time and forward planning. Given the huge potential audiences you can reach, it can be worth every bit of effort you put in in building new relationships and driving potential business.

Christian Arno is the founder of US translation agency Lingo24. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 170 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries. In the past twelve months, they have translated over forty million words for businesses in every industry sector, including the likes of MTV and World Bank. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.

This isn’t going to be an in-depth discussion about Google+. I’ll leave that to the experts. In fact, before my search tips, let me point you to two sources that provide updates on all that’s new on Google+.

HubSpot has published a comprehensive free e-book How to Use Google+ for Business. Just click on the title and you will be able to download the PDF from the home page.

The other is also a lengthy tutorial (slightly more technical) but well worth reading on Blind Five Year Old by AJ Kohn.

My Tips

These are predicated on your being a member of Google+. My good friend Richard Newman at the Newman Group pointed out this new feature when you conduct a search on Google.

Search Personal Results    

You now have the ability to search a subject and get the results, plus see your own Personal Results for that search. The way you do that is by clicking on the tiny icon on the upper right side of the screen. It’s the one on the left that looks like a head and shoulders. The icon next to it, that looks like a globe, allows you to Hide Personal Results.

Here is a screen shot of the two icons:

Google+ Personal Results Icon (head and shoulders)

I put in the search term The New York Times, which I happen to mention often in my posts. I’ve also written letters to the editors and commented on their stories so I knew something of mine would show up if I typed in “The New York Times” in Google search.

First, I clicked the Personal Results icon. Sure enough, I found a reference to a recent post I wrote about The Times and its mistake in accidentally cancelling the subscriptions of 8 million subscribers.

My Google+ Personalized Search of The New York Times

When I hit the globe icon, that reference disappeared. Neat.

Highlighting Words in Google+ Posts

I wish I could find where I read this because I would give attribution. It’s a tiny but nice little touch that Google+ has incorporated so that you can highlight important words in your posts. Highlighting may improve your search results. I tried this tip and it works.

For example, see the bold face in this mock post:

 “Learn more about Google+ in HubSpot’s new ebook”

Here’s how you do it. Type the words you want to highlight. Then type an * in front and at the end* of the words. Like this: Learn more about Google+ in *HubSpot’s new ebook * and you get “Learn more about Google+ in HubSpot’s new ebook.” Viola!

I’ll pass along other easy-to-understand tips on Google+ as I find them. Please include your tips in the comment box. I’d sure like to know about them.

The title tag is the most important element of your blog or website. My blogging coach Bea Fields just recorded a tutorial about optimizing the title tag for her Become a Blogging Maniac course. It’s at the bottom of this post.

Your title tag must contain key words that describe your business. A descriptive, keyword-laden title tag is essential for increasing rankings in search engines.

The title tag appears at the very top of a blog or website and is usually overlooked by visitors — but not by Google or other search engines.  Search engines will “bold” (or highlight) those terms in the search results when a user searches for those terms.

Here is a screen shot of the title tag of SEOmoz.  I don’t need to tell you what they do. Below the screen shot is the video. Take the 5 minutes or so to view it and learn how to write a powerful title tag.

Related articles

• On-Page Search Engine Optimization Information and Facts (seotacticstoday.wordpress.com)
• Search Engine Optimization – Title and Meta Tags (stepup2success.wordpress.com)

I was in a new business meeting the other day and suggested that starting a company blog had the potential to increase visitors to the company’s website. We all know (don’t we?) that Google rewards dynamic content so posting regularly will eventually boost your rankings.

Why Blogs are Abandoned

The designer I was with said “Oh, no” that won’t work. I couldn’t blame him. He had designed websites and blogs for a number of clients and within a short time the blogs had been abandoned.

It’s a commitment to write a weekly or twice-weekly blog. Who will write the blog – someone inside the company or will we outsource it? What will we write about? Where will our ideas come from?

These are legitimate questions, but I believe it is a lack of will and commitment from top management that is behind the failures.There isn’t a plan in place to keep the blog going and building momentum.

Tips for Bloggers

So, if you, or your company, have abandoned your blog here are some steps to take:

• Make a commitment. Decide that you want to increase traffic to your website by x% within six months, or whatever benchmark you want to establish. A blog will help you do that. Static websites don’t cut it.
• Choose categories, or “buckets” of stories. Suppose you’re an accounting firm. You could decide to write about how to finance your retirement, tips for cutting taxes, and estate planning. Over time you could add more buckets.
• Assign responsibilities. Like any other marketing activity, you’ve got to allocate the necessary human and financial resources. Identify content experts in the company as sources for information the writer will need. Think carefully about assigning revenue-producing employees to write. They will usually find an excuse not to do it – I have a client calling, or I need to go to a new business pitch, etc. Better that they supply the writer with the facts she needs. Let accountants be accountants. Let writers be writers.
• Build an inventory of posts. Set a launch date for your blog and then prepare a schedule of posts for the first three months. Write your launch post and at least four other posts from different categories before you begin publishing. The first day, have a launch post that introduces your blog and why you are writing it. At the same time, publish the first four (or more) posts. Why? Because a single post will look like an orphan all by itself. The posts will contain great content and encourage readers to subscribe.
• Offer an incentive. Give readers a reason to subscribe, such as a special report, or something free that would otherwise cost them.
• Solicit guest posts. Ask clients and other experts to write guest posts. You will get backlinks to their sites (another SEO boost) and provide your readers with differing points of view.
• Post to social networks. Now that you have a blog you can automatically distribute new posts to social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+. You will be reaching new audiences who may visit your website and decide you’re a company they would like to do business with.
• Repurpose the content. Turn your blog posts into articles, slide shows and electronic brochures. You will be leveraging your investment and distributing your content through other communications channels.

Beat the Competition

It’s true that many companies have abandoned their blogs. Shame on them. They are missing out on a great opportunity to establish the company’s authority on topics of interest to clients and prospects.

Most people still get their information about a company from its website. Your blog will serve as a sort of Pied Piper, luring in readers searching for valuable information to improve themselves and their businesses.

Why not have them come to you and not a competitor?

Related articles

• The benefits of business blogging: Part 1 (marketing.yell.com)
• 12 Business Blogging Shortcuts for Time-Crunched Marketers (hubspot.com)

Curbing company email

Volkswagen made some news recently when it came to an agreement with its unions to deactivate e-mail on company BlackBerries when its German staff members are off duty. Deutsche Telecom instituted a similar policy to give employees some time away from their smart phones.

Is this the start of a trend?

On All the Time

The on-all-the-time culture is spreading around the world. When business associates write to me in the evening or over weekends, they can usually expect a quick response – and vice versa.

There’s very little light left between work and leisure time. Companies are definitely worried about work-life balance because a burned-out employee isn’t very productive.

But wait a minute. How does this affect how many times my blog posts are retweeted or the number of comments that I get? This isn’t funny or off topic. Companies plan their social media campaigns around the times that consumers are tweeting and commenting – and that’s often after-hours on company smart phones.

Getting Measurable Traffic

I wrote about how to get traffic to your blog in an earlier post. From a study I quoted:

• Timing: Blogs get the most views at 11 a.m., most comments between 8-9 a.m., most retweets at 4 p.m.

• Post early in the week for views and links and on the weekend for comments.

If employees are tuning out email on their own time, will they also be turning off social networks like Facebook where consumer products companies are cashing in big time? Will they stop commenting on weekends?

No doubt social media fatigue is setting in. Twitter continues growing, but by some estimates close to 120 million accounts are dormant. Many users have only written a few tweets so they are hardly active.

Many businesses both large and small are jumping into social media to market to their customers, abandoning traditional channels like paid advertising.

It may be time to rethink throwing all your marketing resources into social media if the window for reaching buyers continues to narrow as customers tune out.

I don’t ordinarily hype affiliate products here but I do think if you’re a blogger you will like the CommentLuv WordPress plugin. Today is the last day to benefit from the launch price of $67 for this plugin.

The newest version of the CommentLuv plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs displays the title and a link to the last blog post of anyone who leaves a comment on your blog as well as their Twitter handle. This shows appreciation for someone who takes the time to join the conversation. Nice touch for thanking people who comment on your blog by directing other visitors to their last post. There are many other bells and whistles like advanced backlink features and spam protection. Check out the video that describes all the features by clicking on the image below where you can also buy the plugin. Enjoy!

Image via CrunchBase

When I read in a Nielsen study that Tumblr ranks third in time people spend on a social network, after Facebook and Blogger but ahead of Twitter, I decided it was time to learn more about it.

Sure, I’ve had an account for quite a while, but that hardly counts as being active.  I’m a regular blogger on my own self-hosted site, post to Twitter and Facebook daily, and I’m very involved with the LinkedIn community. Isn’t that enough? Maybe not. So I wrote my first blog on Tumblr, which I describe later in this post with screen shots of how you do it.

Next Great Social Network?

Tumblr is a blogging platform but much more. The power of Tumblr resonated in a post on Pro Blogger about how a single Tumblr link drove a blog post to the top of Google search. Tumblr says it’s had close to 10 billion total posts and almost 20 million total blogs, more than WordPress.com.

Social media maven Steve Rubel, in a recent post entitled Tumblr is the Next Great Social Network, described it this way, “Tumblr, to me at least, isn’t a blog platform but something new entirely — a social network for both original and curated content that is longer than a tweet and often more visual in nature. It’s a hybrid.”

Through the Tumblr dashboard, you can post text, photos, quotes, links, dialogues, audio, video, slideshows, and more, creating a network effect like the one that drove the Pro Blogger writer’s post to the top of Google search.

How Does it Work?

I decided to write my first post, learning by doing. If you’re new to Tumblr you should first sign up. Here is how the registration page looks (with sample blogs). You simply enter your name, email address and URL from your website at the bottom in the rectangular windows.

Next, you click on “start posting.” You will be taken to a dashboard. Note that at the top of the dashboard there is a Chat icon which allows you to have conversations with other members. You can also upload audios and videos. I added my Tumblr account to my Facebook news feed so my blogs will be automatically posted on my wall. I also chose the option to post them to my Twitter account. Here is the dashboard:

You’re given the option of uploading an image from your own computer or another site. Tumblr has a neat editing program for images, and a variety of blog templates. I initially uploaded an image thinking it would be my blog header, but it ended up at the bottom of my post so I’ll need to figure that out. But if you want to keep it simple, you don’t even need an image. Here is how my plain vanilla post looks:

If you are a new blogger, you might find your first attempts at writing a blog, inserting links and uploading images a little intimidating. I didn’t see any detailed instructions. I’m sure if you do a Google search you can find how-to articles. And, like other social networks, there are discussion forums where you can ask for help.

While Tumblr is growing in popularity, it is still a bit of a mystery to many people, what with Facebook and Google+ hogging most of the spotlight lately. But that’s going to change with Tumblr nipping at their heels in its race to be the leading online community where people spend the most time hanging out.

So are you on Tumblr? How would you compare it to your experience on Facebook and Twitter?

Is paid advertising dead? To hear the experts, it’s certainly on life support. Inbound marketing is all the rage.

HubSpot is credited with coining the term inbound marketing and the company makes its living by selling services to help companies figure out ways to get customers to come to them instead of the other way around. HubSpot describes it in this diagram:

It’s true that consumers are tuning out paid advertising and more often finding you by searching the web – your blog, through your participation on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook and now Google+. Those of us who write blogs are continually fretting over key words and SEO. We distribute our content to a wide range of social media networks. Build it, promote it, and they will come. Or, maybe not.

Inbound Marketing Campaigns

Thing is the companies that are reaping the rewards of inbound marketing are spending millions on inbound marketing campaigns. They run sneaky display ads to get you to their Facebook pages and corner the market for keywords by bidding up the prices of Google ads that will get you to visit their sites. More power to them.

So the notion of inbound marketing being “free” is a misnomer. Of the hundreds of thousands of blogs out there, many thousands never receive a visitor or get a comment. A lot of marketers are sitting around still waiting for their first visitor.

Going Offline

I may be in the minority. But going offline has me intrigued. You remember offline don’t you? That involves calling a prospect on the phone and making an appointment to discuss your business in person. Two live people in an office talking to each other. How novel!

I’m being a little facetious, I know, so please forgive me. But it’s important to re-evaluate how we communicate with our customers and how we sell to them. There are too many social media “gurus” out there who are selling programs that promise to “monetize” your blog. Take their advice and rake in the money from products and services you sell directly to consumers. Web searches will lead them to you like the Pied Piper.

What Works For You

Can we all take a breath for a minute and think, really think, about how we’re going to build our business? Inbound marketing is great and growing but it’s not the whole story. I have a friend whose husband is a lawyer with a special niche. She spends $100 a month for a local Google ad that’s always at the top of the page and that’s how he gets all his leads. Paid advertising.

Some people do make a nice living monetizing their blogs. But others use their blogs as brand builders and as portfolios of their work.

Find what works for you. Don’t be embarrassed just because you found your newest customer next to you in line at the movies or in an elevator leaving a networking meeting, like I did.

Image via CrunchBase

Eli Pariser, the liberal advocate, has written a book  The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You and gave a talk about it at recent TED conference. Thanks to my friend and colleague Joyce Newman, a leading media and presentation trainer, for bringing it to my attention. Pariser’s basic thesis is that the major players on the Internet — Google, Facebook, Yahoo News and others — are filtering what we see to a much greater extent than we may realize.

Pariser recounted a couple of examples in the video from TED that is below this post. While he is a liberal, he also likes to follow conservatives to see what they have to say. One day he was surprised to learn the conservatives had disappeared from his Facebook feed without Facebook consulting him. Because Facebook’s algorithims had detected that he visited liberal friends more often than conservative friends, they simply edited out the conservatives.

Image via CrunchBase

Pariser found Google was doing it, too. He asked friends to search the same word — Egypt –  and the results were dramatically different. He concludes — and it’s difficult to disagree — that the Internet is showing us what it thinks we want to see but not necessarily what we need to see.

That’s how he came to write the Filter Bubble — to show how these content editors (the algorithims) don’t have embedded ethics as they curate the world for us. Pariser believes they must show us other points of view and not just what we’ve searched for. The people writing these codes must take on a sense of civic responsibility so the process is transparent and we can decide what gets through our filters and what does not. I think you’ll find his talk, which is only about 9 minutes long, enlightening — and a little frightening.

I’m pleased that American Express invited me to write another article for its OPEN Forum community. Published today, it is entitled 7 Ways to Boost Your Blog Traffic Using Social Media.

I think you’ll find some good tips and I’d love it if you would leave a comment under my post on the OPEN Forum site. And, if you’re an American Express cardholder, consider joining the Forum, where you can read articles like mine and get advice to help you grow your business.

Thanks a lot!

P.S. If you’d like to read and comment on my other Amex blog, here is the link: How LinkedIn Changed The Way I Do Business.