Assuming that only English speaking readers will be interested in your content is a mistake. Until recently I never considered the possibility that non English speakers could be an audience for this blog. So how do you go about making your content more accessible to those who speak other languages?
Internet language use statistics
- Languages # | Users | % of Internet
- English | 235 m | 38.3 %
- Chinese | 69 m | 11.2 %
- Japanese | 61.4 m | 10 %
- German | 42 m | 6.8 %
- Spanish | 32.7 m | 5.5 %
- Korean | 25.2 m | 4.1 %
- Italian | 24 m | 3.9 %
- French | 22 m | 3.5 %
- Portuguese | 19 m | 3.1 %
- Russian | 18.1 m | 3 %
- Dutch | 12.4 m | 2 %
- Polish | 6.7 m | 1.1 %
- Swedish | 6 m | 1 %
- Arabic | 5.7 m | 1 %
Source: Translate To Success
English is the most common language spoken on the Internet, but it is still only 38% of the total users on the Internet.
Update Services
Adding an update service to your blog that sends content to foreign language search engines and directories is the key. Update services communicate to other web sites that you have updated the content on your site. I have always looked for ways to optimize this process. At one stage I added a list of 50 or so different sites for Wordpress to ping whenever I posted. This of course slows down posting and didn’t seem to work particularly well. So I went back to using Pingomatic, which is the default service for Wordpress. This works great as you only have to ping Pingomatic and they do all the hard work of pinging other sites (Google, Technorati etc) to notify them that you have new content. However, Pingomatic is an English only service. Pingoat is a update service that also pings foreign language services. You really don’t have anything to lose by adding Pingoat to the update services for your blog, but to convince you of how useful it can be… the article I posted just yesterday has already been commented on in French , translated and re-posted in Japanese and Italian.
How to add Pingoat Update Service to Wordpress
In the dashboard of Wordpress go to “Options/ Writing” and paste the following address into the update services, I have also left Pingomatic there.
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
4 Responses to “How To Increase Your Non English Speaking Readership”
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Does that strategy work if you blog is English only? (like mine)
Do you need a translator or something along those lines?
Hi Brian, I didn’t do a thing to get those other bloggers to use my content, so yes it works, you don’t need to translate. Although I guess it might help, I am going to add translate buttons at some point. Cheers.
Ok.
Thanks!
And if you ever do end up placing Translate buttons on your blog - do a post!
I’d love to know about what you’re using, why, and how to do it.
I heard that persian was the number six most used language for blogging. a lot of Iranians cannot gain access to direct new source media so they rely on foreign blogs to keep them updated about the world around them.