Day 25: Translated into 8 Languages, A Version For Mobile Devices, and Submitted To Dozens of Blog Directories

12 Jul, 2007 Marketing, Education Brian Armstrong

It’s day 25 of my 30 day marketing challenge to demonstrate that anyone can start a blog, and it can be a profitable and inexpensive home based business to start.

Today I went to a free marketing class at the University of Houston taught by Dick Myers and Jay Mock. I couldn’t believe how much useful information I got. I’ve been reading a ton about internet marketing, especially lately, so I thought I knew it all. But these guys had some great ideas that I haven’t seen talked about elsewhere.

Jay runs an outdoor lighting and light fixture store that gets a staggering amount of traffic. Dick Myers also has an excellent Internet Marketing Blog that you should check out.

All three ideas for today came from the presentation. I’ll probably go back each week.

1. Translation

Using Google’s Translation service I was able to get my entire website translated into 8 languages! Check out the collection of flags in the sidebar on the right. Here’s how…

Here is the code I used that you can paste into your own website. Note that you will have to find and replace “www.startbreakingfree.com” with your own domain for it to work. I had to modify the code here because I couldn’t get it to work on my site.

I wanted to find a place to put those flags closer to the top of the page, but I couldn’t think of a good place.

This is great because supposedly, 65% of people on the internet speak a language other than English. This dramatically increases the reach of this blog! I image that while most internet users speak at least some English, this will allow them to get more out of it in their native language.

2. Setting Up Access For Mobile Devices

Researchers at IDC say that 1.3 billion people will connect to the Internet via mobile phones by 2008.

Want to see what your website looks like in someone’s mobile device, like their cell phone? Check out this emulator.

This will also greatly increase the reach of the website. I used WordPress Mobile Edition, a plugin by Alex King, to get it up and running. It took about 2 minutes to install and bam, I have a mobile version of this website. Man I love WordPress and all the plugins people have made for it. I have about 30 installed now.

3. Submitting to RSS Directores

Based on Jay’s advice (and the presentation of one other gentleman, who’s name I can’t remember). I decided to submit my site a a bunch of blog directories.

This took a long time but it should generate a lot of back links, because these sites will pull your feed and hopefully create webpages from it that contains your links.

I’d encourage anyone reading this to try and find a similar class or club in your area. Just getting around all those people who were doing what I’ve been trying to do was amazing. I left feeling really inspired and excited (and got 3 killer ideas). That high can be more motivating than any other thing you do.

This post is part of a series on Website Marketing

6 Comments so far »

Aylons said,

Wrote on July 12, 2007 @ 5:02 pm

I’m sorry to say, you don’t have your blog translated to 8 languages… the quality of automated translations is so poor that it’s almost impossible to understand a text larger than 3 sentences.

Of course it’s helpful for those who cannot speak English, or even for those who are struggling with a particular word or sentence. But it’s an insane task to follow a blog based in automated translators.

I’ve just tried to read it in Portuguese, and it was a funny (”killer ideas” was something like “muderer’s idea”), but not really a productive task. In Japanese it gets worse.

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 12, 2007 @ 5:21 pm

ALyons,

Good to know, thanks for the feedback from a native speaker.

Google tends to be the best out there, so hopefully it will keep getting better.

If anyone else out there is bi-lingual, would love to hear your impression.

[Reply]
Danilo said,

Wrote on July 15, 2007 @ 11:40 pm

Indeed Brian, automated translation will give a little help but not really do a great job. I checked out the translation for Portuguese and at moments it was funny, at other moments confusing and it helped only for someone to get an idea of what you are talking about. This applies for all automated translators, even Google.

On your other point, great tip about mobile device although I can imagine readers having mobile access through RSS.

[Reply]
Erik said,

Wrote on July 16, 2007 @ 8:42 am

As a german, I can say that automated translations suck and I get quite offended by people claiming to provide a german version of their website - and if clicked you only see rubbish. I like your tips in general, but I think this one could be counter-productive. People who don’t know english and are willing to suffer these translations can surf the web via google translate or babelfish. As an example I used google to re-translate a part of your ‘german’ webpage. Ask yourself: would you returm to this?

1. This web site of more RSS listings added I terminated to submit with the sides on this list. There was much and it took a long-term. 2. I provided myself business a case of network connection for rice university pupils This was a large case to meet to the people of all age of my University of, rice. Before some this year had graduated, and some 40 year had graduated. This was a good probability to use my business maps. * I pursued with a number of people by email and included my connection in the email. * I formed a contact with a chap, who is to be created other companies in the business of helping. There is a potential for the Partnering here in a number of contexts. Your groups of university network connections use!

[Reply]
Brian Armstrong said,

Wrote on July 16, 2007 @ 10:23 am

Wow, scary example Erik. Based on the feedback, I’m thinking of removing it since it doesn’t seem to be providing much value.

[Reply]