Blogs have become a staple for just about every business, every entrepreneur, and every brand out there. In fact, blogs have become so popular that it can make standing out from the crowd difficult. But with a unique angle, you might be able to give your company’s blog a fighting chance. A bilingual blog, for instance, can expand your readership, attract new consumers, and raise your website’s ranking. The following tips offer ideas on how to run a successful bilingual blog.
Hire A Professional Translator
If you’re going to have a bilingual blog, you need to do it right. If you’re planning on just throwing your content into an online translator, you’re not going to get the quality content that will draw foreign language readers, and even worse, foreign language consumers. To truly put on a bilingual blog, you’re going to need an expert in that language. Just like in the English language, there are nuances, clichés, and grammatical mistakes that robot translators simply won’t pick up…but you can rest assured that your readers will! Therefore, make the quality of the content your top priority. A perfect example of this challenge is that you cannot treat U.S. Hispanics as a whole group. Find a learned translator or native speaker to re-write your blog posts for you and then go over the content to make sure the same message will still come across. Having a coherent, quality foreign language blog should be your first and most important step in running a bilingual blog.
Separate The Content
Obviously, a bilingual blog will have twice as much content on it as a monolingual blog. More content means more scrolling means unsatisfied readers of any language. Separate your blog posts by language and offer your blog visitors a choice in which language they’d like to read in. By separating the content, you can lessen confusion, ease your blog’s accessibility for all readers, and keep your blog’s layout looking clean and organized. There are many plug-ins and tools to help you create separate blogs for different languages. WordPress, for instance, has a plethora of tools that can make separating your content as easy as checking a box before publishing. While separating the content might be more work ahead of time, it will lead to a bigger payoff in the long run when all of your readers find what they’re looking for faster.
“Translate” The User Experience
When you have a bilingual blog, you have to realize that your visitors will be interested in more than just reading the blog post in their native language. What if your blog post really hits home for them and they’d like to join the conversation. Normally, this would be great for analytics, Google AuthorRank, and social media because it shows that your readers are interested. But if your Hispanic reader can’t find the comments or share button in Spanish, their overall user experience has just gone down the drain. Furthermore, the potential of your blog reaching an even wider audience has gone down with it. While hosting a completely separate website in a foreign language might not be necessary, at least translating the most important parts of the user experience should be. Take a look at how people interact with your website to determine how much of your website should be presented in a foreign language.
Give Yourself Time
Having a bilingual blog is no small feat. To do it right, a bilingual blog will require more time, more effort, and maybe even more money if you need a professional translator. And as tempting as cutting corners might be, you’ll only end up hurting yourself and your readership in the long run. Therefore, make sure you give yourself plenty of time to make each blog post as perfect as possible in each language. Consider the time it will take to you write, edit, revise, and proofread the blog post in each language. If you’ll be working with a professional translator, you should also make room for time going over the message of the blog post. Then, optimizing each blog post for different keywords, including different links, and creating unique and attractive titles for each post will also take up time. You might be considering posting your English-version blog while your translator works on your second language version, however, this can be detrimental to your search engine rankings, as your bilingual content might be missed when your site gets indexed. With a bilingual blog, you might actually double your amount of work and time put in. However, reaching a wider audience and finding more consumers to pair with your brand can be a major pay-off.
Takeaway
Bilingual blogs are not all that common for businesses, yet. However, a bilingual blog presents a great opportunity for any brand to promote its products and services to a wide variety of readers and consumers. Start translating your blog posts to give your company’s blog a new and exciting way to stand out from the crowd.
About the Author: Pete Wise is a Copywriter working for Luminar Insights is the premiere source of latino analytics and a reliable source of hispanic data to take your marketing campaign to the next level.
Pete, Firstly, thank you for posting this thought provoking blog entry. My wife is from Puerto Rico, and while I have served people from around the world with my site – which is all in English – I’ve had very few clients from Spanish-speaking nations. Perhaps with your insights and my wife’s fluency, I can finally attract this niche market, which is only getting larger!
Overall, I wonder how many Hispanic Americans, born here in the US would read a bilingual blog. Many speak Spanish fluently, but may not be able to readily read or write Spanish as their parents do. I guess I will just have to let you know how it goes!
Thanks again!
— James