Cindy King's International Business Blog » international business blog

3 Different Communication Challenges Of An International Blog

Cindy King — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 23:00:36 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Can you promote your services to international audiences with a blog ? Yes, this is what I do with my blog and it works very well because of my particular situation. But different businesses are in different situations. And, in these different situations, is a blog still a good option to connect with an international audience? You need to dig deeper to find out.

Your International Audience

When defining your international audience and establishing the right communication to engage with this audience, you can look at this audience from different angles.

You can use a blog to connect with you international clients, potential clients, business partners, suppliers, employees and other business contacts you may have. This is one way to look at your audience. And it is an important one.

But before speeding ahead and analyzing this in detail, remember to take the step backgrounds and look at the very first level of your communication on an international blog.

Don’t miss this very first step in determining whether an international blog is right for your business. In my experience, many missed international business opportunities are due to skimming over some of the most basic research.

Communication Challenges

The first step is to establish the communication challenges related to who you are and who you want to reach. If you read this blog regularly, you know how important it is to question yourself first. It is the same with an international blog. Before you can successfully blog across cultures, you need to have a very clear understanding of you, your business, your international blog and where all of this is in relation to your audience.

Here are 3 different situations, each with different communication challenges to consider before you start your international blog.

1 – English speaking companies targeting audiences in other English speaking countries

Even if you speak the same language, if you want to develop specific English speaking international markets, you still need to pay attention to your cross-cultural communication and marketing. Many businesses forget this and do not adapt their communication to other English speaking markets

Business Opportunity: Country-specific marketing. If you are already getting some clients from another English-speaking country, imagine the potential of developing this market even further with some country-specific marketing. A blog can be the hub from which you do this.

2 – Non-English speaking companies targeting audiences in English speaking countries

The task is almost the same as above, except this time it is more obvious… and therein lies the problem. You see, this time there are not only different languages but also different cultures involved. And people from different cultures may not realize the value of having a blog in English. They hesitate longer and increase the size of the obstacles to overcome. Language issues often become bigger than they need to become.

The good news is if your business is currently selling to English speaking markets, this is not usually a big hurdle to cross. It can even be easier to market abroad with your native language reserved for your home audience, and English to target your main international audience.

Business Opportunity: This is a no-brainer. All non-English speaking companies targeting an English speaking market should have an English language blog, more on this below. A blog and social media makes it easy to conduct a variety of different international marketing tasks. If what you offer appeals to people in English speaking countries, it is foolish to not invest in an English language blog.

3 – English speaking companies targeting audiences in non-English speaking countries

There are a few additional points to consider. The most important ones are:

Whether blogs are common in the country you want to reach
How people in this country use blogs

You need to be a bit more methodical in your research. And a few other tasks important in standard international marketing practices are critical at this first stage: risk analysis and monitoring, flexibility and adaptability to new environments.

Business Opportunity: There are almost always opportunities for international business research. Instead of thinking about a blog all about you and your sales pitch, think about market research possibilities. If you use your blog to try to look for international business opportunities, there are many possibilities with a little research and some thinking outside of the box. Remember, today a blog does not need to look like a blog and it is much cheaper than on-site research.

Opportunity To Reach English-Speaking Markets

Many businesses in English-speaking countries realize the need for a blog now. Unfortunately this is generally not the case for businesses on continental Europe and other parts of the world. If only they knew how publishing a few blog posts in English each week could open international audiences for their business.

What do you think?

Are you interested in reaching international audiences with a blog?
How does your blog engage international clients?
Who should use a blog to develop international business?

Please share your comments below.

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Copyright Cindy King 2006-2010 - International Business Blog

3 Different Communication Challenges Of An International Blog

My International Blog Promotion Secret

Cindy King — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:00:13 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Is there an ideal international blog promotion formula? Well, I have been hunting for a good for a while and I’m now finally happy with what I have come up with for my own international business. I’d like to share it with you.

With my background as a cross-cultural marketer I know how to reach international audiences. That was not my challenge. The missing ingredient for a strong international blog promotion strategy was elsewhere. You see, although it is easy to understand what you need to do to promote your blog online, it is not always easy to figure out how to put this into practice.

Today I’m only going to talk about businesses targeting international English speaking, or “English-reading”, audiences online – we’ll look into international blogs in other languages in another post.

Let’s have a look at the easy part before I share my secret with you.

Blog Promotion Tactics

Luckily, if your international blog is in English, you have many resources outlining blog promotion tactics. The trouble for foreign businesses is:

These resources are in English
The best blog practices in one country may feel a bit “foreign” to someone from another country
It takes time to get used to blogs and blogging practices and even more time when you add in the cultural differences

There is some good news for foreign language blogs: ICANN is now moving forward with URLs for countries with alphabets in non-latin characters. This means there will be more culturally diverse web activity and resources available… and possibly more foreign blogging opportunities.

But at least you can find a multitude of blogging resources in English online. After spending a few weeks reading through the wealth of information on blog promotion it is easy to come up with a long list of things to do. Here the the main ones:

Personal messages to the people who comment on your blog – to create community.

Regular search monitoring – to engage with people linking to your blog or talking about you and your blog online.

Regular social bookmarking & networking activities – to both promote your own blog posts and integrate the communities on a few strategic platforms. For my business these are currently: Posterous, BizSugar, FriendFeed, Delicious, StumbleUpon and Reddit.

Comment on other blogs and forums - to be seen, engage in discussions and create relationships with peers and potential clients.

These tactics work well for blogs in English.

A word of caution: Don’t assume the exact same tactics are ideal for all blogs in other cultures. Cultural differences effect all forms of communication, including blogging. More about this in a future post.

This list looks easy enough. But what happens when you actually sit down to do the work. The truth is, this is the most difficult part of creating your blog promotion.

How Do You Manage Your Blog Promotion

Managing your time investment in promoting your blog is the hard part. You see, if you are not careful you can spend the whole day promoting your blog. Sure, this will get you results. But at what price? This is why I listened attentively and went hunting for formulas on how to include blog promotion into my social media strategy.

How much blog promotion do I need to do for my business?

And finally these are the 3 bits of advice I used to come up with my own plan:

Spend the same amount of time promoting your blog as writing your blog posts
Spend 5 hours promoting your blog for every hour you spend writing your blog post
Do a long list of social media actions every day

Blog Promotion For An International Audience

After looking closely at this advice, I decided to follow and adapt these three rules for my business:

Blog Promotion Rule #1 - When my schedule gets busy I still blog. Blogging is now firmly part of my daily routine. And I always spend at least the same amount of time for blog promotion as for blog writing. No exceptions. This is usually about an hour for each task.

Blog Promotion Rule #2 - As I want to reach international audiences and rely heavily on social media, 5 hours of blog promotion a day is probably a very good thing for my business. So I try to fit in 5 hours worth on as many days of the week as I can. Did you notice how I said ”5 hours worth”? This means I am always looking for ways to increase the value and the reach of the time I spend promoting my blog. So, in practice:

I include a little blog promotion wherever and whenever I can. It has become part of me.
I’ve become a student of productivity and processes, and at the same time paying close attention to what works for me and what doesn’t.
I nurture friendships with people who are both fun to be with and willing to help me out in promoting my blog, even if it’s a tiny bit.

Sure, sometimes I do spend 2 or 3 hours a day solely on blog promotion. But not everyday and sometimes not for a couple of weeks. In addition, it is only when my schedule is free. These long blog promotion sessions are a pleasure because there is often a good deal of networking and connecting with my blog readers. For an international business this is vital.

Blog Promotion Rule #3 - I use a checklist to keep me focused. This allows me to immediately jump into the tasks at hand… and jump out when I’ve finished. My checklist is similar to the ones I found online, except I’ve adapted it a little to fit my business goals. It does not matter if I do not manage to do everything on the list every day. What I’ve found is that it is good to tweak it from time to time to be sure it fits into an hour and stays relevant to my business goals and the new things that pop up in social media.

How has this experience been? Well, although I do spend an hour promoting my blog every day, I started doing this first thing in the morning. This worked wonderfully for me. Then I decided to try to get more “billable” hours into the mornings and moved this to late afternoons.

Big mistake. Although I network on the phone almost every late afternoon and speak to people from all around the world, I was not good at keeping up with the blog promotion tasks in the evenings. My brain was too tired to network across cultures in writing in late afternoons. Speaking was fine. Just not the writing.

So international blog promotion is now back to mornings for me. This is fine. The very first task I do every morning is review my keyword search results to read the latest news of interest to me. And this flows well into the blog promotion tasks.

An International Hub

Blogs are not miracle international sales machines. But with a little thought about your international promotion tactics, your blog can become the hub from which you connect with audiences in different areas of the world. What happens next depends on what you do from there.

As you can see from above, for my international business I allow a large amount of time for networking and almost always include blog promotion while networking. Even if different businesses, with different goals, use different blog promotion tactics to reach their international audiences, networking will probably play a role too. A blog as an international hub makes networking with international audiences a natural choice.

Have you guessed what my secret for effective international blog promotion is? Yes, it is to include active networking as part of my blog promotion. This creates a truly international business hub from a simple blog.

Now it’s your turn…

What international blog promotion formula do you use?
What are your goals when connecting with your international audience?
How do you promote your blog to international audiences?

Please share your comments below.

Business Blogs To Get International Clients

Cindy King — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:00:56 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Earlier this week we looked at how business blogging is a sales conversion tool and for international readers they are strongest at building relationships and making the connection across distance. The question is, can you expect to get international clients out of a business blog? Is an international business blog just as good at sales conversion as a business blog can be in it’s local environment?

Well it depends on several things:

Whether you already have international clients, or not
Where you are located and where your international clients are located
What you sell and what you can sell to your international clients

How International Blogs Bring You Sales

First here are the reasons why an international blog can bring you international clients. An international business blog can:

Provide a platform to give more lifetime value to any international customers you may already have
Make it easier to evaluate specific countries to explore further
Create authority & relationships for an initial step into a foreign country
Give your business visibility to bring in opportunities to create joint ventures or foreign partnerships

In order to get beyond the connection or communication platform you need something else.

The Secret Ingredient

An international business blog can only help you make sales if you find the way to develop relationships with your international blog readers. And this will depend on who you want to reach.

To make a business blog successful in international markets requires a bit more effort. You really need to dig and sift through your online options to find the right one or ones to use to create the authentic connection with your international audience. Then you need to examine your communication strategy carefully to see how this fits in with the culture you are trying to connect with.

It is no secret. Culture-customized content gets more sales. This also means foreign language content gets more sales.

Although your end goal is to create culture-customized communication plan, you can decide to start off with one broad international communication plan. This can give you the time you need to come up with a good strategy and find the right foreign content providers. You will need to transition through to fully customized content if you are serious about developing a foreign market.

One Possible Strategy

Here is an easy first step that works for many cases:

One international business blog, targeting a broad audience
Culture targeted social media marketing to promote your blog

This can create an online synergy and give you feedback on specific markets that can be of interest to you. This process can help you make the business decision to choose which foreign markets to develop first.

Your next action would be to conduct further country-specific campaigns outside of your blog. Your blog could then become a platform for your sales conversion process. However, the distance your blog can take you along the path of sales conversion would depend on a variety of factors relative to your business.

What about you?

How are you using your blog to engage with your international clients?
What challenges do you face when using your blog to reach international markets?
What successes have you had in connecting with international clients through your blog?

Please share your comments below.

Business Blogs To Open Foreign Markets

Cindy King — Tue, 26 May 2009 23:01:26 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Yesterday I wrote about how a web presence is content marketing and described how different content can be used to fulfill different business objectives. Business blogs are great sales conversion tools because you create relationships, credibility and trust through blogging. At least this is how it works in your own markets.

Are blogs still sales conversion tools in international markets?

Today let’s look at how businesses can use blogs to open foreign markets. Before seeing how a business blog can fit in with your business objectives, let’s look at three key points to consider when blogging to build international markets:

Research For Feedback Before Investment

A business blog can be used to get feedback from a wide international audience. You can:

Use tools such as polls, to stimulate feedback
Carry out integrated marketing campaigns to targeted feedback

And of course you can do this targeting international audiences.

For businesses with a longer international strategy, a business blog can be a wise investment. It can shorten your time to enter a foreign market when you do decide to expand and it can help you avoid basic cultural blunders. You can use your time blogging to:

Become familiar with international markets of interest to you
Dialog with international clients to find out how you need to adjust your marketing strategy
Identify primary regions or countries for further international development
Uncover business opportunities you cannot see from your current location

A business blog can be a powerful international market research tool. In some cases, it can also be a stepping stone to reach your international markets before further business development.

Content Marketing Adapted To Foreign Markets

A business blog can only help you open foreign markets if you adapt your content marketing to communicate well within these foreign markets. This may sound complicated and it would be with a typical company website. With a blog it is much easier than you think.

Learn to listen to other cultures

You see, good blogging practices involve writing specifically for the people reading your blog. Blogging is about dialog. Bloggers use other social media platforms, together with some basic marketing tactics, to find out what their readers are interested in. It often simply involves asking readers what they want… and listening. You can easily do the same by filtering out your international readers.

Your international readers will probably have different concerns than your domestic clients. Blogging is a great way to find out what these are. Once you know what interests your readers, and find out how they like their information, it is easy to give it to them.

Language

When adapting your content for foreign markets there is the question of language. Foreign language, culturally-customized content will always get you more sales. But can you rush into selling someone your product if they do not know you? Probably not. You need to transition into foreign language content when you are ready.

I don’t know about you, but translation in blogging definitely does not appeal to me. Good blogs have personality. I think blogs are better when they are written directly by one person instead of two, which is what happens with translation. Otherwise readers will sense the translation and you risk losing the contact with them.

I always read books and watch movies in their original version. I think I would do the same with a blog.

The choice of language raises the important question of defining very clear readership targets with specific business goals. The determining factors in your decision will be whether your company language is English or not, where you are located and where you are targeting.

An English language company can usually create a blog in English for an international audience
A non-English language company might want to look into creating a blog in English to reach a wider audience

If you are an English language company and do not have one narrow cultural target audience, it is probably not worth the investment of getting a blog written in a foreign language. At least not until you find out more about your international markets and how your business objectives fit into that market.

Social Media Relationship Builders

These first two points may, or may not, be enough reason for you to consider creating a business blog to reach your international markets. There is one more element that you must not overlook… and must not underestimate.

Blogs are social media and different cultures respond different to social media

…and this can be great news for many businesses. To me, this is reason enough to get excited about blogging for international audiences. It acts as a turbo charge to the relationship-building aspect of having a business blog.

What does this mean?

Well, when you look at the different cultural scales you can see that some cultures have higher scores than others on the cultural scale of collectivism. This usually means that they like to talk to each other. They probably have other popular social media platforms in their country. You should be able to get a business blog to work well with people from these cultures.

The reason is because your blog is a social media platform. You have the possibility of connecting with other social media platforms and engaging in the dialog with your international markets. These countries probably have different social media platforms and you will need to find out where these are, how people use them and how you can connect to them. But the potential for authentic dialog with international clients while sitting in your home office is real.

International Relationship Building Tool

After all of this, do you think that a blog is an international sales conversion tool? Can a business blog can fit in with your business objectives? And where does it fit in?

Well, when you look at these three points it become clear that a blog targeting an international audience is more about discovering your international markets and building relationships.

This does have a strong advantage over traditional international business expansion methods. You can begin to learn about your foreign markets by creating a business blog:

From your current location
Without travel
Starting with little knowledge of your international markets

And you can create relationships with your prospects and clients abroad. An international business blog can take you a certain distance along the path towards international sales conversion. But alone it has its limits. Luckily in many cultures a well-thought out social media marketing strategy might bring you even further along that path towards sales conversion. More about that in the next article.

What about you?

How are you using your blog to engage with your international clients?
What challenges do you face when using your blog to reach international markets?
What successes have you had in connecting with international clients through your blog?

Please share your comments below.

Business Blogs For Sales Conversion

Cindy King — Mon, 25 May 2009 23:00:55 +0000

How To Create An International Business Blog

Are blogs a good idea for businesses? And what about blogging to reach international markets? Before you can answer these questions you have to understand the world your clients live in.

A Content Marketing World

Today we are all multichannel users.

How many times do you Google the products and services you see in a brochure before running into a store to buy them? When you are online and come across an interesting article on a subject of interest to you, what do you do? Of course, you will stop to read it. Now what happens if someone you trust recommends something? You will believe your friend, right?

It is fair to assume that your clients do the same thing. And probably some of your international clients.

Standing from inside a business, any presence online is about content marketing. No matter where you live and where your clients live it is still about content marketing.

Do you need to be online? Most business can benefit from an online presence, even the ones that do not think so. There are a few more criteria to look at when reaching out to international readers. But let’s leave that question for another day and continue the road to blogging for sales conversion.

Presence today is no longer a static website. You need more than an online presences, you need content marketing.

Content To Stimulate Different Response From Your Reader

Let’s look at these two ways to use content marketing:

Push your information onto people
Pull people to come to you

Both of these actions can be useful to a business. You use each one of these tactics for a different purpose.

First, let’s look at the pushing. An example of this is the content in a newsletter. When you push information onto your prospects and clients, your aim is usually to keep yourself on top of their minds.

Pulling is different. This is when you create content to attract people to come to you. Ideally you create content regularly and write it so that your readers want to come back to you regularly. Your content is enticing so people want to come back for more. It is content with personality that people can relate to. It is the opposite of a long, boring technical manual. It is easy, fun and enjoyable to read. The best example here is a blog because:

Blogs are written by people
Blogs have personality
Blogs are updated regularly and can incite readers to come back regularly to see what’s new

Content For Different Business Purposes

It is only natural that if one type of content stimulates your readers differently, then you also use different content for different business purposes. The two main uses for content are:

Lead Generation
Sales Conversion

White papers are known to be great lead generation tools. Blogs are great communication platforms to get people interesting in buying.

Blogs = Sales Conversion Platforms

Of course, this sales conversion can only take place within a good business strategy. You cannot simply start blogging and expect to increase your sales. The blog is just a communication platform, your business success depends on how you use it.

Let’s look at the key reason why blogs are such a good sales conversion tool…

Relationships Make Sales

Due to the very nature of a blog, readers feel a connection to a blog much more easily than through a company website or an advertisement. This is because blogs are a social media. Blogs create dialog. When you think about it, blogs are all about relationships.

Another advantage to blogs is they can help you increase traffic. You usually update a blog more than a website adding to search engine fodder. And readers come back to look for more interesting content which further increases your online visibility. More visibility increases the number of relationships you create.

But the best benefit for businesses with a blog is that a blog can help you establish authority, credibility and trust. And this is how you can use blogs to make sales.

Your blog communication helps you to convert prospects into loyal customers. The relationship building element of blogging makes blogs a good platform to do some of key business objectives:

Sales conversion
Cultivate loyalty

Blogging Within An International Business Strategy

Do you want to know how can blogging help you open new foreign markets? Stay tuned tomorrow.

Remember, blogging is a form of social media. All good blogs have a solid social media marketing strategy. The Social Media Success Summit 2009 is starting in a few hours. If you are also attending, please hook up with me on Twitter. Let’s enjoy the full social media experience of the summit.

What about you?

How are you using your blog to engage with your international clients?
What challenges do you face when using your blog to reach international markets?
What successes have you had in connecting with international clients through your blog?

Please share your comments below.

Cindy King's International Business Blog » international business blog

3 Different Communication Challenges Of An International Blog

Your International Audience

Communication Challenges

Opportunity To Reach English-Speaking Markets

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

My International Blog Promotion Secret

Blog Promotion Tactics

How Do You Manage Your Blog Promotion

Blog Promotion For An International Audience

An International Hub

More on International Social Media

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Business Blogs To Get International Clients

How International Blogs Bring You Sales

The Secret Ingredient

One Possible Strategy

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Business Blogs To Open Foreign Markets

Research For Feedback Before Investment

Content Marketing Adapted To Foreign Markets

Social Media Relationship Builders

International Relationship Building Tool

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides

Business Blogs For Sales Conversion

A Content Marketing World

Content To Stimulate Different Response From Your Reader

Content For Different Business Purposes

Relationships Make Sales

Blogging Within An International Business Strategy

More on How To Create An International Business Blog:

More on International Social Media

More in these Get International Clients Business Guides