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One of the things all companies should have is a batch of content (articles, blog posts and the like) that is sat on your hard drive ready to react to anything. This content reminds me of a Sunday cookup, where you make up a whole batch of food and stick it in the freezer only to get it out when you need it.

Now it is a great idea to have a content cookup too. Take out some time (not necessarily Sunday) and write some articles, blog posts, paragraphs, anything you can think of. You can then “freeze” these in a directory on your hard drive. In this way, when opportunity arises or you need some content, you have some you can use straight away. Or you can grab some snippets and turn them into something you can use.

To give you some ideas, the kinds of things you should be looking to create in your cookup are:

• Web Content – around 500 word mark.
• Blog Content – Anything from 100 to 1,000 words. (Although longer posts should be broken down into multiple posts).
• Guest posts – Again anywhere up to 500 words.
• Article syndication – Over 300 words is good.
• Facebook or LinkedIn updates – These could be random thoughts or small tips.
• Guest Newsletter articles – again around 500 words is a good length

Now you can use the same article for more than one of these areas, but you will get a bigger and better response if you can make each piece that leaves your desk a little bit unique. Write a paragraph or add in some different points or change the focus of the content.

In this way not only do you add value to your own efforts, you will be adding value all round.

One way, I find the time for content writing is during long train journeys. I can get a few articles or blogs written and a few outlines for other bits and pieces. Now I just need to get a netbook to key them straight in rather than use the old pen and paper method which then takes me longer to get published.

The fact that the global economy has reached a somewhat stagnant state of late shouldn’t mean that businesses’ growth initiatives should stutter to a standstill too.

The need to proactively seek out new opportunities is as important as ever – if not more so – as companies must react to the economic conditions and find fresh ways of targeting new customers.

One way of doing this is through extending your scope beyond the English-speaking markets and targeting the 75% of the world that speak no English at all. This may seem like a daunting prospect, but tapping into new or emerging markets isn’t as tricky as it first seems…all that’s needed in the first instance is a foreign language website and a little online marketing savvy.

Online marketing is probably one of the most effective tools available to modern day business. It connects company with customer and facilitates the building of mutually beneficial relationships between the retailers and consumers of the world.

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is now among the fastest growing marketing strategies, with 64% of European marketers indicating that they planned to increase their SEO spend in 2009. However, optimising a company’s domestic English-language website is one thing – launching a fully-optimised foreign language website is quite another.

A myriad of cultural and linguistic intricacies face those seeking to grow abroad. In the European Union (EU) there are 23 official languages spoken in the 27 member states. Although English is the most widely spoken, German has the most native speakers in the EU with almost 20%, followed closely by English, Italian and French.

Understanding the nuances within languages is crucial to the translation/localisation process. For example, the differences between French and German are obvious. But the differences between French in France and French in Switzerland or Belgium aren’t that obvious.

In France, déjeuner means ‘lunch’, but in Switzerland and Belgium it means ‘breakfast’. Additionally, dîner is ‘evening meal’ in France, but in Swiss and Belgian French the word is souper.

There are many such differences between the French dialects in France, Canada, Switzerland and Belgium which help to highlight the importance of properly localising your services for each specific target market. The same can also be said for German (Germany)/Swiss German, Portuguese (Portugal)/Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish (Spain)/Latin American Spanish and, closer to home, US/UK English.

Assuming you intend to adopt a fully localised marketing strategy, what are the practicalities involved in setting up a foreign language website?

First of all, you must establish a need for your service in a particular country. A good way of doing this is to check out the local competition. If there are similar organisations there already, that’s a good sign, as it demonstrates a genuine demand. However, be wary of too much competition, as a saturated marketplace can be difficult to penetrate.

SEO is central to any domestic online marketing campaign, and international markets are no different. You may already rank highly on Google for certain key search terms on Google UK, such as ‘Home loans’ or ‘accounting services’. However, when you have your website translated for your target market, it’s important NOT to translate the keywords directly: the correct dictionary translation may not be what people use to search for their product or service locally…they might use abbreviations, colloquialisms or a different word that means the same thing.

So in the same way as you identify your industry’s highest ranking keywords for the English market, such as via Google’s free keyword finder, you have to research the keywords for each target country, to ensure your foreign language website is properly optimised. Google has country-specific versions of its keyword tool and is an invaluable means of identifying the correct key search terms in your desired market.

These key phrases should then be incorporated into a professionally translated website to organically optimise its position in search engines.

Another point worth mentioning is that it’s actually possible to rise quicker in foreign search engine rankings, simply because the competition for key search terms is much less than on the English language internet.

And there you have it. A multilingual marketing and localisation strategy should underpin any attempt to enter new or emerging markets, with SEO playing a central role.

About Lingo24
Lingo24 is a global translation services provider that specialises in website localisation. It has over 100 employees based in the UK, Panama, Romania, China and New Zealand, and a network of 4,000 translators. Its projected turnover for 2009 is £3.7m.

Speedie Notes.

This was not a paid for article but one we felt worthy of inclusion.  As well as foreign language markets overseas, there are other smaller pockets of foreign language opportunities within the UK.  Do you need finance or insurance content translated into Polish or German, or Japanese?

If you have read this blog in the last 6 months you would have read me use the term virtual real estate. As I said then I did not coin the word but like it some much, I try and use it whenever I find an excuse.

I have been thinking about a post like this for a while and think it is a good time to write it. I have been speaking with a few clients or late about how they can increase their exposure online without spending lots of money.

A few conversations later I have come up with a few ideas and places that you can add unique content to, which very little cost that will give you more access to your target audience.

The main response I got from clients was that they have never thought of using the Internet much beyond a corporate website and maybe at a push a blog.

Your virtual real estate really is the various locations that you can add content too in order to attract your audience that might not come direct to your website.

So here is a list of 14 sources of expanding your virtual real estate:

1. A standalone blog
2. An industry or secondary website – For example, if you sell classic car insurance, when not run a classic car information website
3. Using Social Networks – Your profile pages are potential routes for clients to find you
4. Article Syndication – writing and submitting content to a range of websites again provides a secondary route to your website
5. Newsletters – Running a promoting a news letter can add some viral elements of sharing which can attract new visitors
6. Guest Blogs – you can write a guest blog post for a related blog in your industry
7. Guest Articles – submit a unique article to another related website
8. Digital Magazine – create a PDF and setup a flash based newsletter
9. Video Site – If you are creating video why not create a separate site just for your video channel
10. Facebook Pages- Setup relevant Facebook fan pages
11. Web Applications – Create a tool that can be given away and circulated. This could be a web tool, Wordpress template or plugin as three examples
12. Audio Site- Create a Audio site for your podcasts and set it up like a radio channel
13. Answers – Using LinkedIn Answers and Yahoo Answers is a great way to get added expert content out there
14. Forums / Comments – Taking part in the on-line conversation on forum and commenting on blogs can lead to increased exposure, plus some of the sites rank well in Google so they can drive you some traffic.

As you can see there are lots of ways of increasing your virtual real estate with little more than a bit of time dedicated to expanding your online real estate every week.

All you need to do is make sure that ALL of the web content you add online adds some kind of value to the potential customer.

Do you have pages on your website that you wish you could add links so that readers can easily share your content?  Now on blog platforms this is real easy to do, most come with some kind of module or plugin.  But what is you are running a old style html site?

Well here are few links that you can use to get set up on the main social networking sites.  You can find the graphic icons in most places, we tend to use some of these:

http://jwloh.deviantart.com/art/Aquaticus-Social-91014249
http://naldzgraphics.net/freebies/22-sets-of-the-best-social-bookmark-icons/

The actual html link code you need to get the icons to share the page is here:

Replace URL with the address of the page you want to have shared.

Delicious

http://del.icio.us/post?url=URL

Digg

http://digg.com/submit?url=URL

Reddit

http://reddit.com/submit?url=URL

Facebook

http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=URL

Stumbleupon

http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=URL

Here are a couple of Finance and Insurance specific bookmarking services

Tipd
These guys let you use several linking options here:

http://tipd.com/bloggers

PFBuzz
These guys let you use several linking options here:

http://pfbuzz.com/content/bookmarklet

Do you know of any Finance or Insurance specific bookmarking sites? Why not share them below?  Send us a comment.

The latest research from Elance, the outsourcing website, which released its latest figures relating to what the top 10 work requests where for April 2009, shows that articles and content were the big gainers.

While dominated by programmers and coders (Numbers 1 and 2), there was a startling increase in the amount of content being requested.

“Article Writing” jumped up 2 places to Number 3

“Online Writing” jumped 12 places to Number 5

“Web Content” dropped 3 places to Number 10

You can see the full list here if you are interested:

http://www.elance.com/p/blog/2009/04/may_elance_online_work_index_cash_is_king.html

But that said it just goes to show that content and articles are growing in popularity as more and more companies turn to content to offset their reduced ad budgets and are starting to see the real long term benefits of a content strategy. They are also using it to boost their virtual real estate and increase the number of potential entry points for visitors online.

If you want to take advantage of this trend and outsource your insurance or finance website’s content strategy why not fill in our contact form and arrange a free 20 minute phone consultation with us and we can explain how we work and how we can help your business.

“Virtual Real Estate” was a term I first heard John Reese use and it really sums up a growing strategy for companies to have multiple websites focussed on separate product offerings and services.  In this way they are getting more chance of multiple listings. On top of this they are able to rank for very different search terms without compromising a parent website.

Using Wordpress allows us to not only deliver a CMS operated website we can:

• Prepoluate it with content
• Submit it to Social Media
• Submit some of it to Article Directories
• Run a stand alone site newsletter from it
• Create valid industry news services
• Build niche directory websites

Here is a quick presentation of what we can help you to create.  In a economic climate where costs are paramount of everyone’s mind, investing in more virtual real estate is a great way to invest in the future of your business.

Like what you see?  Why not give us a call or book in a free consultation with us.

Here is an idea for taking your support emails and turning them into content.  There are lots of  companies with huge (and I mean huge) amounts of potential unique content sat in their email which can be used to create a Support FAQ or knowledge base website that can be crawled by Google.  Using Wordpress and an import function you can build a FAQ website in a few hours. Here is a quick slideshare overview of the process that we operate for clients.

Do you see the benefits and want this for your business?  Talk to us now.

Working with lots of online insurance companies, we are always amazed at the lack of content on their websites, yet insurance companies sell some of the most complicated financial products online, so why are they not educating the customer as best as they can so that they can make an informed decision. This can only be done by adding content.

Maybe it is because they don’t have idea for what to write about. Here are 10 ideas for insurance content for insurance broker websites and these are in no order of importance…

1. Frequently Asked Questions – By now you should have a huge range of questions and answer that you would have provided to customers over the years, either via email, by letter, or over the phone. Collect the more common ones and publish a webpage with this content on. If you have enough you can add a FAQ page per product.

2. Product Information – Don’t just hope that the customer will understand your product because he has found your website. They are looking for information – Give it to them. Glossaries and product guide are great content and these can be split over several pages

3. Editorial Section – Do you add your own voice to your website? Add an editorial section or article section.

4. Question and Answer Sessions – Why not run a Q&A session either with a product specialist in your industry, a related industry that would be useful to your clients – Why not run a Q&A with a local accountant or a mortgage broker. You can use this as a basis for a webpage or if you record it, audio or video, you can publish this on your site and promote it. Or do both and get twice or thrice the content for one bit of effort.

5. Product provider information – Who do you work with, what are they about and why do you work with them. Build a page per partner.

6. Detailed Biography of you and your staff – Add a page for each staff member, get personal. Remember people like people so adding a page per staff member will give a prospective client a good feel about what you are all about.

7. Blog – Could you add a blog to your site? And have more tips and comments on the issues on the industry or on topics that relate to your clients.

8. Video – We touched on this before but some products or application processes could be better explained by hosting a video. This can be done with simple screen capture software. You could offer a whole range of helpful videos which you can add to your website.

9. Forum – The daddy of user generated content. Add a managed forum on your website which you patrol and engage with your customer and clients.

10. News Section – You can add a section on your company news, new staff, new partnerships, or about your work in the local community. In addition add in some industry news from other trusted news sources or rewrite news stories with your own comments or slant.

As you can see there are some very simple steps here to add a raft of great content to any insurance website.