Have you translated your websites to Spanish yet? How about German, or even Chinese? Translation services aren’t as expensive as you think. The English-speaking market is truly quite large, but if you’re websites only exist in English then you are cutting your potential audience by more than half.As the American government has continually discovered, it’s not easy to set rules for the World Wide Web; it’s an elusive medium to regulate specifically because it is indeed worldwide. Setting rules for American webmasters doesn’t mean those outside the United States will feel compelled to follow them. Americans, myself included, often have a tendency to forget that we’re part of a much larger international community. The internet doesn’t start and stop with the United States, and neither should your website marketing efforts.

Of course it’s one thing to think how nice it would be to get a piece of a foreign market, but quite another thing to actually know HOW to get a piece of a foreign market. And I admit, this is a big topic – far too big for a simple article like this. What we can talk about however is how you can get started down this path, and why you should care to get started in the first place.

Let’s start with the incentive, because that’s the easy part. The market outside the United States is just simply bigger than the market inside the United States. So you should care about this market because it’s in your financial interest to care.

Numbers relating to the adult entertainment industry are hard to come by, and when you do come by them they’re usually sketchy at best. So let’s start with some solid numbers from an industry that does have accurate reporting, just to illustrate my general point. I know the example I’m about to give doesn’t equate perfectly to the Internet, but it does give us something solid to work with for the sake of illustration. The movie “Titanic” is, by far, the current heavyweight champion at the box office; it has grossed $1,835,000,000 worldwide – yes, that’s 1.8 billion dollars. More than 1.2 billion of that revenue was generated outside the United States market. More recently, the movie “The Da Vinci Code” brought in a total of $749 million worldwide, with $532 million coming from ticket sales outside of the United States market. In other words, Hollywood knows that ignoring the foreign market would cut the box office sales for their biggest moves by more than half.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you have to have a big budget to branch out overseas, because that’s definitely not the case. If you do have a big budget then you’re just plain making a giant and costly mistake of you don’t think about markets outside of America; but fewer and fewer big adult companies are making that mistake these days. If you don’t have a big budget then you can still at least move in the right direction, and finally we come to the point of this article, which is translation services. If you want to move overseas, you will need to start working with translators.

The English-speaking market is clearly quite large, but are you forgetting about Spanish? Not only is Spanish growing within the United States, but it is spoken in Europe and, of course, all throughout Latin America. Think that German isn’t worth your time? Millions of German-speaking surfers say otherwise. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – if you are starting on a small budget then you probably want to try your luck with just one language and see how it goes. The problem is you don’t speak Spanish, right?

That’s where translation services come into play. I’ve had the privilege to know Mo Aguiari, who is President of TranslationsXXX, and while he doesn’t have very good taste in professional sports, he does have some good ideas about expanding overseas. His company offers a website translation service that charges by the word, meaning even webmasters on a budget can get their websites translated.

Let’s start with a paysite for the sake of example. Let’s say you have a paysite with an elaborate tour that includes a total or 6 pages, including a warning page and a join/billing page; total, these pages have about 5000 words. Now let’s say that you were working with a translation company, and you were being charged 20 cents per word for services. Translating your entire tour to Spanish then would cost you about $1000, which is not a problem for most moderate sized companies. That might be a little expensive for some of the smaller, independent webmasters, however. Luckily there are a few ways to approach the problem of budget:

1. There’s no rule that says you have to translate your entire website all at once. You can treat translations kind of like layaway… translate your site one page at a time as budget permits.


2. Nobody says you have to translate your entire tour. If you have 6 pages for your English tour, simply design a smaller tour and have THAT tour translated. You would easily build an attractive tour with less than a thousand words, meaning even if you were paying as high as 20 cents per word, translation would cost about $200. Still too much? Just reduce the number of words. As you can see, this can get pretty darn inexpensive if you approach it right.

So budget really isn’t an excuse, because it wouldn’t take very many sales until your translation costs had paid for themselves. If you’re not convinced that translation will make that big of a difference with your foreign traffic, just ask yourself this question: when was the last time YOU spent a lot of time on a website built around a language that you don’t understand? So yes, it makes a huge difference.

I mentioned Spanish because I think that’s a great place to start, but if you do want to translate your website to Spanish then you have a choice to make: what flavor of Spanish? I asked Mo if his company translates only to standard Spanish – meaning the kind of Spanish regularly taught in American high schools, which of course is different than the kind of Spanish spoken in Mexico, which of course is different than the kind of Spanish spoken is much of Latin America. According to Mo, he has translators that can work with just about any kind of Spanish, so it’s up to his clients to pick the target. Remember, a lot of the language used on adult websites is slang, which means words might be very different depending which region you are targeting.

Spanish, however, is not the world’s most popular language. In fact, it’s not even second. Second place actually goes to Chinese, so that’s a language you might not want to forget when planning your expansion path. Most of us are aware the China has a policy of censorship, and most adult websites are blocked out – meaning the people of China are probably not your best target. But as Mo rightly pointed out to me, there are a lot of Chinese-speaking people who live outside of China. With webmasters in China prohibited from making adult websites, your competition for the Chinese market might not be as big as you’d think.

So let’s break down my point to something very simple: it costs very little to translate most adult websites to languages other than English, and most webmasters are making a big mistake if they fail to take this step.

But once your websites are translated, then what? First, take a look at your server logs and you might be surprised at what you see. A portion of your traffic is almost certainly originating from overseas, so simply translating your website is a good start – you might add on a few sales while taking very little additional steps. If you do decide, however, that you want to take a more aggressive stance with marketing your website overseas then there are options; in fact, Mo’s latest project, MarketingXXX, is designed specifically to help American webmasters market to overseas audiences. There are also companies like WildlineCorp.com who can help you with your search engine marketing efforts – in fact, Wildline just recently announced a new partnership with European-based Adult Converters, which increases its reach into Europe. And don’t forget to look into international billing issues – there are a number of articles in the YNOT database which address the best ways to bill customers overseas, which might not always be a credit card.

So whether you talk with Mo at TranslationsXXX.com, hit up your buddy Sanchez who speaks Spanish fluently, or even translate your sites yourself, don’t forget to translate your sites! It doesn’t have to be an expensive project, and in fact, you really can’t afford to pass.