Some tips for Profiting Outside US/UK/CAN/AUS (16)
Making money from the popular US/UK/CAN/AUS markets is a bit of a clustermess these days. There's lots of competition and lots of banner blindness. It's not particularly easy in any region - has to be said - but if you can avoid the most common markets, you'll avoid 90% of your competition.
If - like most - you're honeybadgering for an unspoiled pot of gold to shove your beak in, it's time to bust out an atlas, get down and dirty with your translations, and take your campaigns international.
Something I've noticed personally is that although the setup time to get an international campaign running is much more of a pain in the arse, you generally stand a much higher chance of eventually seeing profitability (if you optimize the right way).
Whereas... in the USA and UK, you can be doing everything right and still seeing failure, certainly much more often, because of the saturation and maths no longer working in your favour.
I guess the problem with going international is the extra barrier to entry. It scares many affiliates away, particularly during the early struggle to break even, which can often feel like stabbing in the darkness.
Here's a few tips for doing it right:
Culture is as important as language.
Before I enter any foreign market, I want to know how that market differentiates from what I already know.
To give you an example, in the western world, we have an obsession with tanning. Being olive-skinned - or sometimes fucking tango'd if you revel in delusion - is being healthy, affluent and beautiful.
This is not the case in the East.
Go to somewhere like Thailand and check out the nearest beauty store. Every single skincare product is rammo jammo with whitening serum. That's because in the East, the opposite is true. Women go crazy over getting their skin as white as they possibly can.
It's little cultural quirks that make all the difference in the angles you come up with to promote an offer overseas. What's the easiest way to find these angles?
Use expat sites.
Everybody recommends doing market research, but there isn't much noise about how to actually penetrate a completely foreign market. The easiest way I've found to supercharge this research is to use expat sites.
Expat sites are dedicated to those who have moved abroad to start a new life. They nearly always include vital information about the local customs, and what distinguishes that region from the expat's home. You can scrape this information straight in to your skull for $$$.
Following the insight of expats who have physically moved there is the easiest way to assess the vital differences between your own mindset and the natives of a country you're completely unfamiliar with.
Use this list of expat websites to nail the market you're entering - http://www.transitionsabroad.com/lis...websites.shtml
Translating lots of complicated copy is a bad idea.
The reason why most affiliates end up with horrifically bad translations is because they take their prized landing page, copy and paste the entire text in to a document, then send it straight to be translated. There's an obvious screaming flaw in this madness.
The English language is like very few in the world. How many ways can you think of to say "good"? There are dozens. Including my favourite, courtesy of Alan Partridge - "Jurasssssic Park".
Before you send any copy to be translated, go through it and replace any wordy adjectives and adverbs with their most basic synonyms. Your message is going to get lost in translation if you try to convert Shakespeare in to Chinese. This is tough and emotionally draining - there's nothing I hate more than removing complicated references to my balls from a landing page - but it has to be done. Keep your sentences short and sweet. There is less room for error.
Another issue - What happens to your landing pages when the translated copy is pasted in to them?
Often you will find that you're left with more characters of text than you started with. This can have the knock-on effect of screwing with your winning formula. If your call-to-action disappears below the fold, and the user is turned off by the abundance of text, you need to consider purging some copy.
Only use native translators.
I like to use native speakers for my translations rather than English-speakers who happen to have a knowledge of said language. The reason being that native speakers, if they're worth their salt, will tell you when you're making a cultural faux pas.
Their first reaction will be to make your copy read authentically to their own eyes.
The catch is that you have to find native translators who have more than a vocabulary of 14 words in English.
You've probably heard that One Hour Translation (http://www.onehourtranslation.com/) is a fast and effective site for getting your copy translated. It is, but it's also a little on the pricey side...
Use Fiverr for good cheap translations.
It's amazing what people will do for five bucks.
Besides getting modelesque stunners to write my name on their bits for a few pesos, I also like to use Fiverr for my translations. The quality from the providers I've tried has been excellent, and the value much better than you will get at One Hour Translations where they have the obvious overheads.
Just remember to shop around for the native translators.
Don't assume you've seen the offer before.
We talk constantly about the importance of creating angles and consistent messages to drive users through a conversion funnel.
It's amazing how many marketers neglect this when they're required to communicate in a different language.
Before you promote any foreign offer, hit up your AM for a rundown of the unique selling points. What part of the audience is the offer trying to capture? What unique features are in place to capture this audience?
It may even be worth having the offer translated in full so that you can work some consistency in to the copy of your creatives and landing pages. You have to strive for that consistency. A campaign is dead before it started if you overlook an important niche selling point simply because it was masked by a foreign language.
This is solid advice, thank you for that. I've noticed that culture plays a huge role in even dealing with people on Elance. It is interesting, as an American, I am fairly ignorant of cultures outside of my own. But, when you think about it you can have a completely wrong interpretation for a harmless mistake! What kind of international traffic do you think would be the best converter? Like PPV, Display etc.
Exactly, it's a harmless mistake - and it often never gets recognized as a mistake. It's easier just to rule out the offer as a non-converter, or the market as a dead region ("Bahh, Nobody buys in Zimbabwe anyway.").
In terms of the best conversions, I've had success with display and social. PPV is frustrating. You can devise a fiendishly awesome campaign, launch it, and then discover that there's barely enough impressions to cover Google.com as a target.
Make sure you check with the PPV network what their inventory is in the country you're targeting, although it seems like a few of the networks aren't even sure of this themselves.
This is an awesome post Finch. Details and looking at the offer itself are really important too. I've looked at a pin submit for Argentina for example that was formatted like this:
__ (15) _______
Where the spot before the 15 only had room for two numbers.
Before running the offer I looked up what phone numbers look like in Argentina. While some of them are 02 (15) xxxxxxx, others have three or four digits before the (15). Those ones are automatically pointless to run when a good chunk of the country can't even put their area code in correctly.
You also have to be aware of bigger details too. In Australia I used to see a bunch of flogs that would tell me how many pounds the free trial on a bizopp would cost me. If only that person had spent two minutes on XE.com figuring out that we use the Australian Dollar, their landing page probably would have converted better.
Awesome advice, thanks!
Thank you all for the awesome advice!
Research slang in the specific countries and USE it. THINK: SLAGS
For all the UK goers--what are common slang terms? Perhaps a concise list would be great if it is possible 
SLAGS for sure!
Tor--anymore slang I should be aware of ? C'mon slags is just slut. Let's get something useful LOL
Hey finch,
I'm new to STM and read a lot of your extremely valuable tips and tricks. One question in regards (I know it's "necro-posting") to going outside English speaking countries. How do you research the competition in countries in which you don't speak the language? Especially when it's a general offer (e. g. Mainstream Dating in Brazil --> portuguese...)? How do you find what your competition is doing?
Never thought of using Fiverr for translation, will certainly give it a shot now.
I'm not sure if I understand you correctly, but if you just want to see their landing pages, you can use the STM Adult Ad Spy tool for that country and try to find what your competition is up to. Hope this helps mate.
Originally Posted by inservo
Originally Posted by theoptimist
Originally Posted by inservo
STM Adult spy is for ADULT only. Whatrunswhere.com is great for mainstream!
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