Exporting is not as difficult as it once was.
The Internet now reaches into every country in the world, and it is as easy to market to someone ten thousand miles away as it is to market to the person next door, the world truly is becoming a much smaller place.
But there are things that you can do in order to improve your chances of success in foreign markets, so we have listed a few here in support of other Exporting information in this category, to give Falmouth Businesses a heads up when it comes to using the web to market abroad.
1. Market to everyone. WWW stands for the world wide web, and that include world, and wide. You really can reach everyone now, and its as easy as reaching your home town in many ways, so factor that into your plans form the very beginning if you want to export.
2. Use a .com domain. Many domains are locally focused - for example a .co.uk, or .fr domain will be understood by the search engines to mean the site is associated with one country. The site will be more difficult to rank well in another country, so these national "Top level Domains" (TLDs) limit your potential. .NET and .ORG domains are also international.
3. Consider using Multi language functionality. Most of the internet is in English and so if you want to ranking at the top of search engines for English search phrases, you have the most competition to contend with. Other languages have less sites, and so it may be easier to rank top for them. Lets say you have a B&B in Falmouth, and find you are attracting a number of German Visitors. You can quite easily have a version of your site written in German. Now lets take a look at Google with a simple example. If you search for "Gasthaus Falmouth" there are actually only 5 web sites using that exact phrase anywhere on the web: View Results. Compare that to the English equivalent phrase "Falmouth Guesthouse" which has 5940 results (today according to Google.co.uk) View Results. So much easier to be top of 5 results than it is for 5940. Note there are additional complexities when considering how many people are searching for each phrase, but we won't go into that level of detail here.
4. Flags: For a nice additional touch you can have flags denoting the various languages of your site to allow users to easily switch between the languages - we have all seen the web sites I'm sure. Some of the better open-source web site systems have ways of making this work quite easily - it may not be terribly expensive to do.
5. Sell in local currencies. If you only sell in pounds it may be difficult to attract a US buyer, and the US is the world's largest market. With a shopping cart type site it is easy to sell in more than one currency, and your payment gateway provider can usually handle any currency transfers for you.
6. have a dedicated version of your site for each country. Further than just translating your site into another language you can also host it on that country's domain quite easily. For example if you wanted a Spanish verison of your web site, perhaps it would do best when hosted on a .es domain extension. Changes like this are not technically difficult, but can make a significant difference to your sales on the web.
Peter Graves is a director of Channel Computing - a Falmouth / Penryn based company that specialises in web site development and marketing - or helping your comapny to do better on-line.
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