Since I started offering coaching services for entrepreneurs, I’ve been contacted by different people about their sales.

They wanted to increase their sales. Bingo! And who doesn’t, right?

 

One of the most common mistakes that I’ve found during the last year is diversification. People tend to diversify too little or too much.

Today I’m going to focus on those cases where people don’t diversify enough.

I remember the case of a client that wrote an eBook. This eBook was performing very well in the market, but after a couple of years, the sales started to decrease.

My client was concerned about what could have happened.

 

Well, as obvious as it seems, what happened is that this book had already covered gap in the market. It had a momentum when it was published for the first time, but people that already bought it, didn’t need to buy it again.

There wasn’t a follow-up or a by-product that complemented this eBook.

 

In other words, people bought the product, read it, loved it and forgot about the business of my client, because he wasn’t offering anything else to hook all these buyers.

 

[Tweet “Diversifying too little can kill the sales of your business.”]

 

The role of languages in business diversification

I was doing my research for this blog post when I realise that there’s not much information about the role of languages in diversification of businesses. (Please, if you do know any relevant information about this topic, leave a comment below!)

 

As a translator specialised in marketing and business, I’ve been implementing some business strategies to diversify different businesses though languages. By doing so, I took for granted that this would be of common knowledge, hence why I was so shocked when I couldn’t really find anything worth mentioning online.

 

The truth is that…

 

[Tweet “We can implement linguistic strategies to diversify and revive the sales of a business.”]

 

Especially in those cases where businesses (or products) are based on words, such as eBooks, webinars, online courses, videos, and the list goes on and on.

 

It’s all about covering needs

If you have one single product that covers one single need, expect only one sale per person.

And we don’t want that. We want recurring customers.

 

We need to cover a different need for all these people that have already bought from us, OR we need to target a different market or segment in our market to cover the same need.

 

Then, how languages can be applied here?

 Translation services are the ideal investment to target different markets and cover the same need, but in a different marketplace.

 

In this way, you’re diversifying your business in a different market; hence you’ll have two different income streams from the “same” product.

Following the example of my client with his eBook, let’s say that he managed to sell 500 copies of his eBook. Just with his first 100 sales, he could afford the translation of the eBook, a landing page and a Facebook ad to promote his brand new product in a different market.

 

This is how he doubled his revenue and revived his sales having the same product translated into Spanish.

 

But that’s just a tiny thing of what you can achieve with diversification through languages

 

With this business model, we are still covering just one need in two different markets. Although we can still translate this product into several languages and target more marketplaces, we will only get one sale per person.

 

What about if we design a by-product to complement our first product?

 

Let’s say that we create a webinar or online course that tackles a topic related to our first product.

Exactly! Now we can cover two needs in a market and we can hook our audience with a first product to keep buying from us.

 

And here comes the most exciting part

 And what would happen if we translate this by-product into a different language, to target a different market?

We would be able to have recurring clients in two different markets quadrupling our income and diversifying our business model.

Ooops, it seems that I’ve just created a scalable business model only by using translation services. *wink*

 

Conclusion

 It’s a shame that people and businesses aren’t aware of how they can benefit from translation services.

Especially in the digital world, where it only take one click to buy something and you’re probably missing a lot of these clicks simply because people can’t understand what you’re selling or where they need to click.

Now that you know the important role of languages in the diversification of a business, it’s time to take some action. Don’t you think?