“David, why people aren’t interested in my content?”

“I’ve spent a lot of time and money in getting my website translated but I’m not getting any new visitors.”

“I have translated blog posts into Spanish, but they’re not attracting any traffic to my website.”

“Blogging is dead, no one is paying attention to my posts.”

“Why can’t I increase my sales, David. I don’t get it.”

I keep getting this type of comments day after day.

Blogging isn’t dead, I can guarantee that. In fact, blogging is the main source of income of a lot of businesses.

Have you ever used one of these techniques to get your blog posts/website translated into Spanish?

• I use Google Translate or any other automated translation software (itranslateapp, bing translator, etc.) to translate my content into Spanish.
• I use automated translation pluggings to translate my content into Spanish (qTranslate, transposh, multilingual press free, etc.)
• I know a little bit of Spanish, so I translate my own content OR a friend of mine knows a bit of Spanish so he’s doing it for free.
• I just found this translator on [insert dodgy website] and he’s doing it for free/very cheap.

Then that’s why your content isn’t working.

If fact, this content is probably killing your blog and your reputation as a blogger.

 

You’re a blogger. You know how difficult writing a blog post is. Are you really expecting a piece of free software to do it for you in a different language for free? I’m afraid that’s not going to work.

Your texts will be illegible and they’re probably killing your SEO strategy as well. If your translations are too literal (and believe me, if you use these methods, they’ll be too literal), this can be seen as duplicate content on your website, and you won’t never rank higher on search engines.

Then how can you maximise the results of your translated content?

 

Establish the objective of your post

This also applies to any blog post you’ll write in the future.

You need to write with an objective in mind. Otherwise, you’d never know if your content it’s working or not, because you won’t have the necessary metrics to compare your results against.

What must be the objective of your posts?

This is something that only you could know. But your posts must probably fall under one of these categories, what we call AIDA in marketing:

A for Attention – these posts are focused on attracting attention to your business. They provide very useful information directly related to your audience’s concerns. They will immediately notice such interesting content and won’t be able to help it and visit your site.

I for Interest – now that everyone is visiting your website, you need to make them stay. How? Make them interested in your business. You have provided very useful information about your audience’s concerns, and now… Why they should stay in your website? What are you going to do for them?

D for Desire – desire comes after interest. You need to talk to your audience about the problems they’re experiencing. They must be aware that their situation could be improved, and how you’re going to help them.

A for Action – once your audience know you, it’s time for them to take an action. What do you want them to do? Do you want them to subscribe to your list? Do you want to them to buy? Tell them highlighting what they’re going to get from this action.

 

Now it’s up to you to identify the main objective of your blog posts. Remember to be specific with these objectives to be able to track the performance of your posts against the established objective.

 

Translate the main sections of your website

Is your website optimised for your international clients?

If you start attracting an international audience but the main sections of your website aren’t optimise for them, they’re going to leave (and probably they won’t come back!)

Make sure that your website is optimise so this new audience is able to navigate through them and learn more about what your website is about.

 

Analyse what blog posts perform better with Google Analytics. Do they make sense for your international audience?

Your best posts are the ones that will be likely to perform better for your new audience. This is how I select the posts that I want to translate and it’s worked pretty well for me.

You can see in this graph the visits during a month on my blog. Those dots represent the number of visits my blog has every week.

The highest peak corresponds to a week when I translated one of my posts into Spanish. As you can see, I get twice as many visits when I publish content in a different language in my blog.

I use Google Analytics to analyse which posts perform better on my blog.

You can do it just selecting the period of time you want to analyse, and then you just need to go to “Behaviour” and “Overview” and you’ll have a list of the most visited pages on your website:

Does it make sense for your international audience to get these posts translated? Then you should probably go for it!

 

How to translate blog posts into Spanish

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, translating a blog isn’t about putting words into a different language just like that. (That’s what all these dodgy methods that I’ve mentioned before would do.)

You just need to have a look at one of the big bilingual blogs to notice this. For example, this is the English and Spanish version of Vogue:

As you can see they publish different content adapted to the needs of their different audience.

 

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you have to create content for each of your audiences, but the more adapted your content is, the more effective it will be.

 

These are a few of the techniques that you can use to translate blog posts into Spanish to multiply your blog income and visibility.

4 tips to translate blog posts into Spanish to multiply your blog income and visibility

 

1. Take your time to come up with the best headline

You’ll have to come up with a completely different title for your blog post to attract an international audience.

Persuasion works differently in different languages. And your audience will be more likely to click and visit your blog posts if their titles are adapted to them.

Make sure you’re aware how persuasion works in the language you want to translate your blog post or hire a specialist; otherwise your post won’t have as much impact as they could have.

                 

2. Multilingual SEO will increase visitors from search engines

If you want to make the most of all the organic traffic that your post could be attracting, you need a multilingual SEO strategy.

I already talked about multilingual SEO previously on my blog. Remember that key words may be adapted to the search trends in the target language.

A keyword that may perform well in English may not work well in Spanish.

[Tweet “Research keywords in your target language to boost the performance of your posts over time.”]

If you keep using the same keywords, Google could consider the content on your website duplicated and you could be penalised.

3. Guide your readers through links to Spanish speaking sites and resources

When we write a post, we normally include links to resources with more useful information for our audience. Make sure that you replace these links with content that is relevant for your international audience, and make sure that they can understand the resources that you’re linking to.

Otherwise, they’ll get lost and leave your post:

Your blog post must be a roadmap for your readers to get to know you and your business. You need to make them learn about what you do and why it’s relevant for them.

They’ll need to follow a route among different posts and sections on your website until they’re ready to buy your products and services and become an actual client.

It’s up to you to make them follow this route and guarantee that they don’t get lost.

4. Cultural adaptation of references and examples

You may also use examples and references that your international audience may not know.

Try to explain the topic of your blog post with universal examples that everyone will get, and naturalise cultural references so no one gets lost when reading your texts. You can even include a reference that belongs to the target culture if you are a specialist in your international audience’s culture or hire someone that can do so.

[Tweet “You’ll connect better with your audience making them feel like home when reading your texts.”]

Have you ever considered getting content on your website translated into a different language? Let us know about your experience in the comment section below!