GoFuckYourself.com - Adult Webmaster Forum - Going global - it ain't called WORLD wide web for nothing...

To give you a better idea of the end-user experience that foreign visitors have to endure when visiting your website, you only need visit any website in a language that you don?t understand. It?s not much fun.

Historically, selling to a worldwide audience would have been a Herculean and prohibitively expensive undertaking. However, thanks to the global reach of the web, all of us now have instant access to a global audience of over 1.1bn. (16.9% of the world?s population according to www.internetworldstats.com).

Furthermore, global internet penetration is set to continue rising as more and more people in the developing world go online for the very first time.

It gets better. Not only is the demand for our product is truly universal and transcends national boundaries, but it is already good-to-go for the global market. Luckily the pictures on your tour really do say more than a thousand words.

This makes ?going global? comparatively easy. Since the IP address of your visitors reveals the country they live in and the browser their language, you can and should start communicating with your prospective clients in a language they understand ? theirs.

If you operate paysites, the most logical place to start doing this is on your ?over 18? page, which is usually the first page the type-in surfer encounters. A surfer from, say, Japan is pleased to see anything in Japanese, making him much more likely to click through.

Whilst online translation tools like Babelfish are wholly inadequate for translating large blocks of text, they can be used to translate some key ?non porn? words and remember that hopelessly bad translations might actually do more harm than good.

A new breed from translation bureau that focuses on adult are emerging and will be happy to translate your site and promo materials into other languages for you.

How you communicate with prospects is of paramount importance when it comes to the important part ? paying you. To this end, you must ensure that your call-to-action is in the surfer?s native language. More and more processors are employing technology that does this, so that you don?t have to.

If you decide to go the whole way and geo-target the entire site, always include a ?revert to English? feature. Not doing so will deprive you of potential sales from English speakers living abroad or travelling.

You can now replicate your traffic galvanising activities, with a global perspective.

If you are to target a specific market, it might be worth considering employing the services of a ?local? webmaster that has specific knowledge of that market to help you promote your site and acquire new affiliates in the chosen country.

Once this is in place, your website is more likely to start converting the foreign visitors already visiting your website. The .com prefix is truly international, and if you wish to target a specific country you should also purchase the tld extension for that market (eg .de for Germany).

Your globalization efforts will be counter-productive unless you can convert browsers into paying customers. A little time researching the preferred payment mechanisms of any given country is time well spent. The credit card might reign supreme in the States, but it?s a big world out there and in some countries credit card penetration is still negligible. And yet they all have access to your product!

For such markets, you might want to re-think your business model. Selling a $29.90 monthly credit card subscription to a surfer without one is an exercise in futility.

Far better to take less money and grant less time. This is why Phone Billing is ideal for trials, since it is a payment tool that practically the whole world has access to.

After all, do you know anyone who does not have a phone or cell?