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Going International

March 31st, 2006 by Sean Crotty

There is great potential for both affiliates and affiliate programs that decide to go international.

for Affilates

If you’re an affiliate and see an opportunity to take your successful business international (”Just think of all the people on [continent X]!”), then you’d do well to (1) hire a local resident to help guide you in your target country and (2) work with an affiliate program that has presence across many countries.

I’ve seen people not hire local help, go other routes (automatic translation software, cut-and-paste foreign keywords into generic text, ..), and fail — or at best, marginally succeed.

Successful affiliates most often hire a local language speaker to convert their text. This gives it the important nuances and the linguistic currency that is so important in catching people’s attention. Think of all of the poorly worded spam e-mails you get: “Hello person, I am from [country Y]. I contact you for purposes of business relationships …”. You get the idea.

As a graduate fellow at the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, I studied how to take businesses international. This included international contract law, cross-border trade analysis, world financial markets, and multi-country accounting compliance.

The cultural sensitivity lessons included German drinking habits, Chinese salutations, French formules de politesse, and how to recognize baksheesh in India. The common thread is that you have to work closely with local people to really understand the current environment. They are the only ones who can accurately advise you on how to succeed today, since they live in the environment, know the current political situation, and can navigate to avoid the pitfalls and find the sweet spots.

It also helps to work with a program that has a presence in many countries. For example the eBay Affiliates Program operates in 19 countries: Argentina, Austria, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States of America, and Venezuela. It is easier to learn the merchandise and business methods of one program provider instead of many. This lets you focus on your core competency of driving quality traffic.

for Affiliate Programs

If you provide an affiliate program and want to encourage affiliates to promote your products internationally, I’d strongly suggest creating tools and systems that operate in all of your target countries, have consistent interfaces, and can scale quickly.

It’s important to provide tools that work (and work the same way) in each of your target countries. I’ll use as my example the tool set that I know the best, the eBay API. You can use the API in 33 countries, since all of the eBay sites operate on the same platform.

While providing this broad platform is an enormous engineering undertaking, the consistency it provides allows affiliate developers to write once and use their code around the world. To make your program work in another country with eBay Web Services, you literally change one variable in the header and then choose a Site ID, for example Site 205 for Ireland.

Conclusion

I strongly believe in the huge international opportunity for affiliates. The keys to success are working closely with locals, choosing programs with broad reach, and having consistent tools.

1 Comment | Filed under: Affiliate Marketing