Sometimes we look for the coolest trick or technology, or the hidden secret that will increase our sales and we simply forget or lose sight of the obvious things that are right in front of us and that seem so plain and simple as to be irrelevant. Sometimes we just don’t see them although they arew right in front our faces, other times we believe that everybody else is seeing them too and therefore we should not take action with them since nobody does.
Here you will find, many times, the “hidden secret” that will make you jump forward ahead of everybody else. It is the “everybody knows” that kills you bud!
I want to share a real life experience and some real world observation to drive my point home. I am dealing with International real estate and therefore I deal with people who live in different countries and who sometimes speak different languages. Beware the two different languages could both be English 
Anyway, when you deal with different languages you need TRANSLATION. That would be both language translation as well as culture translation. It is so obvious that it often gets lost. I have been to a couple of high end Internet Marketing seminars and I have heard in both of them the following idiocy: “Don’t worry about translation, there are sites and services out there that will do it automatically for you”. This have NEVER been true and I am afraid it never will be. If you want to have a good laugh, look at the results of this automatic translation sites. They are simply hilarious and they have been for years one of the most fun entertainments we had when I was working in the editorial office back in Italy and we would spend time at the coffee machine laughing ourself deaf with the other journalists of the team. So, if you really want to make fun of yourself use them or encourage other people to do them.
I have been personally translating over 6 million words and I know what it takes to make a translation that is correct, understandable and that conveys the proper image.
Why making your customer work?
But there is more to it. One week ago a very smart US businessman asked me if people would have been able to “ask for a translation” of his site. This gentleman is very considerate of other people and did pose himself the issue of translation, that many others just skip loftily. But “WHY on earth should a customer spend HIS OWN time to translate your message even if that just means pushing a button?” Isn’t it more likely he will simply navigate away from your page and land on a site which is already translated?
The language is not everything
In April 1991 I was asked to develop the Italian edition of the very popular, at that time, PC Magazine. People would ask me why people would buy the Italian edition why they could just have the original which was available in Italy. And mind you, the majority of people who work on computer HAVE to know English. It’s a basic requirement for their profession. I simply didn’t pay any attention to it and went ahead and launched the most successful international edition of PC Magazine: we arrived to 110.000 paid subscribers, 700 hundred pages per issue and we carried only 18% of the original content and the translation of this 18% was such as to make it relevant to the local market.
We found out in the process, that the majority of products mentioned on PC Magazine US were simply not available outside of the US, that when they were available the price was much different or even the features were different, and many times the manufacturers would even change the product names. So we created a local testing labs and produced a truly local content and we were very successful. The other countries, like Israel, India, UK, limped because they were simply republishing the original content. Only when UK developed a local VERY DIFFERENT version of PC Magazine did they become eventually successful. Now let’s come to nowadays. Internet Marketers have it all taped: you set up a shopping cart and a merchant account for the major credit cards and your are ready to go.
Yet in Europe the majority of people DON’T use credit cards to purchase things online, they don’t trust them, and use mostly PayPal. So again a cultural difference that can make all the difference in your marketing results. So even when selling houses these concepts apply: take the extra step to make your message understandable to your customers overseas. It will make all the difference.
Roberto Mazzoni
P.S. If you want to keep up with real rile Internet Marketing become part of the revolution! http://budurl.com/an9p
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