​Tips and Tools Your Startup Can Use to Maximize Your International Business

The world of digital business is increasingly a world without borders. Any barriers, for example, preventing an ecommerce store in Chicago selling to a customer in Bangalore, or a marketing agency in London hiring a freelancer in Vietnam, are likely to be merely logistical or administrative in nature.

Related: The Right Way to Grow Your Business Internationally

That's a good thing, because if you restrict your business to the country where you're physically located, you could be leaving a considerable amount of money on the table. According to the Small Business Administration, 96 percent of the world's consumers now live outside the United States, and two-thirds of the world's purchasing power is based in foreign countries. No matter where your company is based, the benefits of international expansion are difficult to deny.

Traditionally, cost, risk and logistical challenges have discouraged online businesses from selling to or working with customers from anywhere but their home turf or in selected territories their nations control. But now you can open your business's doors to global commerce. Here are the tools for doing that:

Translation and localization

When it comes to website content, English remains the primary language of the internet. W3Techs reports that over 50 percent of web content is written in English. But, according to Internet World Stats, only a quarter of internet users are English speakers. If you're looking to truly expand the global reach of your online business, speaking the language of your next target market could be a good place to start. Typically, this is done through translation and localization.

Though sometimes used interchangeably, translation and localization, also known as L10n, are actually two markedly different processes. When applied to a website, translation involves converting written content from one language to another. While translation is an essential facet of localization, "localization" specifically typically tailors many more aspects of a website to its target market...

https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/316915

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by Idham Azhari