Plan to Globalize Now

In January, 2002 web stats from WinPatrol.com indicated that approximately 80% of our visitors came from locations within the United States.  This month, visitors from the US is higher but now only makes up 63% of our traffic. Apparently, my new Blog is even more popular internationally as graph below shows.

For the first time, last year more PC’s shipped to the Europe than to the US.  In my predictions for 2006, I noted that consumers really don’t have a good reason to upgrade. A strong Euro and demand for consumer laptops accounted for an 17.1% increase in PC sales across the little pond.

33.2 %  Europe, Middle East, Africa
30.7 %  North America
26.1 %  Asia-Pacific and Latin America

According to research firms IDC and Gartner, the big winner in Europe is the Taiwanese computer maker, Acer. Dell also saw their worldwide PC shipments increase 18.6%.

If you run a business that depends on the Internet, you better have a plan to globalize. I don’t mean having your customer support people reading scripts from India rather than Arizona.
Does your online store support non USD currency?
If you get Email in another language can someone respond?
Is your product or website localized so it can be read by non-English customers?

For now, at least, we’ve been saved by some excellent bilingual education in countries outside the US. Bits from Bill may not be the best indicator but according to the graph below I still could be losing 25% of my potential audience. 

Graphs indicate traffic reports from the past week and were created through the use of Site Meter Plus.