Going international

Does anyone have any experience in taking a successful pay for content site and targeting non english speaking countries. Im particularly interested in germany, france, brazil and all spanish speaking conties. If you have any tips regards translation, payment, the best search engines etc it would be great.

depending on what posts I get back I may commisison a economic/demogrphic study for some or all of these places. If anyone wants in let me know my private message.

Thanks

The question about search engines is pretty simple. Most foreign countries search portals still draw their data from the main international databases (Google, Yahoo etc) - but with filters for language and/or TLD. So the search portal names may be different but the SE databases are the same.

As for translation and payment - I'll leave that for others to answer!

Hi, don't take it as advertising, but since I do own a translation company and have done localization projects before... here it goes.
From my experience even if some people can (and will) read English if they have no choice, they will certainly prefer to read in their own language. Particularly if you want to get them to purchase something or give you information, etc.
So by all means, just go ahead and do a localized version of each language, even if a reduced version.

Good luck!

Hi

I have made versions for my site in many latin american countries, in Spanish. I get most of the referrals from google. I find it's a lot easier to get top rankings for keywords in foreign languages than in English, because of the reduced competition.

About payments, in latin american countries, credit cards are not as widely used as in other countries. You will find many people can't pay you by credit card. Also, if you can, try to get a payment system that allows for payment pages to be translated. I use a multi-currency system myself, so that I can display prices in local currencies, this is not mandatory, but it helps ...