I was reading the fine print on one of the affiliate programs I play around with, and I realized they only pay for orders that originate in the US or Canada. So with a little IP address geo targetting, I'm not sending them traffic from non US/Canadian IP addresses. But I'm curious what people's thought are on what I should do with the International traffic? - Shawn
Well if you have the time, languages would be the best use of it. So if someone from Israel visits your site, serve up Hebrew content. That would be cool.
Well the part that determines what language to display would be cake... It's getting someone to actually translate the content. That's another story. You could always set it up so users from certain countries are redirected to Google's translation service or something. That would be easy to do. Of course not the ideal translation, but it would be cool. - Shawn
I know but automated translation still sucks. So - get out some books and learn the other languages. Do the translation yourself. We all know your smart enough.
I dunno who told you I was "smart enough", but they lied. I took three years of French, 2 years of Spanish, and I can speak about 4 words of each. - Shawn
I use an ip to country tool from http://ip-to-country.webhosting.info/ which allows me to show where a visitor has come from at http://bots.pcpropertymanager.com/bs-314.html or to serve up relevant links at http://www.propertyinvestor.info/pia/ (but you'll only see a difference if you visit from Australia). I have to hold the database locally but that's cool. My pet peeve has to be when I see an ad, get an email saying get this free/cheap etc but in reality it's only open to USA or Canadians. Ok, so I use a .com email these days but when I had a .co.nz email it still happened. How hard to ask where I'm from or use my ip to get that info! I'd like to see more geo-targetting being used - we have the technology! Sarah
One other thing I use it for (nothing too exciting) is on the keyword tracker login page it shows the number of users and how many countries there are users within. The country data is based on geo-targeting the user's IP address. It's definitely a neat trick, and I agree that it should be used more... - Shawn
Shawn, wasn't your original question "what to do with the international traffic?" From this question I didn't think you were talking about translation. Obviously if you are getting affilate click throughs from off shore viewers they must be able to read your site. There is probably very little you can do with these people. It is a matter of whether or not the companty for whom you are an affiliate is willing to ship off shore. US companies are notoriously bad at the export game. To avoid their frustration and dissapointment you could put a notice on your site that says these products shipped to US addresses only. The only other thing you could do is go into the export business yourself and fill these orders. Probably not a great idea. Credit card fraud from some countries in Asia is absolutely rampant. This may explain why some companies won't take off shore orders.
It's an online service that caters more towards International users. They don't pay commissions to non-US/Canada users as a loophole is my guess (you have to read deep in the fine print of their terms to figure that out). For now, I'm putting up AdSense ads, but only for International users... - Shawn
If the Afill program is returning good money then keep track of the None US visitors and point out that they are losing revenue and they may change their TC or find a afill that will pay you for both Barrie,