Over 345 million people view more than 2.5 billion blog pages each month on WordPress alone. WordPress.com users produce about 500,000 new posts and 400,000 new comments on an average day.
66 percent of WordPress blogs are written in English, followed by blogs written in Spanish (8.7 per cent), and Portuguese in 3rd. (6.5 per cent).
The first instinct would be to blog in English. There is a global audience at your disposal. There’s a better chance your blog would be read by thousands and thousands if not even millions of readers around the world if you blog in English.
To be adorned by so many!
Blogging, however, doesn’t guarantee millions of readers of your blog, if only it were that easy!
Check out the numbers above again! Only on WordPress.com blogs, there are about half a million new posts per day! Two thirds of those are written in English!
What niche can you cover to be noticed? What different perspective do you bring that more and more readers would eventually notice you in this jungle of thousands of posts?
Your first question shouldn’t be, “What language should I use for my blog?” Rather, it should be: “Why do I want to blog? What am I trying to achieve?”
Content and goals should be addressed first and then focus on which language to use.
If you’d like to reach an audience beyond your own country and give a perspective not available outside your country, write in English or other popular languages like Spanish.
Because English is a globally spoken language, surely there will be more blogs in your niche, so it will be harder to get a piece of cake. You’ll have to put a lot more effort than it’s even possible to achieve any of your business goals in an overcrowded English blogging jungle.
Why not think differently? There may already be (most likely are) many interesting blogs and websites about the topics you’re interested in and would like to write about, but the options in your native language are not so great; the most sensible thing would to blog in your native language.
For example, I write my own blog on customer media in Slovene. There are only 2 million Slovenians! And not many are interested in the topic I cover in my blog.
I decided to write in Slovene for a very very small audience, because I wanted to position myself as a leading expert in the field in my home country. It’s how I’m getting jobs. I knew that there were plenty of blogs and websites on the issue I’m writing about in English. At the time I didn’t feel I could bring something revolutionary new to the table, but I could make a difference in my native language, because I’d be one of the first. Those that read my blog regularly are my valued target audience. I bring great useful content that is otherwise only found in English and written mostly for the North American and UK markets. I feel that I’m contributing.
Michael Schuermann of Easy Hiker once wrote, English is the language of the Internet. “If you are the monoglot citizen of a country like Denmark, you are—through no fault of your own—restricted to an audience the size of metropolitan San Francisco. Even for the native speakers of a major European language such as German, English is the only available ticket to a global readership. This is why virtually everybody nowadays blogs in English.”
But it’s the quality of your readers that matters. It’s the goals that you want to achieve by writing a blog that matters.
When you know why you’re blogging, what you can contribute to the conversation or whether you can start a new one, when you know all this, then it’s going to be much easier to decide what language you should write your blog in.
Do you blog in English or in your native language? How did you make a decision?
