About one or two month ago I decided that I would try to blog and twitter in english, in order to let my text be undestood by everyone. But how does it feel after all?
First thing I recognized is a decrease in comments and answers to me, as most of my readers / followers are german. So, if you’re deciding to switch to english, you should explicitely tell everyone that they still can answer / comment / reply to you in german. YOU MAY COMMENT IN GERMAN EVERYONE! :-D Otherwise some who are not so sure of their language skills might just decide its too hard to translate their thoughts to english. And nobody wants that.
Second thing I realized that you need to change some META-Tags, as you’ll most likely will have defined your site / (micro)blog to be a german one.
Third thing is that my english skills didn’t improve too much during this time, but I think they’re pretty good anyways. Well – you at least practice a bit.
Forth thing … you can see a world-map on the right with approximate locations of my readers. Since I changed to english, there are readers all over the world, but I definitely also lost some readers here in germany.
Fifth thing is one that bugs me … I still have the .de-Domain thats for german sites. The .com site isn’t free anymore, so this some kind of ****s.
After all, it feels good. I’ve got a free and open mind and I think I don’t write about too much local stuff, so why not train my english a bit? I don’t believe the money-making-blog-hype anyways. Did you also think about writing in english in your blog instead of your local language? Or do you use a multilanguage system? Please comment (you can also comment in german)! ;-)
Ich stehe immer noch vor dem Problem, dass ich wohl für meine beruflichen Seiten zwei Blogs erstellen werde.
Englisch, weil ich die Inhalte (und meine Dienstleistungen) weiter als dem deutschsprachigen Raum anbieten möchte und deutsch, weil hier die meisten Auftraggeber “Nähe” benötigen.
I’ve thought sometimes about writing some posts in English as they would also help people outside of Germany in the blog I used now to write the comment.
Most of the time I prefer writing in German because I’m better in my native language, there would be more mistakes if I wrote in English.
Normally, I prefer reading German blogs because I read a lot faster in German than in English.
I wouldn’t comment in German in an English written blog just because it seems not fair to me regarding the non-German-speaking readers.
I agree to your thoughts concerning the money-making-blog-hype. I guess if one writes in English there are more potential readers but there are also more blogs one can choose from. Therefore, it makes no sense if you only see it this way.