Entrepreneur Christian Arno started his translation and localization company Lingo24 in 2001, with a degree in French and Italian from Oxford and a handful of start-up money. Initially working from the spare room in his parent’s house in Aberdeen, Scotland, today Arno has built Lingo24 up to become Scotland’s largest translation company and one of the fastest growing in the world, with projected earnings for 2010 of over $9m USD – and along the way he has learnt some important lessons on how to succeed as a small start-up in a hostile economic climate.
Lessons Learned
One of the most important lessons is that, as a start-up with limited capital, you can’t afford to throw money around on expensive projects like advertising, office space or testing employees soft skills without knowing what your guaranteed Return on Investment (ROI) will be. Luckily for Arno, he quickly discovered the power of the internet for both marketing and communication purposes. By starting his business with a network of employees and freelance translators based around the world, working from home and communicating online, Arno was able to not only reduce his business costs and carbon footprint by avoiding renting office space, but also to start operating 24 hours a day, with employees in different time zones who would pass the baton from one zone to another as business hours finished.
The Turning Point
A major turning point for Lingo24 was discovering SEO, keywords and Google AdWords as inexpensive and highly effective online marketing strategies. By investing nominal sums for click-through results with Google AdWords, Arno was able to boost Lingo24 straight to the top of the search rankings, and also test out the popularity of various keywords by seeing which ones brought in the most click-through traffic from month to month.
Targeting Keywords For Success
Researching keywords online through search engine results, checking out what the competition was using, and using keyword search applications such as Google Keywords were other effective ways Arno used to figure out the best terms to use for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). By figuring out the tricks for success in the Google rankings – including using keywords prominently, keeping websites updated regularly with relevant, useful information and building links with affiliates through guest posts and media coverage – Lingo24 rose up to the top of the Google rankings and stayed there.
Arno discovered that there was much less competition for translation services in the European market – particularly in Scandinavia and Germany – than there was in the UK and not only that, but competition for search engine rankings was also less, purely by virtue of there being less sites overall in non-English languages.
Research Leads to Expansion
He decided to expand Lingo24’s business into the European market to expand its customer base, and also to cushion against currency fluctuations. Lingo24 built five translated ‘toe in the water’ pages for European countries, and the resulting spike in business was encouraging enough to expand with web sites for France, Germany, Austria, Switzerland (in French, German and Italian), Belgium (in French and Flemish), the Netherlands, Luxembourg (in French and German), Norway, Sweden and Denmark.
These sites were all fully localized and search engine optimized, with local domain names, intensively researched local keywords, and with copy translated by in-country speakers, using culturally specific references and phrases. This intensive localization of the websites was seen as essential since internet demographics research shows that, while English may be the ‘mother tongue’ of the internet, the majority of internet users don’t speak English as a first-language, and 85% of consumers will not buy a product from a website if they can’t read about it in their own first language.
Lingo24 was able to exploit this gap in the online European translation market with its localised sites, and the business grew rapidly, facilitating the opening of offices in Romania and, most recently, Panama, to offer a complete international 24-hour service.
Moving Ahead
Lingo24’s current strategy is to distinguish itself from other translation companies by using innovative technologies, such as the revolutionary web-based Computer Assisted Translation (CAT) XTM system that allows translators and editors to log-in and work on a project simultaneously from anywhere in the world, and also allows clients to update and monitor their projects in real-time.
The XTM system also makes use of statistical machine translation, building up a glossary of often-repeated terms that it can replace automatically when it finds them in context in a new piece of text, meaning the longer translators work on a project, the faster they get. The technology is compatible with any file type and is open architecture, meaning Lingo24 can scale-up operations infinitely, as well as open source, which means clients keep and control their terminology glossary.
What Can You Learn From Christian?
Essentially, the lessons that can be learned from Christian Arno’s business strategy are to keep costs low by working from home wherever possible, use the internet for marketing and communication purposes, and work with the latest technological advances. With a similar strategy and commitment to a bright idea, you too can grow from a home-based start-up into an internationally successful business.
