 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to WordCamp. I am Latoya Smith. I'm one of the volunteers in the A.B. Wrangler and I want to introduce Alex Baran. Alex, he actually immigrated to the U.S. in his 20s and he started his own business while he was a freshman at Brooklyn College. So he's been with Wordpress since 2008 when it was still a niche, logging platform. There was no word content management system yet. And Alex is the founder and CEO of Translation Cloud, the company that employs an army of languages and does language translation services in over 100 languages. So let's give Alex a warm welcome. Latoya, thank you so much for the introduction. My microphone up. Can you guys hear me? First, before I start the presentation, I would like to say a big thanks to Wordpress organizers. You guys are awesome. Thank you for this incredible opportunity to present. And I'd like to thank all the community of Wordpress users. Since when we started off in 2008, I had no clue that we grew up in such an impressive community. And today we're seeing WordCamp's popping up all over the world. And this is a great example of the successful life-threat patient. Today I would like to share with you my topic on market penetration and give you some techniques on how to handle your localization needs and what exactly this entails. First of all, I would like to give you a little background of who I am. Thanks for the opportunity to mention that I'm a founder and CEO of Translation Cloud, the language provider in New York City. And we have partners in the German city across the house. The reason I'm in this industry and I'm speaking to you because I want to share my incredible knowledge of masks from 15 years of hard work. First as an immigrant for struggling to find a job. And then now I'm starting to figure out how to put things together. And I understand better what localization and marketing in foreign countries is. And therefore I'm able to pass my knowledge to you with the one knowledge that they have deep trust for. So this is the incredible opportunity to listen and pay attention. If you're interested, let's keep moving. The business I'm part of is Translation Cloud. A full cloud can lead this. Can lead this is one of them. I'm into all sorts of localization projects. And fun fact about me, I'm a winner of the Higher Power Award in 2012. My firm was nominated as one of the successful companies that actually in the midst of recession hired so many people that were proud of it. I went to Washington DC, got my work, got my class badge and so on. So here are your expectations. You go to business, you go to marketing, you feel like an Egypt, right? You jump in high, you make big kicks. And this picture should be more like two guys standing together. You put an apple on top of the hat and then you try to kick it with the hat, right? But in reality, what I'm saying to you is it looks more like this. Is the video working? Is it working? In reality there's no video, but reality looks like there's a fine video. Two girls have played with each other. Another girl imagined that she's a karate kid already. She had to hit the glass on top of the hat and she smashes her friends. So I want to manage your expectations properly. You are in the world of business and whenever you build the theories about your success, we all imagine things, right? We have our ideas and the goals. But in reality sometimes it could be slightly different. Such events as WordCamp are very helpful for you because you can learn from the experienced entrepreneurs like myself and hopefully they'll get into the same problems. What I will cover today is four important topics. One is a brief information about the market penetration. Then I will teach you how to do a proper WordPress localization listing. And then I will give you some ideas on your pricing strategy, how to price your product properly. And last I will give you an effective marketing chance so you can extend properly any further language. Since I introduced myself, now let me ask you a few questions. Who is the blogging developer for WordPress? Who is the business owner? We have a pretty good audience here. We have blogging developers and business people. This is the good stuff for you then. Foreign market penetration, if you are familiar, oh by the way, who is not from New York? Who is visiting? Okay, that's welcome. So if you are born in America, you understand the world, you can actually have a limited knowledge of what's out there. But as myself, I am an immigrant. I was exposed to both worlds. I'm from Belarus, I spoke Russian, I was part of the Soviet Union and its collapse. And in the future, I went to America, and I see a different world, capitalism, something else. But people who are born in America, they have limited understanding and knowledge of what is out there. Therefore, we have to travel first. If you travel a lot, for example, even for work camps, there are events out there, you have to experience a lot of cultures. You stay in hotels, you get to speak to a lot of people, and you see that they all speak in different languages, and it makes your communication harder to learn. This is the common problem. Your voice or yourself, you can expect it to be a very easy experience. Google is not the only choice today. It was effective before, but as all marketing channels, those channels are burning out. So you have to look for a better tune. What is the market penetration? Let me give you a brief introduction. So market penetration is the process of going into... selling the same product to the same segment of customers. Therefore, if you have your own plugin, you don't need to create another plugin. You have to sell the same plugin to more users on WordPress. So you have to penetrate the market and get a higher percentage of downloads and market share. So there are three ways to extend this. It's to find new users within current markets. So you do the quick penetration. You find new uses for current customers, extended use. Sometimes you can write a new feature and penetrate with that feature as well, which wouldn't be important for your target audience before. And you can use... also, no usage per customer. This relates to self-employed companies to drop their providers. They want to offer you more of the same stuff. They want you to apply for download. More minutes to talk on the phone. But this is what I'm sending to you. And now I'm going to give you some brief introduction to NBA. If you study for Masters, you'll probably bore you with those charts. And this is a general chart to give you the answer to metrics. And market penetration, as you can see, is just a quadrant out of the four tiles. It's an existing product and it's for the existing markets. It's a very low risk strategy because you don't have to diversify, you don't have to spend money to R&D, to pay other people to experiment with your... with your software. It's just, you know, backing the product and selling it everywhere. From point A to point B. This is the very common discussion. You look at the successful entrepreneurs and you think, oh, this guy's a successful success. He's been born with a silver spoon. But in reality, your success more looks like this chart on the left. It's like your downloads on your plug-in. I took this picture from one of the plug-ins on WordPress. And it's up and down strategy. It's not linear. Your success is never linear. And when you're an entrepreneur, when you go up, you always have your down moments. And in order to reach this card and get a plug-in, like if people in Russia don't handle this problem because lots of successful entrepreneurs drive it, this is your motivation. This is your motivation. Why are you in business? Because you want to be from point A to point B, from zero to something. And the number of downloads, the number of activations successful on your plug-in, is the good indicator that you're moving to the right direction. How else would we measure it? The more adoption rate you have, the more penetration of your plug-in is, the better. But market penetration does not start by itself. It has to first see on this chart, from animal to a dark container, where your startup is. If you don't have a domain, you cannot do the plug-in. If you don't have a web posting where this plug-in is located, you cannot have the plug-in. You should fill in the prerequisites and then move forward into the market penetration. But the timing is always now, because in my experience, in procrastinating, there's always a temptation to procrastinate. That line is out of tune. We'll all wait until the last moment and write the papers. And then last night, right, when we want to build businesses, for example, we save money for our personal things. We tend to procrastinate important decisions for a very long time. Whenever we get sick or we have terminal conditions, that moment is trying to do some important things. And my understanding is, if you are into the business and you want to be successful in what you're doing, always try to set some hours a set of your business schedule, because we're all surrounded by operational things. I'm a full-time entrepreneur. I wanted to do this presentation, but there are various other things I wanted to do at the same time, right? Everything competes for my attention, for my desire. So I have to put some hours aside from a schedule and just do this presentation. You don't have to understand that no one else would do it better than you. There are certain things you have to commit to. And the right time is, of course, now. Moving forward, preparing for penetration. Who knows what penetration? Penetration. Some people are smiling. That's part of the marketing, right? You have to understand that this is the way we came up with the product. We want to be memorable, because the way our brains are wired is anything that's predictable and tedious, we tend to ignore. Everything that is unusual might change in the color of the slide, and using the word that maybe suggests you the wrong or other meaning of the word. That tends to bring us attention, and if you win that attention, you win the adoption of your power. This is very important. You spend less money per click, less money per view. Just like that. The viral virility, I call it. So penetration. Is this going horizontally or vertically? The way I call it, the market penetrator, by startup, is because I think penetration goes from up down. And this is not what you think. This comes from the space aircraft. There was a Mars expedition. We had to launch the rocket in space. And we launched toward the Mars, and the mission of this craft was to actually penetrate as deep as possible the soil so we can get the sample of what beneath the surface. That's as easy as it is. This is our opinion. But this is important when designing your product, or the name of the plugin, make it stand out. So this part number two is the actual mini-greedy stuff I would like to share with you, the plugin localization. We all heard animals, right? Our limit system, which is inherited from animals, even from dinosaurs, or some people play, consists of multiple parts. But the limit system is the one that actually relates to the aspects of your lives when you tend to compare yourself to other people. So very social. Sometimes when you're daydreaming, you're sitting and you're probably reading the book, and sometimes you don't understand that you basically think about something else at this moment, and then you realize, oh, what did I just read? Did somebody have this problem of a situation? Or as some person talks to you, you're sort of listening actively, but at the same time, you're somewhere else. So this is the condition we, as humans, have all the time. There's nothing to worry about. It's called comparison. We always compare our things, ourselves, our lives, as a social person to somebody else. So if you have your own circle of friends, you have your own circle of coworkers, the plugin developers, and you constantly think about things like, oh, do I owe money to somebody, or there's a bill to do next time. There are always those ideas on the back of your hand. And therefore, we tend to relate to people only who are in the same situation and the same type of condition as we are. For example, you have, if you look at the spouse's successful marriages, both husband and wife look the same. They look like a brother and a sister. Because people tend to flock to the people who look like that. It's just wired in the nature of humans. And therefore, if your product is in the language of your audience, English, Russian, Spanish, Arabic, you will have much higher success rate with relating your product to them. So I will cover three things when we talk about plugin mobilization. It's how to translate your readme.txt file, which is your description file for the plugin. I will tell you how to use the function B. If you're not familiar with it, how to do it. Extraction of the strings. And I'll also show you how to translate your plugin files. They have a full package right here. No obstacles. The readme file, number one. Each plugin has easy translatable parts. Thanks to WordPress. And in WordPress community, that wasn't the case all the time. When we started in 2008, we had a very tough time translating the song. That's why we didn't do it. We just didn't do it. We had an English version, and we thought American market would be sufficient for us. It's a huge market. But fast forward. I think around 2011, we started noticing that a lot of frameworks, CMS, kind of a management system, containing the group out with WordPress, like group out with group out. They all started to blow out this capability to localize things. So this is the, for example, your WordPress plugin. Welcome. This is the page where your plugin is. You have to click on the development link, which will take you to your interface where your strings part used to be translated. In my example, we started off the localization process with Elashian language, and here we have to see that we have several parts, and it looks, of course, very consuming, very confusing. That's why I call it how to interpret this. Some people don't even know when to go there. You have development stages and stable stages. Development means it's only visible to you right now, and stable means it's visible to everybody else. So in order for your listening to game, there's a kind of extra link in the interface of WordPress to the forward version, and therefore participate in the search for extra keywords in the language. You have to have both of these in agreement. So if you click on the Russian language, it will take you to the interface which looks something like this. On the left-hand side, you have the original string and translation on the right-hand side. You double-click on the translation, and you provide your own translation. In my experience, login translation is a pretty straightforward process, and you can even use something simple such as a machine translator, whichever you like, Google, Bing, or Yandex, or anything else. I'm a legal person. I tried to Google translate, and this is probably good advertising for that, but they did pretty good translation because the text of the plug-in is relatively simple. You don't write complicated stuff on the plug-in. Download this, click there, and activate there. It's fairly simple. So the machine already memorized that and reuses those translations, which looks like human form. Therefore, it's fairly straightforward to translate. The only caveat is, when I encountered something specific, when they have the variable inside of the text string, for example, it's got the percentage sign, 1, S, 2, then Google tends to do much worse job. They add extra characters, extra spacebars, so you have to have a human to look at all. So the interface is like this. Also, you don't have to be an admin to translate this. You can have your own dedicated users who are part of your localization team, so if they should have the WordPress username and you want white wisdom, they can have access to this interface and translate it for you. Then you only have to do this to moderate the translation and activate it. This is an additional slide on how to show when you double click on the right-hand part, you see this particular string and you can copy and paste your translation. And this is how the translation looks like. If you're an admin, your translation will go white listed already. If you're a contributor, your translation will go whole for evaluation. Now, part number two, make it multi-labeled. The string functions double underscore and then function E. Who already had experience with this function in your practice? So this is our fairly new functions and me myself as a developer, I was surprised that my job became so much easier than before because before we had to struggle with .po.mo files, we had to download those EO editors to extract the text files from WordPress, load it in our desktop software and then translate it manually by a few months' work, email as a cash installer, freelance translators, and then get it back at all of the website. The new approach is no software, which is really awesome for ourselves. Everybody works in the browsers. There is no exchange of .po.mo files and also what these functions do take into consideration. This is more like a technical knowledge probably if you're beginners, you might not notice the difference, but programmers struggle with a number of variables. When you do the localization, you have to create a new variable which is straight in the whole approach of .po.mo file. In this approach, you just copy and paste the slug of your plugin and you don't have to plug in any names. So there's less and less work for you. Nice and simple. So the three steps to get your plugin ready for localization probably weren't aware of it before, but when you submit your plugin to WordPress directly, it's not yet ready for localization. First, you have to change, and then add the text domain. Text domain is your WordPress slug. Whenever you submit the plugin to the WordPress directory, some moderator, a beaker or somebody else would ask you what would be your slug name for the Europe. The one would be in your WordPress domain, Europe. In our case, we added convey this dash translate. So this is our plugin. This is where you add it to the plugin page. Step number two, you have to load different styles. This is your .po file. We don't know where it is now. It's somewhere in the cloud. You just load it and it's very simple. You submit one place, one string, and it's good to go on. And lastly, you have to update, you have to append the text strings. Whenever you have the trade function, which brings in... It used to be a function echo, which would bring in the... It was displaying the text information on the browser. Now we have to replace it with function e or double underscore. And this function basically also clear up the code, because if you are an ethical person, you could write a JavaScript and put it inside of the script file. And echo function will print it out that allows your JavaScript, because browsers interpret the JavaScript as the execution code. So you can grab personal school keys and they're good to go. So it was a big vulnerability threat. Therefore, this is the team approach to care of it, and now we have nicely functions. So if you took everything together and did this nice job, you will have a new sexual-free interface. It will be in a foreign language. I'm going to list. We'll be off, we're going to go to the foreign language. So the interface finally should look like this, everything green. You activate development, you finish development, you finish the blogging and reading file, which is your script. How to test a new look. It's very simple. Your blogging, when you activate WordPress, it asks you what language you want your WordPress look like in the game. It's located in your settings tab. When you log in as an admin, you go to general and then you select side language. So if you did translate the plugin, you can test it by switching these dropouts. That will be displayed in the WordPress in different language. So you'll have the whole look of your blogging. Now, I'll give you some of the ideas on how to foreign penetration also of course is about this SEO. And SEO is a manipulation, right? No matter what people think, but you have to really stand up for yourself and you have to manipulate sometimes the way to the way you promote yourself is your activities and it's how you do it. And I put up this section into a couple of things. One is clickable images. What we as humans tend to look for is other humans, right? If you are in the business of selling to if your target audience is male, you display males. If your target audience is female, that's that. If you sell to kids, children, you display children. It's that simple. It's more clickable than than cartoonish images are longer. If you have your blogging in a directory which you can be for exposure, you can be for CTR so to speak if you have a real human image. Colors, I suggest is blue, green and white. In my experience, these colors are safer because people feel we all have our own bars and we would never ever see these colors with more more confidence. Look at the Facebook. I think blue. Look at all the successful websites there. We tend to have these colors. Try not to use red or orange. Because these colors make people feel a little anxious. They don't want your customers on the first impression to feel anxious. This is a safe place. Nobody is going to harm you. That's fine. Number two, you have to plug and you need to put keywords in your blogging names. If you translate it, for example, I highlighted this plugin they try to put in two keywords in a title and both of them work perfectly. So if you go to WordPress directory you type in these keywords and you'll find it in that plugin. That works. WordPress is your friend. WordPress is your friend. It's not Google. It does not come to it. It doesn't have any difficult algorithms with CTR. It's not like a directory. So whichever is in a title is being triggered by the search pretty successful. The same thing goes for description. Description, as you can see, is only a small snippet. So try not to do it along description. You don't like four or five lines of description. I wish I could know what that would be about WordPress. Multilingual text. These are the texts that are participating in the search. They're more or less non-deprecated the way I see it. And they're not participating well in the search results. But you should also be thoughtful of the texts which are displayed in your target audience. If you're expected internationally they can be high traffic mode search keywords. Now, this is about the manipulation. This part I'm only bringing you as an example. I'm not urging anybody to do that. Because you as developers should be like antivirus developers. You should know how viruses work. So those are the botlets. This is the way some developers could inflate an active installation by triggering thousands of fake websites and installing a plugin. And therefore they have millions of activations. And therefore users would think, oh, this is a safe plugin. This is good to try. So you can rent a botnet. You can buy it. You can build yourself. It's all out there. You should be vigilant. You should understand that this might be a problem. A different manner does it for us now. And number six also very questionable. I don't encourage anybody to use it. It's called asking for plugin ratings. Rates work really well for the WordPress directory. Therefore obtaining them is very important. But you should never use what's called SAP botleting. It came from the cartoons where they had an arm covered in a sock. They pretend to be people's talking. It's the same technique when you go from WordPress to say hey, you're also developing WordPress. Download my plugin and give me a good rating. You don't have to do this. Or paint somebody on fiber. It's a case recently with somebody. So if you've never seen it, it's not. Now moving to the process for market penetration. Number three. The pricing is very important because you are in the WordPress directory. WordPress is all about free. It's all started as a free start. We want the free free chocolate, free coffee and free plugins. We don't want to pay for anything. But we as developers, we're in the business of probably making some money. Therefore we need to figure out how to price our product. So the penetration pricing again from the if you attend one. It looks more like WordPress. You start, you have a very low entry point and then you try to lock in the customers as much as possible. Like contract by some agreements and then you try to raise the prices and not let the customers go away. It works very effectively in a cell phone industry. People give away cell phones sometimes free of charge. And that's what if the year the culture expires, they increase their bill rates. With your plugin you go with the free offer of course. And then you try to hopefully bring people up in the scale. Price giving is the strategy when you start very high. If you, for example, have very enthusiastic, energetic crowd, people just wait in my final product like for Apple iPhones or MacBooks, whatever they come up for the sale. You start selling to enthusiasts then very press unsensitized and they'll buy it at any rate because they want to feel important. Again it's a social thing as I'm also trying to stand out in the crowd and this part is actually giving you the status there. And then once the market is saturated because enthusiasts are only having to go down the scale and offer the same product for less. Every day a low price is the price employed by Walmart for example. You know that there's always something, there's no specials every day there's a low price therefore your consumption is very even. Freeing pricing. This is the pricing that most developers have. It's on WordPress, it's on web hosting, it's in the language industry. Everything that comes with the consumption like monthly payments, you want to have a free new price. Expect perversion rate around 1%. Remember in attractive free users, very rarely people can work therefore they have to build a lots of adoption. A plugin that actually is not deleted by almost. Now moving to the marketing channels. There are free channels Whenever you try to prepare your image in a foreign market go with something free first because it's easier to experiment there's less risk of failure and then go to the page channels. The advantage of the page channels of course you get much more higher value for your money and you can reach very targeted audience. Free channels is your WordPress directory. Try to do as much as possible with your WordPress directory even just clickable translate them and you can pick up. It's your search, if you're dominating in the search, we're bringing a lot of new users. Page channels are Google AdWords Microsoft Data Ass, similar to Google AdWords Twitter Ass, Facebook, Instagram Ass and YouTube Ass. So as you can see there are all Ass. Those are the channels that are still working for us, that's why I'm bringing this up in the conversation. But as you know in America the post-bricklink is getting astronomical. But the post-bricklink in developing countries where you want to be the project you also need to be adapted, expanded, it's still not. Therefore, you know we are burning out but they're still good. What works better even, the Google AdWords always works quickly. So whenever it works with a human being or a robot you're going to make it quick. YouTube Ass on the other hand is new frontier. New frontier. If you have our products should have users, right? And users always ask you questions how to install this plugin, how to uninstall this plugin, how to activate it Your YouTube Ass, if you shoot something like a tutorial, you can promote it and this is also very effective because it will take a lot of pressure of your support team. What really works. And one of the most important channels is the Apple creation. There are a couple of consumers where we all sometimes see that we're on YouTube all the time watching, we start watching something simple when we came to YouTube to watch the little tutorial on how to install the plugin but since YouTube is so addicted we end up watching something else and this is very time consuming. So you want to transition from a consumer's territory into a creator territory. Creators are very much less people it's a more elite team 1% of the population are creators. You create a YouTube channel if you have the experience in writing good quality code you can share this experience with a screencast on your screen with your audience. There are some already very effective YouTube channels that start as a free project and then move to the very high volume of subscribers and they can dictate a lot of marketing power. The effective channel to promote your YouTube channel is the collaboration. In the beginning you have no viewers, no subscribers, no nothing and you have to pay somebody or you have a friend who would introduce you and also use a collaboration so it will bring a lot of audience from them to you. You can do commenting you can use your finger vloggers you activate the ring button and whatever they call published media it also works. Buying subscribers there are market places where you can buy subscribers it's like an M2O problem if your channel has zero subscribers people will feel like this is something shady they might be more likely to subscribe but there's already subscribers so firstly buy product conclusions this is when you advertise your channel or your product you've already established the vloggers who write about bloggers they ask them hey do something from across contact outreach this is when you publish articles forget about your own blog you have to publish articles on some of the sales blogs and you have to have a team somebody who tells constantly to fellow vloggers and tells them hey I will pay you but you have to publish please publish my article this works make sure your articles have UTM labels those are the labels that actually bring you the idea of where the customer came from the source very important for you for the morning so you can see with which blogs you can invest more money and finally start a podcast podcast is good for those who are driving the car to YouTube but you can still your message, your experience your ideas now of course it's going away because YouTube is replacing all of that with those studies that people listen to YouTube more than watching so this concludes my presentation and I'm open to questions you like him can you come see him for a language to plug in this at the end you can add your language or write your language in your plugin if you have a plugin and it's not doesn't have an ad or it's not a director no no question about your plugin if I can decide for a safe language if not present in your plugin can I add a new language can I add a language in the plugin yes the way we set it up now is a link closer to the machine translator since the plugins usually provide the first layer of translation with the machine therefore the list is limited to whichever software connection if the sufficient number of users ask for this rare language sure we can be standardised if there's no more questions good to go thank you