French Connecting With French Clients

by Claude Jollet B.Sc.A.
(Quebec, Canada)

Helping French speaking business persons establish a meaningful "virtual conversation", in French, with their target clientele on the Internet. This is one of the many services I offer, as coach and adviser to small business people.

Building a small business on the Internet, or even building a Web site for an existing small business, is easy to do, if one is to believe the things you read on this site.

But, wait! Not all businesses have English speaking clients! What if a business needs to cater to French speaking clients?

Site Build It is being advertised as the "be all to end all" solution to build a successful business on the Internet. Oh! sorry, SBI is not advertised, as such. Rather it is widely promoted, all over the world, by it's users. Some people would say it amounts to the same. No. It is immensely better. Why? Because SBI users describe the benefits and advantages within the context of a real, working Web site! That gives the SBI user a huge advantage over an ad appearing somewhere on a Web page on the Net. But I digress.

I specialize in helping French business people build, or boost, their business, in French on the Internet.

I help French speaking businesses build "killer" Web sites, in French, for a French audience ... with, you guessed it, Site Build It!

When my client cannot read English, easily enough to understand the simple SBI instructions in the Action Guide, I step in - by request - and help them adapt SBI to a French context.

Take, for example, the first five steps (they are called "DAYS" in the SBI Action Guide). They are critical to the success of a Web site, meant for business, or otherwise.

It is a well know fact that any business person must speak the language of its target client group, or forever be ignored!

Well, that is precisely what the first five steps of the SBI user guide do. They help the business person "learn" the language of its prospective clients. How! By providing step by step instructions in, first, discovering what words (keywords) French speaking people actually use on the Web to find the information they are looking for and, second, in analyzing the thousands of keywords discovered, to select the top one or two hundred that have the highest potential of being part of a "meaningful virtual conversation" between you and your Web site visitor.

Discovering which French words and expressions are best for doing business in French on the Web is far from an easy task. The Web was not designed to recognize accented characters! Even worse, many words are spelled the same, such as words ending in "ion".

For example, take the word "selection". Even the software tools and utilities that come with SBI can only recognize the un-accented version of the word "selection". The French word is drowned in a sea of English words that are spelled the same.

Thankfully, there are ways to jump over this apparently insurmountable obstacle.

The solution is actually documented in the exhaustive Site Build It documentation! Granted, it takes a little practice before you can extract meaningful results from your French keyword search and analysis. But, it can be done.

I am French speaking, and I use SBI to build my business on the Internet. I have mastered the art of using SBI - and it's English Action Guide - to "guide" me toward any coveted French domain on the Web, successfully.

In my search for ways of using Site Build It to help me build my first French business on the Internet, I discovered that others, like me, had also successfully used SBI to build Web businesses in German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese ...

When there is a will, there is a way!