By Shizeng Guo

China has 234 million Internet users, many people may want to know how they can advertise their website on Chinese Internet so that they can benefit from this huge market. Well, if you already have a website, let me tell you the how-to’s.

1. You need to make a Chinese website. Yep, you will need a Chinese website. The reason is that Chinese language is the dominant language in China. Even though there is a small portion of population in China who has good command of English, most people in China speak, read and communicate in Chinese language. There are quite several Chinese dilates including Gan, Guan (Mandarin or Beifang), Kejia (Hakka), Min (including the Hokkien and Taiwanese variants), Wu, Yue (Cantonese) and etc. But in writing, there are only two types of Chinese characters: traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese. If you are targeting Chinese speakers in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, you need to have your website translated into traditional Chinese. Otherwise, if you are targeting Internet users in the Mainland China and Singapore, then you need a simplified Chinese website. If you want a website with both traditional Chinese version and simplified Chinese version, you will just need to translate the website into either traditional Chinese or simplified Chinese. Then you can use software to convert traditional Chinese language into simplified Chinese and vice versa.
2. Now you have a Chinese version website, what to do next? Most webmasters in this case would consider to submit their websites to Chinese search engines and Chinese directories. Since most traffic for small and medium websites come from search engines, only after your website has been indexed by the search engines can you benefit from the huge search engine traffic. I suggest you submit your website to largest Chinese search engine Baidu and Google China firstly. As a local player, Baidu leads Chinese search market with a share of around 65%. If you host your website outside of China, you need to be patient to see your website get indexed by Baidu bot or Baidu spider. For Chinese website hosted in the Mainland China, it takes from 1 week to 1 month. For a Chinese website hosted outside China, it may take several months to get indexed by Baidu in the worst case. No worries, if your website is written in decent Chinese, with no political, porn or spam content, Baidu will finally indexed it (maybe Baidu will knock out your website later when this search giant finds you are trying to cheat it or the Internet users). Comparing to Baidu, Google China is easy to deal with. Usually, Google China will index any website as long as Google bot or Google spider finds it.
3. Finally, Baidu, Google and other unknown Chinese search engines have accepted your website. It’s time for you to market your website to as many Chinese people so that people can get to know your brand, your products or your services. By the end of 2007, there were more than 1.5 million websites in China. You may want to know how can you advertise on that huge Chinese Internet market. Well, that’s easy. The most feasible way to advertise your website on Chinese internet is to use Google Adwords. As an international search giant, Google is the best option for overseas people trying to advertise their websites in China. Baidu Union, Alimama are two other online advertising publishers that I would like to recommend to you. Since they are mainly China local players, there are many barriers for an expatriate to successfully adopt them. Besides search engines advertising, you can also try to advertise your website on industrial websites, forums or other kinds of websites subject to your niche. In this case, you may need some people in China to help you select and figure out which/what websites are ideal for you to advertise with, the price to advertise on a Chinese website and etc.

I have experience in managing multi-national online advertising campaigns. According to my experience, China has much lower Adwords CPC than most western countries do and online advertising is the most cost effect way to explore the huge China market.

Shizeng Guo, Webpro China Internet Marketing Consultant