Making Common Craft a Global Resource

A while back we realized something interesting about Common Craft videos: they travel well.  We can replace my voice with the voice of a Spanish or Japanese speaker and the videos work.  This set us on a path to take over the world.

Let me explain.  

Educators and trainers in over 40 countries have licensed our videos since 2007 and we receive email regularly asking to translate the videos for their non-English speaking audience.  If we could give these good folks a dependable resource for educating in their native language, it would mean reaching a global audience.

So, we built the new Common Craft to be a global resource, with videos and whole pages in multiple languages. Here’s our approach:

Making Common Craft Videos Global

For a small company, this was a big and complex project.  About 30 videos in our library could apply to a global audience and we identified eight languages that cover much of the e-commerce globe.  The list below links to "home pages" for each language:  

That’s 240 videos files and translated scripts.  It’s 240 individual video pages on our website. In addition to the video files, we had professional translations created for titles, transcripts and descriptions on each video page as well. Here's the Japanese page for Social Media in Plain English:

But that’s not all.  We needed to have a way to introduce these non-english speakers to our website and subscription service, so we created translated home pages, which are abbreviated versions of the information on our home page, along with a list of videos in that language.  We even had our "Common Craft Way" video translated.

Is It Working?

Based on the first 30 days that the new Common Craft was up, yes.  People in 7 countries have become members. 

This gives us confidence that we could be onto something.  According to this chart of Internet languages, we’ve accounted for about 50% of the world’s languages.  This also offers English as a Second Language (ESL) teachers and multinational corporations who have a global workforce multiple language options. 

Now our goal is to be discovered. If you’re interested in using Common Craft videos or helping us gain visibility in other countries, let us know or become a member.