Non-English speakers running English language sites?

bernard

bernard

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I am not a native English speaker, and though I am technically close to fluent, I still make mistakes in jargon, cultural understanding and similar.

I've had English language sites, some which did well, but it always bothered me that the last 10% is missing in my English language writing, while in my own language I have gotten published several times in national newspapers for example. It sorts of negates one of my greatest strenghts, but on the other hand, the English speaking market is just too big to pass up.

Does other non-native English speakers run English language sites and what are your thoughts about it?
 
Your English is better than that of the majority of the UK.

I think your over thinking things personally, I'm a born and bred English speaker and even I will chuck the odd phrase into google to double check what it actually means.
 
If you're writing content yourself (or proofreading content you're buying) I would recommend purchasing Grammerly, it will catch most spelling and grammer mistakes.
 
I am also a non-native speaker running a amazon affiliate website. I don't people read the article word for word. They just skim through. So, I just make sure that the article has good formatting. Like a comparison tables, key bullet points, bold/italic text etc. Then I just check them for grammar and spelling mistakes.
 
I guess I'd take a different angle on this. English markets can be so much more competitive, to the extent that some native English speakers will target foreign markets. Even if they don't speak the language at all. I've looked into it myself and wished I had more language skills. There are cases where some markets might not be big enough to be viable, but it's really about ROI. I would want to be sure your not giving up an advantage instead of just not being too disadvantaged by targeting a foreign market.
 
I suck at and hate writing in both my native language and English, still I am running successful niche site.
Over the past 2 years I learned how to recognize good or bad content from the writers, that helps a lot.
 
I'm not an English native either but I can read and understand pretty well. I manage sites in English with no problems.

I just don't write any of my articles.

If you want to scale you will eventually need to outsource almost all of your content, so I don't see any disadvantage at all.

The only thing that could be a problem is if you want to make videos or something like that.
 
*Not a native as well.

As others said, if you're trying to prove a point on your political views for example, write it down and get someone to proofread it for you. That's how I handle content when I know it would be read.

For anything else, focus of visuals and no one would even care about reading the rest.
 
I am not native English speaker too, but I had to personally write all articles for my first website due to lack of funds.

Since I had learned English in school it was not really a problem to compile grammatically correct sentences, the problem was with overall flow, sentence structure, lack of vocabulary etc.

My writing was straight-forward, bland, but I had a goal to make every sentence useful to reader and to research everything to the last detail.

Later when I tried to sell the site with broker they were surprised and started questioning me about unusually long average time on site - 4m 12s.

Now when I outsource my content I still think I could personally write better content in terms of user metrics, because of attention to detail, research etc, but it just does not make sense time-wise.
 
I actually do this. Unless you go into heavily niched cultural stuff, your English should do fine.
(Like I would not even try to do anything in rap/hiphop because I don't know the scene or understand the lingo)

A lot of niches have their own voabulary, (like online marketing), but if you are into the niche, you probably pick those up as well.
 
Ben said:
If you're writing content yourself (or proofreading content you're buying) I would recommend purchasing Grammerly, it will catch most spelling and grammer mistakes.
Click to expand...
I agree with you on Grammarly. It's a great grammar checker. I've been using it for few months - free version anyway, but that seem to be enough, at least for me.

It seems you misspelled name...:happy: It's Grammarly!
 
+1 for Grammarly.

Almost by accident, I stumbled across a free coupon six months ago.
Now I'd rate Grammarly in my favorite 2 or 3 software tools. Especially enjoy running terrible content from Textbroker/Upwork thru and then sending the mistakes back to the writers when I reject the order.
Would have wasted 15 minutes for me previously, now it's done in under a minute.
 
Didn't know Grammarly before - awesome find, thanks.

Outsourcing is a viable option, though not very cheap if you're priming for quality. What you can do if you want do it on the cheap is writing yourself with the aid of an editor. You can use both Hemingway App (and newfound Grammarly!) for free or use a real editor.
 
Most of the time, I wouldn't be too concerned about it if I'm honest. Not a native speaker myself, but most of the time if you are a fluent non-native, you tend to pay much closer attention to grammar, spelling and punctuation than a lot of natives.
I've barely ever seen someone like us use "you're/your" incorrectly, whereas a lot of native speakers inexplicably seem to struggle with things like that.

Worst case you can always outsource, or use Grammarly as suggested previously.
 
I am not a native English speaker/writer, but I am fairly good at it. In the beginning I used to write my own content in the weight loss niche. But now I realize how much writing my own content held me back instead of just outsourcing the content.
 
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