What language should I write my blog in?

Hint: the answer might not be English

I’m writing this article after two crazy days and a roller coaster of emotions. I just finished doing 2 live webinars. In the first webinar we held Demo Day for the first batch of The Side Project Accelerator, and in the second one we presented how to build your personal brand as a designer. Almost 300 people attended the two events!

Sorry for the #humble_brag, but yesterday I thought that the whole world was crashing down, so today I can finally give myself a pat on the back and safely say that things ain’t so bad.

I also bring up these webinars, because in the second one an interesting question was asked that I’d like to elaborate on.

One of the viewers asked:

“If you’re bilingual, which language would you use to build your personal brand ? The one from the country you live in, the most used and understood one (English) or both?”

It’s a great question, and the answer is: it depends.

As a native English speaker I didn’t realize how much of an advantage I had. English is my first language. It’s the fastest language for me to create content. It’s also the language that I sound smartest in.

All you native English speakers out there, you too need to go and thank your parents right now. Because English also happens to be a great language to write your blog in. The reach is huge, and it’s widely supported.

For those whose first language is not English, this is a real issue. Writing in English brings with it a variety of challenges for them. However, they worry that if they choose not to write in English, they are passing up on a huge audience, hurting their changes of success and preventing themselves from becoming international thought leaders.

In the first batch of The Side Project Accelerator I helped a couple of members choose the language for their blogs. During this process we realized that writing in English, certainly has a lot of benefits, there are also a lot of reasons to choose to write in your native language instead.

I’ll share of each of the four main factors that we discussed, in case you’re also struggling with this decision.

1. Their level of English
2. The culture of the speakers of their native language
3. The popularity of the specific subject they want to write about, in their native language
4. If there are any available alternatives or some middle ground that can be used to maximize reach in both English and their native language

Assess yourself

You first need to do an honest assessment of your own level of English. Ask yourself 3 questions:

• Will the writing seem less professional?
• Will it take significantly longer to write compared to writing in your native language?
• Will it be harder for you to create emotion?

If the answer to any of the above was yes, then you need to ask yourself- will you welcome the above difficulties as challenges and enjoy working to overcome them? Or will they just be irritating obstacles in your way?

Writing and building a personal brand is a hard enough job as it is. You want to remove every obstacle that you can and optimize your process. Keep in mind that you can’t possibly be a successful writer if you never write.

Assess your native language

• Are most other native speakers of your language also comfortable reading English?
• Are there any additional difficulties in creating a website in your language, such as needing to support RTL or a lack of good fonts?
• How large is the audience for your native language? Even if you think it’s small, like the only 8 million or so hebrew speakers in the world. If you have 8 million fans you won’t be happy? The audience is big enough. Plus, you only need 1000 true fans :)
• Are there lots of successful thought leaders who write in your language?

Assess the specific topic

• Are there a lot of other blogs that also write about your topic in your native language?
• Is the audience better suited for one language?
• Is your topic a specific niche that is missing in your language?

Available alternatives

• Can you connect with speakers of your native language using another format? Perhaps a podcast in the language. Maybe the speakers are used to reading in English, as so many Hebrew speakers are, but have a much more difficult time listening to a podcast (with no captions or subtitles) in English.
• Use Medium — if you do your blog in english, can use medium for hebrew or vice versa. You can use medium as a place to dump out what’s on your mind, even if it’s only tangentially related to your main blog topic.
• You can pay a translator. Sagi used Fiverr to pay for translation of his English posts to hebrew. Then you achieve the always-hyped “repurpose” of your content. Do the work once, and reap the rewards multiple times.

Last things to consider

• Yuval Noah Harari wrote the best selling book Sapiens originally in hebrew. Now it’s a gigantic success in many languages. Most English speakers have no idea it started in hebrew, became a cult classic in Israel, then was translated. Even starting as a thought leader in a relatively small language, putting out quality content can still lead to a lot of success.
• Maybe your topic is a specific niche that is missing in that language? When Sagi started Pixel Perfect there were already lots of English design blogs, but the Hebrew Internet hadn’t caught up. He could fill a missing void.
• If you want to hold meet ups, conferences, etc. Then the local language becomes infinitely more important. If this is not your thing, then it’s way less necessary.

As you can see, there’s no right answer for which language you should choose. It depends on you and the language. The important thing to remember is that you can be build a successful blog in almost any language, but in order for it to succeed you actually need to write in it. If you choose to write in English because you’re tempted by the larger audience, then you can’t complain when it takes you twice as long to create your content.