Get a Chinese Domain Name and Get More Traffic

The highways of China are littered with the roadkill carcasses of foreign Internet giants who stumbled, staggered, and got left for dead in their quest for the world’s biggest Internet audience. eBay, Google and Yahoo have all had heaping helpings of humble pie in the Middle Kingdom, and some of them keep coming back for seconds.

At RightSite we don’t plan to join this Internet Abroad Slow Learners Club, and to help avoid this fate, we constantly re-examine our assumptions about our audience and look for ways to make our site friendlier to local users.

As a bi-lingual site, RightSite has to make its content and services work for both local and foreign users, however, most of our revenue will come from local businesses, and since my eyes are round and my hair (even before it turned white) was always a few shades short of black, so this is major challenge.

One big step we have taken to allow local users easier access to our site is adopting a Chinese character domain name.  Most people know about getting a .cn or .com.cn domain name, but this is a very different issue. What many foreigners don’t know is that you can buy a Chinese character domain that represents a URL just like your Western character domain does. We purchased our Chinese character domain name from ZhongZiYuan (中资源网络服务有限公司) in Xiamen, the same registrar where we bought our .cn and .com.cn domains. The cost of the Chinese character domain is RMB 320 per year.

Our Chinese character domain name represents the Chinese name for our company, 领业.中国.  (Our Chinese company name is “Ling Ye” which roughly translates as “high-level assets.” The characters for China are added on the end to make sure that you know we’re in China, I guess).

If you’ve ever laughed at foreign tourists at the Great Wall or YuYuan Gardens who think that by speaking English loud enough and repeating the same sentence enough times, that Chinese people should understand them, then you should laugh at foreign businesses who try to create an online community without a domain name that Chinese people can understand.  And, in case the nitrous oxide hasn’t worn off from your last dental visit, most Chinese people don’t speak English.  Yeah, your tour guide could talk great, and the staff at 5 -star hotels sound like they just stepped off the set of Desperate Housewives, but out in the ‘zhou’s’ where real people live, it’s be Chinese or be gone.

I know because, we almost made the same mistake.  I chose the domain name, rightsite.asia, thinking that the words involved would all be simple enough for most people in China to recognise.  OOPS!  After a few weeks of listening to my staff try to pound out our Roman character spelling over the phone to industrial zone employees in Changshu, Changzhou and Changle, I knew this wasn’t going to work.

The traditional approach to making an easily recognisable domain name in China has been to make your domain a number instead of a word. Thus, 163.com, 126.com, and 51job.com. That’s cool for reading to someone over the phone, but if you’re trying to build a brand that can be differentiated from the crowd, it is pure evil.

So we went with the Chinese character domain name. Now, our team only has to read out the words “领业.中国” over the phone, and anyone, anywhere in China can bash this into their browser’s address bar and get to RightSite right away.

Better still, we have set up a .htaccess file on our webserver that directs all traffic to from our 领业.中国 domain to our Chinese version at RightSite.asia/zh-hans.

Technology and language working together — two of my favorite things coming together to help more people get more out of RightSite. Another reason for a good week at RightSite.