What language to use?

[Miew]

I'm wondering what language I should use to write a blog (or website).
It's basically either english, or my own native language. The way I see it, either option has some ups and downs.
Here are some things I thought of:

Pro's for writing in english:
Most people in the world and especially on the internet use english. It's the lingua franca of the web, so to say. By using english you have a much much wider potential audience. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I guess most google searches use english keywords too.
Most of the time I search on google I use english for the keywords, because a lot of the time there's much better content available in english.

Pro's for writing in another language:
It's basically a niche by itself. A lot of people strongly suggest that you look for a niche for your blog/topics that doesn't have much competition. If you don't use english then, as I said above, there will be much less competition and the chance for ranking higher on google gets much better.
Besides, I've noticed that when I use google, most of the time it will strongly favor german search results, even though my OS is not german and I don't live in germany either. I think the reason for favoring german results is because there's an option somewhere in the windows control panel that lets you set the default language for software with multiple options. I guess that's the reason why the menus of my firefox version are all in german, and the suggested searches in the google bar also favor german heavily.
I'm pretty sure that for a lot of germans or people in germany, this will be the same. So even if they're looking for things like for example "blog", which are the same in german and english, they tend to get german results first, even if they might have a lower ranking if you ignored any language preferences.
Therefore, I think it's much easier to get a decent spot on google if you write in a language other than english. (Of course, this is all based on my observations only. I'd like to hear some of your thoughts on that, or if you can confirm some of those things)

All in all, I think for a really successful blog or website, it's probably better to be in english. If you can beat out the competition and land very high on google searches, then you might as well have the broadest audience, which nets the most views.
If you have a smaller, lesser known page however, I'm thinking it could be better to use a different language. So even though less people are searching google in that language, at least for those people you have a chance of actually getting a good google spot, which might net more traffic in the end than if you were on google page 10 for a certain keyword, were no one ever looks anyways.

Like I said, these are my own observations, assumptions and thoughts on the topic. I'm wondering whether this is right or not. So please let me know what you think.

[sub001]

It all depends on your definition of "successful". Most popular in a given area/topic? It can be in any language because you are then comparing against similar blogs that target the same audience. Most profitable? Here the language selection has impact on the size of the market that you can reach. The larger the market you can reach, the potentially more profitable you can be.

[maccam87]

why dont you have the best of both worlds and write it in your native language then use the google translation tool where people have the option to translate it english, best of both worlds!

[sub001]

Google Translate is good if you want to grow your page count in the eyes of the search engines. But it sucks terribly in terms of human user experience as the translations are barely understandable and certainly not grammar-correct.

[ryn894]

I would say use google translate too! That way, you never have to choose. Its more work, coding wise, but I'm sure it will work out for the better.

Me personally, I'm from Hawai`i - so there is A LOT of people who come from other countries, and people here are able to find people who speak their native tongue.

It might be good to write in German too it keeps your culture and your knowledge of the language in pristine condition.

PLUS if you blog in both german and english, you can also network with other bilingual bloggers

Good Luck!

[downloadvyp]

english is the best language for an website

[sub001]

Originally Posted by downloadvyp

english is the best language for an website

Not if your target audience doesn't speak it.

[Nathan]

If the subject that you are writing about is not very well covered by the internet in your native language then you might get great results writing in your native language because you have a chance at becoming the number one blog on that topic serving your language.

[Florencia]

It all depends on your definition of "successful". Most popular in a given area/topic? It can be in any language because you are then comparing against similar blogs that target the same audience. Most profitable? Here the language selection has impact on the size of the market that you can reach. The larger the market you can reach, the potentially more profitable you can be.

[ChickenFreak]

Just chiming in with an emphatic vote against automated translation of the text - no automated translator is going to give you any more than a vague notion of what the text is about. It's not the equivalent of real, correctly written text.