Internet is without any doubt the medium for international communication. This is at least the case for the majority of the world population. But this international character can turn into a disappointment; if you want to do a concrete attempt to reach the public outside your country. Let's say; you want to promote your travel website for the public abroad, which possibilities do you have?

Of course, the big search engines are the first we think about. Google, Yahoo, MSN are for most of us the starting point of our search. These engines offer local based search results. You can place your advertisement not only on google.com but also on google.de, if you want to reach the German public.

Although this method is the easiest way, I doubt the effectiveness of it. Or maybe I should better say, a site owner should never limit himself to this. There could always be popular national or local search engines, directories or topic-oriented sites, which could be more effective for your campaign. Not to forget that in most of the cases these are financially much more attractive than the international search engines.

How can you find these local sites? The difficulty starts also here. Soon you will notice that internet patterns of your neighbors can differ quite a lot. For your own country it might be not a difficult task. For the Netherlands for example I know from experiences which sites are popular as directory, which sites are used when people want to book online tickets or which online newspapers are referenced mostly. But what is the case in Germany or France? How can we trace the sites, which could be an interesting doorway for online advertisement? It is not only the language factor that causes difficulty. For example, in the Netherlands start page type topic oriented directories are popular when people search for something. In Germany you can look for this but you won't have much success.

Unfortunately, we have to knock at the doors of the big ones again to find local partners. A site like Yahoo, which was organized from the beginning on as a directory, could help ?C I have to say that at the latest homepage of Yahoo it is hard to find the link to the directory listing anymore. Try to find for example search directories or portals in Germany. You will conclude that few of what is listed under the directory list is useful. Some of them have nothing to do with the subject and most of them are again local sections of de international ones (like de.yahoo.com or msn.de).

A second way is a search under proper keywords at big search engines. Finding the proper keywords and results for a specific country could be a very time consuming way. Once you have your first local results these could help you to find others. In fact searching for sites to promote your website will also force you to create your own international roadmap. That is also the positive side of this attempt. You might have at the end your own map or your own directory. It is something like riding from Berlin to Amsterdam. The difference is that you don't need to choose between the shortest autobahn or the country road, because there is still nothing like a roadmap on internet, at least not till now. You have to create it by yourself.