If you want to start online search marketing for Japanese customers and you want to minimize cost for hiring Japanese middlemen, you have only two choices:

• Google adWords
• Yahoo! Japan Listing Advertisement (called Yahoo Search Marketing here in US)

Both services are exactly like US counterparts. Their administrative screens are available in English so you just need to have somebody create an advertisement and keywords in Japanese and you can manage the rest like starting and stopping ads by yourself.

However, Yahoo Japan has recently made almost impossible for people outside Japan to advertise. According to this, they decided to suspend all VISA and MasterCard credit cards which have been issued outside Japan, starting February 1, 2010.

I understand that they’re doing this because of lots of fraud credit cards issued outside Japan but if you have only credit cards issued in US, the only choice to pay is a bank wire transfer which costs a lot for the handling fee.

Unlike here, Yahoo is still strong in Japan in terms of the search market share and auction. So, you don’t want to miss their advertising service but now it’s impossible.

Fortunately, Google doesn’t have that kind of restriction so now adWords is the only game for us.

Last week, Amazon has announced that they opened the data center in Asia Pacific Region in Singapore.

This has nothing to do with Amazon shopping mall as you know. Although it’s run by the same company, Amazon has been providing hosting, data storage and other web services so called “Cloud services” to users.

They now have the four locations you can choose to host your website:

• US North Virginia
• US North California
• EU Ireland
• APAC Singapore

This is very important if you target people in Asia because it reduces the latency I discussed here to half compared to hosting your website in the US West Coast area.

Please see more about this here.