When you say international does your company have business there? are they already a presence? If so then its no different than any other place except for the language difference and there if you already have a french translator then you should be on your way - although I would suggest a french translator living in France. Knowing the language is not the same as understanding the culture of a country at the moment.

One word, FREE.

I have a few sites that target one niche, those sites all have something free that my traffic actually wants/needs.

I don't just hand out free content, it's free content to proven buyers of niche related software. Anyone is able to download the content whenever they want, that gets me lots of free backlinks.

Look for niche problems, what's a problem your niche traffic has?

I actually stumbled into the niche I target, I was a user of a paid software just like everyone else. The software is top of the line but it has a steep learning curve with so many options it's confusing at first (think Adobe Photoshop). I started posting content on the most popular niche forum, people started making request, I consistently delivered without asking for anything in return. Eventually I built a site & started driving that traffic to my site, by the time I built my first site I had a single forum thread that became the most popular thread across the entire forum, the forum is just as big as WF.

None of that would have ever happened If I didn't jump in & help people. The traffic built links would have never happened If I didn't offer something free that was useful, I would have had to pitch a sale all these years (didn't need to).

The sub-niche I target really didn't exist until I stumbled into it, my point is, people don't always know what they want/need. They know there's a problem but they sometimes look at the problem in the wrong way. Example, before I started creating free content everyone on the forum was focused on how to do simple task in the paid software, when what they needed was an existing file to use in the software that would give them something to tweak, a starting point, the more they tweaked my files, the more they learned how to use the software. Traffic didn't know free file samples were even an option. Now they know. Now they build links to my sites whenever someone ask how to get started with the paid software (new software users never stop asking), they consistently send targeted traffic my way.

I know your in the fashion industry, IMO you need to get creative & figure out where there's a problem & be the one to fix the problem. It needs to be a problem that has unlimited solutions yet it's still focused on a single thing, example, I target one major software with unlimited files. The new files keep my traffic returning, they know I'll release new files because I have a few thousand of them I've created over the years. I've basically trained traffic to return to my site by consistently posting new content. I don't post as much these days because it's all evergreen (bump old content), the files from 2007 are just as relevant today as they were years ago.

Not sure If that's what you are looking for but that's how I've managed to consistently get traffic to build global links for my sites over the years.

What's universal in the fashion industry? Do a poll on your own fashion site, what's the problems your traffic has?

Press releases by language and social media link bait. A lot of visual content is good for obtaining multi lingual backlinks, and as you are in the fashion industry? Visual content should be incredibly easy to come across and promote globally.

GGpaul, fashion related videos on Youtube might get you some leads for folks that have similar blogs (links). Maybe search a footprint on Youtube for country specific domain URLs in the video description.

Example:

• Blog link/URL in video description PR3. 599 fashion videos on Youtube.
• hxxp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYj_7jgGKh4

That will get you .fr links & most likely targeted traffic. Just make sure you have a sales page/checkout in French back on your own site.

Look at the example video Youtube channel followers, might find more of the same type of fashion people.

Well that all depends whether you are using technical or business seo, but all the quotes are business seo so you need to do it the hard way. We used a fashion architecture which had a site ranking next to Net-A-Porter, Asos, Amazon first page with the same products within 6wks on short tail keywords - zero marketing (VC & consultancies who rolled it in to a managed platform - long story).

The problem you have is very simple, you need to balaance cost(management) vs time(business) vs architecture(technology). You are concentrating on the business side. Companies like Asos are in the top ~1% of that balance, so unless you have the same, you can throw huge amounts of resource at it but in the end your return on investment will be negative (we know the consultants/architects).

Niche is the exception to this, but you are in the mass market, there are so many factors that only top-end architects who worked in $100s million revenue companies would have any idea. Looking upwards your competitors may be Asos, but they are looking down - you want to be level with them, that takes some knowledge that very few have (they developed the architecture above - looking to create a multi-million product digital music store on it).

On top of that, Google are shifting to technical seo (it actually started 3yrs ago but takes time to filter down), so the business seo is become less effective by the day - much to the delight of the large enterprise companies who balance the two.