The subject came up on another thread. I though I would open this subject again here.
Two members have suggested printing and handing out flyers. Of course we would encourage and support that.
One concern is that it does take a little explaining to get people to understand why LingQ is effective and how it works. Another concern is that if a member goes to the trouble to promote LingQ, he or she should earn the points that that he or she is entitled to under our invite friend program. Don’t forget you can earn 200 points per month that a member you invite is a Basic, Plus, or Premium member.
Rather than just promoting LingQ on flyers, it might make more sense to add something that enables you to get the potential members email. "I am using LingQ and really enjoying it. Why not contact me to learn about how you can learn languages effectively on LingQ? " .
Then our member can email the new person with the URL of our new promotional video for example. At the same time the member can include his badge or link to LingQ and thereby earn points should that person join. It also creates a connection with the newcomer should that perpson have questions.
The same kind of recruiting of members can be done via the web, which may be less time consuming.
If we can get a few hundred new members in smaller countries and maybe a thousand members or so in large countries, we will be well positioned to speed up our development of new features for the site, as well as new languages.
If you check “Earn Points” at the top right hand corner of the LingQ screen you will see that we have a referral system.
The issue is how to keep track of the referrer from a flyer. We are not set up to give the new member extra points. The points go to the referrer, not the new member. This is something we might change in the future but for the time being that is how we are set up. Any member who upgrades gets 500 free points right now.
well, for the newcomer to actually bother to memorize and then enter a code of some sort there has to be a reward. The referral code can be printed on the fliers.
I think flyers are a great idea. Perhaps there are a few words or points that you could use to make them realise that it’s different to other systems out there. “Learn a language naturally and enjoy it!” or “Language learning need not be a waste of time!” or “Fluency is more important than perfection!” If one were to distribute flyers at universities, they could say “Do you want to get ahead in your language studies?” or “Take your language skills to new heights.” I don’t know, just thinking out loud. With the referral issue, you could just have the www.lingq.com website on the flyer and if it’s in electronic form, one could just add the referral code to the end of the web address before printing it.
however, even the best fliers aren’t too effective unless you hand em out at, say a foreign language school or something. Other alternatives include placing them in your signature when going on other language forums (if they permit), or making youtube videos about linQ etc etc
I have created a LingQ group at Youtube called “LingQ Plaza”. I would like to make this a place where people can record themselves talking about their experience at LingQ. Is this what you had in mind?
Live Mocha and RS both raised a lot of money on the stock market to pay for their PR activities. We kind of have to rely on guerrilla marketing.
One thing is sure. The bigger our community gets, the better LingQ will be for everyone. More content, more keen members of the community, and a greater ability for us to add new features and make it even better.
I really appreciate everyone’s help in making LingQ the best place to learn languages on the Web or anywhere.
No question, we appreciate anywhere you want to write our url or write about LingQ. However, keep in mind that anything you do online will drive more visitors and more members to LingQ relatively, than things that you might do offline. It’s much more unlikely that someone will write down the url or remember it from an article. Having said that, any attention and promotion is good promotion and much appreciated.
