This is just a question that emergerd out of nowhere in my curious mind. I think lingQ is a great resource. How many people are fortunate to have discovered it?
Alas, the vast majority of people who find LIngQ, leave it less than in 5 minutes 
The quick answer David, is not nearly enough. And yes the majority leave early. How serious they were I do not know.
We are gaining momentum however, but we recognize that our most important task is to increase the number of people who visit the site. The conversion numbers are more or less in line with industry averages.
I think there is no perfect system out there including LingQ. You have to be serious enough to want to learn a language. A great number of people are looking for freebies. Most sites offer free lessons to open your apetite, but when it comes to pay for the more advance or to have better access to the site, they leave.
When I started at LingQ, I got fustrated that the Italian library was so poor in content, yet as time went by, I begun to see more articles and podcasts. I am glad now I stayed. I would like to see more things added to the website. For instance, on these same posts, to be able to have someone correct my spelling, or suggest choice of words like what we do at Wordreference language forums. Maybe one of these days…
Like you I am glad I stayed despite feeling confused initially.
Unlike you I would hate to have corrections done with a forum setting. [Unless there were a “practice forum” where people would be able to occasionally invite corrections - this should in no way detract from submitting writings to tutors.]
I imagine that about three thousand two hundred people are learning English, and about six hundred people are learning French. The number of members who are learning Japanese is about four hundred.
I suppose that many of the members are “independent,” that is, they do not take online conversation classes and do not try to have their writing corrected by tutors.
I thought a little about this and these are my conclusions.
Firstly, as great as the lingq system is, it’s a niche product. I say this because the vast majority of people subscribe to the ideology, which states that languages are learnt in a classroom, and that you’re either good at it, or not.
Secondly, most people want things to be easy. All off the successfully language learning products I know sell themselves to be ‘Easy’ (rosetta stone, livemoca)
The lingQ system requires you to have faith, patience and to work hard (What one considers ‘hard work’ is debateable). Those of us that are here on lingQ understand that it takes time and hard work to learn a language. It takes a while for you to see the results even if you believe in the system. If most people are not staying when they visit the website perhaps it’s got something to do with them feeling like they have a long road ahead of them.
In order to persuade people into buying into a product you need to talk to their emotions (in my opinion)
I don’t claim to have the answer but this is something to think about possibly.
Having Steve as the face of lingQ, telling us he has learnt his languages in the same way is great, but not enough. Steve may be able to pull people in, but we need to think about ways to hold the attention of people.
Perhaps the way it’s promoted needs to be considered.
lastly, is lingQ trying to appeal to the masses? or is it trying to be the best in it’s niche? If the system is trying to appel to the masses, perhaps what you need to start telling people is how easy language learning is. In my opinion, that would loose the integrity of the community and what the site stand for. I think that lingQ is better off as a nich product, but of course it needs to be the best it can be!
What do you guys think?
Am I off the mark? Close?
We do need to appeal to a broader group than just the die hard language keeners. We are working on this.
The site had an Alexa rating of nearly 30K and dropped off now to 100K. An Alexa rating defines how popular the site is in comparison to other sites: 1 being Google, 2 being Facebook and a considerable number of the top 1000 Alexa sites being adult entertainment sites.
So something has happened to LingQ in the last month. It’s traffic has dropped dramatically.
http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/lingq.com
Also, the site doesn’t get much Search Engine Traffic. Maybe Steve needs to hire some SEO experts, but some high page ranking backlinks or start advertising with GoogleAds or something.
Another issue is that the site doesn’t have these ridiculously outrageous claims like others… Get fluent in English in 10 minutes nonsense… Marketing plays a big part of getting huge users, and of course the majority of people are not serious learners. They want quick gains and want to pay next to nothing to get there. That’s why there are so many lose weight in X days or gain 10lbs of muscle in 1 week advertisements plastered on every 2nd website I visit.
What LingQ needs is not the high relative rating (Alexa) but enough absolute number of the paying members. I don’t want to speak for Steve, but if I understood him correctly during our last conversation , the absolute number is on the rise.
I could have misunderstood him not because Steve spoke Russian but because I had problems with my sound at the moment 
LingQ is essentially a tribe. Refer to Seth Godin’s book “Tribe” for what a tribe is.
You don’t need to acquire a lot of followers in a tribe. It will grow organically. I believe LingQ has positioned itself very well to achieve this:
- It appeals to a niche market (language learners who believe in the LingQ approach)
- It has a leader: Steve
- It has a bunch of followers who believe in the system and are willing to spread the word eagerly
- There is an effective communication channel from the leader to the followers (Steve’s blog)
- There is an effective communication channel among the followers (this forum)
So, it is a matter to time for it to explode…
I don’t see where our Alexa rank is at 100k. It is at 59,000 which is roughly where it has been for the last little while. The way Alexa seems to is that the rank is based on how many people with the Alexa browser plugin are visiting your site. I’m sure there’s some algorithm used but the way we got that Alexa rank is by asking people to install the add on. On the note, if you don’t already have it, please install the Alexa add on to help our Alexa rank! 
In fact, our traffic growing albeit slowly. We would love to dramatically increase our traffic and it should be possible to do so. We just have to figure out a way to get our name out there without spending a whole pile of money which we don’t have. We are trying to add sharing mechanisms on the site. These do need some refinement and we have some ideas we are working on.
SEO is also not that easy and hiring SEO firms has never proven to be successful for us in the past. We have recently decided to make a conscious effort to improve SEO and we will see how it goes. We are getting some great suggestions and help from Gintaras on this issue. And, at some point, we may be asking for volunteers to help us do things for SEO in your languages.
In the meantime, we appreciate anything you can do to help spread the word, from telling your friends, using the Invite feature on the site to invite friends, sharing activities on Facebook or Twitter, putting your badge on your blog or website, or email signature. Or just writing a nice review of LingQ on your blog. Everything helps!
"So, it is a matter to time for it to explode… "
Isn’t it, rather, the matter of WHAT time?
I wrote about LingQ in my blogs
http://bit.ly/gP2AYd
http://bit.ly/fWnB1B
http://bit.ly/a23pg7
and hope it pushed / pushes some people to LingQ…
I’m as well. And as far as I can see I get more and more readers on my blog by google search.
We hope you are right Edwin!
Thanks hape and Vera for your help. We do see some traffic from your blogs and it’s much appreciated! Anyone else out there with blogs or with friends with popular blogs :-), please spread the word! We are also happy to write guest posts etc…
Mark, you need to see Alexa Rank by Month and not see the overall average. That way you can see the daily trend as the average is slightly misleading.
Anyway, maybe you should ask people to give you high-ranking 1-way backlinks. I’m not a big fan of reciprocal backlinks as it makes your site look ugly and cluttered.
FYI, I always suggest people on how-to-learn-any-language.com to check out lingq.com when people are asking for language advice etc.
Though these little posts on other people’s forums don’t bring in the big numbers. You seriously need to do better SEO - no matter how hard or expensive it is.
We know and we’re working on the SEO. It should improve in the next month or so we hope. Our Alexa rank for the last month is 49000 so I’m not sure what you are looking at. This is what I see http://screencast.com/t/x27iOiN8Y. Actually, the quality and quantity of our backlinks is quite good although we are always happy for more.
I generally recommend LingQ to people I know who want to study foreign languages, but I don’t think any of them has so far done anything about it
For LingQ, they certainly need to have enough members to be able to cover their costs. I don’t know if they have done that yet. I certainly appreciate what Steve has created in LingQ, but he can’t be expected to go on funding it forever. It will have to become self-sustaining at some point.
As for attracting more people, perhaps the welcome page needs to be more dynamic. I also just think that the whole LingQ concept is too confusing for newbies. It might help to have a structured beginner program that learners can go through so they understand how the site works. But I assume all that will be built up with time. LingQ is still a work-in-progress.