I’d like to bounce some business ideas off you all and hear what you think about it? Kindly read the post below and let me know what you think. Thank you in advance for your time!
I created english.com.tw out of a small experiment 6 years back and it has now turned itself into a somewhat successful website on its own. By somewhat successful, I mean daily average of 4,500 unique IPs traffic and a member base of about ~45,000 registered members. Needless to say that the domain name of the site is probably the most important factor of its success.
Back in April of this year, I have secured the domain name, English.Asia. Now I wanted to do something with it. The first thing that came to my mind is a social networking site for English Teaching Professionals in Asia. The starting goal is to combine the English Teaching Professional network with English.com.tw member base (members demand to learn English) and create more values by somehow match the supply and demand, then extend the network outside of Taiwan to other countries in Asia. What do you think about this idea? Any thoughts/advices/inputs would be greatly appreciated.
Same as Taiwanese/Chinese English textbooks.
:loco:
The website will probably become quite popular. It provides a comfortable learning environment where students won’t be challenged by a foreign language.
[quote=“DTC”]
The first thing that came to my mind is a social networking site for English Teaching Professionals in Asia.[/quote]
I wouldn’t ever use it. Not being negative about your idea, or speaking for anyone else or saying it won’t work. dave’s eslcafe works and I’ve looked at that four times, tops. Good for newbs, maybe, or people in the Gobi desert, not a lot of use for anyone else.
Free, good quality materials. That’s what I want. In Word files, preferably. onestopenglish.com (owned by publishers and with franchised materials) and bogglesworldesl.com (a lot of people giving free materials; because it’s an amateur site, the stuff is modifiable/tidy-up-able) out of if I had the misfortune to be on the kid shift and genkienglish.net for beginner kids for their whiteboard flash games. And youtube. Only teaching websites I ever used. Your worksheets are all belong to me!
Networking with teachers tend not to work because the traffic is too low and because experienced teachers don’t use them. Imagine forumosa without the volume. There’d be no searchable database to find answers. There’d be 20 newbs a day posting ‘Can I get a work permit?’ or ‘Where can I find sour cream?’ with no-one to answer. Experienced people would avoid it. If you can break out of that cycle and attract enough experienced people who will help and create content, then you might do well.
Which brings me back to ‘materials’. Free materials, better than published material, to attract ‘useful’ users.
