A Bit Of Advice

I've had what I think is a fantastic idea for helping students practice their English in a relaxed and natural environment. The problem is that because I want to get students from many different countries involved, how do I find them? I've tried emailing schools and offering them €20 per sign up but I can tell from my web traffic that it's not particularly effective. I'm not making any money from it so I can't afford to advertise. Anyone who has any ideas please let me know. You can have a look at what I'm doing at englishmountain.weebly.com (no www in the address). I'd be really grateful for any input.

Wouldn't it make more sense to run it as a for-profit business and pay to advertise? If your target students are people who can afford to go skiing, then what reason is there not to run it as a business, especially as you will have to try to find relatively homogeneous groups in terms of level.

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Originally Posted by Tdol

Wouldn't it make more sense to run it as a for-profit business and pay to advertise? If your target students are people who can afford to go skiing, then what reason is there not to run it as a business, especially as you will have to try to find relatively homogeneous groups in terms of level.

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Eventually, yes I'd like to do that but it will cost a fortune so I'd like to do it just for fun for a year or two and see how it works out.

The basic problem, as I see it, is that people in Google will be unlikely to be searching for a product that is new, which makes it difficult to see how they will find you through searches. I might like skiing and need English classes, but am I going to combine those searches? Bringing the two things together into a natural search strikes me as very tricky. There are courses combining English with surfing- heave you seen any of those sites? There's also an abandoned village in Spain that functions as an English-speaking village for residential courses. It might be worth looking at how they did things.

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Originally Posted by Tdol

The basic problem, as I see it, is that people in Google will be unlikely to be searching for a product that is new, which makes it difficult to see how they will find you through searches. I might like skiing and need English classes, but am I going to combine those searches? Bringing the two things together into a natural search strikes me as very tricky. There are courses combining English with surfing- heave you seen any of those sites? There's also an abandoned village in Spain that functions as an English-speaking village for residential courses. It might be worth looking at how they did things.

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Thanks for that, I've found both sites but as you say, if I hadn't been told about them I would never have known where to look. I'll be looking at them later when I get a moment.

What kind of schools and where have you emailed? I can see you live in Poland and your offer is translated into pretty many Central/Eastern European lanuages. Most Polish students can't afford to go skiing in Alps. I don't know if you did, but if you didn't, I would recommend that you pick the right schools before sending your offer--those where the students are rich enough.

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Originally Posted by birdeen's call

What kind of schools and where have you emailed? I can see you live in Poland and your offer is translated into pretty many Central/Eastern European lanuages. Most Polish students can't afford to go skiing in Alps. I don't know if you did, but if you didn't, I would recommend that you pick the right schools before sending your offer--those where the students are rich enough.

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So far I've mailed about 500 schools in Spain, France, Italy, Holland and Belgium. The thing is, it's incredibly time consuming and there's no way of knowing how large the schools are. Ideally I'd like to establish a relationship with one or two schools in each country to ensure a multi-lingual mix and for them to send me a handful of students. If it works out it could turn into an annual trip which would be immensely beneficial to them and their students. It's only finding them that's the problem.