WHAT IS BI-LINGO.COMS SERVICE?

We link people around the world who want to learn English with schools like yours offering courses.

 

HOW DOES IT WORK?

A learner logs on to the Internet and searches for language schools using a browser popular in their country in Brazil, for example, the most popular browser is "cade.com.br".

Bi-Lingo.com has secured high-ranking positions on the browsers in the largest markets for English learners, so bi-lingo.coms site will come up high on the list usually in the top ten. They click on it and are offered the choice of nine languages in which to read the site. They choose one and enter.

Now they can search for schools that fit their location, price and course criteria. For instance, they might want a Business English course in London costing up to 1000 per month. They select these details from the choices offered to them in our School Search section. A list of schools that meet their criteria is then generated from our database.

They compare the schools, reading independent reports written by bi-lingo.com reviewers. These reports have the same format to make comparisons easy. There are pictures, student comments and lots of information - so learners can feel really confident about their choice. If you have a website, they can click on a link and visit that too for more information.

If they have any queries, they can e-mail their language manager at bi-lingo.com in their own language or in English. The language manager will e-mail them back answers. (This is a very popular service. Learners often dont know anybody abroad who can help them.)

When learners are ready, they make a request for a booking to bi-lingo.com. (Because we give them 5% off the normal schools brochure price, learners like to book through us. See How we make our money for details on how we can afford to do this.)

We contact you, the school, to check you have availability and confirm this to the learner. At least two weeks before the course begins, they pay us the full course price minus 5%. We immediately pay you the full course price minus 15%, our agency commission. (We charge schools a 15% commission for introducing students but pass on a third of this to the student.)

 

HOW DOES THIS DIFFER FROM HOW LEARNERS USUALLY FIND A COURSE?

Look at it from the students point of view. They are sitting at home in, say, Brazil. How do they find an English school when they dont know very much English?

Go to the local British Council office? They will be offered a directory of schools and will have to search through them one by one and will not have enough information to decide between schools.

So they write or call for some brochures and wait for those to arrive. When they do, how many of the brochures will be in their language? And how will they trust what the brochures say?

No wonder so many learners end up going to agents even though, in some territories, agents charge hefty registration fees. And it is standard practice to take the 15% commission offered by the school. Sometimes they even increase the course fees and pocket the difference.

Clearly this isnt good for students, but it is bad for schools too. Higher costs reduce demand for your courses. Learners arriving with more money in their pockets would spend more money on their education and the services you offer.

The reach of agents is limited, with large parts of the world not serviced by any agents at all, let alone ones representing your school. With bi-lingo.com, information on your school is as far away as the nearest PC.

Finally, students coming through Bi-Lingo.com are more likely to be happy with your school because they have been able to compare you to more schools and find out much more about you. There will be fewer surprises and less room for disappointment.

 

WE HAVE OUR OWN WEBSITE, WE ARE ON LOADS OF WEB PAGES WHY SHOULD WE USE YOUR SERVICE?

Are any of these web pages high up on the major search engines around the world (not those in the UK because most students arent based in the UK)? If they arent, it doesnt matter how good they look they wont be viewed.

Are the sites searchable by the criteria learners find important so they can find exactly what they want, not wade through a long directory?

Can the sites be looked at in the learners own language?

Do the sites have independent reviews, written by someone who has visited the school? Do the reviewers go to the school each year so the information is up to date?

Do these sites have a Guide to the UK and Ireland to help students choose where to study?

Are there Learning Pages about aspects of Britain with vocabulary and links even questions for teacher-led discussions?

Is there a self-test to help them identify their level of English and help you put them into the right class before they even arrive?

If you cannot answer yes to all these points, we think bi-lingo.com might be for you. You know a web presence is essential (otherwise you wouldnt already spend on web activity). It is only by being on bi-lingo.com that you will harness the full power of the web to attract students to your school from all over the world.

 

TELL ME ABOUT YOUR SITE AND COMMUNITY?

Bi-Lingo.com is a very sticky site. The average length of stay on the site is 21 minutes and 40% of visitors are coming back for a second time or more.

There is a huge amount of loyalty. When we sent out our last bi-monthly newsletter, 8% of bi-lingo.com community wrote back to say thank you.

The countries where most visitors are coming from at the moment are: Brazil, Germany, Korea, France, Chile, Italy and Spain in that order.

Eastern Europe, though it has the smallest number of searches, has the most on-line course registrations.

The Community is 60% Brazilian, 20% German and the remainder come from the rest of the world including out of the way places like Haiti and Burkina Faso.

 

WHEN DO I GET STUDENTS?

Schools are getting bookings from bi-lingo.com already. The sooner you join the site the sooner you could start having your schools details searched by thousands of learners around the world.

Students tend to begin researching a course about nine months before they plan to study. They will use bi-lingo.com to educate themselves about the factors that are important to them: types of courses, locations and schools; accommodation options, social programmes, class sizes and mixes. They tend to request a booking about 6 months before they want to begin and pay their fees soon after.

 

WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP WITH THE BRITISH COUNCIL?

Bi-lingo.com co-operates with the British Council and is present on their virtual campus. bi-lingo.com will be promoted on the government-funded www.educationuk.org site, and in offices throughout the world later in 2000.

 

HOW DO YOU PROMOTE THE SITE?

Internet promotion
We register with the most popular search engines in important markets, such as Germany, Spain, Brazil and Korea. This means that whenever key words are entered that relate to language learning, bi-lingo.com appears high on the list.

We also know how to ensure our site appears high on spider search engines (metabrowsers). This type looks for the number of times key words appear on a site.

Traditional media
Since its launch in 1998, bi-lingo.com has attracted a lot of media interest. There have been features in The Guardian and EL Gazette. A BBC documentary team filmed Bi-Lingo.com for eight months as it developed from an idea to reality. The programme, called "Inside dot-coms", was broadcast in June 2000 in the UK and is being screened worldwide on cable and satellite channels.

On-going PR coverage is being achieved through our PR Consultancy, "Think PR".

Affiliation partnerships
We are creating links to university and company intranets. This enables their students and/or employees to have a resource to help them find good English schools abroad.

Already in Columbia Telecom Columbia, Educatel (a distance learning portal for Latin America), and are affiliates. In Korea, the Kangnung National University has joined and there is a language school group in Bavaria and the Czech Republic who use bi-lingo.com to help their students arrange foreign exchanges. Volkswagen in Czech republic, who use the school, arrange for their students to study English through the bi-lingo.com.

Exhibition attendance
We will attend Expolingo and British Council workshops around the world and we are being promoted in British Council offices overseas.

Community Communications
We send a newsletter to bi-lingo.coms community every fortnight and answer any e-mail requests in their own language if thats what they want.

 

HOW MUCH WILL IT COST MY SCHOOL?

We charge 350 pounds per year - less than a pound a day - for:

An additional 15% commission on course fees is charged to you for students who book as a result of seeing our pages.

There is no cost to the student.

 

I ALREADY PAY FOR LOADS OF PROMOTION. WHERE DOES IT ALL STOP?

Marketing spend, like any other business expenditure, is about value for money. If you accept all the arguments above, we think youll agree that we provide excellent value for money for a service that allows every learner in the world to find your details easily and book in minutes, in their own language.

 

WHY DO I HAVE TO PAY UP-FRONT?

Up-front payment is not an uncommon practice. Many agents ask for a contribution towards inclusion in a brochure or on a web site: e.g. Viva

 

HOW DO WE MAKE OUR MONEY?

The 350 school charges covers the costs involved in sending a reviewer to your school, writing a report, translating it into 9 languages and entering it onto our searchable database and designing the page about your school. You do not pay for all the time we spend promoting the site, maintaining it and answering learner inquiries.

Our income comes primarily from commissions on courses booked. We charge 15% (although we give a third of this to the student in the form of a reduced course fee).

Offering services to businesses that want to promote to learners in the UK and Ireland is also a growing source of income. First Call, the premier ticket agency, offer us good-value packages that we sell on to schools and students.

 

WHY DO YOU HAVE A SERVICE AGREEMENT AND WHY DO I HAVE TO SIGN IT?

We know that a legally binding service agreement between school and agent is not common, but this can lead to lack of clarity. We have created this to protect you, the learners that come to the site and ourselves.

Protection for Schools we cannot reuse the data provided without your consent, we cannot have false information about you or sell your e-mail addresses.

Protection for Learners we guarantee that the information provided by bi-lingo.com is accurate and up-to-date and that the information that learners provide us with, such as email addresses, is confidential to Bi-Lingo.com and the school they register with.

Protection for Bi-Lingo.com we are not liable for incorrect information on the site. All information about schools will have been agreed between you and us. If the information schools provide is wrong, then we are within our rights to remove you from the site. Similarly, the bi-lingo.com name and information provided by bi-lingo.com cannot be used without our permission.

 

WHY DO YOU CALL YOUR REVIEW INDEPENDENT? IF WERE PAYING YOU, ITS NOT INDEPENDENT?

Strictly speaking, this is true even though the 350 annual fee just covers our costs. Our reviews are independent (just take a look at them and youll find ample evidence of this) because its in everyones interest for them to be.

Students they need to rely upon our reviews as they are spending a lot of money coming here to study

Schools if we did give you a good review and dont point out areas of weakness, we would do the same for everyone else. The site becomes discredited and it will be less effective having your school on it. Good schools wouldnt stand out from the not quite so good. (We dont accept schools that get less than 5 out of 10 for anything onto the site at all).

Bi-lingo.com if we posted unreliable reviews we wouldnt be trusted by either students or schools and that would be disastrous for our business long term.

 

WHO ELSE IS ON YOUR SITE?

See www.bi-lingo.com and you can see which schools are already on our site. We are happy for you to contact any of them or we will be happy to provide you with contacts.

 

WONT THIS ANNOY MY OTHER AGENTS?

Agents are free to create their own Web sites and offer services in this way. We are simply another language travel agency and it is unreasonable for an agent to complain about competition: this is the nature of the free market.

 

WHAT DO THE STUDENTS THINK?

See for yourself! These are some of the comments that we have had about the site.

"Students like to go to an English language school to improve their English there - not by reading advertisements for schools or trying to handle application forms in English. Here we have one of the big plus points for tlcuk.com. The company cares about all those difficult details." Stephan Baertges, Student in Development Economics, SOAS Germany

"This is why tlcuk.com is a brilliant idea. On the website you can read a lot about the different courses and schools this is all written by people who have been to see these places. tlcuk.com makes it very easy and simple for foreigners to get the necessary information they need and if in doubt, it is not a problem contacting tlcuk.com for further information. And it does not matter if you are on the other side of the world tlcuk.com is accessible from all over the world." Lise Okholm, Carrier Support Co-ordinator, GTS Denmark

 

OKAY, IM INTERESTED - WHAT DO I DO NEXT?

Let us know by phone (tel: 020 7482 8881) or e-mail and we will talk further about the services we offer.

If you decide to join us then we ask you to sign our service agreement. On receipt of the contract, we then arrange a suitable date for one of our reviewers to view the school, talk to students and take pictures. Their observations are then compiled into a short report and this takes about two days.

Once you have read and commented on the review, it is translated into French, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Portuguese and German, Japanese and Korean by our team of translators and put on the website. Our web design team put together pages on your school incorporating the pictures and a link to your schools website if you have one.

It takes a total of two weeks from the time the Reviewer meets you for your information to be loaded onto our server.

 

PLEASE CONTACT ME WITH FURTHER DETAILS ON BI-LINGO'S INFOMEDIARY SERVICE

Name:
Position:
School Name:
Email:
Telephone Number:
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