Chinese-learning companies - give us freebies...

[roddy]

Or cheap stuff!

 

Following on from last month's big book giveaway, courtesy of Elina at studychineseculture.com and Sinolingua (which I believe is scheduled to continue this month)...

 

I've been getting in touch with a few companies lately to see if they might like to offer free or heavily discounted goodies via the forum. Bit of exposure for them, Chinese-learning stuff for our Chinese learners, everyone wins. 

 

I've been pleasantly surprised by the response, and in the coming months there are going to be a few giveaways which I think, and I hope everyone else will think, are pretty generous. 

 

So if you have a product or service you'd like to promote on here, please do get in touch (admin@chinese-forums.com) and let me know. All we ask is that it's something better than you offer users directly (ie, if you give a one week free trial, we'd like to give away a free month). 

 

Or if you're a user of a service that you think deserves more publicity on here, drop them a line and suggest they get in touch. Or add your suggestion below and I'll try and drop them a line to see what they say.

 

Complaints about the ongoing commercialization of the forums also welcome ;-)

For reference, none of the currently scheduled ones bring me any money, and in one case I'm actually paying for the product, although at a very generous discount. But if someone offers me $XX for each paying customer generated, I'm not going to turn it down. Probably. 

[Shelley]

You are turning into a Chinese learning materials pusher

 

They will offer us free/discounted stuff, get us hooked and then we will be paying out for monthly hits of Chinese learning stuff

 

Hopefully you can tell this is tongue in cheek.

 

Sounds like a good plan, may encourage more forum activity and new users.

 

I will keep an eye out for what might be on offer.

[sinosplice]

Pretty cool!  AllSet Learning would like to get in on this.  I've emailed you, Roddy...

[roddy]

Actually, there's no need to be tongue in cheek about it. If doing this generates more sales for the companies involved, as far as I'm concerned that's a win all around. Company gets more sales, I get more activity, general goodwill from the freebies (hopefully) and maybe affiliate dollars, and the user has found something they consider worth spending money on. 

 

Good to see you posting John, as always. Are you Mayor of Shanghai yet?