I've never heard of cosplay...

又cosplay江泽民...

多cosplay江哥，怎么不能帮你入党？

too funny! :-)

@Drummerboy,

我赞同！

“我讨厌江泽民！”

“我们能不能COSPLAY一次的温家宝了呀？”

“开什么玩笑我们就是江泽民粉丝俱乐部！”

Ha ha! 很好玩！

It makes me want to put on a thick toupe and thicker glasses and take the podium to propagate a number/character combination ideology of my own making.

How about 四江? 江泽民，江湖，江篱，江米 deep, quite deep indeed....

我可以想象我举行示威运动我的粉丝都会对我多多呼喊，“四江！四江！四江！嘿！大哥，四江到底是什么意思呀？！”

Hello just signed up on your site, love it so far! I was just wondering why the transcript and vocab is not available? Isnt there a one week free premium subsription? Thanks!

Hi jesy.eh,

Thanks for signing up and glad you like it. We're experimenting with the signup process now to try and simplify things and encourage people to be more active sharing word-of-mouth about what we're trying to do (after three years, Popup Chinese still invisible in Google -- we need to figure out a way to fix this if we're going to be able to offer so much content for free over the long term).

Part of our recent changes have meant getting rid of the free trial, but also loosening some of the restrictions elsewhere (particularly with the personal lesson feed and user vocab lists). We'll be putting up some sample lessons linked from the payment page so that people can check out what the premium pages look like. That said, everything is still backed by our money-back guarantee, so anyone who wants a free trial can still avail themselves of a 30-day one that way.

Work in progress as always, but suggestions and feedback are always very welcome!

Hey pefferie,

Google's keyword visibility tool suggests there are about 600 monthly searches for "chinese podcasts", compared to around 140,000 for the term "learn Chinese". We appear for a number of modest searches now (including queries like "hsk test"), but aren't close to being visible to the mass market.

As we understand it, we need to encourage more people to link to us in some capacity (ideally using relevant keywords like "learn chinese" in the links). The changes we're experimenting with across the site are intended to encourage people to share word. We'll see how they work out, but if you have a blog or website and can spare a link that's certainly appreciated.

Cheers,

--david

@Trevelyan,

I agree with 尼古拉斯桑, in lew of high Google ranking (last time I checked popup was on the 5th page for the term Learn Chinese, not bad, but considering you have 50+ competitors ahead of you, not super great), maybe putting some videos on You Tube and You Ku and the like can help. I always see Learn Chinese with Yang Yang, a local Chinese girl in Los Angeles up at the top of the search engines with her Learn Chinese video, and I'd love to see Popup there too. Popup is so far and away superior to any other popcast based Chinese learning site that it's ashame that more people don't know about it.

What else can we do to spread the word? Would linking Facebook pages to you help?

@drummerboy,

I think pretty much all of the Youtube video lessons are fairly craptacular. I'm confident that with the quality of Popup Chinese' lessons, there is SURE to be a ton of interest. I like the idea of filiming some of the recordings and putting them out on the video sites, Youtube, Youku, Tudou, 56.com et al.

Also with the right keyword combinations, written content in the titles and descriptions, etc., as well as linking it's relatively easy to get to the first or second page of searches, just like Yang Yang. Keep the PopupChinese.com name and logo on video at all times. Start as many groups as possible on the video sites, and network as much as possible. Twitter, Facebook, RenRenWang etc are all great advertising places.

Get links from some other sites, hopefully RELEVANT and CONTEXTUAL links and the page rank for PP Chinese should come up.

Hits have Google Page Rank value and Links, Content, Keyword Density, Page Titles and so forth need to be constructed fairly carefully to meet with Google requirements, but it's not that difficult to do once you know WHAT to do.

I think if our Popup Crew turn over some advetising stones, the subscription dollars should come in.

Do you or anyone else have any suggestions about what Popup Chinese could do to increase visibility?

@Xiao Hu,

新中国成立以后，周总理即是总理也是外交部长，在中国，总理是负责所有国内内政的，所以总理＋外交部长的意思我理解就是国内国外的担子他一个人挑了。他在外交界的风采最为人称道，他的很多外交政策还有外交故事到现在都为大家传颂。周总理为国家付出的只有一个成语是最好最真实的写照：鞠躬尽瘁、死而后已。虽然我没有生活在那个时代，但是仍然对总理有很深的敬意和感情。

这儿有一些关于总理的小故事，你有时间可以看一看：

http://www.hzxd.cn/Article_Show.asp?ArticleID=10557

http://news.163.com/06/0106/11/26PH4N2D0001124T.html

--Echo

echo@popupchinese.com

@gmarsh

OMG! I just watched about 30 seconds of this link (which was all I could handle). THANK GOD for Popup Chinese, because the alternative is depressingly horrible! That teacher should be euthanized to save the world from miserable Chinese lessons! :-)

@Drummerboy & 尼古拉斯桑,

Gee, too bad I'm in China and can't get on YouTube, now I'm extremely curious as to why Drummerboy went so far as to say 那个中文老师应该被安乐死为的是救我们学生看他的让人郁闷乱七八糟的中文课。

Yet 尼古拉斯桑 said, it's 有点儿有意思.

Hhhhmmm, maybe I should invest in a VPN...

From personal experience, expressive video is not conductive to automatic expression recall as much as expressive audio.

Video has major drawbacks, such as forcing you to look at the screen (obviously) and higher download size/network bandwidth. And it is much more expensive to produce.

That being said, having videos posted is a good promotional tool.

Would it be possible to automatically produce "videos" of podcasts and post them on youtube, containing just the audio + promotional images or transcripts (you would need to decide if showing transcripts in a video has the potential of jeopardizing your premium programs)?

There's a lesson (no pun intended) to be learned from gmarch's link.

There stands a pretty (if somewhat creepy) girl giving a lesson in a way that is just plain weird and certainly ineffective. All in all her channel has 25 3-minute videos posted over the last 6 months. Her channel has 682 subscribers. In contrast, Popup Chinese does not even have a YouTube channel...

@echo,

I am a native Chinese speaker. I was looking for on-line materials for my 10 year old daughter and I ran across your site today. I tried a few intermediate lessons so far and this is the highest quality listening materials I have ever encountered. The lesson download speed is very fast too. Although the contents on Popup China is a bit mature for my daughter right now I will recommend it to other high school and young adult friends who wants to learn Chinese. keep it up. Cheers,

@Echo,

Wow you are really on top of the emails. I have some more suggestions, i will send you via an email. Cheers