As our site grows every day we want to share some information with you on the way we are operating the project. We call this section «Business Blog» as it is similar to doing a log book where data is recorded in a chronological order. «Blogging» is gaining popularity with more and more people picking up the habit of publishing their experiences and thoughts on the Internet. Our Blog covers various topics — from TOEFL, TOEIC, MBA, GMAT, ESL/EFL test preperation to cultural traditions and current political events.
There will also be some Internet marketing terminology and if you have any questions regarding the information simply let us know.

The Business Blog is written by Torsten Daerr and edited by Alan Townend.

2003 — December 03
Today I received an email from James Parsons, the director of www.icc-sprachinstitut.de.
James is from the UK and came to Leipzig a couple of years ago to set up his own language school. He is very good at marketing — wherever there is a big event — you can be sure that James is there. He started his business advertising English language lessons at the university calling his service «Real English». I was one of his first private students and very soon he managed to establish a flourishing business. I referred quite a number of students to him and once he even called me personally to thank me for this kind of support. After that I hadn't heard from him for ages and in his email today he pointed out that we have no right to use the Leipzig Olympic Games Campaign logo. It's very good that we such active businessmen like James who tell us which rights we have — or rather don't have. I'm also very glad that I have to write about this in the NetLog.

Of course we have removed that logo — it was only in German anyway and I have contacted the organization running the Olympic Games Campaign. Our website is used by people from over 60 countries — I'm sure we could support our city's Olympic Games activities…

2003 — December 02
This week I have been spending quite some time on www.sitepointforums.com — one of the best places to study internet marketing. I have picked up a lot of good advice and some of it we have successfully put into practice. A programmer from San Diego by the name of Shawn has been offering an amazing tool that lets you track keywords people use to find your website through Google. You type in the search string you want to track and the program shows you the ranking of your webpages on these particular strings. So far I have managed to track more than 20 different search strings on which our pages appear in the top 10 positions at Google.
Once again Google proves that it generates the most relevant results because it analyzes the actual contents of the appropriate pages rather than the information in the so-called META-Tags hidden code integrated into each HTML document. META-Tags used to be the secret key to top search engine ranking — now those days seem to be over…

2003 — December 01
Leipziger.RU and english-test.net are closely connected to each other as both projects aim to exchange intercultural experiences and share business ideas and concepts. Last Thursday evening when I returned from our first distribution journey, I remembered that there is a Russian couple living in the same house I have my apartment in. (you can tell by their surnames). So, I put a copy of Leipziger.RU into their mailbox and the next day they signed up with our english-test.net newsletter.

Also, within 2 days we have already received 6 phone calls from readers who are enquiring about the Russian TV programmes we wrote about in the newspaper. It is obvious that there a great demand for Russian language media services and we are going to propose a business offer to our partner KabelDeutschland: They could sponsor German and English language courses as well as internet training programs for their Russian speaking clients. I'm sure this will be a very effective campaign, don't you think?

2003 — November 28
Speaking a second language gives you access to another world or at least to a different kind of culture and mentality. The environment I live in uses three languages: German, English and Russian. Take today: I gave an English class to a group of German engineers and at the training facility there are also two groups of Russian immigrants then I met with Slava to fetch our newspaper from the printing company and we set off on a journey to the Russian speaking community in Leipzig. If you want to meet a lot of interesting business people quickly and easily — put together a free print medium and distribute it yourself. We have really got the timing just right as there still seems to be an information vacuum for Russian speakers here. They get a lot of Russian tabloids — one of them has on its front page (in Russian) «McCartney started a fist fight». I can't imagine why a Russian immigrant who has just arrived in Germany would be interested in that type of stuff. On our way we went into a large photocopy shop recently set up to ask whether we could have them print our newspaper in the future. The boss first had a good look at us and then at our newspaper. He leafed through the eight pages and after a while he looked up and said: «Hey, this text is in Russian!» Then he started reading out one article very slowly and it was obviously fun for him. He said that quite a substantial propotion of his customers were Russian and yes, he would love to work with us and he knew a number of businesses who would too. We will be pretty busy over the coming weeks… Meanwhile Alan is holding the fort here at english-test.net writing new tests and communicating on the forum — I'll join in soon…