The Linguist is a languages magazine for professional linguists, translators, interpreters, language professionals, language teachers, trainers, students and academics with articles on translation, interpreting, business, government, technology
Issue link: https://thelinguist.uberflip.com/i/1229313
@Linguist_CIOL APRIL/MAY The Linguist 13 FEATURES Thebig idea Q Tell us about Bilingual Kidspot… A The website is aimed at parents raising bilingual kids. We provide the resources and articles to help, and we've now also got mini courses in Spanish, Chinese and French for kids. It started as a hobby. I'm Australian but I was in Italy, raising my own bilingual kids, and looking for information and strategies. People began asking me for advice, so I started a blog to document our experiences. Q What is your languages background? A I only spoke English until my son started speaking Italian. I couldn't understand what people were saying to him and I realised I was missing out. I was teaching English to young children in Italy and saw how quickly they picked it up. It was a lot harder learning as an adult. I'm fluent now but it took a long time. Q When did you decide to turn the website into a business and what were the first steps? A It started getting really popular. Our social media was growing and the page views were increasing every month. That's when I began to work with other companies on collaborations. I started working on it full time when I moved back to Australia a year ago. Initially it was about creating more content for the website. I started to work with other writers and teachers, language experts, speech pathologists and speech therapists. I also developed sources of income by offering advertising, affiliate agreements and marketing, and sponsored content. Q What new skills did you need to learn? A I did online courses in SEO (search engine optimisation) and social media marketing, and trained in marketing and public relations (PR). I created the website on Webpress, which was a big learning curve. I recently launched a family travel website and developed a lot of skills for that which also support Bilingual Kidspot – things like writing press releases and contacting PR companies. Q Did you hire any experts? A I have a personal assistant and someone to help with social media marketing. With regard to the content, I write a lot of it myself, but I'm not an expert on everything, so I work with some experts in the field who write guest posts. It works well because it gives them exposure to my audience, so it's a win-win for both of us. I also occasionally hire writers if I need to cover something in particular when it comes to a language I don't speak. Q How did you develop the mini courses? A They were created in partnership with language teachers. For example, the Spanish course was created for Bilingual Kidspot by a Spanish teacher who I'd been in contact with online. It is designed for our audience, so we worked together on it, but it was posted on both of our websites. Chontelle Bonfiglio on turning her hobby – a blog sharing tips on raising bilingual kids – into a thriving business Q What is your approach to marketing? A I've done a lot of work on SEO and most of our traffic is organic from Google. We also do a lot of Facebook promotions – we don't pay for them, it's just about putting out the right content for our audience. There are over 30,000 people on our Facebook page now, and we also have a large, very active group for parents raising bilingual kids. Q What changes have you made to Bilingual Kidspot? A There's been a lot of trial and error. The website was very basic at first so I re-did it using Webpress, but that was three years ago and I've learnt a lot doing my travel website. I'm working on another redesign, but it's a long process. Technology changes every day and I'm continuously changing things. Q What are your plans for the future? A I want to add more resources, including physical resources. There's a lot to look into, such as what products would suit our audience and how to implement sales on the website. bilingualkidspot.com