Sunday 30 September 2012

TEFL-Courses-Reviews.com: ITTP Prague Monthly Guest Writer

For this month's Guest Writer we have brought in the owner of www.tefl-courses-reviews.com, the leading independent TEFL reviews site on the net. Josh (owner) has specifically stated though that this article isn't necessarily a recommendation of ITTP products or services and Josh did agree to the interview on the basis that it be understood that www.tefl-courses-reviews.com is a completely unbiased reviews website.  As always, the article appears completely unedited:


Firstly Josh and if you don't mind, we would be interested in learning some basics about your background and why you chose to start up www.tefl-courses-reviews.com.

Sure. im originally from the Czech Republic. i now live in Japan but often revisit my Father who lives in Brno. do you know Brno? its the second largest city in the Czech Republic and about 200km drive from Prague. my wife is from Japan and about 5 years ago we both decided to relocate to Japan. i prefer Japanese lifestyle and its important for my wife to be close to her family there.
i own tefl-courses-reviews.com but my wife also helps run the site. tefl-courses-reviews.com isn't the only reviews site we run. we run about 20 reviews websites ranging from electronics to TEFL. i started the site in 2010 but i have no experience with TEFL. tefl-courses-reviews.com is just business for me.

How do you ensure that your site remains objective and unbiased?

Good question. number 1 is that we dont accept paid advertising from any schools and this also applies to our other review sites.  this is important because in the case of TEFL there are a few review sites on the market which do accept paid adverts. i dont so the reader can be assured that the site is completely unbiased. number 2 is that we check the source of every review where possible. we check positive and negative reviews because in the case of both they could be written by a school and not by a student of the program. this is one of the reasons why tefl-courses-reviews.com has what appears to be fewer reviews than other sites. i am confident that every review on tefl-courses-reviews.com is for sure genuine.

Do you receive lots of fake reviews then Josh?

Absolutely. actually we have the highest amount of fake reviews traffic from Thailand and Prague TEFL schools. well actually just 2 schools in Prague. one of these schools has been very aggressive in this area. you know it isnt natural for a school to have 5 good reviews come in on a Sunday afternoon. it does make our job much more difficult but again it ensures that the site remains unbiased. i can though spot a clearly fake review from a distance and there are specific troubleshoots which we carry out on all reviews received to initially scan them for this type of abuse.

What do you envision for the future Josh with regards to review websites as a whole?

Over the past few years we have witnessed a boom in review sites. and we have of course contributed to this boom. as i see it i think the reviews space on the net is becoming less and less objective due to the hunger of new reviews sites for traffik. think about it for a while and you see that a reviews site can only exist if there are reviews so the aim of many sites is to publish as many reviews as possible. i can see that people are becoming more and more jaded if you like with reviews sites and i think personally that the way forward for such sites is running consistent reviews pages which offer genuine reviews. real reviews and not just high traffic purpose reviews.

Thank you for the opportunity to chat Josh and is there anything else you would like to add?

Sure. it was my pleasure. free exposure on the net is always a good thing for me :) i do need to make it very clear that tefl-courses-reviews.com isn't endorsing any ITTP products or services by agreeing to this article being published on your school blog. we must remain neutral to all TEFL schools. im also open for example to other TEFL schools contacting me if they want a similar thing done for their school board. schools can contact me by going to the CONTACT link on www.tefl-courses-reviews.com.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------