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  Promotional Opportunities at USjournal.com

USjournal.com: Generating inquiries. Generating ideas. Online since 1996.

USjournal.com accepts advertising from organizations that meet three important criteria:

It was a delight to meet you, and thank you so much for sharing with the CCID Summer Institute your knowledge and expertise regarding global issues and recruiting strategies. It was a stimulating, challenging, useful and enjoyable presentation. Your expertise is obviously considerable, and we are indebted to you for sharing with us. -- John Halder, CCID President.

How is USjournal.com different from other inquiry-generating services in the international student market?

For better and for worse, the field of global student mobility is expanding exponentially. While it's certainly a positive trend for most who venture abroad, it's also prudent to analyze the method by which these students actually arrive at their host campuses. USjournal.com's perspective revolves around the initial inquiry stage of students interested in studying in the USA.

Savvy business people all around the world increasingly recognize that there's money to be made in matching students to campuses overseas. A number of creative models have surfaced recently, including those that charge U.S. institutions on a per-lead basis. At first glance, it seems like an efficient model compared to services (like USjournal.com) that charge campuses on an annual basis. To us, the comparison must be based on theories of Push versus Pull from the students' perspective.

Push: With pay-per-lead models, there's an inherent temptation for the service provider to provide a high quantity of leads, without regard to quality.

Pull: The annual fee model, on the other hand, cedes control of the inquiry process to the student, who pulls himself or herself through a site like USjournal.com and volunteers their contact information only to the U.S. campuses that truly interest them, either by completing an online form or by calling the campus directly. Consequently, the quantity of leads may not be as high as other models, but the quality is likely higher, given the conversion rates of initial inquiry to actual enrollee.

The bottom line: Trust your service provider. USjournal.com has been online since 1996, with many clients who have been with us since our days of printing the U.S. Education Journal. Our model encourages feedback and improvement at every turn, as we charge one price which includes upgrades and a number of complimentary services. We honestly do look forward to hearing from you: cheryl@USjournal.com

Current Services, included in each standard campaign

  • Customized Profile Page: A page within USjournal.com describing your program, such as University of California, Santa Cruz. The advertiser supplies text and images. You may request modifications to any element of your campaign for no additional cost.

  • Direct Contact Information on the Advertiser Profile Page: Based on extensive log file analysis and correspondence directly with globally-mobile students, we have found significant differences in how those students prefer to communicate when they are seeking more information about U.S. academic options. As a result, we are encouraging advertisers to include direct telephone numbers, fax numbers and e-addresses on their Profile Pages with us, in addition to the links leading to our inquiry form. Even though we will lose some ability to track our efforts precisely, the modification is in the best interest of the students we want to attract, and our U.S.-based advertisers who want to welcome them.

  • Customized Automated Responses: Advertisers may dictate Automated Responses to inquiring students based on their selection of Degree Preference and Academic Preference. If you choose not to customize your responses, USjournal.com will create a simple template for you.

  • Customized Category Selection: For each program you promote, you may select any combination of the following criteria: Academic Level, Field of Study, and Amount the Student or Sponsor Can Pay per Academic Year. Please indicate your preferences on our Program Selection Chart.

  • Customized Excel Reports: We send our advertisers (via e-attachment) Excel files with the data collected from inquiries about those particular programs, either quarterly, monthly or weekly (whichever you prefer). The Report compiles the e-messages that are forwarded to the advertiser immediately after the student submits an inquiry. Excel Spreadsheets are importable to most database programs. Because of this efficient feature, you may direct all of your prospective students to your USjournal.com Profile Page.

  • Cross-Promotions on Selected Sites Related to International Student Services: For years, USjournal.com has been forging strong relationships with respected colleagues who serve globally-minded students and the U.S. campuses that want to welcome them. Among our affiliations: ESLDirectory.com, USuniversities.com, ICEF.com, and many others. The list is constantly evolving to best serve our advertisers.

  • Rolling Deadlines: You may place an advertisement on USjournal.com and any of our sister sites at any time. We typically post English versions within a week (and translated versions within two weeks) of receipt of text, images and payment.

Additional Services, available at extra costs

  • Enhanced Promotions within USjournal.com: You may enhance your exposure on USjournal.com. Each External Link / Rotating Banner from our home page (to a domain outside of USjournal.com) costs an additional $695. per year. Each Internal Link / Rotating Banner (to your Profile Page within USjournal.com) costs an additional $395. per year. The typical size of promotional banners is 200 pixels wide by 100 pixels high. Tower Ad sizes are also available; contact cheryl@USjournal.com.

  • Translation-Only Services: We prefer to work with campuses on comprehensive multi-lingual campaigns, where we translate, localize and promote campus profiles in particular languages in particular regions. However, we recognize the occasional demand for guaranteed, professional translations only, done by native speakers familiar with the higher education systems in the USA and in the target countries. Contact cheryl@USjournal.com.

  • Group Placements: While the primary objective of USjournal.com and our sister sites is to encourage individual students and executives to enroll in high-quality U.S. academic programs, we are also capable of introducing our advertisers to the potential for enrollments on a group basis. Contact cheryl@USjournal.com.

Multi-Lingual Campaigns: Why buy USjournal.com's translated campaigns?

Carol Johnson, head of marketing for the University of California, Santa Cruz Extension's ELI, says it best:

  • We own the translations. We copied and pasted the appropriate information from USjournal.com's translated sites to our own web site, improving the overall perception of our school in the eyes of non-native English speakers.

  • Having the translated info on our own web site gives us the ability to send links to the translations to prospective students, agents and overseas universities to drive them to our site. More visits = higher search engine results.

  • I use links to the translations in my replies to inquiries from international students from all sources, not just USjournal.com inquiries. This makes the student feel good that their language is being used on our site, and they can really understand what they are reading about our programs.

  • I have made some special partnerships with a few of our international student recruiting agencies to follow-up on the inquiries I get from USjournal.com translated sister sites, so they are not only reading about us in their native language, but they get personal responses in their native language, in addition to my English reply. For example, one of my Turkish agents is copied on all the inquiries I get from the USjournal.com Turkish site. In exchange for getting these leads, he has created a special section about our school on his web site, free of charge. I've done the same with a Japanese agent and a Thai agent.

  • When traveling to countries that speak one of the languages that USjournal.com translated for us, we use the translated text to make fliers to distribute at education fairs or other events. We've done this for upcoming trips to Turkey and Thailand.

  • USjournal.com's translated sister sites ensure that prospective students really understand all the details about our programs, because USjournal.com imposes no word limit on our Profile Pages with them.

  • Having translated information gives us access to beginner-level students that previously could not understand much of anything on our all-English web site.

Based on the success of our model non-English domain, EstudiosUSA.com (which won Yahoo's Education Site of the Year in Spanish, 2002), we launched a number of independent sister domains:

Interest from both students and sponsors dictate the depth of our language translations, and we refresh that content and supplement it regularly. Advertisers who choose any of our non-English services have the option of translating their entire campaign, including their Profile Page, Program Listings and Automated Responses. Or they may simply wish to translate their Profile Page, and maintain an English inquiry form. Again, the strategy depends on that particular advertiser's staff language capabilities, as well as the level of English proficiency they're seeking. Some advertisers prefer that their inquiring students can navigate an English inquiry form, while others will accept very elementary learners of English who prefer to complete an inquiry form in their native language.

Comments / Feedback from USjournal.com Advertisers

Meeting you in person, and realizing that your job is more than a job -- it is your passion, your love and what you sincerely enjoy -- was so refreshing to see. Many businesses are more concerned about the profit rather than what I saw; you are interested in people, more aptly put, students. Thanks for opening up not only your home but also your hearts. I'm glad we can work together. - Fresno Pacific University, California

We would like to request that Japanese and Spanish be added to our profile with USjournal... We have had very favorable results with our ad, and appreciate your quick response to our requests. Thank you for sending us the PDF files for all of our translations; we are using them on our own site if students select a particular language. This way, students have more than one way to connect with US Journal and our website; it has been very helpful in getting new recruits to apply. We are very satisfied with all of your work with us. Thanks again! - Emporia State University, Kansas

We have been very pleased and impressed with the quality of USjournal.com services. You have made enormous progress in expanding the reach and effectiveness of your multi-lingual sites while remaining attentive and responsive to our specific needs. It's a pleasure working with you. - American Consortium of Universities and Interlink Language Centers, Multiple Campuses

The Philosophy of USjournal.com's ever-evolving site revisions

USjournal.com and our sister sites continuously add value to our international student recruitment services. We're launching creative campaigns, both online and offline, to reach a broader scope of prospective students from around the world. A few examples: Cross-promotional efforts with respected agents in Asia, coordinating group English programs for South American students, and exposure at U.S. university fairs in Europe.

These new activities are leading us into more of a gray area, where the results of our efforts are not so easily tracked. When we went online in April 1996, we anticipated a simple black-and-white scenario for measuring Return on Investment: At the end of each enrollment cycle, our advertisers would simply cross-reference their enrollee list with the names on their customized USjournal.com Excel Reports. If only life were so simple... and in some cases, life is that simple. But we've learned that reality, in most cases, is messier than that. Prospective students (and parents) need to hear about your campus from a variety of sources, including the Internet, friends and relatives, agents, fairs and so on. And that's why we're collaborating with those entities to best serve our advertisers.

Have you had a chance to read NAFSA's Report of the Strategic Task Force on International Student Access, titled In America's Interest: Welcoming International Students? Their fifth recommendation, Address Complexity with a Marketing Plan, reads in part: It is essential to develop a user-friendly, comprehensive, sophisticated, web-based information resource through which international students will be able to understand and assess the higher education options available to them in the United States, and identify possible financing options. This online resource should allow students to rank their personal preferences (cost, location, academic program, etc.) and should provide links to institutions that match up with their preferences. Ideally, these links would then allow students to apply for admission online. That recommendation parallels what the USjournal.com has been doing since April 2001 (except for the fact that each of our sponsors pays a minimal amount, so that we're able to sustain ourselves). We've been achieving this recommendation for years.

We realize that, in spite of all of the world's technological advancements, the admissions decision is still based on personal conversations. Increasingly, those conversations occur via e-mail and other online mechanisms. USjournal.com simplifies that process by offering our advertisers the option of customizing practically every element of their promotional campaign, from Info Pages to Automated Responses -- all at a very reasonable price. Contact us for details.