Virtual Bartering: Just swapped some articles for a free online subscription!

I've been trying to learn Portuguese using free apps, but the main ones such as Duolingo only offer Brazilian Portuguese, which is subtly different to European Portuguese, which is far more niche.

The main problem is the pronunciation - it's quite different between Portugal and Brazil, and kind of crucial to get it right if you want to be understood, so I figured I needed a proper European Portuguese portal to learn through.

I did a bit of digging and couldn't find too much that was easily accessible for specifically European Portuguese, a few YouTube videos, but nothing offering anything comprehensive for free.

I hit upon 'Practice Portuguese' as the best subscription based platform for me. It looked well structured and I also liked the fact that it was run by two independent Portuguese guys rather than a massive outfit such as Duolingo.

The problem was it was 15 EU a month for a subscription which is a bit steep, so I hit on the strategy of offering to write them a few articles on my blog which would direct traffic to them, as incoming links are SEO gold after all!

So a quick email to one of the founders, a bit of back and forth with me telling them about the amount of tasty traffic I get, he agreed, and sent me a link for a year's free access.

In exchange I wrote them a nice article directing people to their site, and I'll do a few more over the next few months.

I figured there is something of a synergy between my sociology blog and their's - one of the modules I focus on is education and they are independent education providers, so I can naturally write a few articles around language learning, relevant to sociology without it being too forced.

It's also something I find quite interesting - how small outfits like Practice Portuguese manage to carve out a niche against the big boys like Duolingo who have much more visibility and capacity to offer most of what they do for free.

OK this year's free subscription isn't exactly in the same league as what some of the internet's leading influencers manage to get for free with their YouTube channels, but I'm pretty happy with this result, it's saved me £150 this year anyway!

Win-win!

Or at least it will be when I start using it, best get to it!

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