One of the many questions we get from our users is, “How do I get students?”. This blog series will address the many techniques you can use to improve your online school traffic. More traffic = more students. More students = more sales. More sales = more money!
What are the different marketing techniques?
We divide the marketing techniques into several areas:
- Direct sales
- SEO – search engine optimization
- Social media
Direct sales
Direct sales is when you have contact with someone or a group of people already. It is one of the most effective methods but is also time consuming. Anytime you need to talk to someone, you’ll find you spend a significant amount of time. And there’s only so many people you can talk to at once.
However, the benefits of direct sales is you can greatly increase your chances of closing the deal and you can tailor your pitch to the person’s interest. You can also address questions immediately again improving your chances.
A lot of people that teach workshops or classes can use direct sales quite efficiently. After teaching the workshop a simple announcement that further lessons can be obtained online through a website drives traffic and possible customers to your website. Furthermore, these people have already proven themselves interested in your expertise.
SEO – search engine optimization
SEO is a technique of making your website easily accessible by Google and providing interesting and informative content. The hope is when someone types in a search term into Google, they will be presented with your webpage as a resource. This will drive traffic to your school and improve your sales. For example, a school that teaches painting might hope to end up in the search list for someone searching “how to paint watercolors”.
The benefits of SEO are clear. It’s free traffic sent to your website. However, what is attractive to you is also attractive to others. Therefore, it is a constant effort to maintain or improve your rankings as others are doing the same.
There are a number of methods to improve your SEO and we will address these in following posts.
Social media
Social media is another excellent technique that is Free in some sense. It’s free in the sense you don’t have to directly pay to achieve it. It’s not free in the sense that you have to invest some time and effort to build your social following. However, once established, your social media can run on it’s own.
Building your social media following can be mysterious to newcomers. There are multiple avenues that can be taken including:
- Youtube
and others.
Where you search depends on your time and interest. There is a lot to learn from the tools to use to the etiquette of each platform. The goal is to build a following and develop viral posts. Viral posts have a life of their own and is like winning the lottery. The amount of traffic and attention generated is incredible. For example, a few years ago the “Ice Bucket Challenge” took over the internet and generated millions of video posts on Facebook and resulted in more than $100 million dollars of donations for ALS research!! And this was all FREE advertising!
To achieve just a fraction of this result would be phenomenal and takes a bit of time, effort and education. Stay tuned as we cover the details in further posts.
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