18 Feb 2008 11:40:44 | Peter Fogarty
How many times do you find you are having to create worksheets,
or resources and then they just remain on your own computer, or
in a resource source for your own school?
A few years ago a friend and I were chatting about this and came
to a great idea. Lets use all our own resources we had created
anyway and place them all on the internet for other teachers to
use.
These days the site attracts about 1000 visitors a day. Two
years ago and lots of mistkaes earlier however it had an
attraction rate of 25 a day. So I thought I would outline how to
make a low ranking website into a top website.
The first is the quality of your resources. There are already
far too many poor resources on the website, so make sure your
resources really are worth waiting for and downloading. This in
turn will form word of mouth. Also offer all your resources for
free - those sites which charge for passwords seem to last about
6 months and disappear - and the number of users you get drops
away steeply!
The next thing to complete is making sure the 'keywords' at the
top of your website are a maximum of 3. This helps to keep you
focused. If you want to change subjects, make a new page. By
doing this I found that I could make 'typing game' appear on top
of Google's rankings 2 weeks after I had made the page. Other
sites link into top ranking sites.
The next part takes about a week. Just go on the internet and
email all the top sites and ask them for a link. Make sure the
site is good.
Also look at submitting using free website submissions.
When you have got a good set of links and your hits are
beginning to rise, then look at joining an affiliate site such
as Google adwords (www.google.co.uk) or Commission Junction
(www.cj.com), as these are the major earners in my site. You
just get pieces of code, which you add to the top of your page,
and hey presto, someone else starts to send your regular cash.
If you visit my website, you can see I have even taken half the
battle out of making a great educational website, by providing
you with a starter website with which to promote your own
educational website. All you do is download it and then edit it
as you wish, and promote it.
The last piece of advice I learnt the hard way is that for your
site to be successful, only promote teaching resources. Any
lifestyle ads just fail with teachers. When they are looking for
resources, that is all they click on so spend time finding
resource sites, and not time making lifestyle pages.
About Author :
Educational consultant, who also has gained experience in
building up and running a highly successful educational website
(www.timetoteach.co.uk).