The Best Ways To Marketing Your Education Website & Sell Your Online Courses

You may have built your education website, but if you don’t promote it, it’s unlikely you’re going to see many people sign up to take your courses.

Building traffic can take time, but it isn’t necessarily hard to do.

Here are the best ways to market your education website and sell your online courses.

Using YouTube To Promote Your Course Website

There are two places people commonly go to find answers to their questions on the internet: Google and YouTube.

YouTube can be a real time saver, depending on what the user is looking for. It’s much easier to see how to tie a tie than to try to explain it via text. If someone wanted to learn how to tie a tie, they would probably go to YouTube to learn.

So, YouTube is the perfect place to share your educational content with the world and get traffic coming to your website.

This isn’t to suggest you should give away all your courses for free. Rather, you could take segments or modules and upload them to YouTube, prompting users to go to your website to take the full course. If the content is enticing enough, you will earn some customers from this.

There isn’t necessarily a shortcut to gaining a following on YouTube. As with search engine optimization, you should do keyword research to find what people are looking for, study the competition, and craft your video titles around the keywords you’ve uncovered.

Publishing regularly can also make a significant difference. Publishing new content on a weekly basis can help you grow your following over the long term and continue to engage subscribers. Keep developing new courses, and as you do, remember to share a few free video lessons with your YouTube following to drive more traffic to your website.

Local SEO Is A Good Form Of Traffic For Education Sites

When it comes to the education niche, you’re competing on a global scale.

Certainly, if you’re offering something unique you might be able to find ways of standing out from the crowd. But this can still be a challenge, especially when your site is still new.

Local SEO can be a good way to build an audience locally first and foremost, and then later reach a bigger audience.

Here are several steps you can take to ensure your website is local SEO ready:

Conduct Local Keyword Research

Using the right keywords on your website will make a big difference in terms of the quality and quantity of traffic you attract to your site.

The keywords you find can help you develop better content, rank your website in search engines, and advertise strategically (more on this later).

No time spent researching keywords is ultimately wasted, because they form the foundation of a website the generates a lot of traffic.

Develop Localized Content

Content plays a critical role in driving traffic to your website.

If you can publish content with a local focus, it will help you attract local students who are hungry for the information you have to offer them.

If you want to keep a steady stream of new leads coming to your website, try to publish one fresh blog post at least once per week.

Include Contact Information On Every Page Of Your Website

If you aren’t discoverable on the map, you aren’t truly local.

Now, if your focus is entirely online, then you may not have a physical address you can put on your site.

Otherwise, your phone number, physical address, and email address should be on every page of your site (i.e. in the footer).

Buy Exposure For Your Education Blog With Pay Per Click Advertising

Search engine optimization will prove crucial to your success. But it may not generate immediate results. SEO takes patience, because it’s usually six to 12 months before your efforts bear fruit.

If you’re anxious to attract more students to your website, you might consider taking advantage of pay per click advertising to drive more traffic to your site.

The most popular form of PPC advertising is Google AdWords.

When you place an ad with Google, your search result will instantly appear at the top of the page. This will immediately increase your site’s visibility and help you get more clicks.

If you did your keyword research earlier, you should already have a good sense of what people are searching for and how to position your website in an ad.

The great thing about PPC is that you can control your budget. It’s a lot like a tap. the moment you turn it on, it will start sending traffic to your site. The moment you turn it off, the flow will stop. You never have to spend more than you want to.

Don’t be surprised if you end up having to adjust the targeting of your ad. At first, you might see some of the traffic convert, but not a lot. All this typically means is you need to optimize your ad (i.e. when it’s shown, the ad copy, the geotargeting, etc.).

Guest Post On Other Education Websites For Additional Exposure

Guest posting is a great way to build your credibility in your industry and drive more traffic to your website.

There are many sites accepting guest posts, and some of them have been around a long time and have a large following. Plus, they’re already talking to the audience you’re trying to attract to your website. So, guest posting could prove invaluable to your marketing.

Here are three education websites you can submit guest posts to:

• Edutopia: Edutopia (or the George Lucas Foundation) is an organization that’s looking to change K – 12 educations for the better. Their site is home to plenty of articles on a variety of topics. Edutopia is looking for stories, especially about anything you’ve learned about getting students excited about the process of learning.
• Getting Smart: Getting Smart is a learning design firm that partners with education focused foundations, organizations, schools and districts to support the future of learning. They are looking for posts around innovative learning strategies, as well as technologies and practices that inspire students to learn.
• Educational App Store: Educational App Store is a site dedicated to helping teachers and parents with the process of education with apps. Whether you’re new to blogging or already established, they are accepting posts from teachers and parents alike. Look at the latest topics they’ve covered on their blog and see if there’s anything in the same category you could write about.

Though you may be asked not to link to your site within your article, most sites do allow links in the author byline. Building links to your website is an important part of SEO and can help you attract more students to your online courses.

Final Thoughts

Marketing can be a lot of fun once you get the hang of it.

If at first you don’t succeed, keep trying. Sometimes even ineffective marketing can be turned around with a few simple tweaks.

Always keep your target customer in mind. Research and think about what they might be searching for. Build content around those topics.

Then, just keep going. Your marketing efforts will add up and help you create momentum.