Learning from a blog....

Good listening and learning by a vendor...

I read on a blog about an interesting effort by a vendor to learn about their members and how their services work and can be improved. It was a learning experiment.

And I quote:

The blog - web home schooling - was started by Time4Learning as a learning experiment.We asked half a dozen parents (actually, all moms) of students using Time4Learning to write on this group blog about the details of their homeschooling program. What their days were like and what they worried about. And were happy about.

More specifically, we wanted to know what was working for them and what wasn’t in terms of their use of online educational materials.

--- it continued for awhile and concluded with......

What did we learn? We learned a lot of details and about other products that are used in conjunction with us. We learned that most homeschool curriculums are a home-made eclectic mix optimized for each child. And that there is different mix of planning, routine, and spontenity for each family. We were stunned to find out how unique and useful our service really is. My favorite posts:
The gifted child, with autism, with Time4Learning
How the Internet changes everything….for homeschoolers
T4L - How it helps everyone. Mom too.



del.icio.us

Some websites work....but why?

We experimented this past year with a "group blog" which was about how the web and homeschooling. We invited (actually paid) half a dozen Time4Learning mother's to write two times per week in a blog on whatever their thoughts were on their Time4Learning experience. We encouraged them to react to each other and we were hoping to have it as a sort of ongoing focus group about their use of various homeschooling curriculum (homeschooling curricula?).

We learned alot about our users and how our service works from them. We were also interested in whether the blog would pick up a readership or any Google rank. Answer, after several months delay, it has started picking up good traffic from the search engines. It's not clear that it has any regular readers. And one article, on how has the internet changed your life, is by far the most popular. It alone pulls in almost half the traffic. I'm not entirely sure why, I think it got picked up on some blog service as highly picked (stumbled upon or favorited or tagged or whatever).

We reall

Online Revenue Development

Time4Learning has a fantastic online learning service for afterschool or homeschooling which we provide to users for a monthly fee. So the heart of our business is a subscription service.

However, with over 400,000 visitors per month, we have often considered trying to build revenues though either advertising or affiliate programs.

To be clear, we are NOT talking about advertising to our students or members. We don't do that. We are thinking about our main and tertiary sites where we get lots of traffic but most of which does not convert into members. In fact, 99% of our visitors don't sign up so it seems reasonable to try to make some money on them as they surf out of our site.

Adsense - We have had a variety of different experiences with adsense, some of which we cannot explain. At one point, we made alot of money on it but then, some clever consultants, convinced me to take it down.

Since then, I've run adsense on sidebars of some pages of the site and at best, I can around a 5% clickthru on the ads. With an average of $.10 / click, this means that I make a dime on one out of every twenty visitors or, a half penny per visitor. Here's a question: anybody out there want to share similiar metrics with me? Are there industry norms of what one ought to be able to make per visitor?

I've also experimented with a variety of affiliate programs including commission junction, linkshare, affiliate fuel, amazon, and others. None of them have done much for me. Or, I've not figured out how to do much with them?

If any of you have experience helping to optimize pages for these efforts and wants to help, I'd be pleased for advice or even some consulting help.

Homeschool Education - Googles rankings

Homeschool Curriculum #1
Homeschooling curriculum #8
homeschool #7
home school #17
homeschooling #18

home education - not in top 100 (overture reports 6057 terms)...interesting. My poor position here is interesting since this is part of the title of my home page, the most linked to page on my site and a PR 6. I wonder if this one link will make a difference?