If you have an education platform, whether it’s from-scratch website or one made from a learning management system plugin, you should know that it can not only attract new visitors and revenue, but also drive web traffic. In this article, we will take a look at five ways that education platforms drive substantial amounts of web traffic.

1) Blogs

As a rule, blogs should be a mandatory part of your education platform. Blogging consistently is one of the primary driving factors that brings in customers to your website, especially by adhering to proper SEO practices.

By marketing your education platform on your blogs, you get can generate cross traffic that forms the basis of repeat visitors and people ready to purchase courses.

Blogging naturally can be tied into enhancing your more “concrete” offerings, like online courses, even just by adding “If you’d like to learn more, be sure to sign up for my online course at [web address]”.

Digital marketing agencies use gated blog content as personal forms of communication between an influencer and their audience. Why? Because people who read your blogs can become interested in courses that you have to teach, where you can dive deeper into topics and immerse them in information that only education platforms provide.

Conversely, those who use your education platform in turn visit your other websites for information and future courses.

Blogging can be a way of testing ideas that relate to your audience’s needs. By constantly reviewing your analytics, statistics & data across your website, as well as social media efforts and direct customer feedback, you can provide content that is more in line with what customers want to see. By fulfilling the demand, you provide more value.

2) Tying in Social Media

Social media should be a major component to your education platform. It’s our modern method of staying in touch with friends, families, and professional entities. Think of your social media efforts as a form of client acquisition, where short posts and quotes related to your business model can entice users to try your education platform.

Social media can exponentially expand traffic to your education platform, and vice versa. This “mushrooming” effect can be vital to scaling your business from modest visitors to more than you may know how to handle.

Similarly, your education platform—especially one with a classroom experience—can increase your web traffic as attendees can discuss relevant points and address needs they have. With this feedback, you can tailor your content—including providing FAQs, blogs that target this audience, using a Q&A format from real (or hypothetical) audience members, and so forth.

3) Professionalism

By offering an education service, it shows that you value the knowledge and insight that you have to offer. People begin to associate you as an expert in your niche and this gives you a professional appeal that a plain website and LinkedIn profile fall short of.

Proving that you are an authority in your industry can help you to drive traffic like no other. This is especially true of competitive industries, where your customers and clients are looking for a source of information that can put them several steps ahead of the competition?

In short, an education platform is a professional platform. People who are looking to find in depth answers to their questions rely on online education platforms to give them guided study and vital information all in on package. As anyone knows, if it’s fast and efficient, it’s ready for the fast-paced and globally-oriented 21^st century.

4) Free Offerings

There may be no such thing as a free lunch, but offering a free online education platform subconsciously makes people appreciate your brand. After all, if you give information away for free, it shows that you have value that you want to share. Customers, in turn, will feel an obligation to purchase your other products and regularly visit your website(s) to stay updated.

It’s these free offerings that are key to hooking customers to your brand for the long-term, especially if you offer up-to-date information (i.e. “easy tax loopholes for 2018”) that saves them money, time, and effort.

Free offerings can help you capture a customer’s details and demographics as a form of reciprocal “payment”, making your marketing offerings more precise. You’ll end up spending less on marketing efforts that don’t yield a good ROI while simultaneously cultivating an engaged audience that is always hungry for new, better content. This can take the form of email campaigns or exclusive offers to members.

5) Cultivating Media

Does your online education platform feature videos, audio, and other content? If so, this media can be used to advertise your websites and drive traffic to your websites. For instance, you may offer ebooks that supplement online course from your website.

By including these resources and web addresses in your media offerings, you both educate your customers and ensure that they know where to go to find out more information. Offering serialized version of your books, or creating books out of blog posts, is a way of seamlessly bridging the digital divide and into other mediums (i.e. television, radio, conferences, learning events, etc.)

This media also ties into our previous point about professionalism and social media. Often, many individuals limit their public personas behind a wall of text. Even though you may be camera shy, you should know that by offering yourself as a media personality, you gain key opportunities.

For instance, your education platform’s media may lead you to hosting guest blogs for a similar niche audience, or being featured on media outlets like radio, television, and podcasts. Similarly, if you can provide value through your media, creating a minute-long Instagram video both answering questions and advertising your services ties your education platform to your other efforts.

Conclusion

By elevating your status from just a web domain owner/writer to a full-fledged persona can drive web traffic for those that want to put a face to a brand.

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