™
A Better You,  A Better Society,  A Better World    

Increasing Enrollment

(June 2000)

What good is a school without students? In order to get more students and adult learners to come to the School for Champions for courses and lessons, they have to be made aware of its existence and location, as well as the value of the information. There must be a plan of action to advertise or market the school.

The first question concerns how people have previously found out about the site and have accessed it. Then, marketing strategies can be made to get more users.

Methods to make others aware of the lessons available are through placement on search engines, links from specialized sites, media ads and word-of-mouth advertising. Also, forming a community of like-minded people and forming chat-rooms or ways to communicate could attract more users.

How did they come?

Visitors to the School for Champions, when it was part of the Kurtus Technologies site at www.ronkurtus.com, usually came from searching for a specific subject through the various search engines. Popular topics have been static electricity, waterless cooking and the 6th sense.

There had been thoughts about putting all the content in a database and using the ColdFusion technology to dynamically create pages requested, but that idea was shelved because of the necessity to have each topic listed.

Note that few people have been looking for how to become a champion or other success issues. More seem to be seeking topic knowledge than self-improvement issues, although there are certainly many such people out there.

The manner in which visitors came shows the importance of good and numerous listings with the search engines.

Listing in search engines

Many of the lessons are already listed in the major search engines at the www.ronkurtus.com site. Visitors are now re-directed to the proper page in the School for Champions site.

Pages and organization of the site must be search-engine-friendly. Meta tags with keywords and descriptions are already used in all pages. Keywords are also used in the title. Frames are not used.

The plan is to submit the site to most of the search engines. This may be done through purchasing a service, to maximize the submissions.

Links from other sites

There are a number of sites with links to the ronkurtus.com site. They should be contacted to make them aware of the new Web address.

The plan to get further links is to search for topic areas and then contact sites that list resources about our site. Also, schools and school districts with web sites can be contacted to make them aware. Unfortunately, this is a tedious process, resulting in a small percentage of links.

Advertising in various media

Anyone involved in the School for Champions should mention it to others in conversations and give out business cards, listing the Web address.

Press releases and news stories are good ways to get free advertising. Credibility is the most important factor in contacting the press.

Purchasing small ads in specialty magazines may also be an option.

Word-of-mouth advertising

The most important type of advertising is word-of-mouth. If a web site strikes the fancy of people--such as a "cool" site--people quickly spread the word. This is called viral advertising, as it expands exponentially.

For an educational site such as mine, the value of the lessons is what will encourages word-of-mouth advertising. Viral advertising is possible but unlikely for this type of site.

Forming a community

One of the powers of the Internet is its ability to gather like-minded people from all over the world. Forming such communities in the School for Champions would be an important way to get more users.

Some ideas are being considered, but nothing is solid enough to write about at this time.

In conclusion

Making people aware of the School for Champions and encouraging them to visit will be done through listing with search engines, being linked form other sites, advertising in the media, encouraging word-of-mouth advertising, and forming a community.

Help people find and get what they want or need.

Where can you go from here?