You have a hot idea for an eCourse. You haven’t looked at the search volume numbers yet but you know the interest in the topic is there. You just feel it intuitively. As an eCourse seller you’ve been in this position right? Well let’s imagine we’re someone in this position now. Let’s imagine we’re a construction worker or an architect and we want to teach people how to build their own home. This is the topic we’re obsessed about and we just assume the entire world is as well. The good news is that this "feeling" or "intuition" is an important first step in your long tail marketing strategy. You have to get started somewhere. But at some point you have to let intuition pass off the baton to data. Then, near the end of the process, data once again passes the baton back to intuition. Let me explain how this works. STEP 1: LET’S START WITH VERIFYING OUR INTUITION You don’t just need data to tell you if your intuition is right or wrong, you need that data to tell you how to best plan your eCourse marketing campaign. So how do we do that? Well it’s not that hard… it just takes some time. If we have an idea for an online course we need to make sure the interest in there. The good news is, that due to the global nature of the internet, the interest is almost always there. It’s just a matter of finding out how much. Now, Academy of Mine members get access to some pretty cool research tools and I’m going to be using those tools for the rest of this tutorial, but you can use Google Analytics to do much of what I’m going to do here. So let’s start by looking at global search volumes for the term "how to build a home". That’s got to be a big term right? Well let’s see. These results come back and my heart sinks. I thought the entire world would want to know this information and I thought at least half the world would enroll in my online course. However, 1350 people is only slightly larger than the population of Allenwood, NJ. A far cry from the population of the planet. No offence Allenwood. STEP 2: DON’T GIVE UP. DIG DEEPER The great thing we do in the system we use for our clients is we jump over to the adwords tab and start using that tool to help us brainstorm ideas for alternative and larger search terms. We need to find what people are searching for because in this case our intuition was wrong. As you can see (below) as we start to sift through the data we see alternative terms like "build your own house" . Great! So let’s click on that term to see how it compares. NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE Okay, now we can see our newly suggested search term is much more popular. So we’re going in the right direction with our keyword research. STEP 3: VOLUME ISN’T EVERYTHING Size matters, but it’s not everything. There are many things you need to take into consideration when you’re looking at global volume data around any search term. The first and most obvious question you need to ask yourself is "how competitive is this search term"? You can see above that the search term "building a house" is actually a fairly competitive term based on the advertiser competition metric. However, we shouldn’t give up hope here. While you can often draw a direct line between advertiser competition and organic competition, you still need to check. Don’t make the assumption that because 5000 companies are competing heavily to rank for that term in paid listings, that the same companies are optimizing organically. So let’s look at a few other metics. The numbers come back and it doesn’t look as bad as the advertiser competition made the term look. A Good metric to look at here is the "URLS - In Anchor & Title". This really points to  pages that seem to be actively optimizing for that search term. If I was an eCourse seller in this niche I would "flag" this term as a potential term that I would build content around and try to optimize for. And the reason it’s important to do this research and double check all of your work (especially if you’re just starting out) is because it helps you ensure you’re going after "low hanging fruit". For example, let’s imagine you’re a new eCourse seller and there are two terms you’re thinking about going after. One shows 1000 global average volume, the other shows 10,000 global average volume. If you’re just starting out you might try to go for the "easy" one first. The "low hanging fruit" so to speak. This strategy of getting quick-wins is a good strategy for beginner eCourse sellers. However, volume alone doesn’t tell you how low the fruit is hanging. Remember our less than popular initial search term idea (how to build a home)? Remember it had only 1300 searches / month. Well look below and look at the domain metric "urls - in anchor and title". This terms actually appears as though it would be harder to rank for in organic search. It seems easier to rank for in paid search which is why I recommend you always double check this information. STEP 4: SEARCHER INTENT Volume data combined with organic and paid competition data is a great way for you to start building a list of potential search terms that you want to target. However, it’s not enough. The last macro indicator I want you to look at is "searcher intent". This is when data needs to hand the baton back to your intuition. At this point you need to step back from the data and ask yourself "what is this searcher looking for and how closely does that relate to my eCourse"? For example, the term "dream homes" shows up in our suggested terms results above (when we were brainstorming for ideas). At first glance it meets our volume standards and our low(er) competition standards. So do we put it on the list? Not likely. The searcher intent just isn’t there. This is the delicate art and science of keyword research for eCourse sellers. Have fun with your keyword research. Spend a lot of time here. It will save you a lot of time down the road    

In a recent blog post we talked about ways to analyze long tail search volume data. This data is important because for this of us with limited time (i.e. all of us) because we need to make sure that when we begin implementing a content marketing strategy for our online courses, that we’re spending our energies on realistic goals. You don’t want begin the content marketing process by choosing 10 keywords that you want to optimize for that are highly relevant to your eCourse’s niche only to find out that they are the 10 most competitive terms in organic and paid search. Trying to rank for those terms would be similar to trying to Run the Boston Marathon before first learning how to run around the block. In this poll we wanted to ask our eCourse selling audience just how long they spend each month doing keyword research? Do you do keyword research for your online course at all or do you rely solely on intuition and guesswork? We’d love to know! Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

We’ve been on a little bit of a keyword kick lately. We’re obsessed with this topic and this is one area that we really focus on helping our eCourse selling members succeed. We provide training, strategy and tools that help eCourse sellers grow their educational companies by allowing them to research keywords and phrases and then reverse engineer those terms to find out, not only what the global average volume and advertiser competition is for those terms, but also how competitive the terms are in organic search. In a recent poll we asked "how much time / month do you spend on keyword planning" for your eCourse? In another article we talked about various ways to analyze keyword data to ensure you’re chasing after the "low hanging fruit". However, in this poll we wanted to ask you a strategy question. We want to know how many search terms you’re actively engaged in optimizing your e-Course site for? The keyword here is "actively". If you are publishing 10 blog posts / month on your eCourse website, but not doing anything other than posting those articles on Facebook and Twitter and then moving on to your next piece of content, we wouldn’t consider that "actively". We want to know how many pages within your site you’re actively trying to get on page 1 for. This means that you’ll be engaged in page, title, social and link optimization (to name only a few activities). Without, of course, over-optimizing. Essentially, if you were to think about your organic ranking as a race, how many terms are your really focused on winning for (showing up on the main results page)? Are you hyper-focused on 1, 5, 25 or 500 terms? We find that for many people we talk to, this is often just an "accidental process". We’ve heard people say "if it happens it happens… if not… we’ll we’ll just keep publishing until one sticks". You can vote below using our poll, but we encourage you to talk about your specific strategy in the comments section below. We’d love to hear your suggestions and ideas about strategies you’ve used that have worked in helping you gain additional organic search exposure for your online courses. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

To be clear, I’m a huge supporter of Waldorf education. Mainly because I’m a huge supporter of options. The more, the better. It’s inspiring to see students presented with so many unique educational options. For example, take a look at this video about the Albany Free School which doesn’t give kids any curriculum at all. ALTERNATIVE EDUCATION IS ONLY AN ALTERNATIVE FOR A FEW However, as the video we’re about to watch below points out, these "alternative" options are usually  fee based options, which is one of the main problems plaguing these "alternatives" in the first place. Often, students who need access to "alternatives" the most, are the ones who can’t afford to have it. Poor kids, you stay in bad schools, rich kids… well here are some good public schools for you, and if you want to spend a bit more money here are some private options, and lastly, if you really want to to spread your wings and find an educational philosophy that’s specific to your needs as a learner, well here are an assortment of alternatives for you as well. And the vicious cycle of access based on income continues. Now the video I’m about to show you points out the criticisms and controversies of one of these alternative schools: The Waldorf School. One critic in the video goes as far to say that "the government shouldn’t waste state funds on schools that teach nonsense". He fails to define what "nonsense" is and also also doesn’t provide any insight into how state schools provide only non-nonsensical education. But he seems to have an underlying distaste for the Waldorf System. ACCUSATIONS OF RACISM But the accusations get worse. One of the biggest criticisms of the Waldorf School system is that its founder, Rudolf Steiner, had his writing sprinkled with racist leanings. Some argue that the writings are not racists at all. You can see this post which shows some of the writings and defends them. Now some of the people who defend Rudolf Steiner say that the language he used wasn’t considered racists in the 20′s and therefore shouldn’t be looked at in the same light today. Defenders say that in the 20′s it was the lingo of the day. Based on what I’ve seen myself, I would consider some of his writings racists. However, that is not to say that I am against Waldorf Education. Let me explain. I’ve been to Waldorf schools. A wide variety of races attend the ones I’ve seen and they draw in an eclectic group of parents and teachers. There was no racists teaching activities or behaviours in any of the Waldorf schools that I’ve seen. But before we go any further, let’s first watch the video so you can see what you think for yourself. After the video is over, the discussion will carry on below, at which time I encourage you to add your voice to the comments section. I’d love to know your thoughts on this. Watch on youtube. After watching this video, I’m overwhelmed by one glaring oversight; and that’s that if we’re to judge any educational system based on it’s historical record on racism…. then let’s not hold state funded public education on a pedestal. I’ll put it bluntly; as racist as Steiner’s writings might be, his educational history is sparkling clean compared to that of state sponsored schools. Around this time of Steiner’s writings, you had President Woodrow Wilson ordering the segregation of Federal public services including schools (1913) . Woodrow is also documented as defending the  KKK when he mentioned that "The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation. . .until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country." Or in Canada you have government educators who saw it fit to create a residential schooling system which forcibly took aboriginal children from their communities in an effort to ""Kill the Indian in him" 1 . In many cases students were assaulted, raped or threatened in these schools. These people and governments didn’t write about these things… they did them. We’re all linked to this racists past. This is our collective history. And to this day, we all interact and support these same institutions who did these horrible things in the past. It’s just that the institutions have learnt from their mistakes, and we’ve learnt to forgive. STATE EDUCATORS: HOW SOON YOU FORGET So to state educators criticizing alternative forms of education based on their histories, I would say; get off your high horse. Not only do you teach equally as much nonsense but you’ve also been much more abusive, racists and hateful. Now, as students, teachers, parents and tax payers today, we need to be a little bit smarter than this. I think the trouble here is that we’re having a hard time co-existing with our dirty histories. And we’re all guilty; Steiner, the guy sitting behind the computer in the video above, you, me…. everyone. I think the fact that Waldorf schools are attached to a name (rather than a nameless bureaucracy) makes it a little harder to forgive and also makes it easier for state educators to forget their own pasts. The idea is, to try to overcome our past and then look for ways to peacefully co-exist with it. Not an easy task to say the least, as it often requires that we come face to face with our own hypocrisy.  When we look back into our past it’s upsetting to see all of our ideological faults. But the fact remains that these public, private and alternative institutions have the ability to accomplish extraordinary things. We just need to be able to learn from our mistakes and move on. What do you think of the video above? Do you have experience with the Waldorf School system? If so, what are your thoughts?         Can you appreciate a whitney

I remember seeing the documentary "A Class Divided" a long time ago. As educators we often read through statistics and summaries on the impact that different teaching strategies have on student performance. However, statistics lack a human quality that I feel is so important for true understanding. That is what I love about the documentary A Class Divided. The documentary gives you a saddening glimpse into the consequences of judgemental teaching. Jane’s documentary is amazing because it makes the subject matter really easy to understand. She implements a strategy and you see the positive or negative repercussions of that teaching strategy almost right away. It’s fascinating to say the least. This has repercussions on so many of teaching environments today. For example, if you’re teaching a group of students and your consistently giving a student 52% on their test results…. what bigger impact is that having on them? If you’re an educator, that’s an important question you need to ask yourself. I don’t think Jane Elliott’s documentary about discrimination would be allowed to take place today, but I feel as a community such a documentary is so important to help us humanize what some of the data on educational techniques mean, and it shines a light (a very bright light) on the consequences of making your students feel inferior. The lesson: treat your students as inferior and they will act inferior. You can see the film here.

If you’re selling a course online you’re probably intimately familiar with the process and importance of content marketing. You likely work hard to create high quality content that potential students will use to gauge your level of professionalism and ultimately decide if they will enroll in your online course or not. Creating that free content requires a lot of work, but ranking for it can be even harder. In a previous tutorial we talked about ways to look for "low hanging fruit" in the world of content marketing by looking at global average volume, paid competition, organic competition and searcher intent.  You can read that article on chasing the long tail of search here. In this follow-up blog post, we want to take that research a step further and teach you how to improve search engine ranking after your initial content launch. Many people don’t know what to do with their content after they’ve created it and they’ve done their initial "push". That initial push might be enough to start to rank but it’s not likely going to get you in the top spot is it? Unfortunately, many content marketers forget about their posts after that initial push.  They just move onto the next piece of content  without looking back. A CASE STUDY To highlight the importance of not turning your back on your old blog content let’s look at a real world example. Let’s use a case study from our own site to show how this process looks. The key-phrase we’ve researched and decided to optimize for was the term "WordPress teaching plugin". It’s a very small "long tail" term but it’s highly targeted for us and therefore worth going after. KEYWORD RESEARCH: LOOK FOR LOW HANGING FRUIT As an Academy of Mine member you get access to a lot of great tools. One of them is an amazing research tool that helps you find search terms which we call "low hanging fruit" (decent volume and low competition). Below you can see our research for this term. It shows very small global volume, but virtually no competition. Therefore we put this term on our list to create content around. STARTING TO RANK IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP A few things to note. When we’re creating our content marketing schedule we need to stay organized. We do this by creating "tags" that allow us to see quickly which terms have had content created for them and which ones are still pending. As you can see this term is tagged as "done" which means the content is created. In this case we can see that it’s also already ranking. Now you’ll see our ranking for this term over the last month in graph form. From the time we created it until now. You’ll also see important metrics like "CTR". Essentially, these are engagement metrics which are important quality indicators that search engines use to determine your page placement. Think of this process as having your individual blog post "auditioned" for that particular search term you’re trying to optimize for. Low Click Through Rates (CTR’s) and high bounce rates are "flags" to search engines that the searcher didn’t find what they were looking for. This of course, can be remedied by satisfying search engines and searchers need for quality content. PAGE AUDIT DAYS What we recommend you do is put aside at least one page audit day each month. If you’re actively trying to rank one of your pages for a particular search term you need to remember that showing up on the first page is essential. Showing up as the 457th result is only just slightly better than not ranking at all. Of course, if your goal is content optimization then you’ll see your 457th rank as your starting point. Not your ending point. From this starting position you can then start your climb to the top. Remember, that a first spot position in Google gets roughly 33% of clicks, 2nd spot gets 18%, 3rd spot gets 11% while the 10th position gets only 2%. If you’re chasing that "global volume" number then you have huge incentive to rank in the top 3 spots. Even if you have a term with the global volume of 1000, you might only be seeing 333 clicks from that term if you rank #1. Of course, the math gets more complicated then that, but you get the point. ACTION STEPS & THINGS WE CAN DO After you find your initial position you’ll need to take steps to rank higher. So in our case, we started out not ranking, came into the index at around 30, jumped to 20 pretty quickly and now we’re hovering around 10. During an audit what we need to do is look at that page and figure out how far away it is from ranking for the term. Your strategy moving forward at this point will depend on many things. Namely, how far away you are from achieving a first spot ranking and how competitive that search term is. We used the search term above because it’s a "quick win". it’s our low hanging fruit so to speak. Again, it doesn’t bring in much traffic, but every little bit helps and it’s useful for demonstration purposes for this tutorial. 1: INCREASE QUALITY AND ENGAGEMENT One of the best things you can do for the content on your eCourse site is increase the quality of the content to increase engagement metrics. There are many ways you can do this but let me explain a couple. You might want to start by trying to increase the CTR of your term in organic search. Again, let’s look at the chart we were looking at above to find the CTR. Notice this page in question has a CTR of 5.9%. Not bad, but there is room for improvement. We can make this metric more impressive by analyzing and changing our meta data (title and description) as it shows up in search to make the page more appealing to click on. Another thing you can do to increase engagement on a page is to focus on lowing the bounce rate (ours was 9% in this case) and increasing the time spent on the page. Both are huge quality and engagement indicators. To do this, find those metrics for the page in question. Below you’ll see our page url and the average time on site. Both are okay, but we could do a little bit better on both. 2: IMPROVE SOCIAL SIGNALS Now let’s talk about social indicators. Google has stated that they take social into consideration as a ranking indicator. Depending on who you’re listening to, the importance varies, but many people believe social signals account for roughly 10% of your ranking "juice". When I look at this particular page I can see that we have no social love on it whatsoever. So the first thing we should do is publish it on our various social accounts and ask for others to do the same through sharing and re-tweeting. If you’re just getting started it might be worth using Facebook Ads or Twitter Ads, not to make sales, but to help you get some social recognition which will help you in your rankings. 3: SEEK QUALITY LINK PARTNERS AND FORM DIGITAL RELATIONSHIPS The last macro indicator we’re going to look at right now is the number of links pointing to this page. In our case, because we’re so close be getting the number one spot, and we’re not fighting for a competitive search term, this won’t require much work from us. In fact, it might even be enough just to pass some "juice" from one of our other authoritative internal pages. So we’re going to test that out. However, if you’re really far back in the race you’re going to need to focus on building quality back-links. You can do this in many ways: You can do this naturally, by building strong digital relationships By Adding links to wikis Writing press releases Adding your links to blog comments Adding your links on SlideShare Forum signatures Adding your link on article sites Adding your link internally on authoritative pages So we’re going to get to work on implementing these three changes and we’ll update this blog post as soon as we see a change in ranking.        

The vast benefits of online education for both teachers and students is well documented. As a result the eLearning industry is currently experiencing explosive growth, which is having impacts far greater than we could have ever imagined.  We are currently witnessing the democratization of education as we know it. However, with online education dramatically gaining in popularity, new methods of keeping track of credits and accomplishments are required. In the past, this process was fairly straightforward. A student enrols in a school, undergoes their training for a set duration of time, and is required to achieve a certain grade before being awarded a certificate, diploma or degree. The "piece of paper" was meant to confirm that the student did in fact complete the course and show competency in the course material. Beyond showing competency it was also meant to give the student additional "value" depending on who issued the piece of paper to them. Students are generally willing to invest more in their education if the standards and/or brand behind the issuing institution is recognized and looked upon favorably. This information is important for potential clients, customers, employers and post graduate schools. In a lot of ways these people and institutions are looking for schools to help them "filter" candidates, and this piece of paper helped validated  student learning and teacher training standards. However, times are changing quickly. Very quickly. There are countless MOOCs online now, and others are using a mashup of various WordPress educational plugins to offer their courses online. This has changed the educational landscape and has forced us to reconsider how we validate learning and teaching. As we’ll discuss below, the use of digital badges as micro-credentials are a great way to achieve this goal. VALIDATING LEARNING There are many parties involved who want to be able to validate learning. The learner him or herself will want to ensure that learning actually took place (as we discuss in this podcast here). The more evidence they have to suggest whether their educational investment paid off, the better. Similarly, instructors will want to create an educational system that is undergoing constant improvement. For instance, they can start with student outcomes in mind and then from there, they can monitor their own progress as educators, keeping their finger on the pulse of how close their students came to reaching their educational objectives. They can use the data from the validation process as a way to re-think and improve their educational methods. Lastly, employers, clients, customers, grad schools and potential business partners all have an interest in being able to validate the learning of the people who they are considering working with. VALIDATING TEACHING Validating teaching is as important as validating learning. For example, imagine you want to hire an designer to design a logo for your company or a computer programer to create a hyper-specialized app for you. When you start hunting for candidates for this position there are methods you will want to use to find the most suitable person. Wouldn’t it be great to have access to their test scores, portfolios, school reputation grades and so on? The great news is, with online learning this is totally possible. THIS IS WHERE MICRO-CREDENTIALS AND DIGITAL BADGES COME IN This is an exciting time for students and teachers alike, because we’re now entering into a time where the linear "start here and end here" approach to education is being replaced by lifelong learning which draws on different educational experiences from different places (online courses, continuing education courses, blended learning, libraries, colleges, personal consulting and so on). The trick is trying to find a way to validate this "mash up" of these various educational platforms. The good news is that there are people, organizations and companies working on this right now. For example, Mozilla Open Badges project is working to introduce a micr-credential / digital badge system that helps with the online educational verification process. On their website they describe a badge as: A digital badge is an online representation of a skill you’ve earned. Open Badges take that concept one step further, and allows you to verify your skills, interests and achievements through credible organizations. And because the system is based on an open standard, you can combine multiple badges from different issuers to tell the complete story of your achievements — both online and off. Display your badges wherever you want them on the web, and share them for employment, education or lifelong learning. To add onto the potential of this system, in a related Forbes Article it was stated that: These digital credentials are not mere images. Rather, the badge image links back to verification information on servers that enable anyone looking at the badge to quickly verify the issuing institution, the person to whom the badge was issued, the criteria for receiving the badge, and even evidence and testimonials related to the credential. Pretty amazing isn’t it? This is a step in the right direction for all parties involved who are interested in having learning verified. Now of course, not all learning needs to be verified. However, what I like about this is that it gives credit for lifelong learners engaged in the practice of self-learning and it helps validate great teachers who want to work outside of the traditional school system. It will be interesting to see how this technology is adopted by learners, teachers and employers. What do you think about micro-credentials and badges? Are you currently using this technology to teach or to display your badges as students? How helpful has this technology been to you? Let us know in the comments section below.  

If you’re an educator and you’re offering your courses online have you ever stopped to wonder who provided the internet for you to offer your courses on in the first place? If not, this video walks you through the process of the invention of the internet. IT’s created by a team of designers, journalist, musicians who want to make science look beautiful.

The Council of Educational Facility Planners (CEFPI) is a professional association whose sole mission is improving the places where children learn. CEFPI members — individuals, institutions and corporations — are actively involved in planning, designing, building, equipping and maintaining schools and colleges. Below you’ll see a video from a recent CEFPI school design competition done by a group of students from Eastview Middle School in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada. One of the things they spoke about that I think most educators fail to properly incorporate into their educational strategy, is how their schools plan to interact with the outside community. In the video below the students propose two interesting initiatives. One; the school itself is on public property and can be used by the general public (with restrictions of course) both during school hours and off hours as well. Not only that, but student training doesn’t only take place within the school. The school itself reaches out to different companies, organizations and institutions within the community that will help support their education as well. Places like hospitals, business schools, creative studios, libraries, theatres and computer training centers to name only a few. What do you think of the proposal?

In a recent blog post we talked about the advantages of using badges as micr0-credentials to verify online educational accomplishments. Badges don’t cost anything to implement. You can simply use open source tools like the Mozilla Open Badge project and integrate their verification system into the classes you’re teaching online. In the blog post linked to above we talked about the benefits of verification from both the students’ and teachers’ perspectives. We also talked about the importance of micro-credentials for potential employers, schools, collaborators or business partners. There are numerous people who have stakes in verifying (and at a deeper level… measuring) what type of learning took place in an online environment. So we’re curious to ask people offering courses online… Are you using this open source verification technology in your online classes? You can answer the question by filling out our poll below. Thanks for participating!   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.