How many times do you find you are having to create worksheets, or resources and then they just remain on your own computer, or in a resource source for your own school?
A few years ago a friend and I were chatting about this and came to a great idea. Lets use all our own resources we had created anyway and place them all on the internet for other teachers to use.
These days the site attracts about 1000 visitors a day. Two years ago and lots of mistkaes earlier however it had an attraction rate of 25 a day. So I thought I would outline how to make a low ranking website into a top website.
The first is the quality of your resources. There are already far too many poor resources on the website, so make sure your resources really are worth waiting for and downloading. This in turn will form word of mouth. Also offer all your resources for free - those sites which charge for passwords seem to last about 6 months and disappear - and the number of users you get drops away steeply!
The next thing to complete is making sure the 'keywords' at the top of your website are a maximum of 3. This helps to keep you focused. If you want to change subjects, make a new page. By doing this I found that I could make 'typing game' appear on top of Google's rankings 2 weeks after I had made the page. Other sites link into top ranking sites.
The next part takes about a week. Just go on the internet and email all the top sites and ask them for a link. Make sure the site is good.
Also look at submitting using free website submissions.
When you have got a good set of links and your hits are beginning to rise, then look at joining an affiliate site such as Google adwords (www.google.co.uk) or Commission Junction (www.cj.com), as these are the major earners in my site. You just get pieces of code, which you add to the top of your page, and hey presto, someone else starts to send your regular cash.
If you visit my website, you can see I have even taken half the battle out of making a great educational website, by providing you with a starter website with which to promote your own educational website. All you do is download it and then edit it as you wish, and promote it.
The last piece of advice I learnt the hard way is that for your site to be successful, only promote teaching resources. Any lifestyle ads just fail with teachers. When they are looking for resources, that is all they click on so spend time finding resource sites, and not time making lifestyle pages.
About the Author
Educational consultant, who also has gained experience in building up and running a highly successful educational website (www.timetoteach.co.uk).